THEORY LIBRARY
THE LIBRARY IS FOR
READING!
CUNTY DIAL
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Gill-Peterson takes Butler’s theory of gender and returns it to the body, the clinic, the archive, and the lived stakes of transition.
Judith Butler
Judith, you taught us that gender is an action, not a noun. But sometimes, darling, the performance was so long the audience left at intermission. Bodies are more than language - they sweat, they ache, they transition, they insist.
Eve Sedgwick
Mother Eve, you gave us the closet, but you also gave us paranoia as a personality trait. Push beyond suspicion - some queerness is already in the open, honey, waiting for someone to stop analyzing and start living.
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Snorton transforms Sedgwick’s “closet” from a white gay metaphor into a Black trans political strategy (opacity, fugitivity, survival).
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Yapp radicalizes Foucault by reading biopolitics through crip/queer embodiment and racialized state violence - updating him for the world we actually live in.
Michel Foucault
Michel, my love, you showed us that pleasure could rewire a life - but you floated above community like you were too chic to claim queer kin. Desire isn’t transcendence; it’s entanglement.
Jack Halberstam
Jack, you championed failure, but sometimes the real failure was the editing. The celebration of chaos only works if you notice who can afford to be chaotic in the first place.
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Bey turns Halberstam’s playful “failure” into a political strategy - abolition, fugitivity, and the end of the normative world altogether.
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Chambers-Letson takes Love’s melancholy and transforms it: not just backward feeling, but collective grief reworked into radical queer worldbuilding.
Heather Love
Heather, sweetheart, your devotion to backward feelings is iconic—but even sadness has a shelf life. Inheriting harm is one thing; setting up permanent residence in it is another.