De-Moralizing Gay Rights

Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US

Cyril Ghosh

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319788401
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically interrogates three sets of distortions that emanate from the messianic core of 21st century public discourse on LGBT+ rights in the United States. The first relates to the critique of pinkwashing, often advanced by scholars who claim to be committed to an emancipatory politics. The second concerns a recent US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), a judgment that established marriage equality across the 50 states. The third distortion occurs in Kenji Yoshino's theorization of the concept of gay covering. Each distortion produces its own injunction to assimilate, sometimes into the dominant mainstream and, at other times, into the fold of what is axiomatically taken to be the category of the radical. Using a queer theoretic analysis, De-Moralizing Gay Rights argues for the dismantling of each of these three sets of assimilationist injunctions.

© The Author(s) 2018

Cyril GhoshDe-Moralizing Gay Rightshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78840-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. De-Moralizing Gay Rights

Cyril Ghosh¹

(1)

Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, USA

Cyril Ghosh

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, I synopsize the argument of the book. In so doing, I begin by pointing out that this book is intended as a polemic. I then delineate the argument in what follows. This book critically interrogates three sets of distortions in twenty-first century public discourse on LGBT+ rights in the United States. The first relates to the critique of pinkwashing, often advanced by scholars who claim to be proponents of a radical politics. I suggest that this critique sometimes suffers from analytical overreach. The second concerns a recent US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), a judgment that established marriage equality across the 50 states. I argue that this judgment mobilizes the Court’s own endorsement of two elements of homonormativity: amatonormativity and repronormativity. Instead of endorsing homonormativity, the Court should have instead employed an approach based on decisional minimalism. The third distortion occurs in Kenji Yoshino’s theorization of the concept of gay covering. Yoshino’s calls to dismantle cultural demands for gay covering turn out, I argue, to constitute an oppressive command to “gay-flaunt.”

Keywords

AmatonormativityCoveringHomonormativityRepronormativityMarriage equalityPinkwashingQueer theory

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

This book is intended as a polemic. It takes issue with a critical distortion rife in twenty-first century public discourse on LGBT+ rights in the United States. ¹ The distortion relates to the category of the “queer” and is mobilized by both mainstream, good-hearted liberals as well as by those who more closely identify as queer and/or radical. It typically functions through the public articulation of a series of assimilationist and identity-stabilizing injunctions deployed in order to underwrite a presumptive gay rights program decided—apparently—in advance of any contestation.

These injunctions track what Lee Edelman—in offering a critique of the dominant mainstream’s obsession with children—has called “an ideological Möbius strip” that has a “‘self-evident’ one-sidedness” (Edelman 2004, 2). They also reproduce the following binary logic: you-agree-with-us-therefore-you-are-enlightended-versus-you-disagree-with-us-therefore-you-must-be-benighted. Ostensibly deployed in the name of LGBT+ rights, each of these binary logics is a modern-day American Jeremiad (Bercovitch 1978) steeped in a deeply moralizing rhetoric and each consummately misrecognizes the category of the queer. ² They do so by either dismissing the queer positions on the subject of their inquiry or by rendering these positions invisible or inferior (Young 1990, especially 58–61).

In this book, I critically interrogate three paradigmatic sets of such injunctions frequently cited in contemporary LGBT+ rights discourse. The first relates to the critique of pinkwashing, often advanced by scholars who claim to be proponents of a radical and emancipatory politics. The second concerns a recent US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges , in which the majority opinion—one that established marriage equality across the 50 states—is wholeheartedly committed to encoding into the law of the land the Court’s own endorsement of two central elements of homonormativity: amatonormativity and repronormativity. ³ The third site of my inquiry is Kenji Yoshino’s theorization of the concept of gay covering. ⁴ In spite of Yoshino’s best intentions, his calls to dismantle cultural demands for gay covering turn out to constitute a sanctimonious and oppressive command to “gay-flaunt.”

In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I begin in Sect. 1.2 below with a discussion of the specific intervention this book is intended to occasion. Here, I foreshadow some of the ideas that I engage with in greater detail in the empirical chapters of the book. In Sect. 1.3, I provide an outline of the chapters to come. I conclude this introductory chapter with a Note to the Reader that includes some remarks about the different ways in which this book may be read.

1.2 The Nature of the Intervention

When one writes of queer theory one is in fact writing of queer theories. As Berlant and Warner suggest, queer theory “cannot be assimilated into a single discourse” (Berlant and Warner 1995, 343). Its self-conscious deployment as an analytic category—in the service of critique—did not happen overnight or by happenstance. It has a specific historical context. Queer theory developed in the interstices of a conversation in the academy in the early 1990s between scholarship on poststructuralism, on the one hand, and scholarship on gay and lesbian studies (sometimes nowadays also called queer studies), on the other. The latter is properly understood as both a product of, as well as a constitutive element of, a broader set of identity-based social movements clustered under the rubric of the New Left.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, these kinds of “identity politics,” predicated on a politics of separatism and difference, appeared to be ascendant everywhere in the academy. Newly emergent departments, curricula, programs, and institutes dedicated to women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, and so on were but only a few signs that identity politics was flourishing in the corridors of higher education. In the last three decades, in addition to theories of identity politics, a range of related discussions—such as the politics of difference, the politics of recognition, the politics of acknowledgement, multiculturalism, assimilation, integration, diversity, democratic inclusion , and most recently social justice—have become ubiquitous (see, e.g., Young 1990; Phillips 1993; Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 1995; Fraser 1995, 1997; Markell 2003; Fraser and Honneth 2003; Kenny 2004; Wolbrecht and Hero 2005; Ghosh 2013; Heyes 2016).

Queer theory has an uneasy relationship with identity politics. It shares affinities with it as well as resists it. It does the former by dis-identifying—and always preserving a critical distance—from a dominant heterosexual mainstream. But it also resists identity politics to the extent that it rejects the stabilization of any form of identity at all (Berlant and Warner 1995; Jagose 1996). Thus, while gay and lesbian studies has positioned the homosexual body as always outside of, or on the margins of, a dominant mainstream populated by heterosexuals, queer theorists have resisted this inside/outside binary by taking it as axiomatic that it is impossible to locate oneself fully outside the dominant discourse (Namaste 1994, 224; Fuss 1991). The figure of the queer has thus always been without a specific locus: Never fully inside nor fully outside the dominant discursive context, and always politically committed to eradicating the inside/outside, as well as other, binaries.

Indeed, the queer is “constituted through its dissent from the hegemonic, structured relations and meanings of sexuality and gender” (Duggan 2001, 225) and is mobilized to contest the “stability and ineradicability of the hetero/homo hierarchy” (Fuss 1991, 1). Queer theory’s foundational insights inhere in the social construction and dis-alignment of sexuality, sex, and gender. Thus, in The History of Sexuality : Volume I, Foucault delineates the (reverse-) discursive history that reveals the constructionist character of the homosexual as a “species” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 43). In Foucault’s telling, the consolidation of this identity is an artifact of a proliferation of a discourse on sexuality, one that is always already mobilized both in the name of and as a transgression of the Puritan triple edict of “taboo, nonexistence, and silence” (Foucault 1990, 5). Two critical insights to be found here are, first, that a social phenomenon (silence) may sometimes create the condition of possibility for its own negation (verbosity); and second, that there is no identity of the “homosexual” that predates attempts to regulate “homosex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. De-Moralizing Gay Rights
• 2. Radical Theory Creep
• 3. Obergefell v. Hodges: Marriage Equality’s Insistence on Family Values
• 4. Covering’s Other Hidden Assault
• 5. Epilogue
• Back Matter