Queer Forms

Queer Forms

ASCA Workshop 2027

Keynotes: Eugenie Brinkema, Lee Edelman, Robyn Wiegman

We live in a time of formal failure. Fossil-capitalism, genocidal violence, and anti-trans mobilisation supply our decade with the steady hum of what Lauren Berlant called crisis ordinariness: the fraying reproduction of life-worlds at different scales, from the planetary, political, and academic, to the intimate scales of subjectivity. The rise of populism marks the failure of democratic form all over the world. Legal formations such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice fail to prevent famine and genocide. The university form is constantly in crisis, and hitherto robust knowledge formations (in the natural sciences and philosophy alike) have never received more scepticism and attack. All the while, the modern paradigms of the theoretical humanities, with their insistence on fluidity (gender studies), ambivalence (queer theory), destruction (trans studies), negation (Black studies), and amorphousness (ecocriticism), have fallen short in delivering the tools proper to the invention of new formations to help us hold and think things differently. These disciplines, in their approach to all form/ation as normative and straight, have not taken form seriously as a lens of social and cultural analysis.

Yet the past decade has also offered glimpses of an academic (re)turn to the question of form, in work by a burgeoning movement of scholars across the humanities. In queer theory, this turn is marked by Berlant’s work on infrastructure and Lee Edelman’s ‘structural’ concept of queerness, as well as by Ramzi Fawaz’s attention to aesthetic form in Queer Forms, and the focus on kinship forms in the scholarship of Teagan Bradway. In literary studies, authors such as Caroline Levine argue for the political necessity of formalist method, as the key to a more activist study of the social and the textual. In film and media studies, formalism is undergoing major revisions by scholars like Rizvana Bradley and Eugenie Brinkema, who both insist on the theoretical importance of a critique of form. In art history, scholars such as David Getsy and William J. Simmons push for ‘queer formalism’ as a new artistic category. In Marxist criticism, value-form theory, and its relation to queer and feminist critique, is on the rise, and Anna Kornbluh has mounted a defence of abstraction and mediation (read: form) to argue for theoretical frameworks that support actual political organisation. In work as different as Kornbluh’s and Brinkema’s, a defence of form and formalism equals a claim for the endurance of theory and critical thinking as such.

Queer Forms, the 2027 ASCA workshop, aims to offer a central forum to these divergent debates about form and formalism in the humanities today. Our workshop stages two concomitant lines of inquiry. We ask, on the one hand: How to conceptualise form alternatively–more capaciously, speculatively, queerly–against an over-eager negative conceptualisation of form as solely restrictive, violent, obstructive? What social, political, and disciplinary affordances does a rethinking of form offer in our moment of historical crisis and direly needed intellectual and political reinvention? On the other hand: How to read, and read better, alternative forms of life, world-building, (infra)structure, and community, that are already employed and at work–tactically, subterraneously, poetically? What, if anything, can a formalist methodological practice contribute to the task of critically engaging the forms that life just takes and needs? Heeding Kornbluh’s warning against the retreat into the “beautific fantasy of formless life,” we invite academics, writers, and artists alike to present critical and artistic reflection on the social, political, aesthetic, and theoretical work of form.

Topics of engagement could include:

• new formalisms in literary studies, film studies, media studies, and art history, 
• old formalisms, structuralisms, and their contemporary purchase: Russian formalism, New Criticism, method wars, etc.,
• queer theory and ‘queer formalism’: sex, aesthetics, negativity; desire, form, rigidity; kinship, geometry,
• Black studies and the critique of form: ontology, design, nonbeing, negation, fugitivity, pessimism,
• trans studies and (trans)formalism: (re)presentation, (de)transition, attachments, gender-as-form, artistry
• Marxism and form: social poetics, value form, capitalist form, the dialectic, abstraction, and activist formalisms,
• disciplinary formation, field formation, knowledge formation, critical rhetoric, institutional grammar,
• urban form and city planning, architecture, maps, grids, everyday life forms,
• landscape, ecological forms, assemblages, nature.
• …And forms? From an infinite list: line, fold, seam, cut, edge, suture, dehiscence, sequence, series, set, list, knot, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, diagram, scheme, graph, catalogue, column, threshold, void, gap, hole, rim, ring, mark, trace, curve, convexity, concavity, inversion, reversion, assemblage, montage, ABCs—etc.!