The more things change, the more they stay the same: on the epistemology of queer critique

This article takes issue with the criticism against those that I call “sinister accounts”, that is, analyses contesting pieces of legislation, policy measures and judicial decisions that are generally considered as steps towards a more equal and free society. According to some scholars, such a radical, hypercritical attitude, typical of many queer critiques, tends to produce pedantic and dismissive readings of politi-cal and legal advancements and thus fails to capitalize on the limited resources of Western liberal de-mocracies. Even more importantly, from a social-theoretical perspective, sinister accounts are charged with draining social agents of any autonomy and self-awareness in that they are described as uncon-sciously complying with invisible hegemonic forces. With reference to accounts of the detrimental ef-fects of non-conventional relationship recognition and in the light of a particular notion of the work of concepts in social life, I try to rebut this criticism by showing that sinister accounts contribute to open-ing fissures into the vision of social agents in order for the latter to (re)discover the silenced alterna-tives that various processes of normalization and naturalization inevitably conceal.