A Queer Theory of the State (Critic’s Essay Series)

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.