...David L. Clark Leo Bersani is well known for making a case for the pleasures of sameness. But “to circulate within sameness,” he notes, “we must first of all welcome [ . . . ] lessness.” This essay explores that hospitable gesture in Bersani’s work, focusing on the self-abnegating practice...

... of aesthetic perceptions of sameness replaces the immobilizing forces of desirous knowing and difference. Highlighted is the way in which sameness is not based on a single predicate of commonality, but instead obtains in similar forms of movement that inaugurate correspondences with others and the world...

... and reenacted performance could be said to be the same. Taking fidelity not as an objective measure of sameness but rather as a mediation between machinery and people, the author finds in the discourse around the re-enacting piano echoes of the nineteenth-century scientific “mechanical objectivity” identified...

..., as well as in ostensibly pro-gay claims that homosexuality is not acquired but biologically determined. Invoking Darwin, antigay groups claim that same-sex marriage will lead to human extinction because it does not serve the propagation of the species. However, this insistence on homosexual sterility...

... to black women’s sexuality in state narratives of black freedom and black freedom-to-secure against the backdrop of the racial makeovers of the late twentieth century, and at the same time turning to black women’s expressive culture as a site that both reflects and troubles those racial makeovers...

..., conceptualization as closure, or thought as merely aspirational. Sexual difference is still yet to be thought, and versions of it that we have belong to the anthropological rendering whereby sexes are imagined as existing when one might say they are material conditions formulated within an economy of the same. ©...

...Lisa Guenther Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized...

...Zak Sitter This article builds on postcolonial critiques of colonialism's reliance on the figure of the ``native informant.'' In early-nineteenth-century Britain, the emergent discipline of orientalism required the native informant to ratify its claims to knowledge; at the same time, orientalism...

... related to sexual difference, namely, the case of transgenerational guilt and that of the child who emerges into heterosexuality despite being raised by two parents of the same sex. Acknowledging Mitchell’s suggestion that sexual difference is marked by recalcitrance, but refusing the way in which she...

... of archaic societies, that is, the interdiction of same-blood marriage—the essay follows the subsequent historical “transubstantiations” of blood through theocracy and sovereignty to state and market capitalism. It concludes by addressing the contemporary biopolitical need for a racism—defined, following...

... of instinctive and passionate “savages” by redeploying the terrain of the instinctive onto collective forms of social organization. At the same time, European instincts were believed to achieve greater independence from the material stuff of daily life, being increasingly figured as outside of either social...

... remains cogent, this article argues, for a field in which individual events and texts and large-scale social and political formations are often bound together by no framework other than their putative belonging to one and the same block of time—that is, a period. Aiming to reform this concept in order...

... celebration of the new. The repeated pronouncement of the death of history nourished by poststructuralist theory, along with a concurrent embrace of scientific imperatives of innovation, the author suggests, operate as an attempt to settle disciplinary unease with undecidability while at the same time...

... because commercial advertising alleges that it did, and in part because at roughly the same time a subjective claim—“I am a woman”—began to be voiced. Although registered orthographically, woman 女性 is not simply a rhetorical category or a natural fact; it is not the effect of abyssal sex difference...

... the virtualized Kung Fu arena of the Matrix that was called by the same name. This essay, the third of what has become an unplanned trilogy, explains why. matthew kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University...

...Ankhi Mukherjee This essay examines singular traumas suffered by Tibetan refugees and expedient and culture-specific cures for the same. Drawing on Honey Oberoi Vahali’s Lives in Exile and other ethnographic studies of the Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India, it shows how classic trauma theory...

... narcissism in Homos and Intimacies . The essay concludes by showing how the notion of castration, roundly rejected by Bersani, may address the impasse between solipsism and sociality that he attempted to resolve through sameness. For Bersani, this meant having to first sever the link between violence...

... populations when marriage is used as the platform for reducing the stigma associated with same-sex desire. © 2018 by Brown University and differences : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2018 marriage equality African Americans sexual minorities intersectionality black marriage lgbtq...

... the civil status of gay people as a counterpoint to the failure of matrimonial rights to do the same for heterosexual African Americans. This essay considers some of the assumptions about race, racism, and racial representation that underpin the architecture of Franke’s argument and the meaning of “black...

... of melancholy gender, the author contends that this subjectivity enables a recognition of the same-sex love and desire prohibited by heterosexist culture through an enactment of its loss. As such, avatar suicide videos dramatize death in order to create an important space of public grieving in which...