Queer theory and criticism
#Queer_theory_and_criticism
~>> During the 1980s, the term ‘queer’ was reclaimed by a new generation of political activists involved in Queer nation and protest groups such as ActUp and Outrage, though some lesbian and gay cultural activists and critics who adopted the term in the 1950s and 1960s continue to use it to describe their particular sense of marginality to both mainstream and minority cultures.
In the 1990s, ‘#Queer_Theory’ designated a radical rethinking of the relationship
between subjectivity, sexuality and representation. Its emergence in that
decade owes much to the earlier work of queer critics such as Ann Snitow(1983), Carol Vance (1984) and Joan Nestle (1988), but also to the allied challenge of diversity initiated by Black and Third World critics. In addition, it gained impetus from postmodern theories with which it overlappedin significant ways. Teresa de Lauretis, in the Introduction to the ‘Queer
Theory’ issue of differences (1991), traced the emergence of the term ‘queer’ and described the impact of postmodernism on lesbian and gay theorizing.
Further examples which explore this intersection, and the way both dis-
courses operate to decentre foundationalist narratives based on ‘sex’ or ‘reason’, would include Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1990), #Laura_Doan’s
The Lesbian Postmodern (1994), and essays in the volume Sexy Bodies (Grosz
and Probyn (eds), 1995). Queer theory’s foregrounding of a politics of difference and marginality has assisted gay and lesbian critiques of heterosexual
hegemony and patriarchy while the development of a postmodern aesthetic
has helped inspire the expression of sexual plurality and gender ambivalence in the area of cultural production: a dynamic dialogue which has placedlesbian and gay theories at the forefront of work in the increasingly crossdisciplinary field of critical theory.
In repoliticizing gay theory along these lines, queer theory has drawn on Foucault, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and in its inflection in Great Britain especially towards cultural materialism, on the work of Althusser and Raymond Williams. Here some tension has emerged between queer positions and more traditional Marxist approaches. In Jeffrey Weeks’s view, for instance, capitalist social relations have an effect on sexualities (as on
many other matters), ‘but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexuality’ (1985). His own work demonstrates that power should not be treated as single and unitary but as itself diverse, shifting and unstable, and hence as open to resistance in a variety of ways. This argument makes possible the formation, in Foucault’s terms, of a ‘ “reverse” discourse’ in which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legit-
imacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1976).
Theorists and critics following this Marxist or post-Marxist tradition must
negotiate the situation summarized by Raymond Williams in Marxism and
Literature as one in which ‘all or nearly all initi-
atives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative
or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic’. Queer theory
would question the implication, apparent here and in Foucault’s work, that
alternative or oppositional meanings are fully appropriated by the state.
As Dollimore (1991) writes, ‘Thinking history in terms of the perverse
dynamic begins to undermine that binary opposition between the essen-
tialist and the anti-essentialist.’ As he discovers in the multiple resistances
to Renaissance ideologies, marginality is not simply marginal. Dollimore’s
and Sinfield’s work, in theoretical tandem with other examples in Cultural
Materialism and New Historicism (Stallybrass and White, 1986; Bredbeck,
1991; Goldberg, 1992, 1994, progressing again beyond Foucault, especially
in the area of Renaissance studies. shows that binary
oppositions become unstable in the subversive moment of queer writing.
A key instance here, once more, is Oscar Wilde. Identifying a series of
oppositions between Wilde and his culture, such as ‘surface/depth’; ‘lying/
truth’; ‘abnormal/normal’; ‘narcissism/maturity’, Dollimore concludes:
While recognizing that there is an evident popular desire for a con-
ception of improvised identity and that her own work has been seen to
endorse this, Butler has explained that she intends a more philosophically
rigorous and more limited popular notion of performativity which makes
plain that gender is constructed, or ‘contoured’, through ‘repetition and recita-
tion’, is the subversive ‘re-signification’ of normative identities – but is not
a matter of free choice (Butler, 1994). Liz Grosz (1996) concurs with Butler
that it is the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which gives it its radical
potential, but she also offers a critique of queer theory’s elision of system-
atic structures of power and its celebration of deviant sexual practices of
whatever kind. Other lesbian feminists are critical of queer theory’s tendency
to downplay the significance of gender difference. Many would argue that, although distinct, gender and sexuality cannot be completely dis- articulated. It makes no sense to claim that lesbians’ oppression, while being specific, is not connected to their oppression as women. The tendency for lesbian existence to be marginalized in the new queer discourses is no doubt indicative of the continuing power relations between the sexes.
Nevertheless, there exists a productive tension between lesbian, gay male
and feminist theory in the development of textual and intertextual strategies which undermine both literary norms and everyday sexual stereotypes (Humm, 1994).
Butler’s recent work, in the meantime, while revisiting the themes of
performativity and regulative social-sexual norms, has confirmed the
breadth of her theoretical sources (Freud, Foucault, Derrida), and sought
to address broader political themes. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (1997) is a study of racist ‘hate speech’, pornography, and the
discourse about gays in the military. What Butler argues, however, is that
an inevitable disjuncture between intent and effect, or speech and conduct,
means that injurious terms can be appropriated and re-deployed for
counter purposes (the term ‘queer’, used to reverse its intended meanings,
would be a case in point). The Psychic Life of Power, also produced in 1997,
argues that the psyche is crucial to the formation of normative sexual iden-
tities in that it is constrained to adopt the exclusionary prohibitions – upon
homosexuality, for example – determined by the hegemonic social order.
The result is a ‘melancholy’ loss of what is forbidden but cannot be
avowed. But here again, Butler argues that this experience may be coun-
tered through the unpredictable, and therefore resistant, ways in which norms
might be adopted or performed.
~>> During the 1980s, the term ‘queer’ was reclaimed by a new generation of political activists involved in Queer nation and protest groups such as ActUp and Outrage, though some lesbian and gay cultural activists and critics who adopted the term in the 1950s and 1960s continue to use it to describe their particular sense of marginality to both mainstream and minority cultures.
In the 1990s, ‘#Queer_Theory’ designated a radical rethinking of the relationship
between subjectivity, sexuality and representation. Its emergence in that
decade owes much to the earlier work of queer critics such as Ann Snitow(1983), Carol Vance (1984) and Joan Nestle (1988), but also to the allied challenge of diversity initiated by Black and Third World critics. In addition, it gained impetus from postmodern theories with which it overlappedin significant ways. Teresa de Lauretis, in the Introduction to the ‘Queer
Theory’ issue of differences (1991), traced the emergence of the term ‘queer’ and described the impact of postmodernism on lesbian and gay theorizing.
Further examples which explore this intersection, and the way both dis-
courses operate to decentre foundationalist narratives based on ‘sex’ or ‘reason’, would include Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1990), #Laura_Doan’s
The Lesbian Postmodern (1994), and essays in the volume Sexy Bodies (Grosz
and Probyn (eds), 1995). Queer theory’s foregrounding of a politics of difference and marginality has assisted gay and lesbian critiques of heterosexual
hegemony and patriarchy while the development of a postmodern aesthetic
has helped inspire the expression of sexual plurality and gender ambivalence in the area of cultural production: a dynamic dialogue which has placedlesbian and gay theories at the forefront of work in the increasingly crossdisciplinary field of critical theory.
In repoliticizing gay theory along these lines, queer theory has drawn on Foucault, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and in its inflection in Great Britain especially towards cultural materialism, on the work of Althusser and Raymond Williams. Here some tension has emerged between queer positions and more traditional Marxist approaches. In Jeffrey Weeks’s view, for instance, capitalist social relations have an effect on sexualities (as on
many other matters), ‘but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexuality’ (1985). His own work demonstrates that power should not be treated as single and unitary but as itself diverse, shifting and unstable, and hence as open to resistance in a variety of ways. This argument makes possible the formation, in Foucault’s terms, of a ‘ “reverse” discourse’ in which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legit-
imacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1976).
Theorists and critics following this Marxist or post-Marxist tradition must
negotiate the situation summarized by Raymond Williams in Marxism and
Literature as one in which ‘all or nearly all initi-
atives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative
or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic’. Queer theory
would question the implication, apparent here and in Foucault’s work, that
alternative or oppositional meanings are fully appropriated by the state.
As Dollimore (1991) writes, ‘Thinking history in terms of the perverse
dynamic begins to undermine that binary opposition between the essen-
tialist and the anti-essentialist.’ As he discovers in the multiple resistances
to Renaissance ideologies, marginality is not simply marginal. Dollimore’s
and Sinfield’s work, in theoretical tandem with other examples in Cultural
Materialism and New Historicism (Stallybrass and White, 1986; Bredbeck,
1991; Goldberg, 1992, 1994, progressing again beyond Foucault, especially
in the area of Renaissance studies. shows that binary
oppositions become unstable in the subversive moment of queer writing.
A key instance here, once more, is Oscar Wilde. Identifying a series of
oppositions between Wilde and his culture, such as ‘surface/depth’; ‘lying/
truth’; ‘abnormal/normal’; ‘narcissism/maturity’, Dollimore concludes:
While recognizing that there is an evident popular desire for a con-
ception of improvised identity and that her own work has been seen to
endorse this, Butler has explained that she intends a more philosophically
rigorous and more limited popular notion of performativity which makes
plain that gender is constructed, or ‘contoured’, through ‘repetition and recita-
tion’, is the subversive ‘re-signification’ of normative identities – but is not
a matter of free choice (Butler, 1994). Liz Grosz (1996) concurs with Butler
that it is the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which gives it its radical
potential, but she also offers a critique of queer theory’s elision of system-
atic structures of power and its celebration of deviant sexual practices of
whatever kind. Other lesbian feminists are critical of queer theory’s tendency
to downplay the significance of gender difference. Many would argue that, although distinct, gender and sexuality cannot be completely dis- articulated. It makes no sense to claim that lesbians’ oppression, while being specific, is not connected to their oppression as women. The tendency for lesbian existence to be marginalized in the new queer discourses is no doubt indicative of the continuing power relations between the sexes.
Nevertheless, there exists a productive tension between lesbian, gay male
and feminist theory in the development of textual and intertextual strategies which undermine both literary norms and everyday sexual stereotypes (Humm, 1994).
Butler’s recent work, in the meantime, while revisiting the themes of
performativity and regulative social-sexual norms, has confirmed the
breadth of her theoretical sources (Freud, Foucault, Derrida), and sought
to address broader political themes. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (1997) is a study of racist ‘hate speech’, pornography, and the
discourse about gays in the military. What Butler argues, however, is that
an inevitable disjuncture between intent and effect, or speech and conduct,
means that injurious terms can be appropriated and re-deployed for
counter purposes (the term ‘queer’, used to reverse its intended meanings,
would be a case in point). The Psychic Life of Power, also produced in 1997,
argues that the psyche is crucial to the formation of normative sexual iden-
tities in that it is constrained to adopt the exclusionary prohibitions – upon
homosexuality, for example – determined by the hegemonic social order.
The result is a ‘melancholy’ loss of what is forbidden but cannot be
avowed. But here again, Butler argues that this experience may be coun-
tered through the unpredictable, and therefore resistant, ways in which norms
might be adopted or performed.
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