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Reading and Writing As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity by Chase Gregory Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman, Supervisor ___________________________ Rey Chow ___________________________ Michael Hardt ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 i v ABSTRACT Reading and Writing As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity by Chase Gregory Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman, Supervisor ___________________________ Rey Chow ___________________________ Michael Hardt ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 Copyright by Chase Gregory 2019 Dedication To Isidore, for being warm and good. iv Abstract As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity turns to early queer and third-wave feminist scholarship to identify a unique strategy and style of literary criticism, which I name as/if criticism. As/if criticism is both born of and resistant to two conflicting imperatives in the US academy, which first come to a fore during the 1990s. The first is the demand to write “as”: that is, the institutional demand that critics use their gender, race, sexuality, etc. as credentials of authentic knowledge. The second is the demand to write “as if”: that is, the post-structuralist demand that critique suspend the idea of knowable or stable identity. Challenging both of these demands, as/if criticism employs four different strategies—recognition, qualification, intimacy, and interruption—in order to disrupt identity as it is produced and valued as a knowable category within literary criticism. Taking five authors as case studies, I examine Eve Sedgwick’s compendium of queer critical essays, Tendencies (1993); Deborah McDowell’s debut work of black feminist criticism, The Changing Same (1995); Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive take on race and gender, The Feminist Difference (1995); and Robert Reid-Pharr’s innovative critical essay collection, Black Gay Man (2001). Over the course of its chapters, As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity makes the case that as/if criticism is well-suited to describe fraught social bonds, experimental allegiances, and unintuitive cross-identifications because its style mirrors the substance of its argument. v Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ v Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... viii 1. Introduction: Reading and Writing As/if ..................................................................................... 1 1.1 Becoming a Critic ................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Modes of As/if ..................................................................................................................... 4 1.3 As-slash-if ........................................................................................................................... 9 1.4 Negative Bonds ................................................................................................................. 14 2. Gay-Male-Oriented and Now .................................................................................................... 17 2.1 Tendencies’ Tendencies ..................................................................................................... 17 2.2 Ass/if ................................................................................................................................. 20 2.3 Homosexual Reading, Perverse Reading, Queer Reading ................................................ 33 2.4 White Slashes .................................................................................................................... 45 2.5 Queer Bonds ...................................................................................................................... 51 3. Miscarrying On .......................................................................................................................... 60 3.1 Newborn Disciplines ......................................................................................................... 60 3.2 “For McDowell Read Black Feminist” ............................................................................. 69 3.3 Qualifying Conditions ....................................................................................................... 77 3.4 Passing Over (and Over) ................................................................................................... 91 3.5 “Smith Does; McDowell Does Not” ................................................................................. 98 4. Barbara Johnson’s Passing ....................................................................................................... 105 4.1 Double Mourning in the Academic Sphere ..................................................................... 105 4.2 Hearing in Tongues ......................................................................................................... 109 4.3 Takes One to Know One ................................................................................................. 115 vi 4.4 Lovely College Words ..................................................................................................... 120 4.5 Lesbian Reading Glasses ................................................................................................. 126 4.6 The Death of the Critic .................................................................................................... 136 5. The Living End ........................................................................................................................ 152 5.1 Uses of the Pornographic ................................................................................................ 152 5.2 The Beat Goes On ........................................................................................................... 161 5.3 Shock Value .................................................................................................................... 172 5.4 Gender Trouble ................................................................................................................ 177 5.5 Citing As a Lesbian ......................................................................................................... 185 6. Conclusion: I Probably Think This Essay is About Me .......................................................... 197 References .................................................................................................................................... 207 Biography ..................................................................................................................................... 218 vii Acknowledgements Because I am fascinated by the social space of the academy, and because it gives me a thrill to trace genealogies of intimacy and influence, and also because I love campy melodrama, the Acknowledgements are usually my favorite part of any academic text. If these acknowledgements run long (and they do), it is because I have a lot of people to thank, but it is also for this reason. I love the Acknowledgements. If you do not, you can behave as if they did not exist, and skip this part. Reading and Writing As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity simply would not have happened were it not for the efforts of my dissertation committee, and for that I owe each member thanks. Thank you to Rey Chow for each savvy and illuminating suggestion, for modeling a critical mind, and for helping me find my footing in the early stages of my graduate career. Thank you to Wahneema Lubiano for feedback that is not only on-point, but also actively non- foreclosing, and for a rare ability to teach, edit, and question with an attitude of expansion rather than deletion. Thank you to Antonio Viego for encouraging every strange impulse I had, in the classroom and on the page—an invaluable asset to perverts sorely plagued by inhibition. Thanks to Michael Hardt for stepping in last-minute, on more than on occasion, with good humor and grace. Thank you especially to Robyn Wiegman for providing the guidance and mentorship that made this dissertation possible: thank you for big-picture Eureka moments, long office-hour discussions, meticulous quotation mark formatting edits, encouraging and maddening Word document suggestions, manic email back-and-forths, generative seminars, an Intro to Queer Theory course, several Feminist Theory Workshops, the trip to Ann Arbor, and a million other instances of intellectual aid, both macro and micro. Several organizations have allowed me to work on this dissertation without the extra stress of finding funding. Thank you to the Duke University Graduate School for the Howard viii Whitaker, Jr. Summer Research Fellowship, as well as to the Program in Literature and to Duke’s Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist