The aim of criticism in this light is not redemptive. Already in “’68 or Something,” they are aiming for a different understanding of the entanglements of thinking and writing:

In both conversations and written exchanges, Lauren encouraged the associative logics that are present in The Hundreds and were cultivated in the salons and other experimental formats we organized and participated in together. I remember trying to write something for that special issue that we both knew would never make it through the review process – but through thinking of Lauren as an audience for it, bits and pieces of that writing found its way into an essay for Our Monica, Ourselves, the collection they co-edited with Lisa Duggan, and An Archive of Feelings (whose keyword “archive” owes a lot to the “I hate your archive” of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City), and beyond. But I know they still struggled to make that space for others, once they were able to make it, however precariously, for their own ideas. In the special issue on “Intimacy,” for example, catalyzed by the emergence of queer theory, they framed the title concept as a capacious tent that connected and affirmed scholarship on domesticity, sex, and feelings that could be minoritized as belonging to the domain of the feminine. This effort was visible in their infrastructure-making role as both special issue editor and editorial board member for the journal. Indeed, Critical Inquiry, like its University of Chicago home base, is one of those places where Lauren fought to make institutional space both for their own work – and in its wake for that of others.

It’s definitely a zone for female complaint, as the above passage from “”68 or Something,” which was published in Critical Inquiry in 1994, suggests. We are considered less rigorous, more sentimental, more “tribal,” more merely subcultural and subnational, more merely lesbian, sexually pathological, or just sexual than others whose vital relation to their work seems, nonetheless, to be less personally motivated. -Lauren Berlant, “’68, or Something”Įven before Lauren got cancer, I was feeling some urgency around making sure that the origin story for the affective turn included all the work that proto-queer feminists of our generation did to make space, or infrastructure as Lauren might say, for scholarship on women’s popular genres – stigmatized sometimes even within feminism itself because our objects were seen as non-feminist, or even anti-feminist, and hence an embarrassment. Feminists are still made violently minor in institutional, public sphere, and everyday life contexts.

Slave 1 concept art