Despite the continued valiant effort of radical and critical scholars both in and most importantly outside the academy, mainstream academic approaches to history in the United States and Europe have remained methodologically stable. Most historians “write up” the archive without getting bogged down in too much theory, as if the use of concepts or ways of thinking and reading from outside our small discipline is a mere distraction from every human being’s natural mode of expression: that of the English-language academic historian. As Angela Zimmermann once wrote, the “masters of the profession . . . have never had to recognize the ways language fails most of us—not because of the way we use it but because of the way it uses us.” With terrible accuracy, she describes this “bad empiricism” as “an orthopedic prose occasionally enlivened by talk about the weather––as if admitting that even that ultimate nothing to talk about, the weather, is more than the something about which these historians claim to write.”
Queer historians have been among those trying to insist that how we make meaning matters in how we write history. But as Jennifer Evans points out in her new monograph-cum-manifesto, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism, the term “queer” has itself experienced somewhat of a loss of meaning and a curdling of political potential in the decades since it was new. The contributions of brilliant critics such as Cathy Cohen, José Esteban Muñoz, and Roderick Ferguson led to the term becoming, productively, more mobile, and instructed how it interfaces with our analysis of race and class. But recently, instead of signifying the making-strange of the sex-gender system, “queer” has become more of a floating signifier of alterity. Everything is queer! Even drones! Ironically, the more “queer” has drifted away from its referents, the more it has become an essentializing category, a term that means something like “different-but-good,” a way of avoiding critical work rather than engaging in it. “In our quest for queer kin,” Evans writes, “we have forgotten that the critical work we do is to disturb the practice of essentialism, of seeing queerness unidimensionally, as inherently wed to progressive causes, always on the side of right.”