Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory

Causality dominates today's discussions of LGBT rights: anti-gay voices imagine gay proliferation through seduction, influence, and corruption, while queer communities largely embrace biological determinism, saying they are "born gay." Reading popular rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present day, Lost Causes decenters etiology from queer politics, engages abject tropes of "homosexual reproduction," and considers the effects of retroactive, absent, and contingent causality.