The Map and the Territory

This talk addresses the question of the map and the territory through the intellectual and institutional history of queer studies. It has been the burden of queer thought to push back against philosophical realism and the idea that, for instance, gender is simply there, a set of incontrovertible biological facts or an ordinary feature of shared experience. The performativity thesis in queer theory has brought about a new era of gender freedom by loosening the relation between culture, language, and self-understanding from the ‘givens’ of the body, law, and history. But it has resulted in two problems, which Heather Love investigates in this talk: 1. Reference: the long-standing problem of material reality and its appearance within queer and trans theory and 2. Scale: the non-adequation between queer thought and the needs, interests, and self-understanding of the LGBT community. Love will argue that by taking the map for the territory, and representation for existence, queer scholars have not only made it difficult to address ‘bodies that matter’, they have also intensified the methodological problem of scale.

Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; in September 2026, she will join Rutgers University as the Kenneth Burke Chair of English. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (‘Rethinking Sex’) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations (‘Description Across Disciplines’). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project (‘To Be Real’), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism.