Mosaic 48/1 0027-1276-07/183018$02.00©Mosaic Queer Exuberance: The Politics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s Visceral Fiction TYLER BRADWAY O n the day after Barack Obama’s first election as President, Judith Butler cir- culated a brief online essay entitled “Uncritical Exuberance.” As the title implies, Butler feared that progressives would succumb to the seduction of positive affects. “Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time,” Butler admitted. Consequently, she called for a “critical politics” to inoculate intellectuals from the apparently “unambivalent love” displayed by Obama’s supporters. “After all,” Butler wrote, “fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, ‘I love each and every one of you.’” In an astonishingly broad sweep, Butler conflates the “political affect” of Democrats, Queer theory approaches positive affects with suspicion while negative affects exemplify “queer critique.” Yet queer fiction represents more nuanced relationships between pleasure and political imagination. For Jeanette Winterson, “queer exuberance” encodes social relations and values that oppose the affective economy of heteronormative biopower. Love is an intervention. Is that true? I would like it to be true. Not romance, not sentimentality, but a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dic- tate what will be. —Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods