Reflections

This essay uncovers how queer rage can motivate and inspire change within eighteenth-century studies. Paying homage to Susan Stryker’s foundational work on transgender rage and monstrosity, I present a performance piece that endeavours to rage against the “eighteenth-century machine” and its long and enduring histories of queer erasure and gaslighting, which are always sub-tended by intersectional discriminations. As I term it, the eighteenth-century machine demands a mechanization of conduct, affect, and performance that has been safeguarded and mobilized by a totalizing white supremacy upon which the vast majority of learned societies are built. Queer rage here attempts to call out these stifling arrangements and seek remediation. Through a series of vignettes, this reflection addresses how rage, clarity, queerness’s polyphony, and citational praxes may become an incendiary politics by which eighteenth-century studies can give up its pernicious ghosts and rise from the pyre.