![handle is hein.journals/cclaysolw6 and id is 1 raw text is:
Editor's Note, or a Weakly
Normative Queer Legal Theory of
Litotes
Joseph J. Fischel*
Abstract
This Note describes and softly prescribes a queer legal theoretic sensibility, a sensibility
receptive to and promotional of legal regimes least inhospitable to gender pluralism and
erotic flourishing. The sensibility accretes from first, the costs of law (or the fact that laws
have costs), and second, the author's peculiar affection for his high school Latin teacher's
habitus. The Note overviews the contributions of this issue of CAL, highlighting the essays'
emphases on ungay queer subjects as well as the queerness of sexual violence politics.
My high school Latin teacher taught us rhetorical devices, litotes among them. A litotes is
the assertion of an idea through the negation of its opposite. For example: my Latin teacher
iaas not closeted (he had a coffee mug in the dark corner of his shared office imprinted with
the words hate is not a family value, but that was as far as it went). A litotes can take the
form of a double negative, but it needn't; and whereas a double negative is typically a
grammatical error, usage of litotes is deliberate. A litotes can emphasize the opposite of the
contrary position-damn, he's not bad looking at all!; he's not the sharpest tool in the shed-but it
can also, and for my purposes here, express a middle-range,' better- or under-average
intensity toward an object or event-the party iaas not unfun; lesbian separatism is not the iworst
idea.2 My Latin teacher would never have served as the faculty advisor for our gay/straight
alliance, nor would he have donned a chest harness and chaps to teach the declensions.
* Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Yale University. Many thanks to Simon Stem
and Markus Dubber for the privilege to edit this issue of CritzcalAnaysis of Law, and thanks as well to all the
authors herein, whose contributions, in my biased opinion, together strike that sweet spot of tenacity,
irreverence and prudence that is so delectably queer. All my gratitude too to the student editors of CAL. And
a final shout-out to whip-smart Rafael Walker for arguing with me over Greek and Latin rhetorical devices,
litotes among them, late into the evening (but I was right).
1 Janet Halley, Paranoia, Feminism, Law: Reflections on the Possibilities for Queer Legal Studies, in New
Directions in Law and Literature 123, 129 (Elizabeth S. Anker & Bernadette Meyler eds., 2017) ([Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick] was ever alert for the 'excluded middle,' noting 'middle ranges of agency,' for instance,
that could rearrange dualistic representations of power as an all-or-nothing scenario of domination and
subordination.) (quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes, in Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust 123, 130 (Jonathan Goldberg ed., 2011)).
2 See generally Laurence R. Horn, A Natural History of Negation (1989).
ISSN 2291-9732](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/cclaysolw6&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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