Playing with Fire

Queer Politics, Queer Theories

Shane Phelan, Shane Phelan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781134717576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

The last five years have witnessed the birth of a vibrant new group of young scholars who are writing about queer law, politics, and policy--topics which are no longer treated as of interest only to lesbians and gay men, but which now garner the attention of political theorists of all stripes. Playing With Fire --the first scholarly collection on queer politics by US political theorists--opens the intersection of lesbian and gay studies and political theory to a wide audience. It covers a wide range of issues, including: the theory of queer identities; the contrasts among ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; the debate between liberals and communitarians; the right to privacy; and the meaning of equal citizenship.

II. Queer Critiques

5
Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Queer Translating

Angelia R. Wilson

In the summer of 1992 I attended a gay and lesbian conference at the University of London. As one of the first of such conferences in Britain, the high level of attendance reflected the diverse interests in gay and lesbian studies emerging in this country. However, many of the sessions focused on literary criticism. While perhaps this should have been unsurprising given the vast contribution literary criticism has made in gay and lesbian studies, it was nevertheless disconcerting. The lack of representation on the agenda by gay and lesbian activist groups in London was, for this student of politics, shocking. Admittedly my annoyance at the seemingly depoliticized event was slightly parochial: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had not as yet become required reading for political theorists. A similar concern, however, was voiced in the final plenary session where Butler had stunned the audience with streams of impenetrable prose. The allotted time allowed for only one question, which was posed by one of the most respected literature academics in Britain. He asked why, when the conference had intended to be interdisciplinary, Butler chose to utilise highly theoretical language that was unfamiliar, if not inaccessible, to academics from such varied fields. Her response was something along the lines of “this is how I write, deal with it.” While I sympathise with her response given the situation, it also characterises the difficulty of translating, or negotiating between, the often exclusive practice of theorising and the inclusive potential of political action.

As a theorist I would agree with Diana Fuss that political theory and political action are not necessarily separate exercises, but a few questions consistently arise in my mind as I read “postmodern” or more specifically “queer” theory (Fuss, 1991). My thoughts here may go against current trends or be considered simplistic. And they are; since for all my pretensions to be a theorist, I cannot seem to rid myself of the question, “where is all this getting us?” So to those readers who are beyond such parochial anxieties, you may wish to stop here, but I ask you to continue, if only to humour yourself. I do not believe that I am the first theorist to ask such a basic question. In fact, I have heard political theorists well versed in modernity whisper similar bewilderment at the impenetrable works of those who have become the deities of postmodern theorising (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, et al.). And, when I sometimes find myself surrounded by queer theorists rejoicing with missionary zeal at the radicalism of considering sexuality as a performance with the potential of disrupting the entire gender/sex binary of the western world, I too have wanted to believe. Unfortunately, however, even in my euphoria over this limitless potential, I find myself wanting to ask, “yes let’s do it, but tell me again, how exactly?”

Even among queer theorists, I do not stand alone. There are those theorists who have noticed the gap between queer theory and the practicalities of political activism. For example, Frank Mort’s recent essay entitled “Essentialism Revisited” rehearses the current landscape of queer theory that has posited varied subjectivities as a replacement for the essentialised gay, or gay and lesbian, identities associated with the gay movement of the 1960s and 1970s (1994). He concludes the article not on a pessimistic note questioning the progressiveness of queer discourse, but with an acute awareness of the canyon between queer theory and mainstream politics. “Formal political culture,” writes Mort, “is still almost exclusively organised around fixed epistemologies, conceived within what is in reality an early twentieth-century system of political representation. A cornerstone of this structure remains the fiction of a fixed and stable political self” (Ibid, 220). Given that fixation around a stable political self, the multi-subjectivities proposed by queer theory may be, in the least, difficult to communicate to those who operate daily on the assumptions of a coherent self. Mort’s purpose, in his own words, is “to inject a more urgent sense of the political realities facing the pluralist project” (Ibid, 221). He adds, “there needs to be further thought given to the issue of translating what are a sophisticated set of intellectual concepts into the language of politics” (Ibid.). Mort’s point strikes at the heart of my concern with queer theory, specifically with the unrealised potential of queer theory. In order to address this I want to rehearse briefly the sexual identities that are manifesting themselves in queer theory and queer politics. Doing so will highlight the disruptive potential claimed by queer theory but as yet unrealised, or not translated, by queer activism. Working on the assumption that theorising is a form of activism, my intervention here is directed at the practicalities of the translation process—a point that I do not believe we as queer theorists have addressed sufficiently. Therefore in the second section of this chapter I will consider a unique approach to the difficulties of articulating multi-subjectivities in a political framework premised upon a coherent self.

We Assumed

Since the 1969 Stonewall riots the “gay (and lesbian) movement”—as it was originally labeled and continues to be referred to—has been built upon one premise: the division between “us”—the homosexual—and “them”—the heterosexual “other.” This is not to say that “we” have not been reminded, from the beginning, of internal differences both of multi-subjectivities and of multi-political positionings. As Sheila Jeffreys has so aptly noted in her text Anticlimax, gay men embracing the freedom of post-Wolfenden Britain rarely considered the way in which the “sexual revolution” continued to objectify and discriminate against women (1990). The “we” of the early gay liberation movement was seen by many lesbians as a bastion of white gay men who in the least ignored lesbian feminism or in the extreme were misogynists. And when lesbians claimed their role as a valid and strong part of the “movement,” “gay and lesbian” identity politics served to solidify the “us” versus “them” political positioning. Jeffrey Weeks comments on the role that sexual identity plays in gay and lesbian politics:

The preoccupation with identity cannot be explained as an effect of a peculiar personal obsession with sex. It must be seen, more accurately, as a powerful resistance to the organising principle of traditional sexual attitudes, encoded in the dominant and pervasive heterosexual assumption of the sexual tradition. . . . Modern gay identities, whether they are the out-growth of essential internal characteristics (which I do not believe to be the case) or of complex socio-historical transformations (which I think is more likely), are today as much political as personal or social identities. They make a statement about the existing divisions between permissible and tabooed behaviour and propose their alteration. (1985, 189, 201)

Identity politics has been personally affirming for those previously demonised by the sex/gender norm while at the same time politically challenging that norm. The power of such oppositional politics, as Weeks suggests, “subverts the absolutism of the sexual tradition” (ibid.). In addition, the image of a coherent gay “community,” or a gay and lesbian constituency, continues to be a strong political position, or tool, for activists. Appeals on the part of this supposed gay and lesbian community are commonplace within the political discourse of both traditional lobbying groups such as Stonewall or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the U.S. and the more radical action-oriented groups (like OutRage!).

Within a historical/political context, the emergence of “queer” can be seen as a progressive realisation of difference. For example, Weeks comments on the assumption of a coherent gay community in the days of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF): “although it would have been heresy to say so at the time, it turned out that homosexuality was not a stable basis on which to build a large-scale movement; a host of conflicting class, cultural, sexual, political and social allegiances tugged in increasingly divergent directions” (1977, 205). “Queer,” then, attempts to redress the presumed stability of ‘identity’ in the early political movement. According to Cherry Smyth’s Queer Notions, queer refers to a range of sexualities: “Queer means to fuck with gender. There are straight queers, bi-queers, tranny queers, lez queers, fag queers, SM queers, fisting queers in every single street in this apathetic country of ours” (“Queer Power Now” leaflet in Smyth, 1992, 17). The challenge to the “gay and lesbian community” posed by “queer” theory is interesting in at least two aspects: it creates new possibilities for reinterpreting what it means to be “nonheterosexual” and, as a result, it also creates new possibilities for rearticulating the language of politics. However, queer activism in Britain has yet to come to terms with these possibilities. While queer theory has undoubtedly enfranchised previously marginalised, or suspect, sexual citizens, queer activism as manifest in radical action politics continues to rely heavily upon the assumed coherent constituency of the “gay and lesbian community.”

For example, OutRage!—which professes itself to be “queer”—specifically defines itself in relation to “lesbians and gay men” fighting “homophobia”; very familiar terminology indeed. In a recent article, Peter Tatchell, the most nationally recognised member of OutRage! (and the most vocal) uses the term “queer” interchangeably with “gay and lesbian.” He writes that “the problem is heterosexual supremacism and homophobia, not queer dissent. As lesbian and gay people, we are valuable in our own right” and that assimilation means “us giving up the unique and enriching aspects of our lesbian and gay lifestyle and community” (1995, 12). While this assumption of community is at once problematised and assumed by those of us writing about sexual politics, Tatchell leaves no doubt about the characteristics, or perhaps limits, of the “community” to which he refers:

Compared to most straight people, for example, lesbians and gay men are more willing to transgress the traditional boundaries of masculinity and femininity. As a result, gay men tend to be less macho and more in touch with their emotions. This gives them a sensitivity and creativity that has enabled queers to make a disproportionate contribution to the arts and the caring professions. Lesbians are usually less reliant on men and more independent and assertive than their hetero sisters. Hence their pioneering contribution to women’s advancement in previously all-male occupations. (Ibid, 13)

So much for a broadening of identities. The people in the above “community” are so blatantly a part of the stereotypes associated with gay men and lesbians, I wonder who exactly is doing the defining here. Surely the potential of queer theory has been lost in this interpretation.

Queer Potential

Closer examination of queer theory, such as that delineated in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, brings into focus more clearly the political potential of queer politics. Identity, as Butler reasons, is not necessary to oppositional politics. “The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics” she writes, “tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (1990, 142). In this now familiar text, both sex and gender are considered to be “regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalise the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression” (Ibid, 33). Sex and gender, as a “performatively enacted signification . . . can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings” (Ibid.). And as such sex and gender, or the parodying of sex norms, have subversive political potential. “The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilising substantive identity, and depriving the naturalising narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance” (Ibid, 146). Sex and gender are performance, an acting out of social scripts about sexual behaviour through both speech acts and nonspeech or appearance. The way in which traditional scripts are to be challenged is by acting, if you will, out of character; suggesting through speech or appearance that those scripts are unsuited to expressing the fluidity of sexuality.

More specifically, Butler questions the identity categor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. Queer Identities
• II. Queer Critiques
• III. Queer Agendas