Beverly Smith’s “Notes on This Mess”: The Affective Politics of the Lesbian Feminist Killjoy in Queer Progress Narratives

Abstract:This article theorizes the lesbian feminist killjoy’s negativity in order to elucidate the temporal, affective, and redemptive politics found within feminist and queer collective memory by bringing Conditions: Five and Beverly Smith’s “The Wedding” into conversation with Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter’s Sex Wars. I show how progress narratives presume the unattractiveness of lesbian feminism while investing queerness with the capacity to overcome lesbian feminism’s racial and class exclusions. To counter the way progress narratives’ division between good and bad subjects endows contemporary scholarship with a fantasy of innocence, I consider how the lesbian feminist killjoy might be attractive enough to provoke alternative desires.