Contrapositive

You Can’t Take that Away from Me

No, I don’t mean sex. I can do without it if I have to. It’s identity that I won’t let go of. And in particular—lesbian identity. I’ve been loving it too long. The wide stance, the longing, the social work, the sluttish classicism, the frumpiness, the bad relationships—it’s all too perfect in my eyes. In graduate school, I learned how to distance myself from these experiences, to see them as part of a general history of sexuality. This process of self-abstraction allowed me to go from writing about my problems in my journal to writing about my problems in journals. From a certain angle it can look, even to me, like the ‘‘theory’’ in my work is a professional overlay—a way of dressing up activities and preoccupations that are, at heart, extracurricular. My love of queer theory is not less authentic than my love of lesbianism. It’s just that it’s hard for me to imagine a form of queerness that does not maintain its ties to a specific experience of sexual identity. Behind my work on affect, historiography, and the social, there is a lesbian lying in bed crying.”