Queer Studies Now; or, The (Political) Economy, Stupid

The 1990s witnessed the origin of a decades-long “discipline problem” in queer studies, a conflict between empirical and theoretical approaches, and the two monographs under review—lesbian and gay historian Marc Stein’s Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—might seem like excellent candidates to reprise it. However, this review argues that the place where lesbian and gay history and queer theory have now caught up with one another is a structural one. What’s changed since the 1990s is less our disciplines and more the political–economic conditions that sustain them.What unites these two works in a common project, however, is the way each betrays an investment in the possibility—one might say, the hope—of political and social change.