As If!

In <i>As If!</i> Chase Gregory explores the stylistically strategic often campy and productively fraught cross-identifications of early queer criticism. Gregory calls this form of aids-era criticism <i>as if!</i>-a mode of writing in which authors struggle to read write and identify with and across categories of race sexuality and gender. Analyzing the work of Robert Reid-Pharr Deborah E. McDowell Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Gregory shows how their writing productively challenges fixed ideas of identity and knowledge production. Using these four writers as case studies of a larger trend within early queer criticism Gregory demonstrates that even when critical attempts at relation are met by impasse <i>as if!</i> criticism breaks down social relation especially within those fields influenced by queer theory deconstructionist feminist theory and Black feminist theory. By advocating a return to <i>as if!</i> criticism as a politically useful blueprint for contemporary cultural inquiry Gregory draws attention to the obstacles to forging identification across difference and insists on the impossible project of solidarity across such difference.