A01=Chase Gregory
Author_Chase Gregory
Barbara Johnson
black feminist criticism
Category=DS
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF3
cross-identification
Deborah McDowell
dissatisfaction
embarrassment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
identification
identity
identity knowledge
Nella Larson
paranoid reading
passing
queer bonds
queer literary criticism
queer recognition
reparative reading
Robert Reid-Pharr
Product details
- ISBN 9781478028895
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In As If!, Chase Gregory explores the stylistically strategic, often campy, and productively fraught cross-identifications of early queer criticism. Gregory calls this form of AIDS-era criticism as if! - a mode of writing in which authors struggle to read, write, and identify with and across categories of race, sexuality, and gender. Analyzing the work of Robert Reid-Pharr, Deborah McDowell, Barbara Johnson, and Eve Sedgwick, Gregory shows how their writing productively challenges fixed ideas of identity and knowledge production. Using these four writers as case studies of a larger trend within early queer criticism, Gregory demonstrates that even when critical attempts at relation are met by impasse, as if! criticism breaks down social relation, especially within those fields influenced by queer theory, deconstructionist feminist theory, and black feminist theory. By advocating a return to as if! criticism as a politically useful blueprint for contemporary cultural inquiry, Gregory draws attention to the obstacles to forging identification across difference and insists on the impossible project of solidarity across such difference.
Chase Gregory is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University.
