Thinking Queerly

Race, Sex, Gender, and the Ethics of Identity

David Ross Fryer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317250463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer theory and the gay rights movement historically have been in tension, with the former critiquing precisely the identity politics on which the latter relies. Yet neither queer theory, in its predominately poststructuralist form, nor the gay rights movement, with its conservative "inclusionary" aspirations, has adequately addressed questions of identity or the political struggles against normativity that mark the lives of so many queer people. Taking on issues of race, sex, gender, and what he calls "the ethics of identity, " Fryer offers a new take on queer theory-one rooted in phenomenology rather than poststructuralism-that seeks to put postnormative thinking at its center. This provocative book gives us a glimpse of what "thinking queer" can look like in our "posthumanist age."

1
On the Possibilities of Posthumanism, or How to Think Queerly in an Anti-black World

The Problem

We live in an anti-black world.¹ We live in an anti-queer world. An anti-poor world, an anti-woman world, an anti-Semitic world, an anti-community world.

An anti-black world takes blackness as inferior.² An anti-black world takes all things it stands against as black and takes blackness as including all things it stands against.

The black man is effeminate. The black man is poor. The black man is a criminal. The black man is infiltrating our communities. The black man is taking the white man’s job. The black woman is a welfare mother. The black woman is a crack addict. Addiction is a black problem. Poverty is a black problem. Crime only happens in the black ghetto. The gay man is spreading AIDS. AIDS is the gay man’s disease. AIDS comes from Africa. AIDS is an African disease. AIDS is a black disease. The gay man isn’t a real man. Neither is the black man. The lesbian hates men. The black lesbian hates them even more than the white lesbian. No one is lower than the black whore.

In an anti-black world, anything that stands in opposition to the norm is feared, denigrated, held down, cast out. In an anti-black world, slavery is not a distant memory; rather, it haunts us as the very notion of freedom comes under attack in our day.

Our world hates Jews, Muslims, women, queers, criminals, the poor, and blacks. We live in an anti-black world.

The Preliminaries

The overarching issues that we ethicists explore in our work can be summed up with a single question: what are the ethical imperatives of being human? Changing (healing, mending) the world is, as I see it, the ethical imperative. Among the particulars that concern me in this regard are questions such as: What is the value of identity and how should we comport ourselves to identities in the world? How do cultural and linguistic norms shape and constrain us in our efforts to engage in meaningful living? What does the fulfillment of one’s possibilities entail? Issues of racial, gender, and sexual identity and their origins, meanings, and usefulness are central for me in studying these questions and thus for the project of ethics itself.

Contrary to the way most academics go about studying ethics in the predominantly analytical worlds of philosophy and religious studies, I argue that questions of the ought are not enough; rather, questions of the ought are fundamentally bound up with questions of the is. In fact, I would say that it is precisely in the is that we find the ought; that is, it is precisely in describing human reality as we live it that we not only see the origin of the ethical imperative but also learn how we ought to act in particular situations. Because I argue from a phenomenological perspective, this claim is all the more potent, since from a phenomenological perspective every act of description is at the same time an act of constitution. That is, whenever we describe the world, we are, in a very real sense, remaking it.

While I do offer answers to some of my questions, I by no means want to suggest that they are final answers. Or, at the very least, to the extent that they are, I hope that they are final in the Hegelian sense—finalities that do not foreclose the task of thinking but rather open it up again.

We live in an anti-black world. We live in an anti-queer world. An anti-poor world, an anti-woman world, an anti-Semitic world, an anti-community world.

Some of us want to change it.

We draw upon various histories when we attempt to change things— histories of the oppressor and of the oppressed, of the self and of the other, of the good and of the bad, of universalism and of particularism, of transcendence and of immanence, and, perhaps most poignantly, of the master and of the slave. Drawing upon these histories is no simple task, for it is all too easy simply to take sides, one against the other, losing sight of the value of the other or falling prey to the myopia of the one.

Is there another way to draw upon these histories? Is there a way to answer the call of resistance and social change? Is there another way to think of the human other than through the not-so-useful categories of humanism and anti-humanism? Is there another way to be humane? In short, what are the possibilities of posthumanism in an anti-human(e) world?

The Opening Gambit

Let us begin by posing a deceptively simple question: is phenomenology queer? The question is not mine. It was asked to me by another.

The first meeting of the Phenomenology Roundtable was held in June 2001, in Providence, Rhode Island. In response to a presentation I had just made on gender identity and phenomenology, Lewis Gordon asked me, “Is phenomenology inherently queer?”³ In my presentation, I had suggested that a turn to phenomenology was the best—indeed the only—way to theorize gender identity in non-normative ways without falling into the trap of the positivism latent in the anti-normative critiques of poststructuralism. I had discussed the early work of Judith Butler and more recent work in transgender theory—specifically, photography by Loren Cameron (1996) and theory by Riki Wilchins (1997). I had argued that Butler’s poststructuralist account of performativity, though subversive, was ultimately inadequate for the task of thinking gender beyond a binary construction, and I had found in Cameron’s photography and Wilchins’s writing clear manifestations of a queerness that moved beyond the gender binary in ways foreclosed by Butler’s arguments. Gender theory was stuck, I then argued, when it came to the issue of queer identity. I postulated that Husserlian transcendental phenomenology might be the way out of this impasse and called for a return to it as a method (if not the method) of thinking gender and sexual identity beyond positivism, in both its constructive and negative forms.

Gordon’s question arose out of this presentation. While I was suggesting that phenomenology might help us think gender beyond normative conceptions (that is, queerly), Gordon asked me if I thought phenomenology was itself inherently queer. In other words, while I was taking up what I saw as a practical issue (Q: How do we move gender theory forward? A: Through a return to phenomenology), Gordon pushed me to take up a theoretical issue (what is the nature of phenomenology itself?). From out of Gordon’s question, an entire series of new questions arose.

The Queer Issue

The question of the human manifests itself in several regional ontologies (studies of modes of being), the most interesting ones for me being queer theory, race theory, and feminist theory. As we explore the question of whether or not phenomenology is queer, we must first enter into one of these regional ontologies and inquire into its constituting term. So we ask the question: what does it mean for something/someone to be “queer”?

Queer is a relatively new term in the academy. Teresa de Lauretis introduced it into academic discourse as a technical term in 1991 for an issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. She used it to describe gay and lesbian studies, but it has since grown to take on several different meanings. Today, queer tends to have at least two primary uses. As an umbrella term, it signifies gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and questioning communities; as a descriptive term, it signals an identity or stance that opposes the essentialism and normativity that is implied in the terms gay, lesbian, and bisexual. It is the second meaning that holds the most interest for our purposes in this chapter, and it is this meaning that must be interrogated here.⁴

In short, we are considering queer as an adjective that describes non-normative gendered and sexual identities, actions, stances, practices, subject positions, linguistic operations, and theoretical stances, both within and beyond the academy. Those of us who use the term queer this way and who call ourselves queer in this way are making a statement that our goal in our work and in our lives is not primarily (or perhaps even at all) to be included in the discourses and practices from which we have historically and personally been excluded, though the emancipatory goal of gay and lesbian liberation movements is still on our minds. We are not primarily seeking access to mainstream culture and acceptable society; we are not asking that the concentric circles of identity-based movements for inclusion be expanded one last time to allow us room at the table of the American dream. Rather, we are taking a stance against normative thinking, against being “normalized” at the sake of our own identities and the rights of others who have not yet gained access to the table. We are making a statement that—contrary to the commonly heard position of the gay and lesbian couples seeking the right to marry, who invariably get interviewed on television shows such as 20/20—we are not “just like everyone else.” The desire to be like everyone else, we say, is a desire to be accepted not for who we are but rather for whom others want us to be. The desire to be like everyone else is the death knell of a radical politics, the signal of assimilation, and the end of the struggle for the true emancipation of human possibilities. No, we are not like everyone else, nor do we wish to be seen that way. Rather, we are a challenge to much of what straight society holds dear.⁵ We are, in fact, a danger.⁶

As I have pondered the question “is phenomenology queer?” over the past few years, I have struggled with what I mean by queer when I use it to refer to a non-normative stance. More to the point, I have struggled with how I can reconcile this non-normative stance with my philosophical inclination toward phenomenology, the main tenet of which is that we suspend all presuppositions and agendas in our search for the truth and engage in a truly critical exploration in which nothing is sacred—neither the normative nor the non-normative. So I have thought more about those of us who use the term queer in the aforementioned second sense. And I have asked the following questions: In what sense are we queers not “just like everyone else”? In what sense are we a danger? Are all of us queers polyamorous communists engaging in sadomasochistic threesomes? Are we all tattooed, pierced, shaven (or hairy), and decked out in leather or drag? Many of us are some or all of these things and proud of it. But none of us is all of these things, and even when we make the same choices, none of us makes them for quite the same reasons.

Upon further reflection, it seems to me that the second, non-normative, sense of the term queer needs to be broken down into two subcategories: anti-normative thought and post-normative thinking. The desire to fight the norm manifests itself in both of these.

In the first subcategory, the norm is seen as a substantive enemy by virtue of its opposition to those of us who stand outside of it; it is a set of beliefs—thoughts—that need to be undermined by positing directly challenging beliefs. Here polyamory (loving many people) challenges monogamy; sado-masochism challenges vanilla (i.e., “plain”) sex; threesomes challenge the couple; and polysexuality (sexual desire for many sexualities/genders) challenges monosexuality (sexual desire for one sexuality/gender). But it doesn’t stop there, for being queer is about challenging more than how we have sex. It is also about how we relate to our own bodies and identities and the meanings we attach to them. So the modified body challenges the unadorned one; the transsexual body challenges the unaltered one; and the transgendered identity (that of people who fall into neither transsexual or transvestite categories nor single-gendered ones) challenges the traditional one. Genderqueer and genderfuck challenge gender normativity. Asexuality challenges our most basic assumptions about sexual and gender identities themselves.⁷

This is a powerful stance, advocating this sense of the term queer. But is it phenomenologically sound? Is phenomenology, in other words, queer like that?

I am compelled to answer no to both of these questions, at least on the first go, for it seems to me that if one is queer in the ways and for the reason that I have suggested—that is, for the very reason of challenging the normative status quo—then queer we are but phenomenological we are not, for we are failing to take a truly critical stance—one that interrogates all of our assumptions, not simply the ones that we associate with dominant thought. And so, in pondering Gordon’s question, I wondered if there were a different sense of the term queer that might be compatible with phenomenology; thus I came to develop the second subcategory of this second meaning of the term queer: queer as a postnormative stance.

In this subcategory, the norm isn’t necessarily a substantive enemy, although it might turn out to be in particular cases or for particular persons. Rather, in this subcategory, the norm is a methodological enemy. What we are at odds with, what we challenge, what we reject and replace when we think in a way that is queer is normative thinking, not normative thought.

Normative thinking is the kind of thinking whereby we accept the world as given to us—whereby we do not question the assumptions that underlie our everyday goings-on, nor do we see our role in the world as critical thinkers. Normative thinking is the kind of non-thinking we engage in when we refer to an unnamed doctor as “he.” Normative thinking is the kind of non-thinking we engage in when we ask our children if they want to have children when they get married or assume that our coworkers are straight. Normative thinking is the kind of non-thinking we engage in when we take for granted the way the world seems to be.

Queer thinking is postnormative. Postnormative thinking does not assume that all professionals are white, that all presidents will be men, or that all people are straight. Nor does it simply posit that blacks are professionals too, that someday the president will be a woman, or that some of us aren’t straight. It calls into question these assumptions that normative culture has about the world and that we, when we fail to think, let structure our thoughts. To think queerly is to think, really to think, about gender, sex, sexuality, and indeed all forms of identity and expression as being open to various instantiations, as having multiple—even infinite—modalities, as being never what we assume them to be from surface appearances or uninterrogated presuppositions. To think queerly, then, is to make room for tattoos, piercings, transsexuality, genderfuck, S&M, group sex, polyamory, and intersexuality (having both female and male sex characteristics), as well as monosexuality (hetero and homo), monogamy, and vanilla sex—to view all as potential ways of being human. To think queerly is to recognize that most of us occupy identities in bad faith and to consciously choose not to do so ourselves. Queer thinking is critical thinking through and through.

In these ways, queer thinking and this definition of the term queer, mean refusing to be what others tell us to be simply because they tell us to be that way. And since both Freud and Foucault were definitely onto something, queer thinking also means refusing to accept who we think we are without having interrogated it simply because it seems natural to us. Queer thinking, in this sense of the term, is clearly postnormative.

A Note on the Term Normative

Before we proceed any further, a word on the term normative is in order. Analytic philosophy pairs normative with descriptive: the latter refers to the way things are; the former refers to the way things ought to be. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, uses the term normative to refer to those things society puts forth as the ideals that we all “should” (indeed, must) strive toward, if not live up to—things such as heterosexuality, monogamy, and marriage. By this usage, it may be “unethical” for us to cede to the demands of normativity. In this book, I am using the term normative in this, the psychoanalytic, sense. Thus, my calls for anti- or postnormativity should not be seen as anti-ethics; indeed, it is my position that ethics may in fact r...