It should be a given that the goal of a queer history is not to straighten things out. In turn, that backwardness might be queer history’s most effective mode is only a troublesome thing to say if you believe that the thing calling it backward or bent is itself facing forward, as if it weren’t constantly turning back to keep the other thing in its view.
Heather Love’s Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, proposes exactly this: backwardness, in all its frontages, as a mode of queer thought and history making, and as an undertow to the forward momentum and clear lines of sight of the Modern era. Backwardness, Love writes, accounts for queer readers’ desire for historical precedents that contemporary queer identities can refer themselves to—what Eve Sedgewick has called previously “the search for a useable heritage.” For Love though, this is not compelled by utility as much as the will to redemption, manifest in the tendency to reach “toward isolated figures in the queer past in order to rescue or save them.” This tendency can be volatile, if not flatly self-sabotaging. It is where holding a posture of backwardness gets twisty, where the backward impulse meets refusals that necessitate difficult contortions: foremost from modernity, which seeks to disqualify queer identity, but also from those figures of the past who might themselves “refuse to be redeemed.” ...
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