by Chandan Reddy
Modern
“Modern” is among the most difficult words in our critical vocabulary either to define or to abandon. Within different disciplinary contexts, both the origins and the features of the modern are differently inscribed. Philosophy locates the onset of the modern in the eighteenth-century secularization of knowledge about the human and material world, while history and political science periodize it alongside the generalization of the sovereign nation-state after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the emergence of the citizen-subject after the French Revolution of 1789. For economics, the modern began with the emergence of capitalist market economies following the British Industrial Revolution, whereas literary studies traces it to the invention of the printing press and the gradual universalization of schooling and literacy. The hallmarks of modernity as defined by these intellectual traditions include the development of free labor, universalist notions of culture, and abstract notions of equality. As 85 percent of the globe’s landmass was forcibly submitted to colonial rule, Western intellectuals and their publics, enthralled by the birth of “modernity,” promoted “progress” by fixating on these features as the endpoint of colonial “development.” It was, as one British poet wrote on the eve of the US colonization of the Philippines in 1899, “the white man’s burden” to shine the light of modernity globally (Kipling 1899).
Queer
We tell a story about queer that goes like this: Once a slur used to shame and stigmatize same-sex desire, radical LGBT activists, artists, and academics in the 1990s reclaimed it as a term of gender subversion, antirespectability, and antinormativity (J. Butler 1993b). Today, queer consolidates these dispositions and is put to use by varied people who take umbrage with binary sexual and gender identities, such as straight or gay, male or female, normal or abnormal, cisgender or transgender. Those who seek more to disturb, shatter, or undermine the heteronormative cultural order than to be included or represented by that culture and order especially claim the term (Halberstam 2011). Against “second-wave” feminist constructs of the personal as political, many use queer to stress cultural subjectivities and lives foreclosed by both dominant society’s and feminists’ imaginaries of the “personal” or the “intimate.” The feminist sex wars of the 1980s, out of which some important strands of queer theory developed, pivoted precisely on the exclusion of certain modes of gendered embodiment, sexual desire, and pleasure. And yet, however destabilizing or agonistic assertions of queerness against cultural inclusion and political representation are or appear to be, they are not always in and of themselves political or related to a specifically counter-hegemonic political project or set of meanings. Indeed, the word’s usage by some as a social identity and term of belonging is as tied to maintaining a liberal or nationalist order as defying it (Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Puar 2007).