In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church prescribed the death penalty for same-sex erotic behavior but also created liturgies for same-sex marriages. In the late 19th century, European sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued for same-sex desire as an illness to be “cured” while his contemporary Havelock Ellis saw it as a variation of human typology. In 1977, Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children organization successfully defeated a gay-positive human rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida; at the same time, Harvey Milk was elected as the first openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And, in the first decade of the 21st century, U.S. President George W. Bush supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage while his counterparts in other nations—such as Spain, South Africa, and Canada—enacted constitutional protections for lesbian and gay people. By the second decade of the 21st century, President Donald Trump had set his sights on trans folk, attempting to ban them from military service, while, in the mass media, representation of trans people and subcultures increased in visibility and complexity in television shows such as Pose and Legendary. So much of what we know to be “fact” about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) life and culture is given to us as story, as narratives that transmit ideas, information, and values about who queer people are. But who tells those stories, and what do they tell us?
Finding Out is a book about these and many other questions. It narrates and analyzes some of the ways LGBTQ and queer people have been represented—and have come to represent themselves—in a variety of fields: literature, history, the arts, the sciences, media, and politics. But if Finding Out is, as its subtitle indicates, an introduction to LGBTQ Studies, then what does that mean, exactly? The very act of introducing a topic is often about the telling of stories. One common assignment given by instructors who want students to see the connections between what they are studying in the classroom and the world outside is the interview. The storytelling involved in the interview process creates connections between teller and listener and often between past and present. We hope that the stories we tell in Finding Out will help create (or, in the case of readers who are already somewhat familiar with LGBTQ culture and history, capitalize upon) a similar kind of connection.
But we also recognize that the process of telling and retelling these stories is challenging. As you can see in the examples listed, narratives of LGBTQ experience have often embodied a simultaneity of coexisting, yet conflicting, forces. Given this, we have written Finding Out to enact a kind of theorized storytelling, a simultaneous offering and critique of narratives that contribute to our understanding of terms like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. As you read, you will see this theorized storytelling consistently at work. On one hand, we can highlight the many ways same-sex desires and gender variance have existed throughout history. On the other hand, the stories told about those desires and about that variance are often overly complex. At various times and in different locations, people tell different stories about their desires, even if, on the surface, the similarities tempt us to understand their stories as like our own. Paying attention to critical differences, however, is an important part of understanding not only how same-sex desires and gender were experienced in the past, but also how they have come to exist today.
SOME THEORETICAL STARTING PLACES
Our approach to LGBTQ history, culture, and politics is not simply to record facts. History is rarely, if ever, as simple as the recorded facts. Like most students and scholars, we begin with theories about what forces have impacted the evolution of LGBTQ histories and the emergence of LGBTQ cultures. We assume first that any historical survey must be undertaken with great care and caution. In writing about the history of same-sex desires and the formation of LGBTQ identities, we acknowledge a lineage of queer thinking. We attempt to attend carefully to Jack Halberstam’s notion of perverse presentism. Halberstam warns that anyone writing about the past needs to consider carefully how contemporary notions and constructions of desire and identity can easily be imposed on past persons, incidents, or issues. They argue instead for a “perversely presentist model of historical analysis, a model, in other words, that avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but one that can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past” (52–53). When we write about the past, we do not assume that contemporary labels are necessarily useful in describing past desires. What looks like a gay, lesbian, bi, or trans identity or community from our current perspective may have meant something quite different to people in the past.
Second, we have attempted to highlight the diversity of same-sex desire and gender variance. Understanding that queer experiences are complex, we honor the varieties and diversities of that experience by looking not only at gay and lesbian lives but also at bisexual and trans lives. Terminology takes on particular importance in this context, for the attempt to avoid constructing the past in contemporary terms often means taking great care with the way we choose to name. Lesbian, for instance, shifts in meaning over time from a geographical term to a poetic style to an identity marker. Gay as a slang term originally referred to a (female) prostitute. The meaning has since slipped to delineate a sexually transgressive subculture, a Black lesbian, and a homosexual man. Bisexual originally functioned as a synonym for what we now call heterosexual, a term that was itself originally coined to describe nonprocreative sexuality between men and women. Today, the term bisexual refers to a person who experiences sexual desire for both men and women. The terms transgender, transsexual, transman, tranny boi, FtM, MtF, and so forth describe varieties of identities that register gender roles, deeply felt experiences of gender, or even a mixture of both. Queer is perhaps the most elusive of such terms. Once a taunt used against homosexuals, queer has been reclaimed by a variety of activists and theorists as an umbrella term to signify the diversity of LGBTQ identities and to assert positively the value of difference. However, some object to the term, arguing that it erases crucial differences among the L, the G, the B, and the T. More recently, some have objected even to use of the term homosexual, which emerged as a medical term in the late 19th century to describe those who engaged in what many considered pathological behavior. However, many others adopted the term homosexual as a positive self-descriptor. Although the word has somewhat fallen out of favor, we retain it when historically appropriate to describe those who used it to refer to themselves or when it was the term most widely used at the time we are discussing. Similarly, you might see the word transvestite, which was sometimes used to describe people who wore the clothing of the “opposite” gender. This is another word that has fallen out of favor, but we retain its use when used historically or by people who identified themselves as transvestites.
Third, we believe that the same awareness needs also to be applied when we think cross-culturally; whereas same-sex desires might imply gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity in the United States, this is not necessarily the case in other cultures, particularly outside of the Global North. The same is true for what might look like trans identities and communities in non–Western contexts. We reject the notion of a global “gay” or “trans” identity, and we believe that it is imperative to understand sexual and gendered experiences as contextualized by the times and places in which they occur. We refuse, for instance, to fix the term gay as a prerequisite for global interaction and coalition. For it is in the permutations of this term and its legacies, as they circulate around the globe in queer organizations and gatherings, from Mexico City’s Semana Cultural Lésbico-Gay to New Delhi’s Campaign for Lesbian Rights and Beijing’s International Women’s Conference, from Buenos Aires’s Marcha de Orgullo Gay to the diasporic South Asian and Latino Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade in Queens, New York, that the future of the human and civil rights of queers also lies (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 4).
We hope, in other words, to examine same sex, nonnormative desires and gender variance in various locations worldwide not with the purpose of fitting them into a grand teleological narrative linking globalization with sexual freedom. Rather, we identify connections and similarities among movements and experiences as we observe them, and where possible, we allow agents to tell their own stories. We intend these stories to trouble monolithic social narratives, believing with Gayatri Gopinath that “essentialized concepts of national and diasporic identity are most fruitfully contested from a ‘queer diasporic’ positionality” (150). However, as we attempt to offer a sense of the global experience of LGBTQ people, same-sex practices, and gender variance, we must acknowledge that our strengths as scholars lie in the history and culture of LGBTQ people in the Global North in general and in the United States in particular. Still, Finding Out ranges widely across major events, issues, and ideas pertaining to nonnormative sexualities and gender variance around the world.
Fourth, we believe that the experiences of race, social class, and sexuality are intertwined in compelling ways, and we have attempted throughout Finding Out to represent those intersections. Too often, LGBTQ and Sexuality Studies have been dominated by scholars who have paid scant attention to issues of race and social class. Failing to pay such attention, however, robs our understanding of same-sex histories, identities, and issues of important dimensions. Our experiences are multiply inflected—not just by sexuality but also by race, ethnicity, and social class. For instance, to understand gays and lesbians participating as artists in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is to see those artists not just as gays and lesbians but also as African American gays and lesbians living in a racist and homophobic culture. In terms of social class, it is important to understand that the primary participants in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 were working-class drag queens; the riots occurred in a specifically working-class context. However, since 1969, gay and lesbian rights organizations in the United States have come to be dominated by middle-class people with middle-class concerns. How did this happen? Answering that question involves looking critically not only at issues of sexuality but also at issues of social class. Doing so, however, can be intellectually—and personally—challenging.
In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “Subjects who are outside the purview of dominant public spheres encounter obstacles in enacting identifications. Minority identifications are often neglectful or antagonistic to other minoritarian positionalities” (8). In the United States, for instance, we generally see identity in binary terms—of color or white, gay or straight, male or female. A person occupying multiple or fluid identity categories may be met with incomprehension and even hostility both from the society in general and from the minority groups with which one identifies. A working-class Asian American lesbian, for instance, may have her queer identification overlooked by a dominant culture that sees her primarily as not white, whereas some in her ethnic community may find her queerness disgraceful to herself, to her family, and to Asian Americans in general. Most recently, the emergence into public consciousness of nonbinary identification and the preference for they as a personal pronoun are challenging older, hegemonic Western notions of gender. Examining such complexities is crucial if we are to honor the varieties of LGBTQ and queer experience as well as understand some of the difficulties that people face, individually and collectively, in their searches for equality, freedom, and community. To enrich our understanding of these dimensions of experience, Finding Out actively marks class, race, and ethnicity in both general discussion and separated out for deeper analysis.
Finally, because of the complexities we have discussed, we assume that the study of LGBTQ sexualities, same-sex desires, and gender variance is necessarily an interdisciplinary enterprise, and Finding Out borrows extensively from scholarship in fields including history and the social sciences, the arts and humanities, popular culture and media studies, and politics and law. We have attempted to represent as carefully as possible both the methodologies and the findings generated by scholars in these various fields—and we have learned much ourselves from thinking about queer lives and cultures from an interdisciplinary perspective. When we talk about identity and culture, we are talking about constructs that are simultaneously personal, aesthetic, social, cultural, and political. Stated in political terms, what individual LGBTQ people experience is important—but not just to the individual—it is important for the way it speaks to and interacts with the experiences of others.
As we have stated, in this book we take several different approaches to our material:
· Historical (What did we do, and what happened to us?)
· Psychological (What are our individual and group identities?)
· Sociological (How do we behave as groups in the world?)
· Aesthetic (What have we made that translates our queer experience into beauty?)
· Literary (How have we told our queer stories?)
· Intersectional (How do we account for our various identity fragments?)
· Marxist (How do class and economic factors affect queer lives?)
· Feminist (How does our work relate to gender and women’s concerns specifically?)
· Critical race (How has our queerness played out against our racial and ethnic backgrounds?)
· Queer theory
This last approach requires separate discussion. In many ways, queer theory has been among the most challenging movements within the academy. Growing out of feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and postmodern literary theory, queer theory asks that we take very seriously the representation—and construction—of sex and sexuality in a wide variety of cultural venues. Gay and lesbian studies began to take shape in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on identifying and analyzing representations of the homoerotic and the homosexual in the canons of literature. A queer approach, beginning with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), substantively shifted the question of representation to a radical reunderstanding of Western culture as principally preoccupied with the construction and control of identities based on sexual orientation. Sedgwick argues that “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (1). Following the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), thinkers such as Sedgwick (1950–2009) and Judith Butler (b. 1956) wanted not just to “find” homosexuals but to analyze the power constructs that divide us in the modern and contemporary world, at least in the West, into two categories: gay and straight. These theorists question and often even reject the binary construction of the species into gay/straight, even male/female, in such a way that one pole of the binary (straight, often male) is valorized, privileged, and normalized over the other (gay, often female).
Butler, in her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990), which helped form the queer theoretical approach, argued that drag performances show us that gender isn’t a given, that it is a “performance” to which people are called and that must be repeated again and again to pass as “normal.” A drag queen can perform femininity, for instance, showing up femininity as a cultural construct. But does drag performance transgress gender norms and our understanding of gender as essential? Or does it reinforce normative notions of gender? Some critics believe that drag performers might disparage femininity and feminine behavior rather than celebrate them in their performances. In The Drag King Book (1999), Jack Halberstam argues that
[t]he future of gender … remains uncertain. Gender rebellion seems to be standard fare in popular magazines, sitcoms, cartoons, mainstream film and it is in full display on many a college campus. But somehow the bending of gender has failed to shift the dominance of male and female as the binary poles of gender definitions. Gender play offers us, paradoxically, much room for trial and error, but also little prospect for momentous change. Children are still raised to be normal men and women, and gender experimentation is far from encouraged. (150)
Probing what had been assumed to be a given—our identification based on gender and sexual orientation—is a transgressive move, prompting scholars to reconsider basic assumptions about identity, community, and politics. If the way we understand sexual orientation isn’t a natural given, then neither are heterosexuality, homophobia, or bias against those who engage in alternative or nonnormative intimate and filial practices. Such thinking called for a mode of critique and an activist politics that insisted that we question the “norm” or anything that is socially constructed as “natural” or “normal.” As David Halperin put it in Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography,
Resistance to normativity is not purely negative or reactive or destructive; it is also positive and dynamic and creative. It is by resisting the discursive and institutional practices which, in their scattered and diffuse functioning, contribute to the operation of heteronormativity that queer identities can open a social space for the construction of different identities, for the elaboration of several types of relationships, for the development of new cultural forms. (66–67)
This “resistance to normativity,” encapsulated in embracing the term queer, is a transgressive move. It asks that we reconsider the desirability of the “normal,” of being “normal,” and that we transgress boundaries of taste, belief, and values to “open a social space” for considering and valuing different tastes, beliefs, and values. More recently, bisexual and transgender activists and scholars have been using the basic tenets of queer theory to challenge constructions of monogamy and gender.
How does queer theory challenge academic work? Let’s take an example from literary studies. Working with a gay and lesbian studies approach, a literary scholar might look for past representations of gay and lesbian people in works of literature or for how an author’s supposed gayness influenced their literary output. For instance, William Shakespeare wrote a series of powerful sonnets, some addressed to a close male friend and others to a “dark lady.” Some of the sonnets addressed to his friend contain, by contemporary standards, fairly loaded romantic language, and the poet declares about his male friend, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment”—the opening lines of a sonnet often used in wedding ceremonies today. One might assume, given Shakespeare’s language, that the sonnets represent a bisexual consciousness or identity. A queer theorist might argue that such an interpretation is presentist—that is, viewing past behaviors anachronistically through current identity categories. Queer theorists (like Halberstam) would argue instead for a perverse presentism that would look for expressions of desire, intimacy, and eroticism but not assume that such resemble contemporary categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans identity. Rather, the queer theorist would seek to understand how such expressions are related to constructs of power and social relations. In Shakespeare’s case, for instance, perhaps his “romantic” language about his friend suggests not an erotic relationship but a privileging of friendship between men, with women being relegated to love objects, not true equals. We might view Shakespeare’s intriguing sonnet through Sedgwick’s lens in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985); there she proposes that male–male intimacy in pre-20th-century Western culture is only intelligible insofar as it elides spaces occupied by women. As you read the material in this book, we invite you to use queer theoretical—or other critical approaches—to think through the complexities of gender and sexuality.
Find Out More See the readings by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Warner at the end of this introduction for additional discussion of queer theory.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
We initially envisioned Finding Out as a textbook for use in a wide variety of college courses that focus on LGBTQ identities, communities, and sexualities. To that end, we have included in the text several features designed to advance your thinking—whether you are reading this book for a class, as part of a reading group, or on your own—as you find out more about LGBTQ/queer lives and cultures. For instance, throughout the chapters, Lambda Links—indicated by lambda (l) signs—alert readers that an issue under discussion is related to a similar topic in another chapter. Then, at the end of each chapter, you will find sets of questions and suggestions for further reading. These are designed as teaching tools for use by students in classroom environments or by individual readers who wish to think or read more deeply about issues addressed in the chapter. They are not intended to be comprehensive; they will not address all the issues in a given chapter. We urge you to use the discussion questions to continue your own exploration of the many contexts in which same-sex desires and gender variance exist. Finally, boldfaced terms in each chapter are defined in the glossary at the end of Finding Out.
Part of the challenge of writing Finding Out has been recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of LGBTQ Studies. To address this interdisciplinarity, Finding Out has three large sections: Histories and Politics, Theories and Interventions, and Representations. These three sections are subdivided into chapters. The first section, Histories and Politics, introduces you to and surveys the many ways sexuality has been configured in a variety of cultural, scientific, and psychological arenas from ancient Greek and Roman culture to the contemporary world. Chapter 1, Before Identity, focuses on same-sex relationships, gender bending, and other aspects of queerness from antiquity to the 19th century, specifically elucidating the pre-identity history of queerness that either helped shape or stood in opposition to later, more formal, claims to queer identity. Picking up the historical thread, Chapter 2, Sexology in the 19th Century, describes how medical and sexological models at the fin de siècle pathologized a wide variety of sexual “deviances” and, in so doing, opened the door for the understanding of homosexuality as an identity. This chapter explores some of the pressures that led to the development of this model. In the context of the pathologization of homosexuality by the psychological establishment in the early 20th century, Chapter 3, Sexology, Activism, and Science in the 20th and 21st Centuries, advances the discussion of how 20th and 21st-century science has approached queerness—whether, for instance, homosexuality is a biological essence or a social construction. It also lays out criteria that pro- and antigay activists have used, and continue to use today, to advance their “agendas.” Chapter 4, Imagining Liberation, takes an historical view of gay rights movements in the early 20th century, then shows how social upheavals—World War II and the Cold War, in particular—led to organizing and increased visibility. This chapter ends by considering both the rise of the antigay religious right and the significance of Harvey Milk and the first gay incursions into U.S. politics.
The second section, Theories and Interventions, explores how sex and sexuality—particularly queer sexualities—remain a hot topic in contemporary political arenas. Chapters in this section challenge you to think deeply and critically about the political dimensions of LGBTQ life and culture, with discussions ranging from LGBTQ identity politics to a consideration of the challenges queer theory issues to such a politics. These chapters also provide an examination of the uses (and abuses) of strategies of assimilation as well as exploration of intersections among LGBTQ and other marginalized identities and communities. Chapter 5, Queer Normalization and Beyond, begins with activism in the face of the AIDS epidemic and reviews contemporary developments across the globe in various fights for LGBTQ rights. We consider both the ground gained by queer people in securing civil rights and the costs of assimilation into mainstream culture. Chapter 6, Queer Diversities, examines a related set of debates regarding the integration or exclusion of queers in society, focusing particularly on the complex and sometimes conflicting attitudes that create the tensions within the discussion. Such debates about inclusion and exclusion also occur within queer communities. Chapter 7, Trans Lives and Theories, presents a history and theory centering on transgender people. This chapter focuses on the recent trend toward emergence of nonbinary identities. It also analyzes the reasons behind violent transphobic behavior. Finally, Chapter 8, Intersectionalities, looks specifically at how race, social class, gender, and sex are aspects of identity that intersect with queerness. This chapter highlights common struggles across different identities as well as divergences in how multiply identified individuals and groups understand and represent their experiences.
In Section 3, Representations, we consider how art, media, and culture have long been spaces where homo-, bi-, and trans-erotic desires and identities have been explored and interrogated. Chapters in this section highlight how various cultural workers have grappled with the meaning of queer sexualities. Chapter 9, Queer Literatures, focuses on literature that is well known in LGBTQ communities. We include examples of political and activist literature, queer pulp novels, and texts that have been censored for their queer content. Chapter 10, Visual and Performing Arts, offers a brief overview of LGBTQ and queer art, visual media, and the performing arts. We trace the development of art and drama that explicitly articulates queer desires and relationships. Considering the rise of mass media in the 20th century, Chapter 11 on Film and Television examines the long and complicated history of queers in film and TV. The explosion of lesbian and gay images beginning in the 1990s represented a turning point in queer visibility. We also know that contemporary LGBTQ people find representation and community through the internet, which can provide queer community in a virtual world. Chapter 12, Digitally Queer and Trans, discusses myths about the internet as well as social networking and activist sites and their uses. Our concluding Chapter 13, Queer and Trans Cultures: The Search for Queer Space, describes how a variety of nonmainstream media have assisted LGBTQ people in developing both identity and community. We situate our discussion of such media in terms of how a variety of queer people use them to foster and develop a livable space in which to encounter, explore, and build queer homes.
We hope that you will experience Finding Out as lively, provocative, and challenging. You will not agree with everything you read, and at times, you will probably feel that there is much we have left out—and you will be right. But we believe that Finding Out offers a substantive and critical approach to thinking about the history of sexuality, the emergence of LGBTQ identities, and the development of a queer culture. If it prompts you to find out more about queerness, then it will have accomplished its primary goal. So, with that in mind, we invite you to start finding out.
READINGS
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(United States), 1993
From “Queer and Now”
Christmas Effects What’s “queer”? Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the capital State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will the hostages be free for Christmas? What did the flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “family/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of “the” family.
The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—wind up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is something one can come to view without happy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and instructions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? Think of the entity “the family,” and impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:
· a surname
· a sexual dyad
· a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage
· a circuit of blood relationships
· a system of companionship and succor
· a building
· a proscenium between “private” and “public”
· an economic unit of earning and taxation
· a prime site of economic consumption a prime site of cultural consumption
· a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children
· a mechanism for accumulating goods over several generations
· a daily routine
· a unit in a community of worship
· a site of patriotic formation
and of course, the list could go on. Looking at my own life, I see that—probably like most people—I have valued the pursuit of these various elements of family identity to quite differing degrees (e.g., no use at all for worship, much need of companionship). But what’s been consistent in this particular life is interest in not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time. I see it’s been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate them from one another, to disengage them—the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor—from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called “family.”
Or think of all the elements that are condensed in the notion of sexual orientation, something that the common sense of our time presents as a unitary category. Yet, exerting any pressure at all on “sexual identity,” you see that its elements include
· your biological (e.g., chromosomal) sex, male or female;
· your self-perceived gender assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as biological sex);
· the preponderance of your traits of personality and appearance, masculine or feminine (supposed to correspond to your sex and gender);
· the biological sex of your preferred partner;
· the gender assignment of your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex);
· the masculinity or femininity of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite2 of your own);
· your self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to correspond to whether your preferred partner is your sex or the opposite);
· your preferred partner’s self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to be the same as yours);
· your procreative choice (supposed to be yes if straight, no if gay);
· your preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you’re female or feminine);
· your most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative capabilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive assignment);
· your sexual fantasies (supposed to be highly congruent with your sexual practice, but stronger in intensity);
· your main locus of emotional bonds (supposed to reside in your preferred sexual partner);
· your enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine);
· the people from whom you learn about your own gender and sex (supposed to correspond to yourself in both respects);
· your community of cultural and political identification (supposed to correspond to your own identity);
and—again—many more. Even this list is remarkable for the silent presumptions it has to make about a given person’s sexuality, presumptions that are true only to varying degrees, and for many people not true at all: that everyone “has a sexuality,” for instance, and that it is implicated with each person’s sense of overall identity in similar ways; that each person’s most characteristic erotic expression will be oriented toward another person and not autoerotic; that if it is alloerotic, it will be oriented toward a single partner or kind of partner at a time; that its orientation will not change over time.3 Normatively, as the parenthetical prescriptions in the list above suggest, it should be possible to deduce anybody’s entire set of specs from the initial datum of biological sex alone—if one adds only the normative assumption that “the biological sex of your preferred partner” will be the opposite of one’s own. With or without that heterosexist assumption, though, what’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that “sexual identity” is supposed to organize into a seamless univocal whole.
And if it doesn’t?
That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or … people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.
Again, “queer” can mean something different: a lot of the way I have used it so far in this dossier is to denote, almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional lines. And given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.
At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around “queer” spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example. Intellectuals and artists of color whose sexual self-definition includes “queer”—I think of an Isaac Julien, a Gloria Anzaldúa, a Richard Fung—are using the leverage of “queer” to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term “queer” itself deepens and shifts.
Another telling representational effect. A word so fraught as “queer” is— fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement—never can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself. Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from the use of it about someone else. This is true (as it might also be true of “lesbian” or “gay”) because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category. But “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, impure goal categories governed by empirical rules of evidence (however contested). “Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes—all it takes—to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.
“Queer and Now,” in Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pp. 1–22. Copyright, 1993, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.
Michael Warner
(2012), United States
From “Queer and Then?”
… From the moment of the first reports of queer politics and queer theory, many gay men and lesbians hated the idea. For using the term positively, I was denounced by The New York Native as “the gay Lyndon LaRouche.” Lo these many years later, straight and gay people alike continue to deride queer theory as the ultimate joke of a debased and fraudulent academy. The playwright Larry Kramer, without showing much sign of understanding queer theory, nevertheless bewails that “gay people are the victims of an enormous con job, a tragic heist.” In his view, people throughout history have been gay in exactly the way we understand the term today, and the purpose of gay studies should be to celebrate them. Queer theory’s attention to the historical variety and complexity of sexual cultures is, for Kramer, a betrayal of gay people and common sense alike.
One thing that language registers is that queer theory opened up a conceptual divergence from lesbian and gay studies (ironically at a time when that field was just coming into its own), as well as a political divergence from the lesbian and gay movement (which also burst into mainstream politics with the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton).
The intellectual part of queer theory had in fact begun long before, at least with Foucault’s History of Sexuality (first published in French in 1976). Foucault’s book was clearly unassimilable to movement politics. Early debates about it within gay studies focused on its critique of psychoanalysis and its turn to a constructionist account of gay identity. Foucault’s remark that “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage” became the most famous phrase in the book. But the bigger challenge, one that took longer to digest, was the way Foucault had flipped the lens on the whole project of studying sexuality. Instead of starting with sexual orientations, he wanted to think about the prior structuring of sexuality by several techniques distinctive to modern societies. He drew attention to the way sexuality is stabilized for us by secular expert knowledge and anchored in individuals both by genres of therapy and self-representation. In his account, sexuality became visible as a field of regulation, therapy, and liberation simultaneously. He opened new questions about the deep ties between modern knowledge of sexuality and various forms of what he called “state racism,” including colonialism and, in the extreme forms, genocide and eugenics; the process by which the categories of experts can be taken up as mobilizations by the individuals to whom they are applied; the kinds of normalization specific to modern societies; and the variety of alternative formations throughout history in which the pleasures of the body have been developed within entirely different purposes and imperatives.
The politics of sexuality, in Foucault’s treatment, led not just to an affirmative study of sexual minorities, but to a thorough and radical re-evaluation of the techniques of defining modernity. Lesbian and gay studies quickly took on board Foucault’s constructionist account of the hetero-homo opposition, but the rest of his argument necessarily lay beyond the study of same-sex attraction, and indeed beyond the study of sexuality as a stable object.
Eve Sedgwick accomplished something similar in her early work. Her 1985 book Between Men was a watershed, for me at least. Published just when I was completing graduate school, it approached homophobia—the organizing problematic of lesbian and gay studies—as a constitutive byproduct of modern styles of straight-male homosociality. Sedgwick was envisioning a way for gay studies and feminism to find a common perspective on straightness, masculinity, and the dynamics of domination in modern culture. Like Foucault’s, her analysis flipped the lens: The real problem, for her, was the mechanism of male sociability that, in envisioning the domination of women, made its own homoerotic dimensions abject, projecting the homosexual as a failed but dangerous and repudiated version of itself.
In that turn, Sedgwick was already beginning to imagine what she would boldly declare in the first paragraph of her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet: “An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.” If anything, subsequent queer theory has tended to argue an even stronger version of that claim, suggesting that the normative field of sexuality is so dispersed that it requires us to understand such things as racialization, the dynamic between developed countries and colonies or postcolonies, the stabilization of sex biomorphism, and so on.
Those last questions had also been raised by Judith Butler before they had come to be called queer theory. Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble, in addition to its well-known (but still widely misunderstood) arguments about performativity of gender, had its deepest impact through the same kind of shift in perspective. Instead of starting with the nature of sex, she urged us to analyze the normative frameworks by which gender and sexuality are constituted and inhabited in the first place. Fusing insights from phenomenology and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory together with a long history of feminist thought, Butler foregrounded a problem that has still not been fully grasped in most philosophy or the social sciences. Where most accounts of norms imagine an agent who acts based on beliefs or desires and reflects on what ought to be done, Butler called attention to the ways we find ourselves already normatively organized as certain kinds of agents, for example by having gender in ways that must be intelligible to others. The problem, she said, was the “regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence,” which “disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe.”
That approach immediately opened new problems, occasioning, for example, a debate about “antinormativity” within queer theory. (Does the embrace of queerness entail a romantic opposition to all normativity whatsoever? Is there something inherently antisocial in the experience of sexuality?) But it also gave a vocabulary for a kind of analysis that the disciplines otherwise lacked.
In all these ways, the tremendous intellectual energy of what would come to be called queer theory was already casting a much broader net than lesbian and gay studies. One result over the years has been a succession of movements in which the critical project is joined and adapted by those who have different constituencies in view: trans studies, postcolonial queer studies, queer race studies. Each of those—like the parallel development of queer affect studies, which was not as closely tied to any political constituency—often begin by distancing themselves from what they take to be a narrower version of queer theory. Thus queer theory has often seemed, from its very inception, to be elsewhere or in the past….
A good example of queer theory’s ambivalence about itself is Jasbir K. Puar’s influential 2007 book Terrorist Assemblages. Puar does battle with a succession of polemical opponents: queer liberalism, queer neoliberalism, queer exceptionalism, etc. If all of one’s identities “must be constantly troubled,” she points out, one imagines “an impossible transcendent subject who is always already conscious of the normativizing forces of power and always ready and able to subvert, resist, or transgress them.” That seems undeniable as far as it goes, but it also restates one of the generative problems in Butler’s early work. So while Puar seems to want to associate queer theory with a liberal imperial imagination, she does so in terms that she takes from queer theory itself. Despite its criticisms of (some) queer theory, then, Puar’s book is itself an example of the kind of vital work that queer theory enables, with or without the rubric. Terrorist Assemblages would very likely sit on any queer-theory syllabus today.
Queer theory in this broader sense now has so many branches, and has developed in so many disciplines, that it resists synthesis. The differences have often enough become bitter, sometimes occasioning the kind of queerer-than-thou competitiveness that is the telltale sign of scarcity in resources and recognition. That impulse can be seen, for example, in the title of a special issue of Social Text called “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” And given queer theory’s strong suspicion of any politics of purity, it is ironic that queer theorists can often strike postures of righteous purity in denouncing one another. The Gay Shame Conference at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2003, for instance—to discuss aspects of lesbian and gay male sexuality, history, and culture that “gay pride” had suppressed—featured a remarkable amount of mutual shaming, as though everyone had missed the point.
The scarcity of resources that feeds such a dynamic has a lot to do with university structure. At many colleges, queer theory is now institutionalized as a minor subfield of LGBT studies. Some projects, such as queer ethnography, flourish in this structure better than others. The broader provocation to the disciplines has been neatly compartmentalized, with the consequence that many of queer theory’s greatest challenges—for example, in the analysis of normativity, which should have become central to philosophy and the social sciences, but has been scrupulously ignored by them, or the connections between sexuality and secularism that are central to so many kinds of conflict around the world—remain undeveloped. Thus to my mind, the widespread impression that queer theory is a thing of the past, that we are now at some point “After Sex,” seems tragically mistaken.
At its best, queer theory has always also been something else—something that will be left out of any purely intellectual history of the movement. Like [the rant] “I want a dyke for president,” it has created a kind of social space. Queer people of various kinds, both inside and outside academe, continue to find their way to it, and find each other through it. In varying degrees, they share in it as a counterpublic. In this far-too-limited zone, it has been possible to keep alive a political imagination of sexuality that is otherwise closed down by the dominant direction of gay and lesbian politics, which increasingly reduces its agenda to military service and marriage, and tends to remain locked in a national and even nationalist frame, leading gay people to present themselves as worthy of dignity because they are “all-American,” and thus to forget or disavow the estrangements that they have in common with diasporic or postcolonial queers.
That effect has been possible not just because of the theories themselves, but because of the space of belonging and talk in which theory interacts with ways of life. Much of the social effervescence is only indirectly felt on the page. But it has always been also there on the page, in the work of writing.
That might seem like an odd thing to say, since for mainstream journalists (as for Larry Kramer) queer theory is the extreme case of “difficult” academic prose, and Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick were both singled out for mockery by the self- appointed guardians of accessibility. We are often told that queer theory lacks “clarity.” But technical clarity and journalistic accessibility are not the same, and the attack on difficult style has often been a means to reassert the very standards of common sense that queer theory rightly challenged. Moreover, even the most difficult prose has given people room for being serious in ways sanctioned nowhere else.
And so much of the writing is remarkable. Think of Sedgwick’s bristling, coiled paragraphs; or Berlant’s ability to work so unpredictably across registers to produce a knowledge that is both live and speculative (as in “Beyonding is a rhetoric people use when they have a desire not to be stuck”); or all those astonishing shoes-on- the-table moments like the opening sentence of Bersani’s still-controversial essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”
Sex, as Bersani astutely observed, distresses people, and they don’t like to be reminded of it. Perhaps he had already noticed, at a moment when “queer theory” was not yet the name for what he was doing, the very reason why people seem to long for a present in which they can be postqueer.
Michael Warner, “Queer and Then?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Jan. 2012, chronicle.com/article/QueerThen-/130161.
NOTES
1 Teaching Tolerance “provides educators with free educational materials that promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity in the classroom and beyond” (“About Teaching Tolerance”). Supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, this organization maintains a website that is accessed by educators whose desire is to help their students learn about and honor difference. DM I don't understand these notes. The tolerance one should go after the Teaching Tolerance material in the Preface. Why here?
2 The binary calculus I’m describing here depends on the notion that the male and female sexes are each other’s “opposites,” but I do want to register a specific demurral against that bit of easy common sense. Under no matter what cultural construction, women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0. The biological, psychological, and cognitive attributes of men overlap with those of women by vastly more than they differ from them.
3 A related list that amplifies some of the issues raised in this one appears in the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 25–26. These last 2 notes should go after Sedgwick, not Warner.