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akademiskacademic quarterkvarterVolume 03. Fall 2011 • on the webFlirting with the LawQueer Culture beyond Transgression?Alla Ivanchikovais Assistant Professor of World Literature at The Universityof Alaska Fairbanks. Her research focuses on globalizationand transnational approaches to contemporaryliterature with a particular emphasis on issues of gender,sexuality and race. I am particularly intrigued by “transitions”– transient literary formations that emerge duringthe times of rapid social transformations and culturalcrises, which determined my interest in contemporaryAfrican and East European literatures.We are no longer under the rule of law, but of grace.Saint Paul (Romans 6:14)I fought the law and the law won.The ClashHistorically, queer desire has been imagined as destructive of thesocial order – an ultimate transgression and a quintessential crime.The figure of the queer offender has been conjured by the frequentlyoverlapping discourses of criminology, anthropology,sexology, and most recently, psychoanalysis in both its Freudianand Lacanian versions (Hart 28). Psychological instability, latentor over criminality, and even the mark of psychosis have beenlinked to queer subjects’ failure to subscribe to the imperatives ofcompulsory heterosexuality as manifested in the Oedipus complexthrough which sexual difference and appropriate developmentalgoals are inscribed in the subject’s psyche. The residue ofthis disciplinary history through which same-sex desire has beencriminalized, infantilized, and presented as corrosive of the socialmatrix, continues to preoccupy and titillate contemporary modesof representation.Volume03 159