Queering History

The Essay that Follows was Prompted by a Session at the 2004 MLA Annual Convention, “Ten Years Since Queering The Renaissance,” organized by Madhavi Menon and chaired by Jonathan Goldberg. The other panelists were Jeffrey Masten and Richard Rambuss, two of the contributors to the 1994 volume, and Laurie Shannon. The papers ranged widely from theoretical questions about the activity of queering to the practices of glossing texts, from relations between queering and gendering to the ways in which queering might also throw into question the human-animal divide. The essay below picks up on some of the broadest theoretical questions raised by the panel, emphasizing the need to continue the work begun a decade ago and suggesting some methodological problems and challenges to be faced.