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WORD OF NEW intellectual developments tends to travel indirectly gossip. Soon, more and more people feel the need to know what the real story is; they want manifestos, bibliographies, explanations. When a journal does a special issue or commissions an editorial comment, it is often responding to this need.
We have been invited to pin the queer theory tail on the donkey. But here we cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor donkey's present condition. Queer theory has already incited a vast labor of metacommentary, a virtual industry: special issues, sections of journals, omnibus reviews, anthologies, and dictionary entries. Yet the term itself is less than five years old. Why do people feel the need to introduce, anatomize, and theorize something that can barely be said yet to exist?
The critical mass of queer work is more a matter of perception than of volume. Queer is hot. This perception arises partly from the distortions of the star system, which allows a small number of names to stand in for an evolving culture. Most practitioners of the new queer commentary are not faculty members but graduate students. The association with the star system and with graduate students makes this work the object of envy, resentment, and suspicion. As often happens, what makes some people queasy others call sexy.
In our view, it is not useful to consider queer theory a thing, especially one dignified by capital letters. We wonder whether queer commentary might not more accurately describe the things linked by the rubric, most of which are not theory. The metadiscourse of "queer theory" intends an academic object, but queer commentary has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalism. It cannot be assimilated to a single discourse, let alone a propositional program. Certainly, recent years have seen much queer criticism that tried to think through theoretical problems rigorously, often by way of psychoanalysis. But the notion that this work belonged to "queer theory" arose after 1990, when AIDS and queer activism provoked intellectuals to see themselves as bringing a queerer world into being. Narrating the emergence of queer theory was a way to legitimate many experiments, relatively few of which still looked like theory in the sense...