Queering Norway

Pal Bjorby, Anka Ryall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781560237983
• eBook ISBN: 9781317992097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The articles in this collection indicate the still powerful role of queer theory in questioning the political, social, cultural, institutional hegemony of heterosexuality in culture and society at large as well as in academic research institutions. Written from the perspective of the northern European periphery, Queering Norway specifically reflects the challenges queer theory poses for ways of thinking about sexuality and identity in Norway. At the same time, the questions raised in the articles have wide relevance. From within their various fields (sociology, anthropology, ethnology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, media studies and religious studies) the writers attempt to develop a language enabling them to recognize the multiple social relations possible in contemporary societies, a language in which neither "queer" nor "homosexual" ousts the other, but in which the goal is to work, read, and write in the in-between spaces where no single difference is elevated above any other.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.

Introduction:
Queer Theory in a Norwegian Context

Pål Bjørby, PhD

University of Bergen

Anka Ryall, MA

University of Tromsø

[Q]ueerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.

Lee Edelman, No Future (2005)

The editors would like to thank the Research Council of Norway for providing the generous financial support that has made this collection of articles possible. The initiative for putting together the collection came from the program committee of “Gender in Transition: Institutions, Norms, Identities” (1997–2002). This national research program provided funding for a number of projects on queer and queer-related issues, and half the essays in this collection originated in projects funded by it. Similarly, the following gender research program, “Gender Research: Knowledge, Boundaries, Change” (2001–2007), also under the auspices of the Research Council of Norway, provided funding for several of the contributors to this Norwegian issue of the journal.

We dedicate this collection to Professor Jim Steakley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his unwavering support and friendship and, not least, for his contributions to gay, lesbian and queer scholarship in Europe and in the USA.

By 2008 manifestations of queer (in scholarship, in activism, in mass media, in the entertainment industry and popular culture in general, in personal definitions of gender and sexuality and other eccentric modes of being) are simply so countless, varied, watered down or overused, that the term has become both suspect and capricious. From within academia queer theory has been disavowed, accused of endorsing a mindless, apolitical and vicarious reveling in gender indeterminacy, and tainted with anti-feminism and anti-lesbianism. This all may be true. However, these particular developments of the queer debate will not be pursued here. Rather, as the following introduction to this collection of Norwegian scholars’ contributions to lesbian, gay and queer research and theory will show, queer theory, in the tradition of Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick et al., is still an affirmative practice and still a rallying force in the continuous opposition to powerfully regulatory institutions of heteronormativity. As evidenced by our contributors, the work of Judith Butler, in particular, remains the central source and encouragement for a critical assessment of the discursive frameworks that make up fields of scholarship.

The articles in this issue of Journal of Homosexuality reveal and explore indeterminacy in writing, in theory and in conceptual tools, as well as in the politics of the authors’ research areas. They indicate the still powerful and unapologetic challenge that queer perspectives represent to the political, social, cultural, institutional hegemony of heterosexuality in culture and society at large and in academic research institutions. There will be no post-queer lull as long as heterosexuality’s assumed stability and the given-ness of its gender and sexuality organization remain in situ. The sheer amount of brilliant queer writing has more than proven that in its ingeneous forms and styles, queer theory upstages and upends the prevailing norms and values, assumptions and universalities of the status quo in the humanities and the sciences. And even though many have come and gone as participants in the Foucault-Sedgwick-Butler school(s) of (post)critical interventional reading and writing, these articles clearly show the need for vigilance and continued urgent questioning of the core “truths” of heterosexuality (and perhaps of lesbian and gay homosexuality as well).

Butler’s counter-narrative, her well-known and incisive critique of the relationship between subjectivity (body, gender, sex) and the discursive and social/cultural heterosexualization of desire is as essential to reading and writing today as it was a decade ago. It continues to enable a disruption of the practice of reading and writing, a destabilization of entrenched and universalized notions underpinning disciplines, and a reformulation of questions surrounding sexual minorities, the meaning of sex, gender, sexuality, desire, subjectivity, and the body. Finally, queer theory has resulted in a radical critique of the constructions of heterosexuality, heteronormativity and power. These are issues that cannot be ignored. There is no discourse today that can gently ply its trade, safe from queer visitation in the form of a late-night knock on ivied doors. Queer theory has made us rethink hierarchies and power dynamics that sustain the regulatory regime of heterosexuality, a normativity increasingly taking on the look of a rather tattered and frayed couture, the chic of a universality of seasons past. Although, for some critics, queer has taken on the materialist shape of a star on world tour, the vigilance of queer theory is needed more than ever.

This anthology is neither about queer theory per se nor is it meant to exemplify queer theory’s increasingly global reach. And its contributors do not view queer as supporting the notion of a form of postmodern hegemony. But they clearly see queer as a coalition of the marginalized in a constantly shifting discursive terrain characterized by interdisciplinary possibilities for the recasting of identity definitions via a probing of the core taxonomies in their respective fields of inquiry. In different ways they seek to escape the hetero/homo binary that dominates epistemologies, and although the reader in most cases will encounter a reluctance to come out as fully queer, s/he will also experience a fluid use of lesbian, gay, and queer.

One may see these articles as attempts at a shedding of terms, where familiar claims of identities such as “lesbian,” “gay” or “homosexual” continue to be subsumed and need to be challenged. These categories and the self-identified “queer” can and do coexist in a single life–as they do in the writings of individual contributors to this issue, not as careless synonyms, but as a necessary strategic naming. Hence, they are becoming “critically queer” in their institutional affiliations and in their writing and thinking.

The contributors to Queering Norway shy away from what to many is the central activity of queer theory, namely to settle score with identity politics once and for all. Instead the articles suggest that the tug of war between so-called queer textualists and feminist materialists, or between feminist anti-poststructuralists and their new sensible (philosophical and/or Marxist) models of feminist/female subjectivities that propose to embrace the lived experience of the individual body as pre-representationally available for meaning, is unnecessary shadow fighting. These are not mutually exclusive positions. The definition of anyone as queer who experiences and understands heteronormativity as an act of power, is perhaps too wide a claim for the contributors’ current positions. Their critical focus remains on crises of category and identity, energized by the potential for change as they seek to make “difference” both visible and the object of analysis. In various ways they attempt to develop a language that can recognize the multiple social relations possible in contemporary Norway, a language in which neither “queer” nor “homosexual” ousts the Norway, a language in which neither “queer” nor “homosexual” ousts the other, but in which the goal is to work, read, and write in the in-between spaces where no difference is elevated above any other.

Equally important is their readiness to counter the deeply ingrained homophobic assumptions underpinning their respective fields of study and to denaturalize powerful categories of meaning, and thus, create richer histories of deviancies. In this way, as queer theory does, they move the known and familiar concepts and knowledges toward their critical edge in search of new definitions and purposes.

Although queer theory has entered the mainstream, queer remains a contested term, as is evident from its various guises in the articles presented in this volume. There is no agreement about the exact meaning of queer or about its agenda, except perhaps about queer theory’s overarching praxis of relentless critique and deconstruction of heteronormativity. Energized by the suggestion of the role of indeterminacy at the heart of identity formation, thinking or politics, and fully aware of the criticism leveled against queer theory (as such), the articles explore the central role of the cultural and historical stylization of the male and female body, of the feminine and masculine, the shaping of the lesbian and the homosexual, and in some cases reveal a vacillation between queer and the more clearly delineated historical terms of “homosexual” and “lesbian.” In various ways the articles seek to rethink gendered and sexual subjectivity and identity.

Some of the articles (most notably Tone Hellesund’s exploration of developing notions of spinsterhood in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Norway) are characterized by sharpened sense of the historical anchoring of any identity concept. Others seek to throw light on the structure of the liberal polity of Norway, a polity that thwarts any suggestion of transformation of an abusive heteronormativity that affects all minorities, ethnic as well as sexual. They challenge the privileged notions that shape normative agendas and practices as well as the homophobia masquerading as tolerance.

Significantly, these articles reflect the challenges queer theory poses for ways of thinking about sexuality and identity in Norway, reflect the relationship of Norwegian scholars to Western gay, lesbian, and transgender writings here and now, on the cusp of a new century. After a decade of confrontational exchanges about the efficacy of established terms, where queer theory has positioned itself as an aggressive deconstructive practice, as the mover and shaker of things gendered and sexualized, the authors of the articles in Queering Norway are responding to challenge Eve K. Sedgwick’s claim 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 is does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/hetero-sexual definition” (Sedgwick, 1990, 1).

But unlike Sedgwick, and after a century under the sway of psychoanalysis, none of the contributors imagine a scholarship or an existence where there is no longer the compulsion to decipher a deep meaning of sexual desire. None of them ask if there can be a Symbolic without exclusion or foreclosure. Do we, can we, encounter self-understanding beyond a discourse of desire? As a form of life? It is particularly here that the reader will encounter some hesitancy vis-à-vis the most radical possibility of queer critique, particularly its apparent profligate indeterminacy of signification.

The tentative approach is probably due to influences from critical feminist as well as from gay, lesbian and transgender work. With an attentive eye to the anti-queer criticism of the last decade or so, most of the articles return to the very historical terms (homosexual, gay and lesbian) eschewed by queer theory, to investigate whether and how they still are applicable. In this they are representative of an international scholarly debate (see, for example, Jeffreys, 2003; Boone et al., 2000). Above all, there is a clear desire to transcend the old debate between “essentialists” and “social constructionists,” largely fueled by an expressed need to de-authorize the domineering concepts of “normative heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” as these play out in a variety of research areas. In other words, this collection of articles is by no means a collective endorsement of queer theory, and as a whole they demonstrate the difficulty of generalizing about a field as diverse and changing as queer theory and queer studies.

No less important to the contributors has been queer theory’s questioning of any theory of heterosexuality and, consequently, also of homosexuality. In this they are inspired by Butler’s continued focus on the exclusionary and normative nature of both terms. In a positive sense, to these Norwegian scholars, queer theory thus represents a continuous demand for critical awareness and re-thinking of the employment of familiar terms of explication and representation. Butler’s deconstruction of the gendered heterosexist subject position has clearly resulted in a release from explicit and implicit censorship. To stress the challenge outlined previously: Is it possible to think outside of hetero/homo, masculine/feminine, active/passive, and so on? The articles gamely explore possibilities of destabilizing fundamental narratives of sex and gender as these have determined and constrained their training.

The articles reflect attempts to think about and seek ways around and outside of the much-tried triad hetero/homo/bisexual, outside of the categories of normative versus perverse in descriptions of the sexual subject. They do not commit to the notion of the difference within, or regard identity as exclusively textual; instead, they emphasize the body’s materiality, its varied and gender-constructed history as source of crucial meaning when pursuing understanding of the body’s role as an enactor of difference (manliness, masculinity, maleness). Textually and concretely their forays into such areas as Old Norse religious practices and Viking history (Soli), media politics (Mühleisen), sports (Eng), gender inversion in gay men’s speech (Johnsen) adolescent sexuality (Kristiansen and Pedersen), queer families (Folgerø) and lesbian sexual practices (Bolsø), reveal that the struggle for meaning and for taxonomic regulatory control over the concept of difference continue as actively as ever Implicitly, at least, they address all concepts, leaving none as privileged or foundational. They know how utterly inimical some of the questions their work raises are to the organizing principle of heteronormativity. They address straight academia’s blatant disassociative and dismissive reaction to things queer. They seek to upstage the heterosexual matrix. Since gender is structuring and a relational principle, things can (be) change(d). For, as Butler states, “we do not ground ourselves in a single model of communication, a single model of reason, a single notion of the subject before we are able to act” (Butler, 2004, 48).

Warnings have been sounded that queer has become reified and that its revolutionary élan, once representing a full-blown assault on heteronor-mativity, has become routine. It is evident in these articles, however, that queer theory still energizes the will to explore the potential for transgression, self-invention, and continued debate about difference, representation, and power. To varying degrees they all reflect Judith Butler’s influence in up-ending epistemological operations and categories that produce and marginalize the stigmatized other, as well as Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of an ethics of anti-homophobic thinking and writing. In David Halperin’s words, “Queer is by definition 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 […] describing a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance” (Halperin, 1995, 62).

The apparent cohabitation of gay, lesbian and queer perspectives allows the discussion in general to touch upon a host of issues involving marginal sexualities in contemporary realities and, above all, in the very research areas (such as sociology, history, linguistics, psychology) to which the individual writers belong. The homophobia of the official discourses in their fields is an equal concern. And, although not a concern expressly formulated in most of the articles, the authors acknowledge trans-historical continuities that need to be included in any genealogy of modern concepts of (homo)-sexuality. Furthermore, the shadow hovering in the background of the articles is that of Foucault and his discursive critique. This is also where transgender theorist Jay Prosser levels her critique at queer theory; she shows how the anti-theoretical and anti-dogmatic orientation of Foucault’s work has become the justification of much of queer theory’s own apparent dogmatic binarism (Prosser, 1998).

Do these articles represent a diverse intervention in the queer homosexuality debate at large? Do they intercept and rework international (mainly Anglo-American) positions–queer’s globalizing venture? Do they, in their serious intent to take on queer theory, unintentionally reveal the very parochial nature of queer itself? Or do they prove queer theory’s efficacious capacity as critical and confrontational activism irregardless of borders? Written from the margins of their respective fields of inquiry and from the far corner of Northern Europe, the articles constitute meetings of local concerns and empirical materials with international theorizing about sexuality, and the unexpected turns and results of such encounters are present everywhere in the anthology.

Admittedly, as these articles will show, not all “translations” of queer theory can free themselves of their local origin, and that may also be a strength. Even if they do not in the end succeed in undermining the binary opposition between hetero and homo, they show how complex any account of gender, sexuality, and identity is and ought to be. They clearly reject any discourse that legitimates certain sex/gender definitions and lived expressions while rendering others as abject failures. In that way they move toward a breaking-down of the powerful regulatory means by which appropriate gender expressions and requisite attributes define thinking and writing.

As becomes clear in recent writings by such American scholars as Jonathan Goldberg, Lee Edelman and Carla F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Queer Theory in a Norwegian Context
• Part I: Queer Margins
• Part II: Heteronormativity and Subversion
• Part III: Performing Queer
• Part IV: Queering the Gods
• Index