QUEER THEORY AND QUEER STUDIES

Queer theory emerged during the early 1990s as an effort to think through the politics of sexuality and gender in light of major developments in feminist theory, LGBT studies, and poststructuralism during the previous twenty years. Queer theorists began with the empirical observation that definitions of proper and improper sexual and gender identity have varied significantly over time and space, and that such definitions have played major roles in the politics—the distribution and exercise of power—of Western and non-Western cultures. They then used various heuristic tools from philosophy, literary theory, history, anthropology, and other fields to explore how current definitions came to be and how political action—broadly defined to include activities in social, cultural, and intellectual spheres—might change them. From one perspective, queer theory and queer studies can look very much like LGBT studies, and many people use these designations interchangeably. Both begin with similar empirical observations about chronological and geographic variations in gender and sexuality. But they interpret those observations using distinct conceptual frameworks that can lead to significant disagreement and conflict.

The lack of clarity in the use of the term "queer" is even greater in popular usage than it is in academic contexts. While queer theorists wish to use the term "queer" to mark some distance from "lesbian" and "gay," terms they see as connoting less radical and transgressive politics and as failing to include bisexual, transgender, and intersexed persons, many lesbians and gay men use "queer" as a synonym for the other terms. This gives the term a very broad signification that ranges from conservative, white, middle-class lesbians and gay men to sex and gender radicals and militants. Yet some conservatives and homophobes continue to use the term in its pejorative sense, leading many LGBT people and their supporters to question whether it is possible to reclaim a term that has served as a powerful weapon against LGBT people.

Defining "Queer"

For queer theorists, "queer" connotes a crossing of boundaries, the transgression of norms, and the failure to fit expected categories. Concerned about LGBT politics that reinforce boundaries, reproduce norms, and reinscribe categories, queer theorists embrace dissidence. Several queer theorists have noted that the term's value lies precisely in its resistance to definition. Thus, in a sense, to provide a definitive account of "queer" theory would entail some misunderstanding. However, we may state cautiously that many queer theorists see individual identity (including sexual and gender identity) as resulting from the interaction between cultural forms and psychological processes. Identity, rather than functioning as the starting point for political action and intellectual work, as in the prevailing account of Western liberalism, is the outcome of political—including social and cultural—processes. These processes rely heavily on substantive notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other categories. But the categories themselves are also the result of political context, which defenders of dominant power relations conceal by claiming that they simply reflect "nature." The categories in turn have an impact on the processes, insofar as they contribute to individuals' sense of themselves as social, cultural, and political actors or nonactors. Queer theorists face the paradox of explaining how individuals whose identities result from the operation of an oppressive system (for example, LGBT people) can resist the system's oppression. Beginning at a point when particular definitions of sexual and gender identity seem firmly entrenched, queer theorists want to unpack those definitions, examining the particular combinations of bodies, acts, and desires that they assume in order to wonder how we might combine them differently, especially without having them become disciplinary or coercive.

Several major statements of what would become queer theory appeared during the first half of the 1990s. In 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Epistemology of the Closet, which may stand as a foray in queer theory avant la lettre. Sedgwick did not use the term "queer" in this book but anticipated its development in her argument that the logic of concealment and disclosure around "the closet," a central image for the management of LGBT identities, was a major interpretive key for understanding modern Western culture. This was a very queer claim in its insistence that, contrary to popular belief, LGBT identities mattered for everyone, not just LGBT people, because they helped to define the entire system of cultural meanings. Attempting to move LGBT studies out of a ghetto in which its arguments seemed relevant only for understanding LGBT cultures, Sedgwick's book suggested that modern Western culture as a whole was consistently troubled by queer disruptions. Two special issues of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies referred explicitly to queer theory: the first in summer 1991, under the guest editorship of the film theorist Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities"; the second, as a combined summer and fall issue in 1994, under the guest editorship of Judith Butler, "More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory." In 1993, Michael Warner's edited collection, Fear of a Queer Planet, another foundational text, was published.

Also in 1993, Sedgwick published Tendencies, which includes the essay "Queer and Now." In this article, she argued that "queer" denotes any failure to assemble properly all of the various elements of gender identity and sexual practice that supposedly follow "naturally" and inevitably from the initial datum of one's sexual anatomy. She also argued that "queer" is necessarily a performative term that derives its force from the choice to invoke it—the most reliable indicator of queerness is simply an individual's decision to adopt the term as self-description. Here Sedgwick echoed the account of gender identity as performative that Butler had given in Gender Trouble (1990), a foundational queer theory text. In Sedgwick's view, "queer" is not synonymous with "lesbian/gay." It connotes, rather, a crossing of boundaries in the sense of failure to fit established categories or expectations, with respect to sexuality, but also with respect to virtually any other identity category as well. Given the increasing respectability of many white, middle-class lesbians and gay men and the increasing visibility of otherwise "heterosexual" persons who violate norms of sexuality and/or gender, Sedgwick argued that it is entirely possible to envision lesbian/gay persons who are not queer and queer persons who are not lesbian or gay. Sedgwick identified herself as queer even though she is married to a man.

The Theory and the Social Movement

In this respect, the term "queer" also had the practical effect of helping to resolve a dilemma. The "gay liberation" and "lesbian feminist" movements of the late 1960s and 1970s had given way gradually to the "lesbian/gay" movement of the late 1980s (the change in name from the National Gay Task Force to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1985 can serve as the marker event).That change, and the later shift to "queer," reflected two trends. First, white lesbians, LGBT people of color, and other groups pointed out that differences of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and class mattered for experiencing, understanding, and organizing around issues of sexuality and gender. At best, a gay liberation movement that claimed to speak for all gay and lesbian people but in fact reflected the priorities of middle-class, white, gay men often failed to address the concerns of others. At their worst, middle-class, white, gay men could be as racist, sexist, and classist as their heterosexual counterparts. By the early 1990s, however, it had become apparent that adding "lesbian" after "gay" without making fundamental changes in gay politics was inadequate. As De Lauretis noted in her introduction to "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities," "queer" had the advantage over "gay" of connoting minority sexual or gender identity in some form while avoiding the automatic association of "gay" with "white male."

Second, during the 1990s, various groups, most especially bisexuals and transgender people, announced that the categories "homosexual," "gay," or "lesbian" failed to capture their experiences of alterity and alienation along the axes of sexuality and gender. To some, "queer" seemed more promising. Members of these groups often existed in a peculiar double bind relative to the lesbian/gay movement. On the one hand, it seemed logical that bisexual and transgender people should make common cause with lesbians and gay men. Indeed, many of the earliest activists in the homophile, gay liberation, and lesbian feminist movements had been bisexual and/or transgender. On the other hand, the process of defining an identity category enables a process of inclusion and exclusion. In this case, lesbians and gay men too often excluded or ignored bisexual and transgender people, using some of the same logic that nonqueer people had long used against lesbians and gay men—accusations of promiscuity, claims that only certain identities are "natural" or "normal," and demands for conformity to predetermined standards that had more to do with access to power than with legitimate empirical or moral arguments.

Nor were "bisexual" and "transgender" the only emerging categories. Safer-sex educators began to speak of "men who have sex with men" to denote men who engaged in same-sex sexual activity but did not identify themselves as gay or bisexual. People with predominantly non-European and non–Euro-American ethnic backgrounds, noting that "homosexual" is a distinctively modern, European, and Euro-American category, returned to other cultural traditions to produce categories such as "two-spirited" to describe themselves. Those who had undergone surgery at birth to "correct" ambiguous genitalia began to organize under the rubric of "intersexed" in order to describe their suffering and oppose the practice of early surgical intervention. In 2003, the Toronto publication Xtra reported, "The official acronym for Pride's target groups is LGBTTIQ: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, intersex and queer. To really keep up with trends [sic], though, they need another T for two-spirited, another Q for questioning and an asterisk for those not included in the defined categories." In each of these cases, groups of people found themselves at odds with prevailing definitions and practices of gender and/or sexuality, but not because they were "gay" or "lesbian."

"Queer" as Sedgwick defined it—failing to fit existing categories—allowed for a definition of a social movement that could encompass a wide range of people, including LGBT people, but also those who were unsure of their sexual or gender identities, those who were reclaiming old or inventing new sexual and gender identities, and those who identified as "heterosexual" but wished to announce their strong support for LGBT and sexual liberation. Use of the term "queer" also directed attention to the process by which individuals come to have their identities rather than assuming that the identities are preexisting, which in turn allows for more thoughtful explanations of how individuals participate in their own oppression and how the oppressed can become oppressor in dismayingly short order.

Nevertheless, most movement leaders still prefer the acronym "LGBT" to "queer" for describing the range of persons and interests they hope to represent in mainstream electoral and legislative politics. This in part reflects beliefs about the costs and benefits of pragmatic versus radical politics. But the biggest impediment to the use of "queer" as an umbrella term for the newly expanded social movement of the mid-1990s was its continued punch as an insult to many members of LGBT communities. This problem in turn became fodder for queer theorists, who often investigate relationships among language, subjectivity, and politics; who are critical of LGBT conservatism; and who challenge the stability of all identity categories, including the category "homosexual," by demonstrating the historical weight of linguistic meaning and its impact on the development of individual identity. Psychiatrists may believe that they defined the category "homosexual" on the basis of empirical evidence, but unruly "homosexuals" routinely demonstrated the fragility of the assertion that a propensity for same-sex eroticism necessarily indicates some broader commonality of character, belief, or deportment. Intramovement conflict over the use of terms such as "queer" also reflected the generational divides that emerged as a result of very rapid change in the experiences of LGBT people, with adolescents coming out of the closet at ever-earlier ages, literally growing up queer during the late 1990s in a way that was impossible even ten years earlier. Queer theory strives to capture all of these phenomena by demonstrating the instability and fragmentation of all identity categories in the face of the apparently infinite profusion of individual experiences.

While most movement leaders continued to prefer the designation "LGBT" to "queer," some activists in the early 1990s dissented. Queer theory developed in complex dialogue with activism that labeled itself queer. In 1990, a new militant political group calling itself Queer Nation was founded in New York. Within a few years, there were dozens of Queer Nation groups across the United States. Queer Nation often aimed its protests as much at "respectable" lesbians and gay men as at "heterosexuals." The San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation, for example, included the Suburban Homosexual Outreach Program, or SHOP. Queer protest frequently involved the insistence on public representations of gender and sexual nonconformity through the creative reworking of common images, in order to demonstrate the presence of queers in unexpected places and the queerness of seemingly ordinary things. As the emphasis on dissident nonconformity suggests, academic queer theory and activist queer nationalism shared many characteristics. However, insofar as nationalism tends to assert clearly defined boundaries for identity categories and territories, queer nationalism points in the opposite direction from queer theory.

Queer Theory and LGBT Studies

Many scholars slide comfortably between "LGBT studies" and "queer studies/queer theory," but genealogies of the two fields reveal significant differences. The empirical work of LGBT studies undoubtedly underwrites queer theory, but scholars of LGBT studies typically grounded their arguments for the construction of LGBT identities more in Marxist or Marxist-feminist frameworks—John D'Emilio's "Capitalism and Gay Identity" may serve as the exemplar—or simply in the empiricism of historical research. Queer theorists, influenced by the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tended to emphasize the disciplinary and productive aspects of discourses about sexuality and gender—how, for example, expert definitions of propriety became the basis for legal and medical practices that effectively imposed "homosexual," "hysterical," and other deviant identities on various populations. If the LGBT studies approach has tended toward the structural—concern for economic and other large-scale social forces that shape individual identities—the queer theory approach has tended toward the poststructural, exploring how discursive practices serve to connect large-scale structures to individualized experiences in multiple directions. The best work in each field tends to elide the distinction between them, however, showing especially how material and discursive elements usually overlap and intertwine.

Queer theorists also wonder about the model of human agency and culture that the LGBT studies approach uses. These theorists' attention to issues of meaning and agency reflect their engagement with post–World War II Continental philosophy. Although queer theorists draw broadly from those philosophical developments, the figure most widely associated with queer theory is Foucault, and the work most frequently referenced is The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction (1978). Whereas the LGBT studies approach rests on a broadly Enlightenment epistemology, according to which language is a transparent tool that rational individuals may use for describing the world, queer theorists typically begin with a poststructuralist suspicion of epistemology and the representational function of language, and they emphasize the fragmentation rather than the coherence of individual identity. They see language as playing a fundamental role in shaping human understanding of the world, requiring individuals to adopt recognizable although unstable identities—"male" or "female," "heterosexual" or "homosexual"—in order to communicate with others, often perpetuating oppressive meanings and practices even among those who wish to eschew them. So, for example, while an LGBT studies scholar might look at how LGBT people, in struggle with straight people, use language, a queer theorist might look at how language creates and destabilizes the very distinction between LGBT people and straight people in the first place. Again, the best work draws from both sides of the divide, rather than advocating either approach in isolation.

With their focus on discursive practices, queer theorists borrow heavily from The History of Sexuality, in which Foucault argued that the "deployment of sexuality" involved the use by authority figures, such as priests, parents, teachers, and psychiatrists, of perpetual self-reflection in matters of desire in order to inculcate moral subjectivity in humans. "Sexuality" in Foucault's account (and in the view of many queer theorists) does not describe an inherent set of human drives (an assumption more commonly found within LGBT studies), but reflects the administrative incitement and codification of desire as the linchpin for a historically and culturally specific system of moral and political preferences and practices. It is a discourse that provides a conceptual and practical grid for connecting and codifying everything from national populations to individual sex acts.

More than any other queer theorist, Butler has extended this exploration into the history of Western philosophy. In Gender Trouble, she disputed the common feminist conception of sex as the material, bodily ground onto which culture inscribes gender. Instead, she argued that the very distinction between the material and the cultural was itself a function of a gendered linguistic system, and that all gender is discursive and performative. In Bodies That Matter, she examined Plato's work to argue that the definition of "matter" as substance that precedes signification or linguistic definition is itself gendered, thus making the materiality of bodies a suspect ground for feminist and/or queer political and intellectual work.

Debates and Disputes

Foucault failed to incorporate gender into his account of sexuality. The title of the 1994 special issue of differences, "More Gender Trouble," invokes the title of Butler's book Gender Trouble, but it also evokes the doubts that many feminists have raised about the utility of queer theory and of queer work that derives from Foucault's work (which failed to incorporate gender into its account of sexuality). Even so, Butler and the other contributors to "More Gender Trouble" were not alone in finding Foucault's work and queer theory useful for their analysis of how power is exercised at the micro, or "capillary," level, and they thus proceeded to integrate feminist and queer insights. Sandra Lee Bartky noted in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby's Feminism and Foucault (1988) that the body on which disciplinary power operates in Foucault's Disciplineand Punish looks suspiciously universal and ungendered. She then discussed empirical research indicating that women restrict their bodily comportment—how they sit, walk, and reach, and the amount of space they occupy in public places—more thoroughly than do men. According to Bartky and several other feminist scholars, disciplinary power functions to install self-regulating consciousness in individuals, as Foucault claimed, but it does so more effectively in women than in men. Foucault pointed to the exercise of disciplinary power distributed broadly through social institutions such as families, churches, schools, prisons, and factories; feminists noted the implicit claim to authority and the disciplinary effects that result when, for example, total strangers exhort fat women (a description Sedgwick applied to herself in defining herself as "queer") to diet. Gender politics, as much as the politics of sexuality, involve not only, or even primarily, actions by the state, but the quotidian discipline of social interaction at the most basic level.

The sorts of philosophical debates common among queer theorists have invited the criticism that queer theory perpetuates, rather than undermines, long-standing hierarchies in Western culture. Critics have derided queer theory as jargon-ridden and therefore accessible only to elite academics. They have taken queer theory to task for its perceived failure to account for material and structural forces, or to recognize the significance of gender and sexual identities for people who do not wish to have those identities deconstructed. They have suggested that queer theory is hopelessly utopian because of its belief that sexualities and genders labeled "queer" are necessarily oppositional and comprehensively transgressive. They have also pointed to egregious examples in which queer theorists have badly oversimplified the work of earlier scholars of LGBT studies.

While some feminist, lesbian, and antiracist critics have found "queer" a useful concept for their critical and political practices, others have raised questions about the ways in which queer theory can reenact and reproduce the power of white men. In some cases, interest in queer theory has become an occasion for gay male scholars to ignore or repudiate feminist theory. Others have argued that queer theoretical explorations distract from, and even harm, otherwise successful efforts at achieving reform through practical engagement with the political process. Ironically, despite their critique of identity, queer theorists and activists strike some critics as creating just another identity category (complete with fashion expectations and language norms). At the same time, some African American lesbian feminists have found "queer" a useful concept for their critical and political practices, even using it as a basis for critiquing barriers of identity within feminist and lesbian/gay academic and political circles.

Perhaps the most intense debates have focused on how queer theory deals with relationships among sex, gender, and sexuality. Introducing "More Gender Trouble," Butler illustrated the conceptual power of a queer theoretical approach for investigating relationships between gender and sexuality and between feminist theory and lesbian-gay studies by recovering the domain of "sexuality" for feminist scholarship from the implication in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader that feminists only addressed issues of gender. The editors of the Reader had claimed that lesbian and gay studies would do for sexuality what feminism had done for gender, implying that the "proper objects" of study for the two fields were distinct. The title of Butler's introduction, "Against Proper Objects," conveys the suspicion that queer theorists harbor of rigid categorical (including disciplinary) boundaries. Butler insisted on reasserting the longstanding feminist concern for issues of sexuality and the often undesirable effects—from a queer perspective, but presumably also from lesbian/gay and feminist perspectives—of insisting on clean-cut categorizations.

Arguments about gender and sexuality as axes for the exercise of power and about the historical weight of language and discourse led Foucault and queer theorists to reject standard accounts of identity in favor of conceptions of "subjectivity" that explore how individuals become bound to a seemingly fixed sense of identity through the exercise of disciplinary power. This is a major point of dispute for critics of queer theory. They argue that an account of individual identity that over-emphasizes social, cultural, and political determinants leaves no room for resistance to domination, which derives in the standard version of twentieth-century liberalism from an individual's capacity to apply universal moral standards to oppressive situations and to use those moral universals as the basis for demanding an end to oppression. Foucault's and queer theorists' accounts of subjectivity challenge the liberal account in two ways, first by suggesting that human identity results from, rather than originating, politics, and second by arguing for the historical variability of moral standards.

Yet this queering of subjectivity at least has the virtue, compared to the liberal account of humans as rational actors enforcing universal moral norms, of explaining how individuals participate in their own oppression without blaming them: it accounts for the ambiguity inherent in the perspectives of individual queers who may demand equal opportunity and equal treatment publicly even as they remain closeted about their sexual or gender identity within their families of origin. Further, some observers have suggested that the critics of queer theory only prove queer theorists right by engaging in denunciations of queer intellectual work that seem to rest more on the emotional responses of threatened identities and the desire to discipline unruly queers than on the rational, dispassionate scholarship the critics claim to defend.

Transgender theorists and activists have played important roles in these debates. Illustrating the influence of queer theory and queer politics, for example, the organization Gender PAC, originally a transgender civil rights group, now eschews claims on behalf of transgender persons in favor of an opposition to all gender classifications as oppressive and discriminatory. Its leaders base this position expressly on Butler's queer critique of identity politics. Other transgender activists respond, however, that Gender PAC fails to recognize the class-and race-specificity of Butler's position, and that a philosophical refusal of identity is useless in the face of overt harassment by passersby and disciplinary practices that occur daily during otherwise routine interactions on city streets. In other words, Gender PAC may want to do away with gender classifications, but in the real world, gender classifications matter. This dispute illustrates both the influence of queer theory in the political sphere and the contentious character of queer theoretical claims.

Queer Theory in the Disciplines

Even so, queer theory has influenced scholars in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, as the array of books that invoke "queer" in their titles or contents indicates. Literary criticism, Sedgwick's discipline, is the best example, with such volumes as Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (1994), and Glenn Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation (2003). De Lauretis introduced queer theory to her home discipline of film studies with The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994). Scott Bravman, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (1997), is queer scholarship by a historian. The philosopher John Corvino queered his discipline (which is also Butler's) as editor of Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality (1997) by combining contributors from multiple disciplines in a single volume. The collection edited by Gordon Brent Ingram and others, Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (1997), offers scholarship from geography and architecture while making a queer claim for the public visibility of gender and sexual minorities. Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson, Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies (2003), is only one example from the emerging field of disability studies. Standards and Schooling in the US: An Encyclopedia (2001) includes a section titled "queer sexuality." The Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (2000) contains a chapter on "sexuality," but also one on "queer theory."

To some extent, such uses of the concept represent a normalization that may seem to violate the spirit of the origin of queer theory. However, as Foucault argued in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," the search for a pure, unsullied origin is a hallmark of Western practices of control. The origin and effects of queer theory are multiple. As Butler has argued with respect to gender, the most useful strategy of queer resistance would appear to involve not efforts to dismantle the system, but the incessant profusion of meanings within it.

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William B. Turner

see alsocultural studies and cultural theory; lgbtq studies; philosophy; queer nation; women's studies and feminist studies.