Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007)

Introduction

Her main premise is to think about a relationship to the past that can fully account for negative affects without this attention somehow prohibiting politics in the present. Love argues that many contemporary critics neglect these negative affects through instead affirming a 'progress' narrative. 'Although many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress; despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people' (3). Love argues that this tension between wanting to explore the connection between queer existence and loss and arguing against it. However, she wants to argue that texts that evoke feelings of loss have an insistent hold on the contemporary queer imaginary. Love explains that she wants to look at these dark representations and avoid the impulse to turn them into 'good use' (4).

Love outlines the persistent connection between queerness and backwardness and argues that the texts she looks at 'turn their backs on the future' (8). Further, she wants to engage with the 'backward feelings' that the texts inspire in contemporary critics. 'In that these texts do not welcome contemporary critics - instead they turn away from us - they often have proved difficult to integrate into a queer literary genealogy' (8). Love points out the impetus to want to rescue queer figures from the past but is interested in her texts precisely because they seem to resist. 'Texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present. We find ourselves unsettled by our identifications with/these figures: the history of queer damage retains its capacity to do harm in the present' (8-9). She points to the tension of being ruined by the past, in that being attached to these figures somehow means ruin in the present. She argues that this refusal to turn to the past 'has made it difficult to approach the past as something living - as something dissonant,/beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the present. Clearly annihilation is not a goal for the movement, but an absolute refusal to linger in the past may entail other kinds of losses' (9-10).

Primarily, Love suggests that disavowing histories of loss structures queer existence in the present. In other words, Love is concerned that queer theory, 'in its haste to refunction such experiences, may not be adequately reckoning with their powerful legacies' (19). Love is interested in the tension between looking back and moving on. She argues that the conflicting feelings of shame and pride, hope and despair, means that contemporary queers 'find ourselves in the odd situation of "looking forward" while we are "feeling backward"' (27). She wants to resist a complete turn to the future and instead wants to linger with the 'damage that we live in the present' (29). 'The politics of optimism diminishes the suffering of queer historical subjectsl at the same time, it blinds us to the continuities between past and present. As long as homophobia continues to centrally structure queer life, we cannot afford to turn away from the past; instead, we have to risk the turn backward, even if it means opening ourselves to social and psychic realities we would rather forget' (29).