Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué reviews Queer Forms

Ramzi Fawaz. Queer Forms. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 464 pp.

27 August 2024

Ramzi Fawaz’s Queer Forms is centered on the premise that to take up a particular form is not to be limited by it. On the contrary, for gendered and sexual difference to appear in forms is to enable an expansion of the prevailing sense of what is possible, to expand the political imagination. Writing against what he calls a “commitment to formlessness” in certain strands of queer theory, where queerness is represented as infinitely fluid and forms are interpreted as “disciplinary forces,” Fawaz is interested instead in positively reinterpreting the productivity of forms (p. 6). His study centers on aesthetic productions from the American '70s to the '90s, a moment he argues is a flashpoint in innovation of forms for sexual and gendered difference and their political mobilization. Fawaz is especially interested in works that reveal the interwoven thinking of feminist and gay liberation politics of the moment. Indeed, beyond Queer Forms’s primary task of arguing for the productiveness of forms, its other most concentrated mission is rewriting our sense of the relationship between the feminist and gay movements of this period. The aesthetic works that Fawaz reads through reveal that feminism and gay liberation were not separate domains but rather intertwined and collaborative efforts to radically develop the political imagination. Their shared primary method for this development, he argues, is their investment in the invention of forms.

By “forms,” Fawaz does not mean named identity categories (gay, bisexual, trans), nor obviously material-political forms (the picket line, city council, the lawsuit), but rather what we might call modes of appearance, vehicles by which gender and sexual difference are given shape. This translates to both the social forms native to the activism of the moment (such as coming out or consciousness-raising) as well as more transhistorical aesthetic forms (such as metaphor or collage). The chapters of Queer Forms are organized by pairings of a social form and an aesthetic one which, in the works analyzed therein, enable each other to give shape to gendered and sexual difference. Those pairs are as follows: the concept of women’s equality and the figure of the replicant in '70s science fiction (chapter 1); lesbian separatism and the fictional commune in '70s and '80s science fiction (chapter 2); consciousness-raising and the social circle in The Boys in the Band (dir. William Friedkin, 1970) (chapter 3); coming out and serialized narrative in Tales of the City (1978) (chapter 4); sexual pluralism and the comic strip in the comics work of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz (chapter 5); and AIDS politics and metaphors of the gut in Angels in America (chapter 6). The book’s formalism is a bit loose (this is not queer theory’s Boris Eichenbaum, nor does it aim to be), but its method of reading often yields useful insights about the works Fawaz analyzes and their relationship to their moment’s activisms.

Fawaz’s interest in reviving critical discourse on generally middle- and lowbrow popular feminist and gay liberation aesthetics is well followed through. His readings are adept and often pleasantly counterintuitive, as when he reinterprets Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) as an allegory criticizing '70s white liberal feminism’s conflation of equality with sameness. Further, it is refreshing, in a critical moment heavily interested in revisiting second-wave feminism, to see a scholar enriching that analysis by looking to gay liberation’s imbrications with feminism.[1] But Fawaz tells us early on that he is not interested in analyzing “political documents [and] social histories of activism” (p. 17). If he had done so, his book would have been, in my opinion, stronger. Queer Forms is often overly optimistic about the relationship between gay liberation and second-wave feminism—two movements which were often deeply antagonistic to each other. Nowhere were these tensions more apparent than in discussions of sexuality and pornography; for example, in 1980, the National Organization for Women declared that “pederasty, pornography, sadomasochism and public sex” did not count as “Lesbian rights issues.”[2] Fawaz’s account of these movements somewhat buries their very real, often fiery tensions for the sake of arguing for them as collaborating on an expansion of the political imagination. This strikes me as symptomatic of the monograph’s utopian political bent, which sees these movements as sharing “a utopian investment in opening up the possibilities of what women and queer people could desire from their genders” and which sees its own work as “aid[ing] and abet[ing] a non-market-driven form of freedom” (pp. 24, 52–53). Nonetheless, where Fawaz is most helpful, for those interested in the relationship between gay liberation and feminism, is in providing a method for reading the deployment of their political forms in aesthetic works.

[1] See Lorna Bracewell, Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (Minneapolis, 2021); Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, ed. Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder (New York: 2019); and Dana Glaser, “Reductive: Andrea Dworkin’s Style as Thought,” Signs 49 (Summer 2024): 913–43.

[2] National Organization for Women, “Lesbian and Gay Rights,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 195.