Anti-communal, Anti-egalitarian, Anti-nurturing, Anti-loving: Sex and the 'Irredeemable' in Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon

The work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon on sex and sexuality has often been posed as adversary to the development of queer theory. Leo Bersani, in particular, is critical of the normative ambitions of their work, which he sees firstly as trying to ‘redeem’ sex acts themselves, and secondly as advocating for sexuality as a site of potential for social transformation. In this article, I argue that this is a misreading of their work. Drawing on Dworkin's wide body of writing, and MacKinnon early essays in Signs, I suggest that their work makes no such case for sex or sexuality. Rather, by bringing their analysis into conversation with Halberstam's recent work on ‘shadow feminism’, I contend that Dworkin and MacKinnon's antisocial, anti-pastoral and distinctly anti-normative vision of sex and sexuality shares many of the same features of queer theory, ultimately advocating for sex as ‘irredeemable’

Boys Like Her: Queering Gender, Queering the National Body

When a car full of queers attempts to cross a border that is regulated by the law when their bodies are not legible in a system which attempts to fix and sex subjects according to a rigid binary, they become immediately suspect. And in this case, their whiteness cannot outshine their queerness. As the law sees it, “Four queers crossing the border in a borrowed car, four smiling and self-satisfied queers, were most certainly up to something” (Taste This 18). But what is it that made this group of “four smiling and self-satisfied queers” suspect? Was it the fact that they were driving a borrowed car? Was it because they were read as queer? Or was it because in their queerness, they could not be read at all? While many factors could have played a part in this story, I suggest that there is something more than homophobia to account for here; it is not a fear of what is thought to be known about the queer person, but rather a response to the threat posed to the law and to the state because the queer body cannot be read accordingly. In other words, I am asking us to pay attention to the threat and the fear of the unknown, the illegible, and the invisible – that which is not given-to-be-seen on the queer body. It is this very uncertainty about the body and its continual crossing of borders real and metaphorical that threatens the law and the nation