Queer Theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality to be oppressive. Because queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality. Instead, it sees them quite artificially—wholly as a product of how we talk about those issues. It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language. This does little to encourage its accessibility with most people, who rightly see it as being quite mad.
Queer Theory presumes that oppression follows from categorization, which arises every time language constructs a sense of what is “normal” by producing and maintaining rigid categories of sex (male and female), gender (masculine and feminine), and sexuality (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on) and “scripting” people into them. These seemingly straightforward concepts are seen as oppressive, if not violent, and so the main objective of queer Theory is to examine, question, and subvert them, in order to break them down.
This is all done in ways that explicitly rely on the postmodern knowledge principle—which rejects the possibility that an objective reality is attainable—and the postmodern political principle—which understands society to be structured in unjust systems of power that reinforce and perpetuate themselves. Queer Theory makes use of these to satisfy its ultimate purpose, which is to identify and make visible the ways in which the linguistic existence of these categories create oppression, and to disrupt them. In doing so, it exhibits an almost unmodified manifestation of the postmodern themes of the power of language—language creates the categories, enforces them, and scripts people into them—and the blurring of boundaries—the boundaries are arbitrary, oppressive, and can be erased by blurring them into apparent absurdity. Together with its goal of subverting or rejecting anything considered normal and innate in favor of the “queer,” this can make queer Theory frustratingly difficult to understand, since it values incoherence, illogic, and intelligibility. This in turn makes it obscure by design and largely irrelevant, except to itself. Nevertheless, it has been profoundly influential on the development of postmodern Theory into its more recent applied forms, particularly in domains like gender studies, trans activism, disability studies, and fat studies.
Like postcolonial Theory, queer Theory developed in response to a particular historical context. It grew out of the radical groups that had been revolutionizing feminist, gay, and lesbian studies, and related activism since the 1960s. The civil rights movements also helped spark a new interest in the study of homosexuality, and the ways in which it had been categorized and stigmatized, both historically and in the present. Queer Theory was deeply influenced by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which made gay rights issues an urgent central social and political concern.
Like postcolonial Theory, queer Theory has a solid underlying point. We have changed the way we see sexuality quite profoundly. Throughout Christian history, male homosexuality has been considered a heinous sin. This is in stark contrast to ancient Greek culture, where it was acceptable for men to have sex with adolescent boys until they were ready to marry—at which point it was expected that they would switch to having sex with women. In both cases, however, homosexuality was something that people did rather than who they were. The idea that one could be a homosexual only began to gain recognition in the nineteenth century, appearing first in medical texts and within homosexual subcultures. Contemporary medical texts described homosexuality as a perversion. Public perception of homosexuals then gradually started to shift, due to the rise of sexology at the end of the nineteenth century, and, by the middle of the twentieth, homosexuals were regarded less as corrupt degenerates who required punishment and more as shamefully disordered individuals who required psychiatric treatment.
Over the second half of the twentieth century, this attitude shifted again until a dominant liberal discourse around homosexuality—which still holds the moral high ground today—evolved. This attitude is best summed up as “Some people are gay. Get over it.” Since queer Theory is an applied postmodernist Theory, however, this universal liberal idea, which stresses our common humanity over a specific demographic identity, is considered problematic. It is Theorized as a problem both because it presents LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) identities as stable categories and because it does not foreground LGBT statuses as social constructs, built by the powerful in the service of dominance and oppression.
While there have been dramatic changes in how we regard homosexuality over the last century and a half, our understanding of sex and gender has changed much less. We have generally always understood our species as overwhelmingly consisting of two sexes, and gender as mostly correlated with sex. Gender roles, however, have changed considerably. Throughout most of Christian history, men had been associated with the public sphere and the mind (sapientia) and women with the private sphere and the body (scientia), which has led to analogies like “men are to women as culture is to nature.”1 Women were therefore considered suited to subservient, domestic, and nurturing roles and men to leadership, public engagement, and assertive managerial roles. These attitudes, which are referred to as biological essentialism, represent a largely cultural requirement, which dominated society until roughly the end of the nineteenth century, when feminist thought and activism began to erode them.
As biological essentialism faltered, a need to distinguish with greater clarity between sex and gender arose. Although the word “gender” was not used to describe humans until the twentieth century—some languages still have no comparable word—the idea of gender seems to have always been with us. Sex is to gender as man is to manly or woman to womanly. Thus, gender has seemingly always been understood as correlated with but distinct from sex. If the sentence, “She is a very masculine woman,” makes sense to you, you already distinguish sex—a biological category—from gender—behaviors and traits commonly manifesting more in one sex. History is full of examples of people referring to “manly” and “womanly,” or masculine and feminine, traits and behaviors and applying these adjectives both approvingly and disapprovingly to both men and women.
However, a profound change took place during Western second-wave feminism in the latter half of the twentieth century, when women gained control over their reproductive function and the rights to access all jobs and be paid the same as men for the same work. Now women are to be found in every profession and experience few legal or cultural barriers to entry throughout the West, although they still do not make the same choices in the same numbers as men do. Similar changes resulted from the gay rights and eventually Pride and trans rights movements, which have succeeded at removing many legal and cultural barriers for LGBT people. Even though most of these changes were the result of recognizing the biological roots of sex, gender, and sexuality and the attitudes involved were broadly liberal and individualist—“she’s a person who is trans; okay, fine”—they are taken as evidence of the social constructedness of gender and sexuality by queer Theorists, especially those with a feminist perspective. For example, the gap between sex and gender has been taken as evidence that gender—and even sex—are social constructions.2
Since queer Theorists believe that sex, gender, and sexuality are social constructions, chiefly dependent on the prevailing culture, they are less concerned about material progress than about how dominant discourses erect and enforce categories like “male,” “feminine,” and “gay.” In all fairness, these scholars and activists are rightly concerned about the cultural power dynamics that naturally come along for the ride when such categories are considered real, meaningful, and normative. It was in this context that queer Theory arose,3 and its founders, including Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drew significantly upon the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of biopower— the power of scientific (biological) discourses. Unfortunately, they seem to have missed the point that biologically legitimizing sex, gender, and sexuality statuses tends to lead people to become more accepting, rather than less,4 and that such discourses are no longer misused to exclude and oppress. Liberalism generated the type of progress postmodern Theories tend to claim credit for—without using postmodern Theories.
Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourses—how things are spoken about—the deconstruction of categories, and a profound skepticism of science. Following Foucault, it frequently examines history and points out that categories and discourses that were accepted as obviously sensible or true in their own time are not accepted as such now. This is used to argue that the categories that seem so obvious to us now—male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual—are also socially constructed by dominant discourses. This, to the queer Theorist, is reason to believe not only that we will be able to think and speak about and categorize sex, gender, and sexuality differently in the future, but also that we may consider such categories largely arbitrary and nearly infinitely malleable.
This is where the word queer comes in. “Queer” refers to anything that falls outside binaries (such as male/female, masculine/feminine, and heterosexual/homosexual) and to a way of challenging the links between sex, gender, and sexuality. For example, it questions expectations that women will be feminine and sexually attracted to men, and it also disputes that one must fall into a category of male or female, masculine or feminine, or any particular sexuality, or that any of these categories should be considered stable. To be queer allows someone to be simultaneously male, female, or neither, to present as masculine, feminine, neuter, or any mixture of the three, and to adopt any sexuality—and to change any of these identities at any time or to deny that they mean anything in the first place. This is not merely a means to individual expression but also a political statement about the socially constructed “realities” of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Like the other postmodern Theories, queer Theory is a political project, and its aim is to disrupt any expectations that people should fit into a binary position with regard to sex or gender, and to undermine any assumptions that sex or gender are related to or dictate sexuality. Instead, they should defy simple categorization. In general, then, queer Theory’s political agenda is to challenge what is called normativity—that some things are more common or regular to the human condition, thus more normative from a social (thus moral) perspective, than others. The main industry of queer Theorists is to intentionally conflate two meanings of “normative,” and deliberately make strategic use of the moral understanding of the term to contrive problems with its descriptive meaning. Normativity is considered pejoratively by queer Theorists and is often preceded by a prefix like hetero- (straight), cis- (gender and sex match), or thin- (not obese). By challenging normativity in all its manifestations, queer Theory therefore seeks to unite the minority groups who fall outside of normative categories under a single banner: “queer.” This project is understood to be liberating for people who do not fall neatly into sex, gender, and sexuality categories, along with those who wouldn’t if they hadn’t been socialized into them and weren’t constrained by social enforcement. It produces a de facto coalition of minority gender and sexual identities under the appropriately unstable set of acronyms that tend to begin with LGBTQ.5
Because this is a political project for queer activists, in recent years it has become common to hear “queer” used as a verb. To queer something is to cast doubt upon its stability, to disrupt seemingly fixed categories, and to problematize any “binaries” within it. When scholars speak of queering something, they mean they intend to remove it from the categories within which we understand it now and look at it in new and counterintuitive ways. Queering is about unmaking any sense of the normal, in order to liberate people from the expectations that norms carry. According to queer Theory, these expectations—whether explicit or implicit—generate a cultural and political power (“the personal is political”), which is referred to as normativity, and which constrains and oppresses people who fail to identify with it. This phenomenon may not have anything to do with gender or sexuality, and has even expanded to include time and space6 and queer Theory itself.7 Queer Theory, then, is essentially about the belief that to categorize gender and sexuality (or anything else) is to legitimize one discourse—the normative one—as knowledge and use it to constrain individuals. It addresses this problem in postmodern ways, which draw especially upon the Theorizing of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
This makes queer Theory notoriously difficult to define, perhaps partly because being comprehensible would be inconsistent with queer Theory’s radical distrust of language and would violate its ambition to avoid all categorization, including of itself. Nevertheless, David Halperin attempts to define “queer” in his 1997 book, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in which he argues that Foucault’s idea that sexuality is a product of discourse revolutionized gay and lesbian political activism. He describes “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”8 (emphasis in original)
Because the central feature of queer Theory is that it resists categorization and distrusts language, it is generally difficult to work with. Queer Theory is not only resistant to definition in the usual sense, but also to functional definitions based on what it does. Papers that use queer Theory usually begin by examining an idea, problematizing it in queer (or “queering” or “genderfucking”9) ways, and eventually concluding that there can be no conclusions. As Annemarie Jagose, the author of Queer Theory: An Introduction, puts it, “It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.”10 The incoherence of queer Theory is an intentional feature, not a bug.
Despite the deliberate weirdness—which Jagose lists among its “charms”—queer Theory is mostly, but not entirely, unreasonable in its social constructivist views. As most people now acknowledge, many of our ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality—and particularly about their associated roles—are social constructions that are somewhat malleable, since culture changes over time. Very few people are strict biological essentialists anymore—and, those who are, are shown to be wrong by scientists.11 Nearly everyone accepts that some combination of human biology and culture comes together to create expressions of sex, gender, and sexuality. As evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson states, “No serious scholar would think that human behavior is controlled the way animal instinct is, without the intervention of culture.”12
This is not the prevailing view of queer Theorists, however. Because queer Theory is thoroughly postmodern, it is radically socially constructivist. There can be absolutely no quarter given to any discourse—even matters of scientific fact—that could be interpreted as promoting or legitimizing biological essentialism. As a result, if biology makes an appearance in queer Theoretical scholarship it is usually for one of two purposes: to problematize it as merely one way of knowing—a chauvinist one that has encoded the biases of powerful groups, such as straight men who identify as men; or to demonstrate something that no one denies—that intersex people exist. The existence of intersex people is pointed out only to obfuscate the facts that an overwhelming proportion of Homo sapiens are either male-or female-sexed and that gender expression in humans is overwhelmingly bimodal in nature and strongly correlated with sex. These undeniable facts are summarily problematized as supporting normativity and are therefore suppressed by queer Theory.
This radical neglect of biology limits the ability not just of queer Theory but of all scholarship on these topics to rigorously investigate socialized aspects of gender presentation and expectations—while rendering potentially valuable insights from queer Theory nearly completely irrelevant to those serious about such questions. There are biologists and psychologists advancing knowledge of how the sexes differ (or do not differ) biologically and psychologically on average, how sexuality works, and why some people are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender—but their work is not welcome in queer Theory. On the contrary, such knowledge is generally regarded with the utmost suspicion, as an inherently dangerous or even “violent” way to categorize and constrain those who do not fit neatly into one of the following two categories: “masculine man attracted to women” and “feminine woman attracted to men.”13
This understanding of the oppressive role of science can be largely traced back to Michel Foucault. Foucault studied the production of “power-knowledge”—how knowledge is socially constructed by discourses, in the service of power—and was particularly concerned with “biopower”—how the biological sciences legitimize the knowledge that the powerful use to maintain their dominance. In his four-volume study, The History of Sexuality,14 Foucault argues that, since the late seventeenth century, far from suppressing speech about sex (as neo-Marxist thinkers like Marcuse had argued), there has been an explosion of talk about sex—both the act and the biological concept. As scientists began to study and categorize sexuality, Foucault claims, they simultaneously constructed it and created the sexual identities and categories that accompany these constructions.
The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it.15
Foucault’s view was that the discourses produced by this “machinery” gained social legitimacy as “truth” and then permeated all levels of society. This is a process of power but not, as the Marxist philosophers had claimed, one in which religious or secular authorities enforce an ideology on the common people. In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society and determining what people held to be true and, consequently, how they spoke about it. The view from Foucault, thus Theory, is that power is a system we’re all constantly participating in by how we talk about things and what ideas we’re willing to consider legitimate, a system into which we are socialized. The prime culprit for legitimizing knowledge—and thus power—in Foucault’s view was science, which held prestige in society for exactly that purpose. This is what Foucault referred to as “biopower,” claiming that scientific discourse “set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity,” and “in the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state” because “[i]t grounded them in ‘truth.’”16 Foucault argues that power runs through the whole system of society, perpetuating itself through powerful discourses. He called this the “omnipresence of power.”
“Power is everywhere,” Foucault writes, “not because it embraced everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”17 For Foucault, power is present on all levels of society because certain knowledges have been legitimized and accepted as true. This leads people to learn to speak in these discourses, which further reinforces them. Power works like this, for Foucault, “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.”18 This view has gone on to become one of the core beliefs of applied postmodernism and Social Justice activism today: unjust power is everywhere, always, and it manifests in biases that are largely invisible because they have been internalized as “normal.”19 Consequently, speech is to be closely scrutinized to discover which discourses it is perpetuating, under the presumption that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other latent prejudices must be present in the discourses and thus endemic to the society that produces them. (This is circular reasoning.) These “problematics” need to be identified and exposed, whether they manifest in a president’s address or in the decade-old adolescent tweet history of a relative nobody. The widespread slang term “woke” describes having become aware of and more able to see these problematics.
From these basic premises, first spelled out in the 1970s, Foucault provided the philosophical foundations for the queer Theory of the 1990s, which included a deep suspicion of science as an oppressive exercise of power rather than a knowledge producer, a skepticism of all categories that describe gender and sexuality, a commitment to social constructivism, and an intense focus on language, as the means by which power disguised as knowledge infiltrates all levels of society and establishes what is accepted as normal.
Queer Theory evolved out of a postmodernist consideration of sex, gender, and sexuality. Its three founding figures are Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom drew heavily upon Foucault. Each also vigorously resisted normativity in the three main domains to which queer Theory devotes the bulk of its attention. These three Theorists laid the cornerstones of the core projects of queer Theory, which emerged in the mid-1980s.
In her 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin argues that what we consider “good sex” and “bad sex” (in moral terms, all quality assurances aside) are socially constructed by various groups and their discourses about sexuality.20 Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the social construction of sexuality beginning in the nineteenth century, she became deeply skeptical of any biological studies of sex and sexuality. Her essay made a foundational contribution to queer Theory by rejecting what she saw as “sexual essentialism”—“the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life and shapes institutions.”21 For Rubin,
It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs. Similarly, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology.22
This is a highly pragmatic, even agenda-driven, argument. Rubin asserts that we should believe sex, gender, and sexuality to be social constructs, not because it’s necessarily true, but because it is easier to politicize them and demand change if they are social constructs than if they are biological. Where one might at least see Foucault’s cynical reading of the history of sexuality as descriptive of what has been and is, Rubin’s was plainly one that was ready to take up an ought and put it ahead of what is. This is a feature of applied postmodernism that distinguishes it somewhat from the postmodernism that came before—and it has consequences. It undermines public trust in the academy, which is generally considered a guardian of what is, by making it more like a church, which conveys that which people ought to think and believe.
This agenda-driven view, which lies at the heart of queer Theory, goes against both the rigor of scientific inquiry and the ethics of universal liberal activism for gender and LGBT equality: liberalism does not require one to believe that gender and sexuality are socially constructed in order to argue that there is no justification for discriminating against anyone. Rubin states her position on this in “Thinking Sex”:
Concepts of sexual oppression have been lodged within that more biological understanding of sexuality. It is often easier to fall back on the notion of a natural libido subjected to inhumane repression than to reformulate concepts of sexual injustice within a more constructivist framework. But it is essential that we do so.23
Rubin insists that it is crucial to reject biology and fully embrace the idea that sex and sexuality have been constructed in an unjust hierarchy,24 even though she recognizes that it would be easier to accept what is far more likely to be true—that different sexualities exist naturally and some of them have been unfairly discriminated against.
Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” provides both an early indication of the coming development of intersectionality and a rejection of contemporary forms of radical feminism. Describing the hierarchy of sexuality, Rubin notes, “This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics. It grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged.”25 She also recognizes that “sex is a vector of oppression … cut[ting] across other modes of social inequality, sorting out individuals and groups according to its own intrinsic dynamics.”26 Rubin therefore took aim at the dominant form of (radical) feminism at the time—which was very negative about sex and sexuality and focused on the material harms of sexual objectification—and (not wholly wrongly) likened its approach to socially conservative, right-wing views.
For Rubin, radical constructivism and a focus on the discourses around sex were essential to the liberation of those whose sexuality or gender identity was not typically cisgendered, gender-conforming, and heterosexual. The dismissal of biology and any explanation of variations in sexuality or gender identity it might offer was considered a political necessity, justified through a profound moral relativism about sexuality (including a defense of pedophilia). Thus, we see in queer Theory a rejection of science when it returns results that deviate from Theory, of liberalism when it puts universal humanity first, and of feminism when it regards women as a class of people oppressed by another class of people—men—and, instead, the prioritization of “queerness.”
The most influential queer Theorist who theorized this issue of queerness is Judith Butler, and it is her work that has most successfully broken the bounds of queer Theory and become influential on many forms of scholarship and even in wider society. Butler is an American philosopher, influenced by French feminist thought, who draws heavily upon postmodernism, especially the work of Foucault and Derrida. Butler’s chief contribution to queer Theory was to question the links between sex—the biological categories of male and female—gender—the behaviors and traits commonly associated with one sex or the other—and sexuality—the nature of sexual desire.
In the 1990s, Butler was phobic about any whiff of biological essentialism. She argued extensively that gender and sex are distinct and that there is no necessary correlation between the two. For Butler, gender is wholly socially constructed—a claim so ridiculous that it required much Theorizing to establish it as believable. Butler did so primarily by employing her most well-known concept: gender performativity. This is a remarkably complicated idea defined in her 1993 book, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”27—that is, how something is brought into being, placed into meaningful categories, and made “real” by behaviors and expectations encoded in speech. Among other features, one immediately notices the postmodern political principle, as derived from Foucault, and the related theme of the power of language.
Although the term evokes the idea of a stage performance, the concept of gender performativity is derived from a branch of linguistics and doesn’t refer to acting. A male actor could, for example, perform a female stage role, while still retaining his belief in himself as a man. This is not what Butler means when she describes gender as “performative,” as that would require some “preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured,”28 which she insists does not exist where gender is concerned. Instead, in her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler claims that gender roles are taught and learned—often unwittingly, through socialization—as sets of actions, behaviors, manners, and expectations, and people perform those roles accordingly. Gender, for Butler, is a set of things a person does, not something to do with who they are. Society enforces these actions and associates them with linguistic cues like “male” and “manly,” so these roles become “real” through gender performativity. For Butler, because of the immense socializing pressures and normativity of gender roles, people are unable to help learning to perform their gender “correctly,” as though playing out a rehearsed script, and thereby end up perpetuating the social reality called “gender.”
Butler’s view is that people are not born knowing themselves to be male, female, straight, or gay, and thus do not act in accordance with any such innate factors. Instead, they are socialized into these roles from birth by their near ubiquity and the attendant social expectations and instructions (normativity). In themselves, roles like heterosexuality or homosexuality do not represent stable or fixed categories, but are merely things people do. It is, for her, only by taking up these roles and “performing” them according to those social expectations (performativity), that people create the (oppressive) illusion that the roles themselves are real, stable, and inherently meaningful. The notion of discursive construction—the idea that the way a particular society talks about things legitimizes them, making them seem self-evidently true—is therefore key to understanding queer Theory because it is through discursive construction that these roles and expectations are created and perpetuated.
Butler’s ironically detached view of gender therefore follows Foucault closely and describes a vast social conspiracy, which plays out both intentionally and unwittingly—a common theme in applied postmodern Theory. She describes “a true gender identity” as “a regulatory fiction” that needs to be “revealed.”29 The “regulatory fictions” of sex, gender, and sexuality are, she argues, maintained through the ubiquity of gender performativity, which contains “the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character.”30 For her, the mission of queer Theory and activism is therefore to liberate “the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.”31 That is, if we recognize gender as performative, we can also see that it can be performed in ways that do not privilege the masculine and heterosexual.
Butler Theorizes this by using the Derridean notion of phallogocentrism—the idea that social reality is constructed by language that privileges the masculine—and by expanding upon Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality32—wherein heterosexuality is taken as the natural state of being, and homosexuality is therefore scripted as a perversion, to enforce compliance with “doing straightness.” Butler, however, was not optimistic about our ability to disrupt these allegedly hegemonic discourses (ways of speaking about things that hold almost unassailable power, a concept adapted into Theory from the views of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci). Instead, she believed that it is impossible to step outside of social constructions created by discourses: we can only trouble and disrupt them, to make space for those who do not fit.
Butler’s proposed solution to this intractable problem had a profound influence upon the activists who followed in her wake: she advocated the politics of parody, a “subversive and parodic redeployment of power.”33 This approach attempts to subvert the patterns of gender performativity—particularly phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality—which “seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies”34 by rendering them absurd. To achieve this, Butler advocated deliberately “subversive repetition” that “might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself.”35 This is often achieved by “genderfucking,” which Wiktionary defines as “the conscious effort to subvert traditional notions of gender identity and gender roles,” through the employment of drag, say, or the “queer-camp” aesthetic.
The purpose of Butlerian parody is to cause people to question the assumptions upon which performativity is based and thus be able to see it as a socially constructed illusion that is, ultimately, both arbitrary and oppressive in its current forms. The point of this is to achieve liberation from these categories and the expectations that come with them. Judith Butler advocates a move towards incoherence. If an activist can make the incoherence of rigid categories of sex, gender, and sexuality obvious—if not ridiculous—then those categories and the oppression they create cease to be as meaningful. Butler asserts this so tenaciously that she has even called into question whether biological sex can be considered anything other than a cultural construct. In Gender Trouble, she writes,
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.36
Butler directly challenged the prevailing forms of feminism by asking, rather incomprehensibly, “Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?”37 That is, might the ways that we consider “woman” to be a real biological category have the unintended consequence of creating a “coherent and stable” notion of what it is to be a woman?
For Butler, then, the very existence of coherent and stable categories like “woman” leads to totalitarian and oppressive discourses. Though most people would find such a conclusion properly ridiculous, her queer Theory rests on resisting and subverting these categories. Underscoring her seriousness, she describes as a kind of violence of categorization the scripting of people into a category, such as a gender, that they feel does not adequately or accurately describe them. For Butler, activism and scholarship must disrupt these discourses to minimize the apparent harms of this “violence.”
The focus on breaking down categories by rendering them apparently incoherent is also central to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose work lies at the foundations of queer Theory. Her contributions to Theory are ultimately about resisting the temptation to resolve contradictions and finding value in plurality—accepting many perspectives all at once, even when they are mutually contradictory—and in incoherence—not attempting to make rational sense of anything. Consistent with the ought-over-is mind-set that characterizes applied postmodernism in general, she regards these values as useful for activism. She writes,
In consonance with my emphasis on the performative relations of double and conflicted definition, the theorized prescription for a practical politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalist-model strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and gender-integrative analyses would likewise proceed in parallel without any high premium placed on ideological rationalization between them.38
Here Sedgwick is saying that a productive movement could incorporate all the ideas to be found in LGBT scholarship and activism—even mutually contradictory approaches—without needing to resolve ideological differences. She argues that the contradictions themselves would be politically valuable, not least because they would make the thinking behind the activism very difficult to understand and thus to criticize. This is, of course, very queer.
These ideas are most prominent in Sedgwick’s 1990 book, The Epistemology of the Closet, which developed Foucault’s idea that sexuality is a social construct brought into being by scientific discourses—especially those legitimized by medical authorities, who classified homosexuality as a psychopathology. She, nevertheless, diverges from Foucault fairly radically, in favor of Derrida. Sedgwick reversed Foucault’s belief that dominant discourses created homosexuality and heterosexuality, arguing instead that it is the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality that gave us binary thinking—people are either gay or straight, male or female, masculine or feminine. For Sedgwick, sexual binaries underlie all social binaries. The Epistemology of the Closet spells this out from the beginning:
The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.39
For Sedgwick, then, a binary understanding of sexuality forms the basis on which all binary thinking rests. Furthermore, all such thinking is false. Therefore, understanding the fluid complexities of sexuality is key to undoing many forms of black-and-white thinking in society. Sedgwick is therefore a significant player in establishing the queer Theoretical tendency to “interrogate” and resist perpetuating any kind of binaries, lest they become sites of oppression.
Sedgwick’s symbolism of the closet is especially predicated on this idea of false binaries. One is never fully in or out of the closet. Some people will know one’s sexuality, and others will not. Some things will be said, and others will not, and there is knowledge to be gained both from what has been said and what hasn’t. The closet, to Sedgwick, therefore symbolizes occupying contradictory realities at the same time. Embracing this and making it visible are core to her approach to queer Theory, and in this we see the beginnings of the expansion of the queer to matters outside of sexuality, along with its use as a verb.
Because she took a postmodernist approach, Sedgwick identified language—specifically, “speech acts”—as the way in which these unjust binaries and “the closet” were constructed and maintained. She therefore saw her Theoretical approach as potentially revelatory and therefore freeing. She remarks,
An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition—have the potential for being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally.40
These relations Sedgwick views as in need of deconstruction, following Derrida. She emphasizes, for example, analysis that recognizes that homosexuality is considered inferior to heterosexuality, but that the term “heterosexuality” would not exist if homosexuality were not a category of difference. This observation is meant to deconstruct the power relationship in the binary, by highlighting that—because the concept of heterosexuality is dependent on the existence and subordinated status of homosexuality—it cannot be said to have priority status. In this way, she seeks to deconstruct heteronormativity, the widespread expectation that heterosexuality is normal and the default.
Sedgwick finds it useful to generalize from this understanding of binaries that apply to sexuality to other binaries in society, as a way to destabilize hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. In this, she is thoroughly Derridean. Like other Derridean thinkers, this leads her to highlight and exploit what she sees as the tension that arises from holding two seemingly contradictory views at the same time. In sexuality, for Sedgwick, these views are the “minoritizing view” and the “universalizing view.” In the minoritizing view, homosexual is seen as something that a minority of people are, while the majority are heterosexual. Meanwhile, in the universalizing view, sexuality is considered a spectrum in which everybody has a place. That is, everybody is a little bit (or a lot) gay. These two ideas seem contradictory, yet Sedgwick believes that the contradiction itself is productive. As she puts it,
The book will not suggest (nor do I believe there currently exists) any standpoint of thought from which the rival claims of these minoritizing and universalizing understandings of sexual definition could be decisively arbitrated as to their “truth.” Instead, the performative effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their overlap will be my subject.41
For Sedgwick, productive political work can be achieved by forcing the maintenance of a clear contradiction because doing so undermines a stable sense of meaning for the relevant concepts. The incoherence of endorsing two contradictory models of sexuality at once can help us accept the complexity and mutability of sexuality. Thus, we see here, yet again, the commitment to rejecting objective truth and concrete categories and the idea that incoherence and fluidity are liberating and politically necessary. Queer Theorists can expand this thinking to encompass almost anything and they think of this as “queering” the topic. Theorists have, for instance, queered categories of time and history42 and life and death.43
Queer Theory is one of the most explicitly postmodern forms of Theory within identity studies today, and it owes much of its foundational concept of the social construction of sexuality by discourse to Foucault. The postmodern knowledge principle, in which objective reality is denied or simply ignored, and the postmodern political principle, which insists that society is structured of systems of power and privilege that determine what is understood as knowledge, are front and center in queer Theory. They are most evident in its foundational concept that science is a form of oppressive discipline, which enforces gender conformity and heterosexuality by establishing categories and attempting to assert truths about them with rigorous authority and social legitimacy.
Of the four major postmodern themes, the blurring of boundaries and the intense focus on language (discourses) are absolutely central to queer Theory. These are the two themes most hostile to the concept of a stable reality that we can discuss straightforwardly and therefore the most self-destructive. Queer Theory avoids the self-destructiveness of the original postmodernism, however, by making the blurring of boundaries into its preferred form of political activism and calling it “queering.” That is, its destructiveness, which is occasionally self-directed, is meant to have a political purpose. Much of this activity is applied to discourses, leading to an almost pathological obsession with the ways sex, gender, and sexuality are spoken about, which has led to a proliferation of terms demarcating subtle differences in gender identity and sexuality, which simultaneously inhabit a fluid and changeable space and yet demand impossibly extreme sensitivity of language.
The other two of the four themes also appear within queer Theory, but less overtly. The theme of cultural relativism is implicit in that queer Theory assumes that understandings of gender and sexuality are always cultural constructs. This is a trait it shares with postcolonial Theory: hence queer Theorists often use postcolonial Theory and vice versa. Although there are significant differences between the two groups and their goals, these two Theories draw upon one another because their methods are fully compatible, since they are both heavily influenced by Foucault and Derrida. Meanwhile, the loss of the individual and the universal is also implicit in that individuals’ gendered and sexual selves are considered to be constructed by discourses of power that they cannot help but learn and can only subvert in minor ways. Universality is therefore queer-impossible, as this would require a common human nature—a concept that queer Theory utterly rejects.
With its focus on deconstructive techniques and its conception of knowledge as a construct of power, queer Theory is, arguably, the purest form of applied postmodernism. It underlies much trans activism and makes an appearance in multiple forms of Social Justice scholarship. The conceptual framework of intersectionality formed part of the foundational texts of queer Theory, and although the name “intersectionality” is more associated with critical race Theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, Butler also spoke of “intersections” with other forms of marginalized identity at the same time as Crenshaw and, seemingly, independently. For her, “gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.”44 Thus, Butlerian queer Theory is easily integrated as a key dimension of intersectional thought. Consequently, intersectional feminists are very likely to include queer Theory in their work.
Perhaps most significantly, queer Theory differs fundamentally from the liberal feminism and LGBT activism that preceded it. Claims that queer Theory is the only way to liberate those who are not heterosexual or gender-conforming are belied by the success of universal liberal approaches both before and since. Pre-Theory liberal activism and thought focused on changing prejudiced attitudes towards people of a certain sex, gender, or sexuality by appealing to our many commonalities and shared humanity, and to universal liberal principles. This is probably something that trans activism could also focus on, as the science around trans issues develops—if queer Theory weren’t actively attempting to subvert anything universal or normative.
Queer Theory aims, instead—very unhelpfully—to modify or unmake the concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality themselves and so tends to render itself baffling and irrelevant, if not positively alienating to most members of the society it wishes to change. Queer activists reliant on queer Theory tend to act with surprising entitlement and aggression—attitudes which most people find objectionable—not least by ridiculing normative sexualities and genders and depicting those who recognize them as backwards and boorish. People generally do not appreciate being told that their sex, gender, and sexuality are not real, or are wrong, or bad—something one would think queer Theorists might appreciate better than anyone.
Further, the idea that heterosexuality is a social construct completely neglects the reality that humans are a sexually reproducing species. The idea that homosexuality is a social construct neglects the plentiful evidence that it is also a biological reality. Despite any “liberation” this may achieve, it threatens to undo the considerable progress made by lesbian and gay activists in countering the belief that their romantic and sexual attractions are a mere “lifestyle choice” that could, in two manifestations of the same principle, be Theorized into existence or prayed away. While homosexuality would be a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice, all the evidence—and the overwhelming testimony of gay men and lesbians—indicates that it is much more than that.45
It does not tend to make for productive activism to be dismissive, ironic, antiscientific, and largely incomprehensible by design. It also doesn’t help people who wish to have their sex, gender, or sexuality accepted as normal to be continually rescued from any sense of normalcy by arguing that considering things normal is problematic. Therefore, although queer Theory purports to advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, the majority of LGBT people are neither familiar with it, nor support it. As it continues to assert itself as the only legitimate way to study or discuss topics of gender, sex, and sexuality, then, it also continues to do harm to the causes it seeks most interestedly to support.