Re- and De-Queering Dave Hickey

On the 30th anniversary edition of Hickey's The Invisible Dragon

The Theorist (Dave Hickey), 2004-2007, pencil casein on paper, 96 x 80 inches, by Ian Jehle

In the interests of keeping things spicy in this newsletter, I’m participating in an old school Slate book club-style discussion of a new book, in this case the 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s seminal work The Invisible Dragon.

The new edition includes the original “Four Essays on Beauty” along with some previously uncollected essays by Hickey (on Dolly Parton and Richard Pryor, among other subjects) and a long afterword from Hickey’s editor and friend Gary Kornblau.

I’ll be weighing in later this week with my own contribution, but just wanted to bring your attention to the opening sally in the discussion, by

Blake Smith

.

Dave Hickey, that Queer

It’s a long, rich essay, but I suspect the piece of it that we’ll end up focusing on the most, in the course of our discussion, is the section toward the end where Blake takes issue both with Kornblau’s attempt to “queer” Dave and with the broader confusions, as Blake sees it, in the contemporary construction of “queer.” He writes:

What we have … is a ‘queer’ project out to sneakily and incoherently try to combine

1)    The promotion of the well-being—or at least the cultural visibility of certain—sexual minorities (some more than others)

2)    The celebration of the anti-normative sexual energies (wrongly! contingently!) identified with those minorities

3)    A progressive egalitarian politics that, of course, does not actually believe in doing away with norms or with insiders-and-outsiders, but which merely, qua political movement, wants to erect a new set of rules and distinctions said to be more inclusive and humane but which, necessarily (and I’m not saying this is even a bad thing, but just a feature of our being human) merely rewrite the terms of normativity and queerness, making, as I’ve said elsewhere, supposedly ‘queer’ progressives into the normative subjects and the erstwhile normative ones into the ‘new queers’

The four official discussants in the book club are myself, Blake,

Paul Franz

, and

John Pistelli

, but anyone who wants to weigh in, either in the comments or in their own posts, is more than welcome, and I’m on board to engage/share/link/excerpt.

The new book is for sale here. It’s a bit hard to find copies of the original original text, which is a pretty lovely object, but there are plenty of used copies of the revised version that University of Chicago press put out some years later.