8
Under The Sign Of The Queer Cultural Studies and Social Theory
For several years now, lesbian and gay studies has found a growing place in the academy. Increasingly, work in literary theory and cultural studies has defined this field. More recently, lesbian and gay studies has gone by the name of "queer theory," in which scholars have tended to focus on representations of homosexuality in literature, film, and popular culture.
A new paradigm of cultural studies, queer theory draws on the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. Queer theory differs from the writing and research of earlier scholars in lesbian and gay studies because it emphasizes the
This chapter is a slightly revised version of a review of Michael Warner's Fear of a Queer Planet that originally appeared in Found Object (fall 1994).
close analysis of texts, popular culture, and the media. The earlier generation focused on historical, social, and anthropological analysis of documents, movements, and social structures—supplemented by the recovery of lost and forgotten authors, historical figures, and pioneering political activities.
Although the term "queer" reflects a revolution in lesbian and gay studies, it also marks the emergence of a new generation of political activists. The 1991 founding of the group Queer Nation underlined this development. The term "queer" plays on the double entendre of its pejorative meaning in relation to homosexuals and its more benign implication of "odd" or "marginal"; together, the two types of connotations assert the relation of the stigmatized "queer" to the dominant "normal." The name "queer theory" appeals to those in the field because it moves away from the simple assertion of identity politics indicated by the name "lesbian and gay studies," and includes all hybrid forms of identity that are different from hegemonic heterosexual identities.
"Queer" includes those who identify as homosexual, lesbian, or gay; those men (who may not identify as homosexuals) who have sex with men, and those women who have sex with women; bisexuals; transvestites, transsexuals, and transgendered people; sadomasochists and leather people; and all those who have a sexual preference that is not normative. "Queer" can signify the mere eccentric, as well as the sexual pervert (the word has long been used to identify—and stigmatize—deviants). "Queer" privileges that which is "not normal"—it defends the different, the marginal, and the oppositional.
It is not always clear whether queer theory and the politics of groups such as Queer Nation seek to transform existing social norms (thus replacing oppressive norms with new, liberating ones), or whether they strive to resist the social process of normalization tout court . The latter strategy is hopelessly romantic—that is, sociologically impossible. No form of social life exists without some sort of norms.
To theorize under the sign of "queer" is to critique lesbian and gay politics as a form of social mobilization predicated on a stable social identity. Queer politics, Michael Warner has argued, avoids the binary
logic of member/nonmember, a polarization that plays a key part in the identity politics of race and gender. Although both gender and race remain important distinctions, queer politics offers a way of cutting across race and gender lines. It rejects the minority group pursuit of social acceptance or proper representation. Instead, queer politics represents inclusion. Specifically, queers resist the regimes of the normal. It implies that we redefine the problem of homosexual liberation so that we no longer fight intolerance but resist normalization . We need to stand firm against heteronormalization —the domination of norms that support, reinforce, and reproduce heterosexual social forms. To assert that normalization rather than intolerance is the aversion of queer politics overwhelmingly suggests that homophobia expresses itself not through repression and physical violence alone but also through normalizing moral and scientific discourses.
Michel Foucault provided the theoretical foundation for this form of homosexual politics. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality , Foucault challenged the "repression hypothesis"—the notion held by theorists such as Freud and Wilhelm Reich that modern societies required a high degree of repression in order to function effectively. Foucault argued that in the modern era, power was no longer centered predominantly in the sovereign state but was dispersed throughout civil society. Foucault thought we could not comprehend the implications of such a momentous historical shift if we continued to think of the subject's relationship to power solely in terms of repression. He posited that resisting repression and violent domination no longer exclusively shaped the modern subject so much as the power of discourse.
There is no doubt that the normalizing discourses of medicine, psychiatry, religion, popular culture, and even advertising have had a significant impact on homosexual oppression in American and European societies. However, a social theory that exclusively focuses on the discursive regimes of power/knowledge can offer only limited guidance in developing political strategies and achieving long-term social change.
In Fear of a Queer Planet , Michael Warner has edited a collection of essays that seeks to spell out the implication of queer politics for the
writing of social theory. In this essay, I will focus on the vision of social theory revealed by the authors in Warner's collection. In his introduction to the book, Warner notes that the Foucault-inspired social-constructionist perspective of queer theory has encouraged a growing skepticism about rights discourse and forms of universalism in gay politics. In the wake of such doubts, queer theorists have replaced the universalizing discourse of rights and gay identity with new theories of political interest or sexual difference.[1] As Cindy Patton argues in that volume, "The crucial battle … is not achieving democratic representation but wresting control over the discourses. "[2]
How do we wrest control over the discourses? Discursive formations are pervasive, highly elastic, thoroughly interlocking social structures. Can political and social movements (or even power elites) do anything more than try to shape the fundamental discourses of any social system? If we must try to wrest control over the discourses, is that a politically realistic strategy?
Performative As Political
What are the theoretical foundations of queer theory? The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, in addition to that of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, looms over most of the pieces in Fear of a Queer Planet , and their operative assumptions have significant implications for queer social theory as represented in Warner's book. Sedgwick and Butler's works extend and work out the social-constructionist agenda that Michel Foucault pioneered.[3] Their work explores the productive and mobilizing effects of discourse. In the work of these queer theorists, like that of Foucault, the subject is the product of complex regimes of power/knowledge that function in and through discourse.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is perhaps the most creative and original theorist of queer studies. Nonetheless, the relation between the texts she studies and the real historical processes that have shaped those texts remains obscure. She makes the radical claim that by the end of the
nineteenth century, no one could avoid categorizing himself or herself as heterosexual or homosexual. The emergence of such a choice—between categorizing oneself as homosexual or heterosexual—obviously resulted from profound historical changes. It provides the historical context within which Sedgwick examines a series of literary texts. Yet, she neither explains nor empirically demonstrates the genesis and development of this choice.
Sedgwick has developed two complex lines of argument that have significant social implications. The first one, which she elaborates in her 1985 book, Between Men , is that homosocial forms of domination partly result from men's repudiation of homoerotic bonds.[4] As they shun these homoerotic feelings, they project them onto the marginalized figure of the homosexual man. In the Victorian period, both class identity and male domination rested on homosociality—the sex-segregated forms of social life. The second argument, which she makes in Epistemology of the Closet , is that in Western societies, separated but related forms of knowledge (science, coded vernacular knowledges, open secrets, the unsayable) have established a medium of domination unlike any other. Sedgwick's arguments identify powerful ways in which society represses and marginalizes homosexuality.
Judith Butler's contribution to queer discourse has less to do with constituting queer studies as a discipline than with working out a theory about how gender and sexuality are forms of subjectivity. In her book Gender Trouble and in the essays collected in Bodies That Matter , Butler has explored gender and sexual identity as constituted through performativity. This notion of the performative comes from speech-act theory. According to this theory, judicial sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, legal contracts, declarations of ownership, and marriage ceremonies would all be performative acts. In her work, Butler has expanded the notion of performativity. People construct gender and sexual identities, Butler argues, through a reiterative process by which the power of discourse can produce the phenomenon that it "names" or categorizes. In other words, if one acts queer in enough ways, one acquires a queer identity.
Following in the footsteps of kindred political theorists such as
Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj
Cindy Patton's essay "Tremble Hetero Swine" provides a good example of this theoretical approach by precisely exploring how political signifiers are defined and constituted contingently. Patton argues that the lesbian and gay movement and the Religious Right have focused on each other, which has helped both groups to consolidate their internal identities. They have each publicly dis-identified with the other, which makes the two movements "allies" in a sense, or perhaps more accurately "codependents."
The Disappearance Of The Social
Cindy Patton argues that our ability to understand the social "constitution of identities in the civil sphere lags behind the techniques for deconstructing them." For instance, "the 'social,'" as Patton says, "is deconstructed and evacuated, but a 'cultural' … is reinserted in the same place."[6] In other words, Patton sums up well the dilemma that Warner and many of the contributors face.
Patton's diagnosis is right on the nose, but ironically, her own essay is trapped in the rhetorical theorizing that she seems to want to escape. The truth is that, compared with the social or political theories that are currently available, the cultural and textual theories of homosexuality and identity are much more sophisticated, subtle, and extensive.
For example, when Patton explores the state's significance for queers, she does not discuss policies, institutions, or material effects of the government's actions, but identities, discourses, and the space of queerness. Patton's analysis is intelligent and might be true, but it remains too much at the highest levels of abstraction about discursive formations.
This aspect is compatible, however, with her claim that our political goal should be "wresting control over the discourses ."[7] Queer theorists never recover the social because the empirical detail of institutions and social structures is never examined. Identifying potential political strategies primarily by wresting control over the discourses leads only to cultural politics—certainly a valid form of political activity but not sufficient for achieving many political goals.
Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman's study of Queer Nation shows just how elusive "the social" remains and just how dominant "the cultural" is in its presence. Their article demonstrates the limits of both queer politics and queer theory as political analysis. Berlant and Freeman's survey of Queer Nation's political activities reveals a politics of symbolic gestures, many of which are nothing more than intellectually creative cultural provocations: posters, T-shirts, kiss-ins at malls, or "queer nights out" at local singles bars. Only the Queer Nation offshoot, the Pink Panthers (modeled on the Guardian Angels), directly uses physical or institutional forms of domination. Berlant and Freeman interpret most of Queer Nation's actions as theoretically suggestive forms of resistance to the cultural hegemony of heterosexuality—to the process, as Warner said, of heteronormalization.[8]
The queer moment did not emerge from nowhere; it grew out of AIDS activism. As with being queer, being infected with HIV cuts across numerous social categories such as sexual identity, race, and gender. Those with AIDS are stigmatized by the normalizing discourses of morality, medicine, and politics. Queer politics thus owes something to AIDS activism.
The AIDS movement pioneered new and sophisticated forms of cultural politics—the large dramatic and well-planned demonstrations on Wall Street, at the Food and Drug Administration, and at St. Patrick's Cathedral, along with the political posters by the activist art groups Gran Fury and Gang. The movement was also politically successful; it forced the federal government to modify its policies about testing AIDS treatments and about the direction of AIDS research and education. AIDS activism has successfully combined media-savvy cultural politics with hard-headed realpolitik. Queer theory has been much more interested
in being media savvy than in the politics of governmental reform. Douglas Crimp's AIDS activism work acknowledges both dimensions of the movement's political strategy, but he has nonetheless tended to focus his argument on cultural politics.[9]
Cultural politics is the form of political action that queer theory and its conception of heteronormalization imply. Some queer political activists discount as naive and assimilationist any interpretation of civil life that emphasizes legal rights, political representation, community development, and identity politics as necessary for homosexual emancipation.
The Heteronormativity Of Grand Theory
In Fear of a Queer Planet , Michael Warner makes the powerful and fruitful claim that because of the centrality of heterosexual norms in the work of the most contemporary social theorists (Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe), this work has minimal relevance for queer activists and intellectuals. These thinkers have not only frequently failed to incorporate sexuality into their theories, but if they do, they almost never account for the central role of homosexuality in North American and European societies. In contrast, queer theory has produced a solid body of work that shows homosexuality's centrality—in Epistemology of the Closet Eve Sedgwick has argued that "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 does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition."[10]
Heteronormativity, in Warner's interpretation, is not merely an intellectual or normative "bias" in the work of social theorists; it is embodied in social systems.[11] Heteronormativity permeates the powerful discursive formation—what Gayle Rubin has called "the sex/gender system"—that codes everything from social class to race into a particular set of sexual and gender identities and roles.[12] Warner's account of heteronormativity offers an original and radical critique of the social
ontologies of contemporary social theorists. He takes "queer" as the fundamental recognition of difference. To ignore queer sexuality is to deny the queer nature of the world and the production of difference.
Following the lead of Monique Wittig, Warner identifies heterosexuality itself as "the social contract." This implicitly heteronormative political fiction has a supplementary idea—a reproductivist conception of the social. The institutions of heterosexual reproduction (marriage, kinship), institutions of socialization (schools, sports, families), and heterosexual hegemony (family law and the heterosexual assumption) all contribute to this notion. The heterosexual social contract and the reproductivist conception of the social shape the political and moral discourses that normalize sexual perversities.[13]
Is it possible to have a society that is not founded on a reproductivist conception of the social or heteronormativity? Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization , Norman O. Brown in Life against Death , and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus have all tried to articulate conceptions of the social that are not reproductivist or heteronormative.[14]
Identifying the heteronormativity implicit in works of social theory is extremely important for developing homo positive social theorizing. A third of Queer Planet consists of valuable studies of the heteronormative bias in important works of social thought. Andrew Parker explores the homoerotic and homophobic dynamics underlying Marx and Engels's collaboration, which effectively challenges them as authors and castigates their homophobic reaction to the nineteenth-century German homosexual emancipation movement.
Queer Planet does not take on any of the major figures of contemporary social theory. An examination of heteronormativity in the work of Habermas, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, or Pierre Bourdieu would be extremely valuable to homo theorists. Moreover, none of the Queer Planet authors examine the work of social theorists who do include queer and homosexual themes. For example, in several of his latest books, including Modernity and Self-Identity and The Transofmration of Intimacy , Anthony Giddens has identified lesbians and gay men as creating new forms of intimate relationships.[15]
Several feminist social theorists have developed powerful critiques of heteronormativity, including Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and Monique Wittig. Gayle Rubin undertakes the most important deconstruction of heteronormativity in social theory (she draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan) in her landmark essay "The Traffic in Women." By analyzing the sex/gender system as the infrastructure of discursive formations that map "biological capacities into symbolic and social patterns that constitute our lives as gendered and sexual human beings" and that privilege heterosexuality, Rubin contributes significantly to nonheteronormative social theorizing.[16]
Warner notes in passing Herbert Marcuse's important contribution to a social theory of sexuality and homosexuality. It would be a shame, however, to forget that in Eros and Civilization , Marcuse managed to escape heteronormativity to some extent. Arguing that homosexuality was a revolutionary form of sexuality, he championed "polymorphous perversity" as a utopian form of sexuality free from procreative demands. Although we might have reservations about Marcuse's theoretical assumptions and terminology, he does try to explain the capitalist organization of libidinal gratification. Marcuse points to the double-edged aspect of consumption—its liberatory as well as its repressive role—and discusses how the emergence of a late-capitalist consumer economy increased the search for sexual gratification within new normalized limits. He characterized this heightened but constrained desire as "repressive desublimation."[17] To some extent, the theoretical writing of the Gay Left Collective, Jeffrey Weeks, Dennis Altman, and John D'Emilio in the late 1970s and early 1980s derives from Marcuse's example.
One of the contemporary homo social theorist's most important projects would be to deconstruct the heteronormative in our social thinking. The heteronormativity of most influential social theories is partly what makes normalization the primary focus of queer theory. The stress on the issue of normalization, or the "wresting control over the discourses," makes cultural politics a major component of homosexual politics. With this emphasis, however, lesbian and gay theorists and activists find it difficult to develop political strategies promoting the
acceptance of sexual diversity in American life. Cultural politics and its reconfiguring of cultural representations can have a discernible impact, but they can't help us defeat those who resist changes in public consciousness.
The gay and lesbian movement failed to counter homophobic representations of homosexuals' serving in the military. In addition, the movement could not exert the raw economic and political power needed to force the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold fair hearings on the question. The movement's stress on cultural politics and the critique of heteronormativity showed that it was not prepared or willing to organize institutional and electoral resources. Ultimately, this political failure resulted from both the continued hegemony of normalizing discourses and the movement's inability to mobilize political and electoral power.
Culture Wars And The Problem Of Hegemony
Fear of a Queer Planet does not situate the queer, the homosexual, and the sexual pervert in a broader political and social context. Although Warner and many other queer theorists believe that the word "queer" overlaps many other identities, being queer does not necessarily mean that one can escape other institutionalized social identities. The discursive formations that shape the queer, the homosexual, and the sexual perversions do not stand alone. They are embedded in a whole network of discursive processes that generate a spectrum of American social identities—racial, gendered, religious, regional, ethnic, and generational.
Queer politics and social theory need to be placed in the larger political framework in order to articulate the movement's political project and its relationships to other communities and identity groups. Despite the homophobia that pervades American life, no single hegemonic discourse precludes the queer. Instead, society is deeply divided between a vaguely liberal inclusiveness and a hostile conservative fundamentalism.[18]
Unfortunately, the idea of inclusiveness—multiculturalism—does not really provide an effective counterhegemonic framework for a political analysis of queer and sexual issues. At best, this eclectic, expressive form of pluralism offers a loose umbrella under which many groups can define a social space for themselves. Multiculturalism does not imply a clear-cut agenda for politically reorganizing American public life. Nor does it provide a realistic basis for a political coalition; no societywide consensus exists for establishing an institutional framework for multicultural political representation. Nevertheless, an important component of any queer political or social theory is to locate homosexuality in a larger social framework.
In queer theory and cultural studies, intellectuals are mapping the discursive regimes of power/knowledge that constitute the queer, the homosexual, and the sexual pervert. These regimes of cultural hegemony are immensely powerful, but a discursive politics alone will not weaken the forms of domination that shape the lives of homosexuals and other sexual perverts. Although Foucault was right to critique the "repression hypothesis" as the exclusive explanation of stigmatized identities or sexualities, he explicitly noted that repression remained a component of domination.[19]
The state and the material force of economic life remain central institutions of repression, enmeshed as they are in normalizing discourses and bodies of knowledge. Homo social theory must incorporate the larger historical structures of the economy, institutions, and the state in order to complement queer theory's maps of discursive formations. In doing so, homo social theorists must elaborate the relationships between discursive formations and the other aspects of social-historical systems. Discursive formations help both to explain and to interpret people's actions, intentions, and beliefs, whereas social-historical systems explain the institutions, social structures, and normative patterns within which people operate.
Fear of a Queer Planet marks the emergence of a new style of homosexual politics and theorizing under the sign of "queer." The book also denotes a revival of interest in the construction of social theory that integrates sexuality, homosexuality, and the queer as constituent elements.
These developments are particularly valuable in this period of escalating political-cultural strife—the primary aim of the Religious Right is to eliminate homosexual rights (which barely exist in most places) in the coming years.
Fear of a Queer Planet joins the tradition of political and social theory that Dennis Altman, Gayle Rubin, Radicalesbians, John D'Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Guy Hocquenghem, and Mario Mieli established in the first twenty years after Stonewall. The question that the book addresses, and that none of the contributions resolve, is, What is the relation between queer theory and knowledge of society? Queer theory has emerged from the work of scholars in literary and cultural studies, while lesbian and gay studies increasingly devalues knowledge based on empirical research and theory in the social sciences and history. The essays in Fear of a Queer Planet attempt to develop social theory within a theoretical paradigm that privileges cultural politics.