Too Good for the Gays: Douglas Stuart’s “The Englishman”

“Too Good for the Gays” is a creative-critical essay stemming from a book-length project-in-progress titled A Fuckable Object. A Fuckable Object is a critical memoir (a term borrowed from Jill Dolan and Ann Cvetkovich) which examines the author’s potential to fuck over his objects of study in the act of researching them, in dialogue with queer theory by José Esteban Muñoz and Lauren Berlant. A Fuckable Object compares Muñoz’s and Berlant’s use of “something” in their key theoretical works as a means of interrogating the indeterminacy for which “queer,” in academic and quotidian contexts, often stands in. “Too Good for the Gays” is one in a series of essays which mobilises textual analysis as a method of critical reflexivity, where the author studies a text that he “loves” in order to interrogate what may unwittingly be stowed within his colloquial use of “love” and its relationship to how queerness emerges in his critical, aesthetic, and everyday practice.