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I shall then suggest that ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it "recruits" subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or "transforms" the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most common everyday police (or other) hailing: "Hey, you there!"
-Althusser (130-31)
She had failed to respond to this invitation merely because it was a little queer and imaginative-she, whose birthright it was to nourish imagination!
-Forster (Howards End 78-79)
Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation has proven immensely helpful to a generation of post-structuralist scholars seeking to describe the means by which individuals become subjects of, not merely subjects to, particular ideological regimes. The policeman's authoritative summons is an extreme example of the multitudinous rhetorics and discourses-some exceptional, some everyday-through which individuals are ritually and repeatedly constituted as faithful followers of the dominant order. Because this process of social inscription begins even in pre-natal practices of naming and gendering, the individual is "always already" interpellated as a subject, sewn into the legal and cultural fabric before ever making a sound. Althusser's nod to the "sexual subject" (132) has made interpel lation a particularly useful concept for queer theory as it continues to question the practices and protocols by which heternormativity sustains its power over bodies, pleasures, and modes of intimate assembly.1
This essay aims not to question interpellation's intellectual value but rather to offer a counterweight, the queer invitation, to help illuminate insurgent opportunities to break with dominant patterns, to become subject to something other than what the individual "always-already" is. Where interpellation locates the subject in relation to present circumstances, the queer invitation encourages a move beyond into unknown territory, opening a horizon of possibility. Through a reading of E. M. Forster's Howards End, from which I borrow the idea of an invitation that is queer, I argue for a more dynamic understanding of subjectivity in which rigidifying interpellations intermingle with queer invitations. I call these queer because they work to undermine the social norms against which certain kinds of erotic and non-erotic intimacy-same-sex, cross-class, and inter-generational, to name only a few-are judged to be abnormal, inferior, insane,...