Queer Today, Gone Tomorrow

Queer Today, Gone Tomorrow Steven Bruhm Mount St. Vincent University W h at’s left of English Studies? This is a slippery question for me, on a number of fronts. First, I find it hard these days to imagine something to the left of English Studies; despite the reactionary whimpers we can still detect from the conservative haunts of our departments, our discipline has placed itself so firmly on the left that it has become more or less syn­ onymous with “progressive” politics. There’s nothing to the left of English Studies because English Studies is left. The second difficulty for me, though, is my position in this political arena: as a queer scholar working in both textual and cultural studies, I assume I have common cause with the other people writing for this forum, but I’m not really sure what that common cause is. You see, a very cursory survey of English departments across the country reveals that most of the major schools in Canada are not doing queer theory or teaching it to their graduate students, and undergraduates fare no better. There is not much left, in Canada at any rate, of the kind of work I’ve been doing. Queer theory is one of those methodologies (and there are others: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the new formalism) that have failed to make significant inroads in English Studies as they are practiced in Canada. But why should this be the case? I want in the next few pages to think about queerness in the Canadian academy, its reception, ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 25-32 Steven Bruhm is an Associate Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University. He is the author of Gothic Bodies: The Politics ofPain in Romantic Fiction (U of Pennsylvania P, 1994), and ReflectingNarcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (U of Minnesota P, 2001), and co-editor with Natasha Hurley (Rutgers) of the forthcoming Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (U of Minnesota P, 2004). As president of the International Gothic Association and editor-in-chief of Gothic Studies, he is a lover of all things grotesque, including dances of death. He is currently at work on a book-length project entitled Only the Dead Can Dance: Gothic Choreographies of Mortality. and its relative insignificance. My argument, cryptically put, is this: while there is little of queerness left in Canadian English studies, what’s to the left of English studies is the queer. But evidence first. In preparation for writing this essay, I cruised the internet homepages for the major graduate schools in English across Can­ ada to see which ones had full-time faculty who declared queer theory as a primary interest or which offered courses in queer theory. According to the websites (which I admit are never a reliable archive, but they do indicate what is being advertised to the potential grad student) the following depart­ ments have queer practitioners, although it doesn’t follow that the schools are now or have been offering courses in queer theory: Alberta, ubc, Cal­ gary, Guelph, McMaster, Ottawa, Simon Fraser, Western, Wilfrid Laurier, and York. The following don’t: Carleton, Dalhousie, Manitoba, McGill, Memorial, unb, Queen’s, Saskatchewan, Victoria, Waterloo and Windsor. Toronto has someone interested in “Sexual Diversity Studies”—I’m not exactly sure what that is—and someone else interested in “Gay and Lesbian Culture” but the particular resonances of queerness are nowhere to be felt. What’s even more interesting to me from these websites is that all the graduate schools in this country have people working in feminist studies and post-colonial and race studies. In most cases, there is more than one person in each of these fields. In fact, I once had someone tell me that her department was entirely devoted to materialist political work, yet hers is one of the departments in which no sustained queer work is being done. What does this tell us? Why are positions in queer theory not being advertised, and why are queer scholars (I still assume we are legion) not indicating themselves as such in their department’s public documents? The easy answer is homophobia: department members are still very reluc­ tant to...

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