Chapter 9 - Queer Feminism

Summary

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’, beginning with the fraught way that queer has sometimes been understood as a move away from feminism’s perceived limitations. It maps debates about the relationship between feminism and queer and their respective objects of study across work by scholars including Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Annamarie Jagose, Robyn Wiegman, and Clare Hemmings. With a specific focus on the temporal relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘queer’, the chapter performs a relationship to ‘queer feminism’ that might go beyond the idea that queer emerges ‘after’ feminism. Instead, it opens up a number of different temporal relationships that might be bound to the idea of ‘queer feminism’including repetition, institutional time, belatedness, and the idea of being on, or in, time. It thus insists on ‘queer feminism’ as not only a methodology but also an object that might be tracked, a means of returning to the question of what kinds of objects gender and sexuality are, an invitation to consider disciplinary or institutional time, and a mode of theorising time’s affective structures.