ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the material concerns of struggle as deeply embedded in the antagonism between competing discourses, what Foucault has called discrete bodies of knowledge that enable and constrain the social imagination, sometimes producing forms of social identity. It explores how the tragic queer commodity retains its overdetermined force as both target and spark for a re-evaluation of the history of queer opprobrium, a history that continues to unfold in courtrooms and theaters. The chapter shows takes many forms; it is often enshrined in common law, jury selection, and torts. The viability of the tragic paradigm in queer law and literature involves a social internalization of a history of opprobrium, a sedimentation of prejudice whose etiology springs from a complex matrix of historical, sociological, and psychological factors.
