A Usable Queer Past

Ramzi Fawaz's Queer Forms is a dazzling study of (primarily) late twentieth-century queer and feminist cultural production. In this book—his second, after The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016)—Fawaz develops a theory of "queer forms" and a creative/interpretative practice he terms queer formalism. He uses the former to describe an archive of gay liberationist and feminist cultural production from the 1970s on, and the latter for both the practice of crafting queer forms and a method to identify and interpret them.For Fawaz, artists and activists in the 1970s "offered up queer and feminist forms as provisional shapes, or constructs, for picturing queerness" (35). "A queer form," he writes, "is any material shape, construct, or pattern that is articulated to, or comes to be inhabited by, some aspect of gender and sexual nonconformity or divergence" (36). In each of the chapters of the book, Fawaz turns to a distinct queer form, which he pairs with a particular feminist or gay liberationist political concept. These include "the female replicant" (or android), which comes to symbolize "an imperfect or failed duplicate of an 'original' woman"; "the material structure of a walled-off utopian commune," which often takes the shape of a dome, and represents "the concept of lesbian separatism"; "the geometric shape of the circle as a blueprint for the feminist political concept of consciousness-raising (CR)"; and "serial cultural forms" as a means to "illuminate the . . . project of redefining genders and sexualities as successive states of being" (50–51)—to name only a few of the queer forms Fawaz outlines.A major argument advanced by Queer Forms is that we risk doing ourselves a disservice, both politically and aesthetically, by rejecting this rich repository of feminist and gay liberationist cultural production from the post-Stonewall and AIDS epidemic eras. So, whereas the lesbian separatism of the 1970s radical feminists is often seen as leading in a straight line to the transphobic TERFs of today, Fawaz argues that the story is more complicated. Not only did lesbian separatism function "in the 1970s as a rich speculative project of seeing what forms women might take in the absence of patriarchy," but some of the core impulses of separatism actually inform a wide range of progressive politics today. He writes: "If lesbian separatism is a highly refined identity politics aimed at ameliorating harm by producing an analysis of hierarchical power in the hopes of destroying its malevolent hold on oppressed people, then it precisely describes nearly every major left-wing intellectual and activist project for political freedom since the radical movements of the 1960s" (151). In this respect, Queer Forms is part of a recent turn (back) toward this post-Stonewall moment in feminist and gay activism, alongside Cristan Williams's (2016) account of the trans-inclusionary aspects of radical feminism, Andrea Long Chu's (2019) rereading of Valerie Solanas in Females, and Amia Srinivasan's (2021) recent reevaluation of Catharine MacKinnon in The Right to Sex and of Andrea Dworkin in the London Review of Books (Srinivasan 2022). However, where some of these other scholars hope to recover (aspects of) radical feminism for its own liberatory impulses, Fawaz does so both for that reason and to highlight the real affinity and solidarity that existed between gay liberationists and radical feminists at the time. And, in this context, he helpfully reminds us that the "gay" in gay lib "functioned around 1972 similarly to how we understand the terms 'queer' or 'trans*' in activism and theory today, as a flexible name for gender and sexual transformation, rather than a prescribed identity" (26).In addition to its theorization of queer forms, Fawaz's book stages what can be best described as a loving polemic against identity politics, so-called cancel culture, and purity politics—all from the vantage of a historically grounded queer Left. Unlike earlier critiques of identity politics, however, Fawaz's problematizes the common queer fantasy of (or aspiration to) "formlessness" alongside a more familiar critique of rigid, essentialist identities and their policing. Whereas, by now, we are extremely familiar with the latter, that is, a critique of identity politics that challenges versions of such a politics grounded in the fixity and essentialism of "identity," less common is a critique of queer theory's response to identity: the assertion of gender and sexuality's fluidity and formlessness. For Fawaz, "the twin constructions of formlessness/fluidity and rigidity/identitarianism that queer, feminist, and trans* theorists and activists often conceive of as radically opposed are often merely two sides of the same coin" (10). The problem with fluidity, for Fawaz, is that it often morphs into "a demand that one's personal expression of gender and sexual multiplicity be recognized as the fundamental inner truth of self," thereby "inverting into its own type of identitarianism" (9). As an alternative to this "frustrating dialectic," he proposes "shapeshifting," which "more accurately describes how individuals meaningfully mold and remold their sense of self over time" (10). Fawaz delves into what this might look like in detail in his analysis of seriality as a queer form in the fiction of Armistead Maupin and the comic art of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz.Finally, a central theme of Queer Forms that is explored in greater depth toward the end of the book is friendship. In contrast to the adage I've often heard in progressive organizing spaces in Europe and the United States that you don't have to be friends to organize politically with someone, Fawaz argues that, in fact, it was friendship between women and queers that formed the solid foundation of a lot of queer and feminist organizing in the 1970s and through the AIDS epidemic. As a non-filial kind of relation, for Fawaz, friendship "establishes completely new orders of ethical belonging based not on preexisting rule, law, or moral commandment but on mutually negotiated, contingent criteria between two equal participants" (340) and that friendship "might provide one important, but underutilized, framework for studying social movements" (343). As opposed to a "discourse of care" that sets up one of two interacting subjects in a position of lack, friendship can serve as the ground for a more equal and "mutually transformative exchange" (352).Queer Forms ends with a spectacular reading of Barry Jenkins's 2016 film Moonlight. Fawaz parses the scene in which Juan teaches Chiron how to float in the ocean as offering up its own queer form, that of the embrace: "In Juan's tender cross-generational hold," Fawaz writes, "it becomes possible to conceive that a Black queer boy can inhabit 'the middle of the world' rather than its periphery. That 'Black people are everywhere.' That Black boys can look 'blue in the moonlight.' That a Black straight man can support a Black queer boy, as gently and lovingly as the liquid touch of water" (361). In a sense, Moonlight is the queer present's legacy to a future that we can't yet know. Perhaps, as Fawaz suggests, we should approach the twentieth-century's queer cultural archive with the same tenderness we would expect from future readers and viewers toward Moonlight and other texts of our queer present, as offerings of queer forms readily available to make our own.