Queer Theory

An Introduction

Anna1narie Jagose

111
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Washington Square, New York
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Theorising Same-Sex Desire 7
What is homosexuality exactly? 7
The invention of homosexuality 10
Homosexuality and heterosexuality 16
© Annamarie Rustom Jagose 1996
3 The Homophile Movement 22
All rights reserved

Published in 1996 by Melbourne University Press

4 Gay Liberation 30
First published in the U.S.A. in 1996 by 5 Lesbian Feminism 44
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Washington Square 6 Limits of Identity 58
New York, N.Y. 10003

CIP data available from the Library of Congress

7 Queer 72
ISBN 0-8147-4233-5 (clothbound) Homosexual, lesbian or gay, queer 72
ISBN 0-8147-4234-3 (paperbound) The post-structuralist context of queer 75
Printed in Malaysia
Performativity and identity 83
HIV/AIDS discourse 93
Queer identity 96
8 Contestations of Queer 101
9 Afterword 127
Notes 133
Bibliography 137
Index 150
 7 Queer

7 'perverted' from its proper usage. When John Boswell's book,

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in
Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Queer Fourteenth Century, was published, Keith Thomas chided the
publisher for allowing such slackness in Boswell's use of 'gay':
'History suggests that attempts to resist semantic change are almost
invariably unsuccessful', he wrote. 'But it seems a pity that the
University of Chicago Press should in this case have capitulated so
readily' 0980:26). Thomas then specified wh tis wrong with this
usage:

The first objection is political. A minority is doubtless entitled to

rebaptise itself with a term carrying more favourable connota-
tions so as to validate its own behavior and free itself from scan-
Homosexual, lesbian or gay, queer dal. But it is scarcely entitled to expect those who do not
belong to that minority to observe this new usage, particularly
Although the widespread use of 'queer' as a term of self-
when the chosen label seems bizarrely inappropriate and
description is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is only the most :,1
appears to involve an implicit slur upon everyone else ... The I
recent in a series of words that have constituted the semantic
second objection to 'gay' is linguistic. For centuries the word
forcefield of homosexuality since the nineteenth century. The
has meant (approximately) 'blithe,' 'light-hearted,' or 'exuber-
word 'homosexuality'--coined in 1869 by a Swiss doctor, Karoly
antly cheerful.' To endow it with a wholly different meaning is
Maria Benkert-was not used widely in English until the 1890s,
to deprive ourselves of a hitherto indispensable piece of vocab-
when it was adopted by the sexologist Havelock Ellis. It continues
ulary and incidentally to make nonsense of much inherited
to have a certain currency but, because of its unshakeable associ-
literature. (ibid.)
ation with the pathologising discourses of medicine, it is seldom
used nowadays as a term of self-identification. 'To describe one- Only fifteen years later Thomas's objections seem comic. His out-
self as "a homosexual'", writes Simon Watney 0992:20), 'is imme- rage that 'gay' not only misdescribes homosexuals but also disen-
diately to inhabit a pseudo-scientific theory of sexuality which franchises heterosexuals from such categorical happiness has
more properly belongs to the age of the steam engine than to the been no more persuasive than his anxiety that the homonymous
late twentieth century'. 'gay' would damage language and literature. Indeed, the popular-
More recently, in the 1960s, liberationists made a strategic break ity of the term 'gay' testifies to its potential as a non-clinical
with 'homosexuality' by annexing the word 'gay', thus redeploying descriptor unburdened by the pathologising history of sexology.
a nineteenth-century slang term which had formerly described Tracing etymological evolution is more commonly a general
women of dubious morals. 'Gay' was mobilised as a specifically than a precise task. While, to a large extent, the terms 'homo-
political counter to that binarised and hierarchised sexual cate- sexual', 'gay' or 'lesbian' and 'queer' successively trace historical
gorisation which classifies homosexuality as a deviation from a shifts in the conceptualisation of same-sex sex, their actual deploy-
privileged and naturalised heterosexuality. Much conservative- ment has sometimes been less predictable, often preceding or
not to mention linguistically naive--criticism was levelled at this post-dating the periods which they respectively characterise. For
appropriation on the grounds that an 'innocent' word was being example, George Chauncey 0994) observes that in the various

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 Queer Theory 7 Queer

subcultures which constituted the visible and complex gay world what terms to use in which circumstances, James Davidson
of pre-World War II New York the term 'queer' pre-dated 'gay'. He 0994:12) writes: 'Queer is in fact the most common solution to
notes that 'by the 1910s and 1920s, men who identified themselves this modern crisis of utterance, a word so well-travelled it is
as different from other men primarily on the basis of their homo- equally at home in 19th-century drawing-rooms, accommodating
sexual interest rather than their womanlike gender status usually itself to whispered insinuation, and on the streets of the Nineties,
called themselves "queer"' (Chauncey, 1994:101). By contrast, the where it raises its profile to that of an empowering slogan'. In its
term 'gay' first 'began to catch on in the 1930s, and its primacy erratic claims to various historic periods, Davidson argues that
was consolidated during the war' (ibid.:19). As recently as 1990 queer 'produces nothing but confusion' (ibid.). The critical term
the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality glossed 'queer' as an almost 'queer' has proved to have a highly elastic sense of history (see
archaic term, concluding-prematurely, as it turned out-that 'the Chapter 1). But it has been most commonly mobilised not as a
word's declining popularity may therefore reflect today's greater retrospective and transhistoricising descriptor, but as a term that
visibility and acceptance of gay men and lesbians and the growing indexes precisely and specifically cultural formations of the late
knowledge that most of them are in fact quite harmless, ordinary 1980s and 1990s. Describing the shift from 'homosexual' to 'gay',
people' (Dynes, 1990:1091). While conceding that in twentieth- Weeks 0977:3) argues that these terms 'are not just new labels for
century America 'queer' 'has probably been the most popular old realities: they point to a changing reality, both in the ways a
vernacular term of abuse for homosexuals', the Encyclopedia hostile society labelled homosexuality, and in the way those stig-
incredulously reports that 'even today some older English homo- matized saw themselves'. Similarly, in distinguishing itself from
sexuals prefer the term, even sometimes affecting to believe that it those terms which form its semantic history, 'queer' equally fore-
is value-free' (ibid.). The examples of Chauncey and Dynes stand grounds 'a changing reality' whose dimensions will now be
as cautionary reminders that the vagaries of historical evolution examined further.
rarely match the altogether neater paradigms that purport to
describe them. Nevertheless, the path traced by 'homosexual',
'gay' or 'lesbian' and 'queer' accurately describes the terms and The post-structuralist context of queer
identificatory categories commonly used to frame same-sex desire
in the twentieth century. Queer marks both a continuity and a break with previous gay
Although these terms are clearly related to one another, the liberationist and lesbian feminist models. Lesbian feminist models
constructionist arguments surveyed in Chapter 2 indicate that they of organisation were correctives to the masculinist bias of a gay
are not merely different ways of saying the same thing, and there- liberation which itself had grown out of dissatisfactions with
fore should not be misrecognised as synonyms. As Simon Watney earlier homophile organisations. Similarly, queer effects a rupture
0992:20) has argued: 'Far from being trivial issues, such questions which, far from being absolute, is meaningful only in the context
of change and contestation at the level of intimate personal iden- of its historical development. The mock-historical sweep of gay
tities are fundamental to our understanding of the workings of evolution by Susan Hayes 0994: 14) casts queer as the latest in a
power within the wider framework of Modernity'. 'Queer' is not series of related events:
simply the latest example in a series of words that describe and First there was Sappho (the good old days). Then there was the
constitute same-sex desire transhistorically but rather a conse- acceptable homoeroticism of classical Greece, the excesses of
quence of the constructionist problematising of any allegedly uni- Rome. Then, casually to skip two millennia, there was Oscar
versal term. Noting in the recent discursive proliferation of lesbian Wilde, sodomy, blackmail and imprisonment, Forster, Sackville-
and gay studies a certain hesitancy or self-consciousness about West, Radclyffe Hall, inversion, censorship; then pansies, butch

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and femme, poofs, queens, fag hags, more censorship and and sexuality which in large part underwrite the queer agenda
blackmail, and Orton. Then there was Stonewall 0969) and we have changed, and to recognise the implications such changes
all became gay. There was feminism, too, and some of us have for the theorising of power and resistance. In distinguishing
became lesbian feminists and even lesbian separatists. There the Gay Liberation Front from Queer Nation, Joseph Bristow and
was drag and clones and dykes and politics and Gay Angelia R. Wilson 0993:1-2) consider it definitionally significant
Sweatshop. Then there was Aids, which, through the intense that 'an ertswhile politics of identity has largely been superseded
discussion of sexual practices (as opposed to sexual identities), by a politics of difference'. Similarly, Lisa Duggan 0992:15) notes
spawned the Queer movement in America. Then that supreme that in queer models 'the rhetoric of difference replaces the more
manifestation of Thatcherite paranoia, Clause 28, which pro- assimilationist liberal emphasis on similarity to other groups'. In
voked the shotgun marriage of lesbian and gay politics in the identifying difference as a crucial term for queer knowledges and
UK. The child is Queer, and a problem child it surely is. modes of organisation, these theorists map a change which is not
specific to queer but characteristic of post-structuralism in general.
Although this account is too tongue-in-cheek to be a wholly per- As Donald Morton 0995:370) writes:
suasive genealogy of queer as a category, its parodic invocation of
historical cause and effect certainly dramatises the ambivalent con- Rather than as a local effect, the return of the queer has to
tinuities and discontinuities that characterise queer's evolution. be understood as the result, in the domain of sexuality, of
While the mobilisation of queer in its most recent sense cannot the (post)modern encounter with-and rejection of-Enlighten-
be dated exactly, it is generally understood to have been popularly ment views concerning the role of the conceptual, rational,
adopted in the early 1990s. Queer is a product of specific cultural systematic, structural, normative, progressive, liberatory, revo-
and theoretical pressures which increasingly structured debates lutionary, and so forth, in social change.
(both within and outside the academy) about questions of lesbian Indeed, as an intellectual model, queer has not been produced
and gay identity. Perhaps most significant in this regard has been solely by lesbian and gay politics and theory, but rather informed
the problematising by post-structuralism of gay liberationist and by historically specific knowledges which constitute late twentieth-
lesbian feminist understandings of identity and the operations of century western thought. Similar shifts can be seen in both femi-
power. This prompts David Herkt 0995:46) to argue that 'the Gay nist and post-colonial theory and practice when, for example,
identity is observably a philosophically conservative construct, Denise Riley 0988) problematises feminism's insistence on
based upon premises that no longer have any persuasive aca- 'women' as a unified, stable and coherent category, and Henry
demic relationship to contemporary theories of identity or gender'. Louis Gates 0985) denaturalises 'race'. Such conceptual shifts
The delegitimation of liberal, liberationist, ethnic and even sepa- have had great impact within lesbian and gay scholarship and
ratist notions of identity generated the cultural space necessary for activism and are the historical context for any analysis of queer.
the emergence of the term 'queer'; its non-specificity guarantees it Both the lesbian and gay movements were committed funda-
against recent criticisms made of the exclusionist tendencies of mentally to the notion of identity politics in assuming identity as
'lesbian' and 'gay' as identity categories. Although there is no the necessary prerequisite for effective political intervention.
agreement on the exact definition of queer, the interdependent Queer, on the other hand, exemplifies a more mediated relation to
spheres of activism and theory that constitute its necessary context categories of identification. Access to the post-structuralist theori-
have undergone various shifts. sation of identity as provisional and contingent, coupled with a
Before considering specific debates about the efficacy of queer, growing awareness of the limitations of identity categories in
it is important to understand that those models of identity, gender terms of political representation, enabled queer to emerge as a

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 Queer Theory 7 Queer

n~[qr:m of personal identification and political organisation. assumption that an identity is the natural property of any indivi,-
'Identity' is probably one of the most naturalised cultural cate- dual. Sigmund Freud's theorisation of the unconscious further
gories each of us inhabits: one always thinks of one's self as exist- challenges the notion that subjectivity is stable and coherent. In
ing outside all representational frames, and as somehow marking establishing the formative influence of important mental and psy-
a point of undeniable realness. In the second half of the twentieth chic processes of which an individual is unaware, the theory of the
century, however, such seemingly self-evident or logical claims to unconscious has radical implications for the common-sense
identity have been problematised radically on a number of fronts assumption that the subject is both whole and self-knowing.
by such theorists as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Furthermore, interpretations of Freud's work-particularly by the
Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Collectively, their French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan--establish subjectivity as
work has made possible certain advances in social theory and the something which must be learned, rather than as something which
human sciences which, in the words of Stuart Hall 0994:120), is always already there. Subjectivity is not an essential property
have effected 'the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject' (cf. of the self, but something which originates outside it. Identity,
Chris Weedon, 1987; Diana Fuss, 1989; Barbara Creed, 1994). then is an effect of identification with and against others: being
Consequently, identity has been reconceptualised as a sustaining ong~ing, and always incomplete, it is a process rather than a
and persistent cultural fantasy or myth. To think of identity as a property.
'mythological' construction is not to say that categories of identity In some influential lectures on structural linguistics which he
have no material effect. Rather it is to realise-as Roland Barthes delivered in 1906-11, Ferdinand de Saussure argues that language
does in his Mythologies (1978)-that our understanding of our- does not so much reflect as construct social reality. For Saussure,
selves as coherent, unified, and self-determining subjects is an language is not some second-order system whose function is sim-
effect of those representational codes commonly used to describe ply to describe what is already there. Rather, language constitutes
the self and through which, consequently, identity comes to be and makes significant that which it seems only to describe.
understood. Barthes' understanding of subjectivity questions that Moreover, Saussure defines language as a system of signification
seemingly natural or self-evident 'truth' of identity which derives that precedes any individual speaker. Language is commonly mis-
historically from Rene Descartes' notion of the self as something understood as the medium by which we express our 'authentic'
that is self-determining, rational and coherent. selves, and our private thoughts and emotions. Saussure, however,
Reconsidering Karl Marx's emphasis on the framework of con- asks us to consider that our notions of a private, personal and inte-
straints or historical conditions which determine an individual's rior self is something constituted through language.
actions, Louis Althusser has argued that we do not pre-exist as free The theories of Althusser, Freud, Lacan and Saussure provide
subjects: on the contrary, we are constituted as such by ideology. the post-structuralist context in which queer emerges. The French
His central thesis is that individuals are 'interpellated' or 'called historian Michel Foucault has been more explicitly engaged in
forth' as subjects by ideology, and that interpellation is achieved denaturalising dominant understandings of sexual identity. In
through a compelling mixture of recognition and identification. emphasising that sexuality is not an essentially personal attribute
This notion is important for any thorough examination of identity but an available cultural category-and that it is the effect of
politics, because it demonstrates how ideology not only positions power rather than simply its object-Foucault's writings have been
individuals in society but also confers on them their sense of iden- crucially significant for the development of lesbian and gay and,
tity. In other words, it shows how one's identity is already consti- subsequently, queer activism and scholarship. To say this is not to
tuted by ideology itself rather than simply by resistance to it. claim that there is literally a causal connection between Foucault's
Like the Marxist structuralist approach to subjectivity, psycho- work and queer practice and _theory. Yet, as Diana Fuss (1989:97)
analysis makes culturally available a narrative that complicates the observes, Foucault's work on sexuality resonates with 'current

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Queer Tbeory

disputes amongst gay theorists and activists over the meaning and quently, Foucault's revaluation of power has significantly affected
applicability of such categories as "gay", "lesbian", and "homo- much lesbian and gay analysis.
sexual" in a post-structuralist climate which renders all such asser- Since he does not think that power is a fundamentally repres-
tions of identity problematic'. 1 sive force, Foucault does not endorse such liberationist strategies
as breaking prohibitions and speaking out. Indeed, because the
Foucault's argument that sexuality is a discursive production
idea of modern sexual repression is widely accepted, Foucault
rather than a natural condition is part of his larger contention that
speculates that the discursive critique of oppression, far from cor-
modern subjectivity is an effect of networks of power. Not only
negative or repressive but also productive and enabling, power is rectly identifying the mechanisms of power, 'is ... in fact part of
the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubt-
'exercised from innumerable points' to no predetermined effect
less misrepresents) by calling it "repression"' (ibid.:10). Foucault
(Foucault, 1981:94). Against the popular concept that sex both
questions the liberationist confidence that to voice previously
exists beyond power relations and yet is repressed by them,
denied and silenced lesbian and gay identities and sexualities is to
Foucault (1979:36) argues that power is not primarily a repressive
defy power, and hence induce a transformative effect. As Foucault
force:
takes a resolutely anti-liberatory position on this matter he is
In defining the effects of power by repression, one accepts a sometimes read-perhaps unsurprisingly given the common cur-
purely juridical conception of that power; one identifies power rency of what he critiques as 'the repressive hypothesis'-as advo-
with a law that says no; it has above all the force of an interdict. cating political defeatism (ibid.: 15).
Now, I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow and skele- Yet Foucault also argues that 'where there is power, there is
tal conception of power which has been curiously shared. If resistance' (ibid.:95), a resistance 'coextensive with [power] and
power was never anything but repressive, if it never did any- absolutely its contemporary' (Foucault, 1988:122). Like power,
thing but say no, do you really believe that we should manage resistance is multiple and unstable; it coagulates at certain points,
to obey it? What gives power its hold, what makes it accepted, is dispersed across others, and circulates in discourse. 'Discourse'
is quite simply the fact that it does not simply weigh like a force is the heterogeneous collection of utterances that relate to a parti-
which says no, but that it runs through, and it produces, things, cular concept, and thereby constitute and contest its meaning-
it induces pleasure, it forms knowledge, it produces discourse; that 'series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is
it must be considered as a productive network which runs neither uniform nor stable' (ibid.:100). Just as he cautions against
through the entire social body much more than as a negative thinking that power demarcates only hierarchical relations, so
instance whose function is repression. Foucault insists that discourse is not simply for or against anything,
but endlessly prolific and multivalent: 'we must not imagine a
In Foucault's analysis, marginalised sexual identities are not simply
world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and
victims of the operations of power. On the contrary, they are pro-
excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the
duced by those same operations: 'For two centuries now, the dis-
dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that
course on sex has been multiplied rather than rarefied; and if it
can come into play in various strategies' (ibid.).
has carried with it taboos and prohibitions, it has also, in a more
When describing the relation between discourses and stra-
fundamental way, ensured the solidification and implantation of
tegies, and demonstrating how a single discourse can be used
an entire sexual mosaic' (Foucault, 1981:53). This emphasis on the
strategically for oppositional purposes, Foucault specifically
productive and enabling aspects of power profoundly alters the
instances how the category of homosexuality was formed in
models by which traditionally it has been understood. Conse-

81
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 Queer Theory 7 Queer

relation to structures of power and resistance. The rise of the tity politics that merely replicate race and class oppression are
homosexual as a 'species' exemplifies the polyvalent capacities of inadequate. Yet identity politics cannot be recovered simply by a
discourse:
scrupulous attention to the axes of difference. For as post-
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century structuralism also demonstrates, identity politics are eviscerated
psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of dis- not only by the differences betwee~ ·subjects but the irresolvable
c?urses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inver- differences within each subject. As Diana Fuss 0989:103) argues,
s10n, pederasty, and 'psychic hermaphrodism' made possible a 'theories of "multiple identities" fail to challenge effectively the
stro~g advance of social controls into this area of 'perversity'; traditional metaphysical understanding of identity as unity'.
but it also made possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse:
homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand Performativity and identity
that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the
same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was Within lesbian and gay studies, the theorist who has done most to
medically disqualified. (ibid.:101) unpack the risks and limits of identity is Judith Butler. In her wide-
ly cited book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Discourse, then, is entirely within (yet not necessarily in the ser- Identity 0990), Butler elaborates Foucault's argument about the
vice of) the mechanisms of power. Foucault's analysis focuses on operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the
discourse as a mode of resistance, not to contest its content but in ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those
order to particularise its strategic operations. In so far as homo- identificatory regimes they seek to counter. If Foucault's Tbe
sexuality is one of his key examples, Foucault regards sexual iden- History of Sexuality (vol. 1) is for David Halperin 0995:15) 'the
tities as .the discursive effects of availi6le cultural cat~g;~ies. single most important intellectual source of political inspiration for
Challenging commonly held understandings of power and resis- contemporary AIDS activists', then for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
tance, his work has obvious appeal for lesbian and gay-and sub- 0993a: 1) Butler's Gender Trouble is the correspondingly influen-
sequently queer-theory and practice. Although Foucault (1988b) tial book for queer theory: 'Anyone who was at the 1991 Rutgers
trea~ t~e 'author' as a textual effect rather-than a real presence, his conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies, and heard Gender
pub~ic i_den~ity as a gay man may well have facilitated the gay Trouble appealed to in paper after paper, couldn't help being
studies inspired by his work.
awed by the productive impact this dense and even imposing
Even more explicitly than Althusser, Saussure, Freud and Lacan, work has had on the recent development of queer theory and
FoucatJlt radically reconceptualises identity in ways that have sub- reading'. Rosemary Hennessy 0994:94) similarly reports that
~tanti~lly re~?aped lesbian and gay studies. The recent critique of 'Judith Butler is cited more persistently and pervasively than any
identity politics-both inside and outside lesbian and gay circles- other queer theorist'. Although Gender Trouble is framed most
?as not arisen simply because the reification of any single identity prominently in terms of feminism, one of its most influential
is felt to be exclusionary. It has occurred because, within post- achievements is to specify how gender operates as a regulatory
structuralism, the very notion of identity as a coherent and abiding construct that privileges heterosexuality and, furthermore, how the
sense of self is perceived as a cultural fantasy rather than a demon- deconstruction of normative models of gender legitimates lesbian
strable fact. Objections to the emphasis on identity in lesbian and and gay subject-positions.
gay politics were based initially on the fact that the foundational Butler argues-controversially-that feminism works against its
category of any identity politics inevitably excludes potential sub- explicit aims if it takes 'women' as its grounding category. This is
jects in the name of representation. Clearly, lesbian and gay iden- because the term 'women' does not signify a natural unity but

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 Queer Theory 7 Queer

instead a regulatoty fiction, whose deployment inadvertently power) are nevertheless generated by that law-highlight the dis-
reproduces those normative relations between sex, gender and cursive rather than the essential character of gender. Hetero-
desire that naturalise heterosexuality. 'The cultural matrix through sexuality is naturalised by the performative repetition of normative
which gender identity has become intelligible', writes Butler gender identities. Butler advocates contesting such naturalisation
0990: 17), 'requires that certain kinds of "identities" cannot "exist" by means of a displaced repetition of its performativity that would
-that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and draw attention to those processes that consolidate sexual identi-
those in which the practices of desire do not "follow" from either ties. One of the strategies she recommends is a parodic repetition
sex or gender'. Instead of naturalising the same-sex desire of of gender norms. Instead of marking a distance between itself and
homosexuality-which is the usual strategy of gay and lesbian the parodied original, the kind of parody which Butler has in mind
movements-Butler contests the truth of gender itself, arguing that 'is of the vety notion of an original' (ibid.:138). Consequently,
any commitment to gender identity works ultimately against the heterosexuality is no longer assumed to be the original of which
legitimation of homosexual subjects. homosexuality is an inferior copy. In advocating parody as a resis-
No longer a natural basis for solidarity, gender is refigured by tant strategy, Butler intends to demonstrate that the domains of
Butler as a cultural fiction, a performative effect of reiterative acts: gender and sexuality are not organised in terms of originality and
'Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated imitation. What they manifest instead is the endless-though
acts within a highly rigid regulatoty frame that congeal over time heavily regulated-possibilities of performativity.
to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' By persistently denaturalising gender and sexuality, Butler prob-
(ibid.:33). Consequently, there is nothing authentic about gender, lematises many of the cherished assumptions of gay liberation and
no 'core' that produces the reassuring signs of gender. The reason lesbian feminism, including their appeals to commonality and
'there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender' is collectivity. Michael Warner 0992:19) points to discontinuities in
'that identity is performatively constituted by the vety "expres- their respective theoretical frames when he compares the
sions" that are said to be its results' (ibid.:25). Heterosexuality, Radicalesbian manifesto with Butler's work:
which passes itself off as natural and therefore in no need of
Radicalesbians began their manifesto 'What is a lesbian? A les-
explanation, is reframed by Butler as a discursive production, an
bian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explo-
effect of the sex/gender system which purports merely to describe
sion'. If Butler could be persuaded to regard the question 'What
it. Like Foucault, who foregrounds the importance of discursive
is a lesbian?' as one worth answering, she might respond that 'a
strategies and their revisionist potential, Butler identifies gender as
lesbian is the incoherence of gender binarism and heterosexu-
'an ongoing discursive practice ... open to intervention and resig-
ality condensed to the point of parody'.
nification' (ibid.:33). Her strategic resignification of normative gen-
der models and heterosexuality is achieved by staging gender in While Butler is interested in all performativities that repeat the law
ways that emphasise the manner in which 'the "unity" of gender is with a difference, she focuses on drag as a practice that reinflects
the effect of a regulatoty practice that seeks to render gender iden- heterosexual norms within a gay context:
tity uniform through a compulsoty heterosexuality' (ibid.:31).
'What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the As much as drag creates a unified picture of "woman" ... it also
regulatoty practice of identity itself?' asks Butler (ibid.:32). She reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience
argues that those failures or confusions of gender-those perfor- which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatoty
mative repetitions that do not consolidate the law but that fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag
(remembering Foucault's emphasis on the productive aspects of implicitly reveals the imitative strncture ofgender itself-as well

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Queer Theory

taken by many of her readers to be 'exemplary of performativity';

as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of
as such, it satisfied 'the political needs of an emergent queer
~he perfom~.ance is in the recognition of a radical contingency movement in which the publicization of theatrical agency has
m the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural
become quite central' (Butler, 1993a:231). Distancing herself from
configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be
those who understand gender as wilfully performed, Butler em-
natural and necessary (Butler, 1990:137-8).
phasises that 'performativity is neither free play n_or theatrical self~
presentation; nor can it be simply equated with performance
Butler does not consider drag to be an essentially subversive
(ibid.:95). To counter these dominant misreadings of her work-
parody. Rather, in its literal staginess, it offers an effective cultural
and to discourage thinking about performativity in voluntarist or
model for deconstructing those commonly held assumptions that
deliberate terms--Butler introduces the notions of 'constituted-
privilege certain genders and sexualities by attributing 'natural-
ness' and 'originality' to them. She argues just as emphatically- ness' and 'constraint':
although, as subsequent uses of her work demonstrate, less mem- Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of
orably-for the efficacy of all those troublesome gender perfor- iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of no~i:ns.
~ances which 'repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repet~t~on
mtemal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition
they are mobilized' (ibid.:31). for the subject, This iterability implies that 'performance' is not
. Butl~r's notion of performativity has gone into a kind of hyper- a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual
circulation. Mentioned in passing here, pressed into more rigorous reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the
serv~ce _there, it has been highly productive for lesbian and gay force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and
s~dies m the 199~s. Most commonly, however, critics who appro- even death controlling and compelling the shape of the pro-
pnate Butler's notion of performativity literalise it as performance, duction, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.
and concentrate on those theatricalised stagings of gender which (ibid.) 'i;lij

self~consciously interrogate the relations between sex, gender and Ii

Butler reiterates the fact· that ge.n_ci~r, being performative, is not
desire. Performativity figures, for example, in the work of Judith
like clothing, and therefore cannot be put on or off at will. Rather
Halberstam (1994) on female masculinity, Cathy Schwichtenberg it is constrained-not simply in the sense of being structured by
0993) on Madonna, and Paula Graham (1995) on the male lesbian limitations but because (given the regulatory frameworks in which
and camp. While the concept of performativity includes these and performativity is meaningful) constraint is the prerequisite of per-
other. self-reflexive instances, equally-if less obviously-it
explams those everyday productions of gender and sexual identi- formativity. . .
Although Butler carefully specifies her anti-voluntanst posi-
ty ':hich seem most to evade explanation. For gender is perfor- tion-and emphasises that performativity is not something a sub-
matlve, not because it is something that the subject deliberately ject does, but a process through which that subject is co->:5tituted-
and playfully assumes, but because, through reiteration it con- her notion of performativity has been criticised as a naive render-
s~l_idates the subject. In this respect, performativity is the' precon- ing of more complex material conditions. Literal~sing Butler'~
dition of the subject. notion of performativity, Sheila Jeffreys (1994:461) misrepresents it
In a later book, Bodies That Matter (1993a), Butler puzzles over as a kind of quasi-theatricality, and not the register of everyday
r~ductive uses of her work, and particularly the tendency to con- gendered life. 'Surely it would be hard not to notice''. she asks
sider performativity literally and theatrically in terms of drag. rhetorically if also counter-intuitively, 'that a problem arises when
Presented by Butler as an example of performativity, drag was

87
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 Queer Theory 7 Queer

seeking to include lesbians in notions of camp and queer which emphasis on the performative. Although she considers aspects of
depend on "performativity" of the feminine?' Jeffreys's problem performativity theory productive, Weston 0993:5) . ~inds 'this
h~wever, arises only when 'performativity' (in Butler's sense) i~ framework inadequate to comprehend the complex1t1es of the
misunderstood as being a pretence and therefore less real than gendering of lesbian relationships'. Weston's criticisms, however,
some underlying gender truth. Yet the theoretical significance of depend again on a misreading of performativity as a voluntary the-
But_ler's performativity is that all gender-and not simply that atricality. Concluding that performativity falls short of 'its promise
~~~ch_ self-consciously dramatises its theatricality-is per:forma- of a personal/political empowerment'-as well it might, since
t~~e. Smee lesbians-no more nor less than any other group con- empowerment is not what performativity promises-Weston fo:e-
stituted as subjects through the repetition of gender norms- grounds what she takes to be inadequate about the performatlve
'p~r~orm' gender, there is no problem in theorising lesbianism understanding of gender by introducing the trope of the
w1thm models that depend on Butler's notion of performativity. wardrobe. 'When a lesbian opens the closet door to put together
Jeffreys persists in misreading Butler despite the fact that her an outfit for the evening', she writes, 'the size of her paycheck
evidence comes from the very article in which Butler explicitly limits the choices she finds available' (ibid.:14). There is no dis-
corrects such misapprehensions. Although Butler Cl993b:21) puting the accuracy of this observation. Yet to reduce Butler's
specifically describes gender as 'performative insofar as it is the understanding of performativity to the closet-to clothes, and the
effect of a r~~ulatory regime of gender differences in which gen- seemingly endless possibility of assuming and casting off gender
ders are d1v1ded and hierarchised under constraint', Jeffreys identities-is a serious misreading. Weston's title-'Do Clothes
0993:81) maintains that Butler's understanding of gender is Make the Woman?'-implies that, in a theory of performativity,
'r~moved from a context of power relations'. Jeffreys also trivi- they do. Yet Butler-in a passage fortuitously rendered in the
alises Butler's emphasis on the subversive potential of under- same vocabulary--emphatically states that they don't: 'The publi-
standing gender performatively: cation of Gender Trouble coincided with a number of publications
that did assert that "clothes make the women", but I never did
When a woman is being beaten by the brutal man she lives with
think that gender was like clothes, or that clothes make the
is this because she has adopted the feminine gender in her
woman' (Butler, 1993a:231).
appearance? Would it be a solution for her to adopt a masculine
While understanding that performativity is not 'the efficacious
gender for the day and strut about in a work shirt or leather
chaps? (ibid.) expression of a human will in language' (ibid.:187), Elizabeth
Grosz (1994a:139) disputes the centralisation of gender in perfor-
Clearly, the answer-for Butler as for Jeffreys-is no. It is worth mativity on the grounds that 'gender must be understood as a kind
noting-precisely because Jeffreys doesn't-that Butler Cl993b:22) of overlay on a pre-established foundation of sex-a cultural vari-
specifically argues that 'gender performativity is not a matter of ation of a more or less fixed and universal substratum'. As a con-
ch~osing w~ich gender one will be today'. Jeffreys ignores the sequence of characterising gender in this way, Grosz argues that
a~t~-~~luntanst emphasis of Butler's argument. Consequently, in Butler's account of performativity ought to focus properly on sex:
c:1t1c1~1_ng Butler's notion of performativity, Jeffreys not only over- 'The force of [Butler's] already powerful arguments would, I
simplifies Butler's theoretical position but also misrecognises her believe, be strengthened, if instead of the play generated by a
own over-simplification as a deficiency of the position she seeks term somehow beyond the dimension of sex, in the order of gen-
to discredit. der she focused on the instabilities of sex itself, of bodies them-
In an essay which is more attentive to Butler's text and corre- sel~es' (ibid.:140). Such a change in focus would denaturalise sex
spondingly more persuasive, Kath Weston also critiques Butler's by drawing attention to the fact that 'there is an instability at the

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7 Queer

very heart of sex and bodies, that the body is what it is capable of
explanatory model-and being subject to contestations and nego-
doing, and what anybody is capable of doing is well beyond the
tiations-performativity has engendered a renewed engagement
tolerance of any given culture' (ibid.). To recommend that sex-a
with those processes by which the identity categories we inhabit
category that historically has been theorised as more 'natural' than
determine our knowledge and everyday ways of being in the
gender-be denaturalised is valuable. Yet Butler's project is closer
world. Butler's rigorous deconstruction of identity is most evident
to her own than Grosz allows. For although Butler undeniably
in lesbian and gay studies' cultivation of a suspicion about the effi-
prioritises gender, she does not, as Grosz suggests, mobilise it in
cacies of identity, its 'crisis about "gay" identity' (Cohen, 1991:82).
opposition to some more foundational sense of sex. On the con-
In the wake of Butler's critique, homosexuality-like heterosexu-
trary, she explicitly questions such a reification of sex:
ality--comes to be understood as the effect of signifying practices,
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this con- an 'identity effect' that concentrates at certain bodies: "'Homo-
struct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, sexual", like "woman", is not a name that refers to a "natural kind"
perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence of thing', David Halperin explains (1995:45). 'It's a discursive, and
that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no homophobic, construction that has come to be misrecognized as
distinction at all. an object under the epistemological regime known as realism.' As
It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cul- a result of this profound suspicion of classification, identity cate-
tural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. gories have come to be considered complicit in the very structures
Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural that their assertion was intended to overthrow. For Butler
inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex . . . [because it] must (1991:13-14), 'identity categories tend to be instruments of regula-
also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the tory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive
sexes themselves are established (Butler, 1990:7). structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of
that very oppression'. Formerly assumed to be a prerequisite for
In contesting the allegedly immutable character of sex, Butler
(ibid.:6-7) asks the following questions: political intervention, the assertion of collective identities is now
routinely understood to put into circulation effects in excess of its
And what is 'sex' anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromo- avowed intention.
somal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the In stark contrast to those liberationist or ethnic gay and lesbian
scientific discourses which purport to establish such 'facts' for models that affirm identity, promote 'coming out', and proclaim
us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different his- homosexuality under the organising affect of 'pride', lesbian and
tory, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex gay studies in the 1990s have begun to question and resist identity
was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary categories and their promise of unity and political effectiveness.
options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural That 'recognition of the precarious state of identity and a full
facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific dis- awareness of the complicated processes of identity formation,
courses in the service of other political and social interests? both psychical and social' which Diana Fuss 0989:100) called for
in relation to gay and lesbian identity politics now commonly
In refusing the commonly assumed distinction between sex and
undergirds queer practice and theory. Frequently the categories
gender, and in dismantling those allegedly causal relations that
'lesbian' and 'gay' are both interrogated and denaturalised even as
structure the difference between the two, Butler-like Grosz-
they are being mobilised in critical discourse and political practice.
frJregroµnds the 'instability at the very heart cT~ex'.
Ed Cohen 0991:72) writes of his difficulty in identifying with the
Debates about performativity put a denaturalising pressure on
category 'gay man' because he finds that term's implicit claims to
sex, gender, sexuality, bodies and identities. In proliferating as an
collectivity unpersuasive: 'By predicating "our" affinity upon the
90
91
 7 Queer
Queer Theory

assertion of a common "sexuality", we tacitly agree to leave unex- hegemony they are programmatically opposed to has generated
plored any "internal" contradictions which undermine the coher- an imperative--even a willingness-to adopt analytical models
ence we desire from the imagined certainty of an unassailable that question the authenticity of identity, and particularly those
commonality or of incontestable sexuality.' Similarly, Butler that critique the putatively causal relation between a secure iden-
0991:14) discusses her ambivalence about writing an essay for an tity and an effective politics.
anthology which, in being subtitled Lesbian Theories, Gay The implications of such a critique for lesbian and gay politics
Theories, seems to identify her with the very terms she is contest- are taken up by Diana Fuss (1989:100) when she asks:
ing: 'I am skeptical about how the "I" is determined as it operates Is politics based on identity, or is identity based on politics? Is
under the title of the lesbian sign, and I am no more comfortable identity a natural, political, historical, psychical, or linguistic
with its homophobic determination than with those normative construct? What implications does the deconstruction of 'identi-
definitions offered by other members of the "gay or lesbian com- ty' have for those who espouse an identity politics? Can femi-
munity'". The strenuousness of these efforts to denaturalise such nist, gay, or lesbian subjects afford to dispense with the notion
seemingly self-evident categories as 'identity' and 'sexuality' is dis- of unified, stable identities or must we begin to base our poli-
cernible here in the diacritical work that both Butler and Cohen tics on something other than identity? What, in other words, is
devolve to quotation marks: 'our', 'sexuality', 'I', 'gay and lesbian the politics of 'identity politics'?
community'. The same strategy is employed relentlessly by Valerie
Traub (1995), who always encloses the word 'lesbian' in quotation Although queer was not a popular term of self-identification at the
marks. time when Fuss articulated these questions, its recent deployment
The widespread discontent with that version of identity politics is often informed by those issues of identity, community and
which is advocated in both liberationist and ethnic models of politics that she raises here. A similar scrutinising of lesbian and
homosexuality is generated not only by a sense of resistance to a gay identities can be seen in the queer engagement with post-
new normativity but also by a more sophisticated understanding structural critiques of subjectivity and individual or collective iden-
of the interworkings of identity and power, as evident in com- tities, its pragmatic crystallisation and deployment of recently
ments by David Halperin (1995:32): reworked subject positions, and in its attention to the discursive
formations of the various terms by which homosexuality in partic-
Disenchantment with liberation [does not] proceed merely from ular and sexuality more generally are categorised.
a growing awareness that gay life has generated its own disci-
plinary regimes, its own techniques of normalization, in the
form of obligatory haircuts, T-shirts, dietary practices, body HIV/AIDS discourse
piercing, leather accoutrements, and physical exercise ... If post-structuralist theory can be claimed as part of the context of
Ultimately, I think, what the shift away from a liberation model queer, then queer's emergence as a diacritical term can be linked
of gay politics reflects is a deepened understanding of the dis- just as plausibly to developments outside-but not discrete from-
cursive structures and representational systems that determine the academy. The most frequently cited context for queer in this
the production of sexual meanings, and that micromanage indi- sense is the network of activism and theory generated by the AIDS
vidual perceptions, in such a way as to maintain and reproduce epidemic, parts of which have found that queer offers a rubric
the underpinnings of heterosexist privilege. roomy and assertive enough for political intervention. In this
respect, queer is understood as a response not only to 'the AIDS
This 'deepened understanding' of how the marshalling of lesbian
crisis [which] prompted a renewal of radical activism' (Seidman,
and gay identities might inadvertently reinforce that heterosexual

92
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1994: 172) but also to 'the growing homophobia brought about by as a significant term, the urgent need to resist dominant construc-
public response to AIDS' (Creed, 1994:152). What set of effects- tions of HIV/AIDS reinforced a radical revision of contemporary
put into circulation around the AIDS epidemic-both necessitated lesbian and gay politics. Commenting on the historical failures or
and nurtured those new forms of political organisation, education, limitations of the gay and lesbian movements-such as inadequate
and theorising that are produced under the rubric of queer? An attention to internal differences, and an inability to collaborate ef-
adequate answer to this question has to take account of the fectively with other liberation movements-Douglas Crimp 0993:
following: 314) writes: 'The AIDS crisis brought us face-to-face with the con-
sequences of both our separatism and our liberalism. And it is in
• the ways in which the status of the subject or individual is prob-
lematised in the biomedical discourses which construct AIDS
(Haraway, 1989)
this new political conjuncture that the word "queer" has been
reclaimed to designate new political identities'. The 'new political
identities' enabled by queer are very often intent on denaturalising
I
I
l
• the shift---effected by safe-sex education-in emphasising sex- those categories which AIDS renders equally strange. Like queer, iI
ual practices over sexual identities (Bartos et al., 1993:69-72; observes Thomas Yingling (1991:292), i
Dowsett, 1991:5)
• the persistent misrecognition of AIDS as a gay disease (Meyer, the material effects of AIDS deplete so many of our cultural
1991:275) and of homosexuality as a kind of fatality (Hanson, assumptions about identity, justice, desire, and knowledge that
1991; Nunokawa, 1991:311-16) it seems at times able to threaten the entire system of Western
• the coalitional politics of much AIDS activism that rethinks thought-that which maintains the health and immunity of our
identity in terms of affinity rather than essence (Saalfield and epistemology: the psychic presence of AIDS signifies a collapse
Navarro, 1991) and therefore includes not only lesbians and gay of identity and difference that refuses to be abjected from the
men but also bisexuals, transsexuals, sex workers, PWAs systems of self-knowledge.
(People with AIDS), health workers, and parents and friends of A similar recognition of the 'collapse of identity and difference'
gays prompts Lee Edelman 0994:96) to argue that queer and AIDS are
• the pressing recognition that discourse is not a separate or interconnected, because each is articulated through a post- ,,
111:i

second-order 'reality', and the consequent emphasis on contes- modernist understanding of the death of the subject, and both
tation in resisting dominant depictions of HIV and AIDS and understand identity as a curiously ambivalent site: "'AIDS", then,
representing them otherwise (Edelman, 1994:79-92) can be figured as a crisis in-and hence an opportunity for-the
• the rethinking of traditional understandings of the workings of social shaping or articulation of subjectivities'. In so far as AIDS
power in cross-hatched struggles over epidemiology, scientific enables-and at times, demands-a radical rethinking of the cul-
research, public health, and immigration policy (Halperin, tural and psychic constitution of subjectivity itself, Edelman finds
1995:28). in it the promise of a refashioned subjectivity, which might re-
These are just some of the multidirectional pressures which the articulate current notions not only of identity but also of politics,
AIDS epidemic places on categories of identification, power and community and agency:
knowledge. Their relation to the rise of queer as a potent and
enabling term is more than coincidental. we have the chance to displace that [oppressive] logic [of ·
While responses to the AIDS epidemic-governmental, the culture] and begin to articulate the range of options for
medical, scientific, activist, theoretical-cannot be held entirely what might become a postmodern subject; we have the chance,
responsible for generating the conditions in which queer emerged in other words, to challenge, as Andreas Huyssen suggests

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Queer Tbeory

which 'mark[s] a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of

postmodernism must, 'the ideology of the subject (as male,
non- (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception',
white, and middle-class [and we must add, as he does not,
Alexander Doty (1993:3, 2) finds it attractive in so far as he also
heterosexual]) by developing alternative and different notions
wants 'to find a term with some ambiguity, a term that would
of subjectivity. (ibid.:111)
describe a wide range of impulses and cultural expressions,
Perhaps not surprisingly in this context, Edelman concludes that including space for describing and expressing bise~ual, trans-
'such a mutation of the gay subject can already be seen in the sexual, and straight queerness'. Queer is widely perceived _as ca_H-
process by which, in certain quarters, "gay" is being rewritten as ing into question conventional understa~~ings of sexual_ identity
"queer"' (ibid.:113). by deconstructing the categories, oppositions and equa,~io~s ~~at
The most public mobilisations of the term 'queer' have doubt- sustain them (Hennessy, 1994:94); yet 'just what "queer sigrnfies
less been in the services of AIDS activism, which in turn has been or includes or refers to is by no means easy to say' (Ab~love,
one of the most visible sites for the restructuring of sexual identi- 1993:20). Partly because queer is necessarily indetermmate,
ties. The relationship between the new and decentralised activism, Sedgwick argues in a recent interview that calling yourself queer
and the coming into prominence of queer as a term that can direct 'dramatises the difference between what you call yourself and
attention to identity without solidifying it is contextual rather than what other people call you. There is a sense in which queer_ ca~
causal. Certainly debates (in what were once lesbian and gay con- only be used in the first person' (Hodges, 199~). Se~gwtck s
texts) about how to refigure subjectivities and identities different- provocative suggestion that, despite its routine c1rculat1on a_s a
ly have been partly reinforced and partly provoked by the new descriptive term, queer can only be auto-descriptive emphasises
urgency generated by the AIDS crisis. Yet such debates about the extent to which queer refers to self-identification rather than to
identity and the most efficacious ways of ensuring social transfor- empirical observations of other people's characteristics. . .
mation have been equally, if less spectacularly, energised by Even more than the lesbian and gay models from which it _h~s
developments in post-structuralist, feminist and post-colonial cir- developed, queer evades programmatic description, because ~t 1s
cles. All of these have challenged the notion of a stable identity- differently valued in different contexts. Often used as a conve~~ent
not simply because it is a fiction but because it is the sort of fiction shorthand for the more ponderous 'lesbian and gay', 'queer 1s a
which may well work against the interests of those constituents it boon to sub-editors. Gay and lesbian community newspapers
claims to represent. evidence an enthusiasm for 'queer' as the preferred synonym for
'lesbian and gay', as Stephen Angelides (1994:68) discovered:
A cursory scan of the pages of two of Australia's lesbian and
Queer identity
gay newspapers-Melbourne Star Obseroer and Sydney St~r
Given the extent of its commitment to denaturalisation, queer itself Obseroer-highlights the extent to which the term queer 1s
can have neither a foundational logic nor a consistent set of char- being deployed in this context. From 'Queer Cartoons' to q~ee,r
acteristics: 'There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily film to letters to the editor section entitled 'Queerly Speakm_g ,
refers', writes David Halperin 0995:62, original emphasis). 'It is an the pages are saturated with queer references directed specifi-
identity without an essence.' This fundamental indeterminacy cally at the lesbian and gay community. ·
makes queer a difficult object of study; always ambiguous, always
relational, it has been described as 'a largely intuitive and half- Recent books similarly favour queer in titles such as Queering the
articulate theory' (Warner, 1992:19). Queer's ambiguity is often Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology (Brett et al., 1994) and
cited as the reason for its mobilisation. Defining queer as a term
A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture

96 97
 Queer Theory 7 Queer

(B~rston and Richardson, 1995). At other times, queer is deployed Queer has tended to occupy a predominantly sexual register.
to indicate a critical distance from the identity politics that under- Recent signs indicate, however, that its denaturalising project is
pin traditional notions of lesbian and gay community. In this being brought to bear on other axes of identification than sex and
sense, queer marks a suspension of identity as something fixed, gender. Describing queer as both 'anti-assimilationist and anti-
coherent and natural. But queer may also be used to signify a dif- separatist', Rosemary Hennessy 0994:86-7) argues that the queer
ferent kind of identity which is consistent and self-identical, as in project marks 'an effort to speak from and to the differences and
the case of some of the mobilisations of Queer Nation (see silences that have been suppressed by the homo-hetero binary, an
Chapter 8). Eschewing post-structuralist critiques of identity cate- effort to unpack the monolithic identities "lesbian" and "gay",
gories, queer functions here more as a fashionable than a theor- including the intricate ways lesbian and gay sexualities are in-
etical term. It is used as a way of distinguishing old-style lesbians flected by heterosexuality, race, gender, and ethnicity'. Sedgwick
and gays from the new, where that distinction may be registered (1993a:9) makes an even stronger claim when she observes that,
not so much historically as variations in the understanding of iden- in recent work, queer is being spun outward
tity formation but stylistically in, for example, body piercing. Or
along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and
queer may be used to describe an open-ended constituency,
sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial
whose shared characteristic is not identity itself but an anti-
nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting,
normative positioning with regard to sexuality. In this way, queer
identity-fracturing discourses, for example. Intellectuals and
may exclude lesbians and gay tnen whose identification with com-
artists of color whose sexual self-definition includes 'queer' ...
munity and identity marks a relatively recent legitimacy, but
are using the leverage of 'queer' to do a new kind of justice to
include all those whose sexual identifications are not considered
normal or sanctioned. the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state.
Like the theory of performativity, which to a large extent under- Although some complain that queer encodes a Eurocentric bias,
writes its project, queer opts for denaturalisation as its primary which makes it insensitive to the largely identity-based politics of
strategy. It demarcates 'a domain virtually synonymous with ethnic communities (Maggenti, 1991; Malinowitz, 1993), the recent
homosexuality and yet wonderfully suggestive of a whole range of work that Sedgwick here refers to indicates that queer's denatural-
sexual possibilities . . . that challenge the familiar distinction ising impulse may well find an articulation within precisely those
between normal and pathological, straight and gay, masculine contexts to which it has been judged indifferent.
men and feminine women' (Hanson, 1993:138). Like early gay lib- Clearly, there is no generally acceptable definition of queer;
erationism, queer confounds the categories that license sexual indeed, many of the common understandings of the term contra-
normativity; it differs from its predecessor by avoiding the delu- dict each other irresolvably. Nevertheless, the inflection of queer
sion that its project is to uncover or invent some free, natural and that has proved most disruptive to received understandings of
primordial sexuality. By rejecting what Michael Warner 0993a: identity, community and politics is the one that problematises nor-
xxvi) calls the 'minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political mative consolidations of sex, gender and sexuality-and that, con-
interest-representation', and favouring instead 'a more thorough sequently, is critical of all those versions of identity, community
resistance to regimes of the normal', it demonstrates its under- and politics that are believed to evolve 'naturally' from such con-
standing that sexuality is a discursive effect. Since queer does not solidations. By refusing to crystallise in any specific form, queer
assume for itself any specific materiality or positivity, its resistance maintains a relation of resistance to whatever constitutes the nor-
to what it differs from is necessarily relational rather than mal. While bearing in mind the multiple and even contradictory
oppositional. sites signified by queer, Queer Tbeory emphasises this aspect of

98 99
 Queer Theory

queer, and the analytical pressure it brings to bear on what 8

Sedgwick Cl993a:8) calls 'the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of
meaning where the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of
anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify
Contestations of Queer
monolithically'.

Although queer can be described as a logical development in

twentieth-century gay and lesbian politics and scholarship, its
progress has not been uncontentious. As the point of convergence
for a potentially infinite number of non-normative subject pos-
itions, queer is markedly unlike those traditional political move-
ments which ground themselves in a fixed and necessarily
exclusionist identity. In stretching the boundaries of identity cate-
gories, and in seeming to disregard the distinctions between
various forms of marginalised sexual identification, queer has pro-
voked exuberance in some quarters, but anxiety and outrage in
others. The various contestations of the term demonstrate the
implications and investments of queer, clarifying its ambitions and
limitations.
Queer scepticism about the self-evident status of identity cate-
gories has itself come under suspicion from those who think it is
a merely apolitical or even reactionary form of intellectualising. In
an extreme example of this, Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope
(1993:5) introduce their recent anthology of lesbian cultural criti-
cism by identifying the destabilisation of identity as an explicitly
homophobic strategy:
We [cannot] afford to allow privileged patriarchal discourse (of
which poststructuralism is but a new variant) to erase the col-
lective identity Lesbians have only recently begun to establish
. . . For what has in fact resulted from the incorporation of

100 101