'I called these words keywords in two connected senses: they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought' (Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [Oxford University Press, 1976]).
Queer Keywords, a two-day international conference, was held in the School of English at University College Dublin on Friday and Saturday April 15-16 2005. In my opening remarks I outlined the two key influences behind the project: Raymond Williams’s Keywords and speech act theory and the politics of iterability and performativity.

In his introduction to Keywords Williams outlined his project as 'the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practice and institutions which we group as culture and society. Every word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself on my attention because the problems of its meaning seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss'. This conference addressed itself to a number of words which have indeed 'pressed themselves' on our attention and the Queer Keywords conference expanded on the varied projects of George S. Rousseau, Julian Wolfreys, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Judith Butler and the California Irvine Queer Locations Collective and invited reflection on neologisms, adaptations, alterations, extensions, and transfers, and their cultural and societal significance, origins, contexts, political agendas and so forth.

The first session on 'Queer Locations' began with Robert Tobin’s 'Queer in Germany: Translating Queer Neologisms in a Global Era', which looked at how neologisms like queer have translated into the German context. He noted a number of loan words which go untranslated in German to do with sexual identities and practices: fisting, slings, glory-holes, darkrooms. The word closet does not translate very well; straight has not fared well either. Schwul refers only to gay men. However, the word queer with its Indo-European etymological roots in the German quer meaning transverse grafts itself very well and Tobin gave the example of the academic collection que(e)rdanke.

Anna Apostolidou’s 'Linguistic and/or Social Inefficiency: The Story of the Greek "Coming Out"' presented some of her ethnographic work and emphasized also that the word closet does not translate terribly well. The word gay in fact is only six years old in Greek official discourse and there is no queer in Greek as such. Like many of the other contributors to the conference and this panel in particular Apostolidou emphasized questions of commodification and globalization.

Anne Mulhall’s 'Camp/Kitsch/Queer' began by asserting that queer Irish studies is a discipline yet to be brought into being and she noted that theory in Irish Studies is also viewed suspiciously as being complicit with globalizing forces. Her paper looked at the place of kitsch in Irish Studies and the work of David Lloyd, Colin Graham and Elizabeth Cullingford in particular. Mulhall analyzed the now defunct Club Outrageous in Galway’s drag performance of the birth of Christ in terms of Bersani’s 'Is the rectum a grave?' and the Alternative Miss Ireland competition
in terms of the Frankfurt School’s (Benjamin and Adorno in particular) writings on aesthetics and waste.

The first plenary session, David Roman’s 'Dance/Liberation', in the spirit of Williams, attempted to demystify three keywords: dance, archive, and liberation. Roman argued that (gay) historians have underplayed the role of dance and outlined his ongoing project of trying to build an archive of dance. Roman sees the archive as a deeply politicized site, one not of knowledge retrieval but of knowledge production. By looking at public and semi-public dancing and critically engaging with The Boys in the Band Roman discussed dance as a political activity and emphasized dance’s potential for securing queer affirmation, collectivity, connection, community and belonging.

The second plenary session, Richard Meyer’s 'Gay Power circa 1970: Visual Strategies for Sexual Revolution' politicized an altogether different archive. Meyer
asked what art history and gay history might teach each other and asserted that although visibility has been a keyword for our studies actual images have received little attention. There are no photographs of the Stonewall riots whose very immediacy eluded photographic capture but Meyer focused on photos staged later both inside and outside the bar. He also surveyed a wide range of images from the gay liberation magazine Gay Power and power emerged as a word which is being resignified and refunctioned at least in gay male studies.

The second panel began with Eve Oishi’s '(Politics of) Perversity' which set out to resignify perversion and to theorize (via a rethinking of Laura Mulvey and utilization of psychoanalytic film theories of the gaze) a perverse spectatorship and politics. In an intensely personal autobiographical reflection on the homosocial dynamics of watching John Woo films with her father and a series of letters in which she came out to him as lesbian Oishi concluded that all identifications are what she calls
mis/identifications. Like Tobin who called for a 'hopeful awareness of failure' and Roman who refused to mourn 'the failure of the archive' Oishi sees moments of failure as intensely productive ones.

Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui’s paper 'Sarduy’s Baroque Genealogy' introduced many of us to the Cuban exile Sarduy who was involved with the Tel Quel group, attended Lacan’s seminars, and used the word citationality as early as 1972. He reproduced several of Sarduy’s complex Lacanian algorithms and used them to discuss his writings on transvestism, the baroque, AIDS and its ethics, and queer latino/a identities. He offered Sarduy’s radial reading as a version of Edelman’s homographetic reading.

Jack Fritscher in his paper 'Homomasculinity: Framing Keywords of Queer Popular Culture' responded to the call to activist coiners of various keywords to reflect on the contexts for their neologisms. Fritscher who served as editor of the magazine Drummer for several years took us on a tour through some of his many coinages: homomasculine, man2man, perversatility, bear, mansex, gaystream, leatherstream, queerstream and their take up in popular and academic culture.

Robert McRuer’s 'Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies' outlined the recent imbrications of critical
disability and critical queerness but argued for the urgency of always cripping disability studies and for not seeing the progress disability studies has made in
recent times as unequivocally good. Looking at the popular show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, McRuer pointed to its normalizing and disciplining of queerness as well as its routinization and normalization of disability.

Michael O’Rourke’s 'Becoming-Wasp: Some Queer Deleuzian Buzzwords' began with Žižek’s recent claim that Deleuze’s 'extension of the concept' is exemplified by fist-fucking and attempted to rethink the history of philosophy not as a kind of assfuck (according to Deleuze) but as a kind of fistfuck. To do this I looked at one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most difficult concepts the Body without Organs alongside Foucault’s later interviews and writings on S/M and degenitalization. Like McRuer I appealed to futurity in the Deridean sense (the queer theory-to come and disability studies to-come) and the urgency of queering or fisting queer theory.

Niall Richardson’s 'Camp' re-examined one of Queer Theory’s most overused words and attempted to retheorize it. He argued contra Meyer, Miller, and Medhurst that it is time to share the politics and poetics of camp rather than seeing it as solely a gay male preserve. To do this he examined Desperate Housewives as a critique of middle/class heterosexuality indebted to American Beauty, Sirkian melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s films Far From Heaven and Safe. Richardson argued that the aptly named Bree Van de Kamp exemplifies the exposure of the constructedness of gender and roles in the hit show.

The third plenary lecture, Rick Rambuss’s 'Homodevotion and the Disciple Jesus Loved' examined two popular cultural texts, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Dan Brown’s religio-conspiracy thriller, The Da Vinci Code, which was recently condemned by Rome. Rambuss argued that Gibson’s film marginalizes Mary Magdalen so that there is only one (de-eroticized, unthreatening) Mary (the Virgin mother) in this film. Magdalene in the swabbing scene bears witness to trauma and stands in for us in a film preoccupied with the gaze. John the Beloved Disciple is also sidelined-always at a modest distance and never allowed to touch Christ. Contra Denby’s 'Nailed' review of the film Rambuss argues that Gibson strains to evacuate homodevotion and eros leaving only thanatos in the form of torture, suffering, and death. Brown’s novel also, he claims, obliterates any
possibility of (homo)erotic or homodevotional cathexis.

The penultimate session began with Susan Clayton’s 'From a Ms Alliance to an Espousal; or How to Call Women who Wed Women' in which she answered Judith
Butler’s call in Undoing Gender for a new legitimating lexicon by suggesting new terminologies, neologisms, but always warning about the dangers of not subjecting
naming to self-enqueery.

Geraldine Cuddihy’s 'The Uncanny and Claude Cahun: "To Be Two"' examined the connection between the uncanny and anxiety which lies at the heart of Freudian theory, Nicholas Royle’s recent book on the uncanny, and the many self-portraits of the French artist Claude Cahun. Cuddihy asserted via a theoretical engagement with Irigaray and Kristeva that Cahun is always becoming herself and that the uncanny is always already performative.

Geraldine Friedman’s 'Friendship as a Queer Keyword' in the spirit of Williams demystified three keywords: eros, family, and democracy and appealed to Derrida’s Politics of Friendship to suggest that romantic love and friendship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has at its heart an undecidability. Her case histories were the Woods/Pirie case (well known to readers or viewers of The Children’s Hour) and the Ladies of Llangollen.

The final session began with Aintzane Legarreta-Mentxaka’s 'Recognition: Two Anglo-Irish Texts Building on Lesbian Literary Tradition' which attending to the importance of naming focused on two Anglo/Irish novels. Sheridan LeFanu’s lesbian vampire short story Carmilla is she claims a reworking of Virgil’s Camilla. And Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour, she persuasively argued, is a rewrite of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: the heroines are, after all, Clare and Clarissa.

Noreen Giffney’s 'From Hetero-Species To Homo-Species Desire in One Hour and a Half: Closet Anxiety, or When a Woman Loves an Ogre' began by outlining the coinages homospecies, heterospecies and most importantly homoqueer. The latter, Giffney argued, marks the increasing normalization, naturalization, and
commodification of queer by gay men and gay male scholars and is a prescriptive, disciplining term which flattens the queerness of queer. Like McRuer Giffney is extremely worried about this disciplining of queer studies and her new term is likely to prove both provocative and contentious. Her paper turned to a reading of the animated cartoon Shrek as a postmodern children’s movie which attempts to promote heteronormativity but undoes itself at every turn. She highlighted this through a close reading of the film’s puns on the ass/ phallus, abjectified liquids,
kinging, intertextual references to Thelma and Louise, and camp.

The final paper was J. Keith Vincent’s 'Homofascism' which examined the connection (one made by the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno) between
homosexuality and fascism which are often made to belong together. He gave us the example of Mishima who is a fascist in Japan but a homosexual in the West
before moving to a detailed reading of the homosocial and homoerotic energies in Oe’s untranslated novel Our World. Rather than yoking homosexuality and fascism as Adorno does, Vincent pointed up the historical and representational aporias at the very heart of homofascism.

The keywords which recurred throughout the conference were: naturalization, commodification, baroque, camp, closet, kitsch, failure, and future. As Raymond Williams puts it in Keywords: 'In this as in many other respects I am exceptionally conscious of how much further work and thinking needs to be done. Much of it, in fact, can only be done through discussion'.
 

Research, Rhetoric and Reality Conference