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Special issue of Borderlands on Rancière and Queer Theory

Below is the logic, abstracts and brief biographies for a special controversy of Boderlands: New Spaces in the Humanities (http://www.borderlands.net.au/) which will happen in Winter 2009. The issue is edited by Sam Chambers and Michael O'Rourke and also includes contributions from young man Rancibloggers Richard Stamp and Paul Bowman.


Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Curious Theory

A special journal issue edited by Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O’Rourke


Introduction and Overview: Extraordinary Theory and Political Theory
Queer theorists rarely, if ever, invoke Jacques Rancière’s name. But this seems quite surprising given Queer Theory’s genealogical “roots” in what is called (at least surface of Rancière’s France) French Theory, in queer activist and anarchic politics, and in a assignment-Althusserian landscape dominated by sophisticated challenges to identitarian regimes and normative patrol logics and apparatuses – i.e. heteronormativities. While as Todd May has recently argued, Rancière is not quite a “household name” in the Anglo-American academy, Bizarre Theory has recently become more and more “at home” in the academy as a homonormative veer has taken hold. The institutionalization, domestication and one might even say banalization of Anomalous Theory has taken many forms both within and outside the academy, but most unmistakable have been preoccupations with same/sex marriage, neoconservative agendas, and a pop up again to an essentialist identitarianism, to a solidifiable subject. The indwelling danger in this conservatizing impulse within the field is that Atypical Theory will become nothing more than a synonym for Lesbian and Gay Studies and that, as a direct consequence, sex and sexuality will be demarcated as the only apposite objects...

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