Abstract
Abstract Spivak refers to “originary queerness” as a concept she cannot yet theorize. If concepts convey and uphold heterogeneous lived experience, then the paradoxical missing-ness of a corresponding “what happened” augurs a form of understanding underived from information retrieval. In this spot lives our undifferentiated experience such that “one cannot imagine what one seems to know.” Such imagining of what one (already) seems to know is the task of...
Abstract Spivak refers to “originary queerness” as a concept she cannot yet theorize. If concepts convey and uphold heterogeneous lived experience, then the paradoxical missing-ness of a corresponding “what happened” augurs a form of understanding underived from information retrieval. In this spot lives our undifferentiated experience such that “one cannot imagine what one seems to know.” Such imagining of what one (already) seems to know is the task of tarrying with difference “in its place.” This essay reads the novel Shame to suggest that the question of originary queerness (what happened?) is an effort to “cross identity” for the heterogeneous. Shame’s elite Pakistani women are apertures of difference in its place precisely because their fates are so stereotypically dismal. Instead of what is in the novel – the unequivocal gender coding that renders women monstrous or pure, grotesque or invisible, barren or fertile – they contest the narrator’s illocutionary claim that “all stories ha[ve] to end together.” Since none epitomize appropriate femininity, they refract sexual difference as lived failure to gesture to (an) un-exceptional originary queerness that does not queer places. In fact, places queer it.
Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities – Taylor & Francis
Published: Sep 3, 2021
Keywords: originary queerness; Spivak; sexual difference; Rushdie; postcolonial; philosophy; Shame
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