Queer Theories: An Introduction

From Mario Mieli to the Antisocial Turn

Lorenzo Bernini, Michela Baldo, Elena Basile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429515545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This is a short and accessible introduction to the complex and evolving debates around queer theories, advocating for their critical role in academia and society. The book traces the roots of queer theories and argues that Foucault owed an important debt to other European authors including the feminist and homosexual liberation movements of the 1960–1970s and the anticolonial movements of the 1950s.

Going beyond a simple introduction to queer theories, this book situates them firmly in a European and Italian context to offer a crucial set of arguments in defence of LGBTQI+ rights, in defence of the freedom of teaching and research, and in defence of a radical idea of democracy. The narrative of the book is divided into three short chapters which can be read independently or in sequence. The first chapter argues that queer theories are rooted in the critical philosophical tradition, the second presents a critique of heterosexism and the binary inherent to the gender-sex-sexual orientation system, and the third chapter sketches a history of the queer debate. The book offers a useful typology of queer theories by sorting them into three basic paradigms: Freudo-Marxism, radical constructivism, and antisocial and affective theories, clarifying the complexities of the nature of the debates for undergraduates.

The book is both accessible and original, and is suitable for both specialist researchers and undergraduate students new to queer studies. It will be essential reading for those studying philosophy, sexuality studies and gender studies.

1 Critical theory and political philosophy

1.1 What is political philosophy?

Queer, as I will argue in the next pages, is a polysemic term, or better, a floating signifier, which transfers its own instability to the nouns it modifies when it is used as an adjective. This is especially true when queer accompanies the noun ‘theory’, which I would rather use in the plural: queer theories encompass a broad range of studies in which many different methodologies and opinions are at stake. Whether they apply to literature, cinema, art or society, or whether they are situated within the disciplines of anthropology, sociology or history, queer studies share a similar critical stance and are anchored to a few fundamental political principles, which will be examined later in this book. The purpose of this first chapter is to situate queer theories within the tradition of critical theory, which in turn can be situated within the larger tradition of political philosophy. Our first question will thus be: what do we mean by critical and political philosophy? Instead of finding an immediate answer, this question might generate more questions, in a kind of fractal progression: ‘what is critical philosophy?’, ‘what is political philosophy?’, and also ‘what is philosophy’, ‘what is politics?’. This task already sounds exhausting. Moreover, it won’t produce satisfying results, as it will be impossible to give one definitive answer to each of these questions. There may be more than one answer each time, and when one is selected it will be because of a specific choice of method or field, so as to enable me to trace a coherent trajectory towards a possible definition of queer theories.

While in Italy gender studies and queer theories do not have a specific institutional status, ‘Political Philosophy’ is the name of a discipline recognised by the Ministry of Education, University and Research. It is also the title of a university course within the Political and Social Sciences degree, listed as SPS/01. In the list of academic disciplines, there are other subjects considered similar to political philosophy: History of Political Theories (SPS/02), History of Political Institutions (SPS/03) and Political Science (SPS/04). These distinctions may sound spurious, and aimed mostly at differentiating academic posts, and I recognise they partially are. However, there is a deeper reason that distinguishes political philosophy from other similar disciplines: political philosophy examines political phenomena with the instruments of philosophy. We can consider valid what Leo Strauss stated in a renowned conference in 1955: ‘Since political philosophy is a branch of philosophy, even the most provisional explanation of what political philosophy is cannot dispense with an explanation, however provisional, of what philosophy is’ (1989, p.4). If, to begin with, political philosophy is the academic discipline that observes political phenomena through the lenses of philosophy, then in order to understand what political philosophy refers to, we need to start asking ourselves what we mean by philosophy, and what we mean by politics. In order to avoid an endless accumulation of references, I will rely here on prominent ideas, as Aristotle invites us to do when reliable premises are missing in dialectical arguments (1997, p.10). However, I won’t consider the prestige of such ideas as a guarantee of truth.

Scholars generally recognise Socrates as the initiator of the Western philosophical tradition. He was sentenced to death in 399 bc by his Athenian fellow citizens because of his philosophical activity. Philosophy was accused of challenging traditional ideas and faith in the gods, and of corrupting the young; in brief, it represented a danger to the established order. We could thus define philosophy starting from its function, taking on board what Socrates’ accusers believed, and state, by borrowing the title of a film by Pedro Almodovar, that the purpose of philosophy is bad education, ¹ that is, challenging accepted truths in the community one belongs to, being critical of its institutions and causing trouble and disruption. In Plato’s narrative, Socrates himself, in his fruitless attempt to defend himself, can’t come up with anything better than to compare himself to a ‘gadfly!’.² We could therefore argue that philosophy itself was constitutively born as political and critical philosophy, that is, as a practice of thought meant to enact forms of disturbance towards the ‘polis’. Alternatively, we could attempt to define philosophy starting not from the function that it first acquired through Socrates in Athens, but from Socrates’ way of practising it, that is, from his habit of asking his fellow citizens, in an exhaustive manner, the question: ‘what is it?’ and in contesting their answers each time. In the Republic, a dialogue that seeks to define what justice is, Plato asks Socrates to narrate the reaction of sophist Thrasymachus to this way of practising philosophy, a reaction of someone who seems to have lost his temper:

But when we paused after I said this, he could keep still no longer; he coiled himself up like a wild beast crouching, and came at us as if to tear us to pieces. Polemarchus and I were both panic-stricken. What is this stale old nonsense you are babbling, Socrates he roared out in the midst of the company. And why do you keep politely deferring to each other like simpleminded fools? If you truly wish to know what the just is, do not merely ask questions or refute out of emulousness when someone suggests an answer because you know it is easier to ask than to answer. Answer for yourself, and say what you claim the just to be. And see to it that you do not tell me it is the obligatory or the useful or the beneficial or the profitable or the advantageous, but state clearly and precisely what you mean, because I will not accept it if you talk stuff like that.

(2005, p.13; 336 b-d)

Since its origins, therefore, philosophy has been compared by its opponents to a useless mental exercise, to a meaningless ‘chat’, that those who need certainties and easy answers find irritating. Its unproductive nature was even more stigmatised in the beginning, when philosophy was not yet divulged through written texts, but through discussions so polite as to be unnerving. Thrasymachus indeed reproaches Socrates and Polemarchus of ‘politely deferring to each other like simpleminded fools’. However, back then as well as now, philosophy not only requires patience, good manners and steady nerves. It also, and especially, requires courage. Its radical questioning does not stop at anything or anyone: not at beliefs that seem obvious and natural; not at the teachings and precepts that come from the authorities; not at the opinions held within the intellectual circles to which the philosopher belongs; not even at the vehemence and violence of those who want to silence philosophy ‘by tearing to pieces’ those who practise it (Plato will follow Socrates’ example after his death). It is no coincidence that Thrasymachus, who in this passage lashes out against a thought that proceeds by formulating problems and not by asserting dogmas, will affirm in the rest of the Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Without delving into the details of Plato’s definition of justice as the harmony of the parts, it is important to stress here that Socrates inaugurates philosophy by way of asking the wise men of Athens the ‘what is’ question, with the intention of refuting their answers. Following his example, I will attempt to apply this method to the subject I teach, examining some of the views of those who addressed the issue before me. Like Socrates, I will talk to my fellow citizens, and in particular to the academics, since I am an academic myself, with the ideal aim of opening up a debate on the philosophical-political status of feminism and queer theories.

My first wise man is Stefano Petrucciani, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University La Sapienza in Rome and currently second-term president of the Italian Society of Political Philosophy (SIFP). Among his many books we find also the textbook Modelli di filosofia politica [Models of Political Philosophy], which, similarly to what I do in this book, begins with the attempt to define political philosophy by resorting to some authoritative voices in the field. Just as I did, Petrucciani also follows Leo Strauss’s suggestions and starts by going after the meaning of the term ‘philosophy’, reaching a definition that I believe owes to Jürgen Habermas’s thought. Habermas delineates philosophy neither through the Socratic practice of questioning, nor through its political function, but through selecting Socrates’s research method and the object such method is applied to as the criteria for its definition. Petrucciani states that philosophy is ‘a refined and institutionalized form of discourse whose method consists in the use of public, critical and open reasoning’ (2003, p.8).³ If he is right, according to this method the Western philosophical tradition can be described as an uninterrupted and still ongoing discussion, which started with the questions that Socrates asked his fellow citizens. Everyone can potentially intervene in this discussion, provided that one complies with the specific parameter set out by Habermas (1998) in his theory of communicative action: the logic of the best argument. According to this logic, what counts in a philosophical discussion are the most persuasive arguments; not the strength, power or charisma of the person who speaks, but the most rational and convincing argument, the one that manages to refute the arguments of the opponents and challenge them to further refutations. Philosophers thus know very well that every outcome of their philosophical reasoning is provisional and open to the criticism of those who come after them. Their philosophical practice is non-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian and offers a contribution to the field of public discourse, which in fact is one of such practice’s own condition of possibility (Habermas, 1989). For Petrucciani, however, the provisional status of philosophy’s achievements depends only in part on philosophy’s own research method. It is also the very object of research that turns philosophy into an endless practice.

According to Petrucciani,

as to the object, [philosophy] confronts the issue of our own orientation in the world – an issue that is as inescapable as it is (perhaps) inexhaustible and one that cannot be addressed by the empirical sciences because they themselves need legitimation and orientation.

(2003, pp.8–9)

Thus, if the method of philosophical questioning clearly separates philosophy from revealed religions, where truth is entrusted to sacred texts or communicated directly by the deity, its object of research differentiates it also from what Petrucciani calls the ‘empirical sciences’. Philosophy’s relationship with empirical data is, in fact, never direct. Indeed, even when philosophy invokes experience, such experience is not confined to the individual but is characterised by an intersubjective dimension, which requires the consensus of others in the public sphere (and this idea is present both in Habermas’s theory of communicative action and in Kant’s (1790/2007) theory of aesthetic judgement). For Petrucciani, this has to do with the fact that the questions formulated by philosophy, even when it analyses facts, are questions about orientation, direction and meaning. An example might help clarify this further. When Hannah Arendt examines the political reality of the twentieth century, the purpose of her research, which is nonetheless based on historical facts, is not to establish the truth of the facts but rather to interpret them in a meaningful dimension. When Arendt uses the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ (1951), she highlights the radical discontinuity that the fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century mark with respect to previous political experiences, particularly past tyrannies and dictatorships. Faced with the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime, Arendt probes the nature of the evil that was at work in that historical event, coming to the well-known conclusion that this was a sort of ‘banal’ evil (1963), caused by habits of obedience and lack of critical thought. The value of Arendt’s theses stems not only from their adherence to historical truth, but also from their effects of political truth. To put it in Petrucciani’s terms, it stems from the way in which they orient Arendt’s readers in the world they share with other human beings. In other words, the concept of the ‘banality of evil’ isn’t circumscribed to the description of a given regime’s functioning. It is a call not to forget the importance of political thought and political action,⁴ and to resist any regime that tries to smother their unfolding.

This example allows us to take a further step. If philosophy is the discursive practice that applies the method of the best argument to the problem of the orientation of human beings in the world, then political philosophy will be that philosophy that will use the same method to ask questions of direction concerning politics, as Arendt does in her analysis of the totalitarianisms of her time. ‘But then, what is politics?’, Socrates would ask at this point. Petrucciani would reply that politics is that sphere of human experience characterised by the presence of ‘power relations’ and thus that power is the specific object to which political philosophy applies its method of the best argument. ‘So then, I can hear Socrates asking again – what exactly is power?’ As Petrucciani states:

If asked about this point, political philosophers would give very different answers: the most canonical tradition of political philosophy examined institutionalized forms of power, represented by laws and government institutions; whereas it was especially heterodox philosophers who insisted that the most fundamental power relations are found outside canonical government institutions and outside the law, in property relations (Marx) or in the ‘micro-physics of power’ (Foucault).⁵ These heterodox thinkers will not be wronged, however, if we say that political philosophy has to do mainly with institutionalized forms of power, which, from a certain point in human history onward, can be defined as state power.

(2003, p.6)

Therefore, claiming that power is the main object of investigation of political philosophy does not settle the issue – on the contrary, it is a way to open it up further. Those who practise political philosophy are divided on the question of what constitutes power, and which power relations are philosophically relevant.

Like every definition of political philosophy, Petrucciani’s is also the result of a firm and specific choice. In addition to Habermas, he refers to a well-established theoretical tradition in modernity, which he presents as ‘canonical’, and whose origins can be traced back to the seventeenth-century theory of contractualism, and specifically back to Thomas Hobbes. According to this tradition (which Arendt holds responsible for the processes of depoliticisation that led to totalitarianism), politics coincides with the administration of the State and the exercise of violence necessary to it. In addition, political power essentially coincides with the State’s ability to make subject/citizens obey, ultimately through the sanctions the State can impose on those who transgress the law. In fact, Petrucciani defines political power, using Max Weber’s famous words, as the ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ (Weber, 1946, p.78). These words can be contrasted with those, equally famous, of Carl Schmitt, according ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Translators’ preface: Le teorie queer di Lorenzo Bernini
• Introduction: studying queer theories in the Italian university
• 1. Critical theory and political philosophy
• 2. An exercise in queer critique: how does sexuality function?
• 3. Elements of queer theory
• Index