Believe it or not, I started my training as a political scientist. Specifically, a political theorist. In my modern political thought courses as an undergraduate, I was mesmerized by the ways thinker asked broad questions about power, governance, the role of the state. And yet, I was always struck by how the narratives of theory, which often produce universal narratives about the world (e.g. disciplinary society is the universal condition of the modern age for Foucault or the prison camp as the norm of sovereign power and modernity for Agamben) rarely speak to the material conditions of Blackness. EPJ’s “Quare Studies” is a revelation for its centering of materiality, flesh, to theory. This playful and ingenius riff on “queer” via his use of the term “quare” is a call for grounding theory not just in materiality but also in the nuances of race and class, which shade universality with the inflections of particular experiences. Quare for Johnson is instructive not just because it displaces the grand narratives of queer theory, but because it demands that scholars attend to performance: to the microscopic things we might to with our bodies. This attention not only has the power to reshape what theory in the academy looks like, but also brings the seeminly frivolous, the unserious, and the disregarded into the center of conversation.
