Queer Theory and Social Change

Max H. Kirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415221849
• eBook ISBN: 9781134737413
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Queer Theory and Social Change argues that there is a crisis within Queer theory over whether or not its theories can actually deliver change.
Max Kirsch presents a challenging alternative to the current fascination with post-modern analyses of identity, culture, and difference. It emphasizes the need for a discussion of the importance of communities and the role of globalization on queer movements.

Part I
Positioning Queer
theory

1 Crossroads

The current dilemma

In the summer of 1998, Christian right ministries placed full-page advertisements in newspapers across the United States offering services to “cure” homosexuals. Providing a message of love and hope for those deemed suffering, they are also the supporters of a bill in Congress that would ban federal housing funds to cities that require firms to provide domestic partnership benefits to their employees, including same-sex couples. The New York Times offers frequent reports on same-sex couples losing custody of their children, of gay men and women being thrown out of the military, and of legislation that curtails the rights of homosexuals. It is prudent to ask, therefore: after decades of fighting for sexual and gender rights, why is this backlash still occurring? Although the advertisements promising cures for homosexuals drew little response, they did receive widespread media attention that included an edition of the prime-time news magazine Nightline.

Representing the gay community was Andrew Sullivan, at that time editor of The New Republic and a conservative Republican. While declaring his full support for the ministries’ first amendment rights, Sullivan explained his opposition to the ministries’ practices by asserting that homosexuals have no more choice in their orientation than those born into a race category have about their racial group.

This dialog between political conservatives, played out in the mainstream media, claimed to include queer viewpoints, raising many questions concerning ongoing debates in queer communities. Should queer political energy be focused on deflecting challenges presented by right-wing fringe groups? Or should the agenda be a broader-based initiative of expanding rights while effecting wider social change? Are sexual and gender orientation innate, fundamental, and incorruptible, or is psychosocial and unconscious choice a factor? Moreover, what are the strategic ways to confront hidden prejudices reflected in religious “mouthtalk”? Is it strategically significant that a conservative Republican has been engaged to represent queer interests?

We note that we are living in a time when the gap between rich and poor is widening, where inequality and warfare are on the rise, where human needs are secondary to capitalist profit and accumulation, and where, finally, power is transnational and impersonal. Power and politics are central issues. But what kind of power, and what kind of politics? Members of queer communities exhibit confusion and ambivalence about these subjects. The managers of commodity production recognize that money speaks, and with a growing awareness that queer populations, or at least gay, white males, have in general more disposable income than other consumers, corporations and advertisers have been more than willing to orient their marketing campaigns to queer populations.

Temporary recognition and rights are granted when they produce profit, championed by those who understand the possibility of enhanced capitalist growth. But we know that rights will be just as fully opposed when the scapegoating of minority groups serves the same goal. The contradictions involved here are not entirely negative. The tolerance for diversity permitted by a growing economic arena does not automatically self-destruct when the productive realm weakens. Particularly for those with secure incomes not directly subject to the fluctuations of the market, the presented ideologies of fairness and justice may be kept long after general economic conditions have deteriorated.

Thus gains have not been quick to dissolve. An insistence on inclusion and equality by queer communities has succeeded in keeping crucial discussions alive. Changes have indeed come: from the continuing development of queer political organization that results in demands for recognition; from the alliances forged in reaction to the AIDS pandemic; and from the energy created by twenty-five years of a movement symbolically marked by the Stonewall uprising.

The politics of these movements, while not claiming to challenge or radically overturn the dominant structures of power, and despite conservative backlashes, did manage to transform the public sphere. The general population and the wider culture no longer automatically condemn queer lifestyles. Despite what “family-valued” conservatives continue to tell us, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports that most Americans now support equality for homosexuals.¹ Certainly in urban areas there is a growing acceptance of queer lifestyles and, in a few, even an acceptance of equal rights. Given these gains, it would be difficult to assert that these movements were insignificant. The question of what we can learn from them remains.

As Foucault (1980) rightly observed, discriminatory labels are vehicles for the construction of alliances that can serve as a basis for liberation. But we also know that there are other forces at play, including the purveyors of ruling ideologies to suppress or involute liberatory energy before and as it occurs.² The many displays of homophobia by the Christian right, for example, correspond to an economy that we are told is in full swing, but which in fact has produced lower standards of living for most Americans – and a dearth of jobs with livable wages. The need for social control is reflected in the State’s dialog with the extreme right, and in its record of backtracking on promises made to minority groups, including queer communities. The most notorious is perhaps President Clinton’s inaugural campaign promise regarding the acceptance of gays in the military. These facts raise the specter that some of the blame may be with the tactics that queer communities have used to gain political ground. Is it possible that we are foreshadowing disappointment by working within the framework of accepted political norms?

The struggles for recognition and inclusion have their roots in the new social movements that began in the 1960s, in what Eder (1993) has referred to as “a new politics of class.” Despite the differences and arguments that beset them, these movements and alliances resulted in the vast social scope and concern that is now labeled “diversity.”

The Reagan years worked to disenfranchise these movements, not by disqualifying them but by usurping their energy. The Reagan administration’s brilliance was its ability to redirect widespread discontent towards conservative goals. Rhetoric provided answers to the problems faced by many by proposing simple changes in attitude. The “breakdown of family values” became a metaphor for the existent problems of communities, violence, drug use, and even the exclusion of minorities from access to the basic tools for living. We were told that by repairing our thinking, we could also stimulate the economy by cutting social programs, somehow making life better for all.

What then of theory?

What is the role of intellectuals in the building of emancipatory social movements? What do we mean when we call for equality? These questions have been asked, predominately, on college campuses and in classrooms. With students continuing to demand more accountability for the relevance of their studies, we have witnessed the birth of ethnic and identity studies, disciplinary concentrations in human rights, and a challenge to what we take for granted as cultural norms. In response to calls for inclusion, identity studies have become a mainstay in college curriculums. As part of this development – and as a reaction to it – what has thus evolved is a body of theory that is now known as “Queer.”³ However, unlike its predecessors in identity and ethnic studies, and despite the new social movements from which it evolved, “Queer theory” does not promote a real public engagement or a questioning of its tenets. Indeed, I will argue that Queer theory’s highlighting of the impossibility of identity and the relativity of experience closely follows the development of current capitalist relations of production, where the self-contained individual is central to the economic goal of creating profit through production and its by-product, consuming. I will maintain that even the “newness” of Queer theory is not new, but has precursors in past theoretical debates, and that the hunger for novelty is the academic corollary to the drive for replacement labor and products by which capitalist relations of production attempt to create ongoing growth. It is thus my view that the tenets of Queer theory closely pattern the characteristics of social relations that it claims to reject. Rather than building resistance to the capitalist production of inequality, it has, paradoxically, mirrored it.

My intention, then, is to refocus current debates about a “queering of culture” to a level of analysis that includes social movements, race and class, power and dominance, and ultimately, social change. To do this, it is necessary to look historically and anthropologically at the world in which we live and the forces that affect our everyday lives. We should revisit the discussions concerning the relationship of economics to social being, to individual and social reproduction, and explore the way that “queer theorists” have used or ignored these concepts in their own work. Doing so provides both a critique and a synthesis that I hope can serve as a basis for furthering a discussion of theory, methodology, and practice.

Examining Queer theory

We start with the premise that all social analyses are, perforce, political. We live in a political world ruled by forces that are opportunistic in nature, and driven towards the maintenance of dominance that has as its goal the accumulation of wealth. As such, our work is subsumed under an infrastructure of capitalism that has specific goals not tied to human social needs beyond the reproduction of labor. The analyses that we choose to pursue are a reflection of our relationship to this dominant economic nexus and our willingness or refusal to oppose it or deny its presence.

This assertion of choice, conscious or not, has an impact on the way we look at queer communities, arguments about biological components, and the social construction of gender and sexuality, including implicit assumptions about human nature.

Behavioral and psychological phenomena are a part of this process. Our beliefs about ourselves, the ways in which we act, our ability to express ourselves, and the behaviors we exhibit all play out within the limits of our experience and our ability to adapt to our surroundings. This may seem too obvious to the reader. But many of the dominant strands of current Queer theory, such as the signification of the self, the concentration on performativity (Butler, 1992), and the deconstruction of roles and identities pose the danger of forgetting that observable norms do exist, are enforced through socialization, and are fundamental to the exercise of power. In the realm of “performed” individuality, there is no identity. In fact, I will argue that these norms are all thoroughly informed by the persisting ego in the “individual’s era” of capitalism. This level of analysis does not provide a means to analyze and to manage the alienation that capitalism produces because it codifies such differences into arguments about theory, rather than grounding them in society and history.

We thus require data on observable behavior. As Ruth Benedict succinctly summed up, “you cannot beat your culture.”⁴ For the study of gender, sexuality, and queer movements, the attentive analysis of the socio-political context is both necessary and primary. Whether we argue that sexuality and gender are social constructions or biological in nature, or both, it exists within a shared system of meanings and behaviors. This has often been forgotten in the current social context of theory that has led to analyses of social life, difference, and debates taking place within narrow academic frameworks.

The postmodern turn

Postmodernity and postmodernism

Queer theory stems from the movement in theory towards postmodernism and post-structuralism that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and which has taken up residence in the halls of humanities and social science departments, even making forays into the empirical worlds of the natural sciences. How this shift from “modern” to “postmodern” and beyond occurred is the object of much disagreement, encompassing radically different views of the social and its consequences for the everyday life of individuals.⁵

The “post” of postmodernism presupposes a concept of something after, something beyond what has already been experienced or accomplished. It is both a theoretical and a historical category. It is the juncture of these two contexts to which postmodernism and post-structuralism have come to give meaning for the present project.

“Modernism” is derived from “modernity,” that historical period of the Enlightenment where norms of reason, origins, and the search, later, for empirical validation took place. It was a reaction to the humanism of the Renaissance that emerged in the thirteenth century and an adaptation to the changes that took place with a transformation of social reproduction.⁶ From the period of the Enlightenment we have the beginnings of ideology and from ideology, state rationalization and social control, viewed as parts of a larger concept of “progress.” But we need to remember that the Enlightenment also corresponded to the development of capitalism in Europe. It was indeed a period of rapid social change: structures of the family, notions of the individual, and definitions of the “social” all were transformed, debated, and reconstituted by intellectual and political forces. There was no standard agreement here, for its leaders – from Rousseau to Condillac to the later romantics – all had their own visions of what it meant to be human, sometimes even arguing against their own work. Reason is easily generated to improve managerial styles and to better control aspects of work and daily life; rationalization is intertwined with directed activity.⁷

The reasoned logic of the Enlightenment was offset by the spiritual focus of its antagonists. These points of view have their own historical projectories and involve ongoing debates about the influence of, in particular, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. They are also contextualized within their own political and social frameworks: the French Revolution destroyed the basis for feudal obligations; the German movements against Enlightenment ideas were in the context of calls for separate identities within the Prussian Empire and the struggles for power that ensued.

The periods of the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment were followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by an increased emphasis on empiricism and managerial rationality, corresponding again to currents of capitalist growth. The theories that grew out of this period, from Lenin to liberal economics to Rostow (1960), were still primarily based on a concept of modernity, the embodiment of the Enlightenment.

What then of “postmodernity”? It is a new period, tied to the growth of the world system, where differences in social organization render “objectivity” a problem. Cultures differ from one another, knowledge taken for granted becomes questionable. In a word, reality somehow is destabilized.

But are the historical periods and their cultural reflections necessarily given? Terry Eagleton (1997), making a distinction between the historical period of “postmodernity” and a culture of “postmodernism,” tells us that “postmodernity”

has real material conditions: it springs from an historic ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of “identity politics”. Postmodernism is a style of culture which reflects something of this epochal change, in a depthless, decentered, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between “high” and “popular” culture, as well as between art and every-day experience.

(Eagleton, 1997: vii)

Postmodernity and postmodernism, then, are not the same: while the analysis of “postmodernity” can be tied to actual historical junctures, the “postmodern” is only one idea that expresses that reality. Postmodern writers, then, confronting an increasingly fragmented and purposefully divided society, have devised a theoretical framework to incorporate the pieces. Perhaps it is a more linear logic than self-identified postmodernists would care to discuss. But it is assuredly purposefully divided, for the current fragmentation we witness and experience is not a result of a unilineal or “natural” evolution of s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Positioning Queer theory
• 1. Crossroads
• 2. Making Queer theory
• PART II Evaluating practice
• 3. Considering sex, gender, and difference
• 4. Capitalism and its transgressors
• 5. Meta-identity, performativity, and internalized homophobia
• PART III Moving ahead
• 6. From culture to action
• Conclusion: Theory, politics, and the community
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index