Something like a whole: The utopian promise of queer retrosexuality

Abstract

This chapter theorizes the relationship between queer of color critique and the politics of utopia through a framework of “queer retrosexuality”: The narrative return to historical primal scenes of pre-Stonewall persecution that subtend post-Stonewall literary and cultural LGBT productions. What motivates this return to the wounds and bruises of history? In what sense can this return be paradoxically theorized as reparatively utopian and thus a hopeful critical practice that promises pleasure-seeking possibilities? Theorizing these questions in relation to Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988) as emblematic of queer of color critique, the chapter attends to the complex historiographical possibilities that become available when the intersecting vectors of race and sexuality frame our theorizations of utopian political and historical projects.