LGBT Studies and Queer Theory

New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain

Karen Lovaas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781560233169
• eBook ISBN: 9781136569913
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Find out how the tension between LGBT studies and queer theory exists in the classroom, politics, communities, and relationships

LGBT Studies and Queer Theory: New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain examines the similarities and differences between LGBT studies and queer theory and the uneasy relationship between the two in the academic world. This unique book meets the challenge that queer theory presents to the study and politics of gay and lesbian studies with a collection of essays from leading academics who represent a variety of disciplines. These original pieces place queer theory in social and historical contexts, exploring the implications for social psychology, religious studies, communications, sociology, philosophy, film studies, and women's studies. The book's contributors address queer theory's connections to a wide range of issues, including the development of capitalism, the evolution of the gay and lesbian movement, and the study of bisexuality and gender.

Many scholars working in gay and lesbian studies still question the intellectual and political value of queer theory. As a result, queer theory has often been concentrated in the humanities, while gay and lesbian studies are concentrated in the social sciences and history. But this has begun to change in the past 10-15 years, as documented by the 12 essays presented in LGBT Studies and Queer Theory: New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain.

LGBT Studies and Queer Theory: New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain includes:

• historical notes on LGBT studies and queer theory
  
• some continuing tensions between LGBT studies and queer theory
  
• doubts about whether queer theory can lead to social change
  
• an analysis of the current state of proto-fields of LGBT studies and queer studies in religion
  
• concerns that queer theory's "erasure of identity" feeds into late capitalism
  
• an analysis of variability in social psychologists' studies of anti-homosexual prejudice
  
• an exploration of the commodification of queer identities in independent cinema
  
• how and why the category of bisexuality has been marginalized
  
• a historical review and assessment of recent bisexual theory
  
• a case study of Provincetown, Massachusetts
  
• an investigation of the interarticulation of race/ethnicity and gender
  
• a case study of the struggle to introduce LGBT studies in the curriculum at West Chester University
  
• and much more

LGBT Studies and Queer Theory: New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain is an essential read for researchers, academics, and practitioners involved in exploring multifaceted aspects of LGBT Studies and Queer Theory and their points of convergence and divergence.

INTERSECTIONS

Historicizing (Bi) Sexuality: A Rejoinder for Gay/Lesbian Studies, Feminism, and Queer Theory

Steven Angelides, PhD

Monash University

SUMMARY. One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality and to work the hetero/homosexual structure to the point of critical collapse. Despite an epistemic location within this very structure, however, the category of bisexuality has been largely marginalized and even erased from the deconstructive field of queer theory. This article explores some of the factors behind this treatment of bisexuality and suggests that bisexuality’s marginalization and erasure brings into relief the strained relationship between the fields of gay/lesbian history, feminism, and queer theory. In exploring some early influential queer deconstructionist texts, it argues that in overlooking the role the category of bisexuality has played in the formation of the hetero/homosexual structure, the project of queer deconstruction has in important ways fallen short of its goals. The author concludes with a call to rethink conventional deconstructive reading practices. doi:10.1300/J082v52n01_06 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Queer theory, feminism, gay/lesbian studies, bisexuality, social constructionism, deconstruction, history

Any discourse that is based on the questioning of boundary lines must never stop questioning its own.

–Barbara Johnson (1987, p. 14)

The field of queer deconstructive theory is heavily indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian theory, poststructuralism, and Derridean deconstruction. One of its primary principles is the claim that all identities, sexual or otherwise, are only ever constructed relationally. The central paradigm of analysis has been the axis of sexuality in general and the hetero/homosexual opposition in particular. Queer theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Diana Fuss, and Lee Edelman, among others, have produced many useful studies that serve to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality and work the hetero/homosexual opposition, as Fuss (1991, p. 1) puts it, to the “point of critical exhaustion.” Despite an epistemic location within this very opposition, however, the category of bisexuality has been curiously marginalized and erased from some of the founding texts of queer deconstructive theory. It is an analysis of this phenomenon that concerns me in this article. I am going to suggest that the marginalization and erasure of bisexuality brings into relief the strained relationship between the fields of gay/lesbian history, feminism, and queer theory.

While many bisexual theorists have identified this marginalization and erasure of bisexuality (e.g., Eadie, 1993; Hemmings, 1993; James, 1996; Young, 1997), none has yet provided an adequate explanation of how and why it has occurred. This article attempts to do this by subjecting some of the early foundational works of queer deconstructive theory to historical and deconstructive critique. I will argue that the failure to account for bisexuality is the effect of two interrelated factors. First, contrary to stated aims, one of the tendencies of many queer theorists has been to think the two axes of gender and sexuality vertically or hierarchically rather than relationally and obliquely. Second, interrogations of the axes of gender and sexuality have been subsumed within poorly historicized deconstructive frameworks. What this means, I will contend, is that efforts to deconstruct the hetero/homosexual structure have foundered, on the one hand, because of a failure to address the history of (bi) sexuality and on the other, because of the methodological tensions between gay/lesbian history, feminism, and queer theory.

REREADING THE HISTORY OF (BI) SEXUALITY

In what might appear at first sight to be a statement of the obvious, Jo Eadie (1993, p. 139) begins her article on bisexual politics with the claim that “[l]ike all sexualities, ‘bisexuality’ has a history.” Yet as Eadie herself is fully aware, this history has scarcely even begun to be told. Histories of homosexuality, and increasingly of heterosexuality, abound. Yet bisexuality scarcely figures within the historiography of sexuality in general. It is certainly true that the study of bisexuality has received much greater attention in recent years. A history of bisexuality in the ancient world has been written by Eva Cantarella (1992), and a number of articles on aspects of bisexuality in the history of modern sexuality have been produced (e.g., Storr, 1997; Udis-Kessler, 1996). A number of edited collections that contain articles concerned with theorizing bisexuality and bisexual politics have also appeared in recent years (Beemyn & Eliason, 1996; Bristow & Wilson, 1993; Hall & Pramaggiore, 1996; Hemmings, 2002). Merl Storr’s edited collection, Bisexuality: A Critical Reader (1999), has collated a number of significant historical documents that were pivotal to modern theorizations of bisexuality. In spite of a flurry of publications on the subject of bisexuality in the last decade or so, however, the epistemological category of bisexuality has not been historicized in relation to those of homo- and heterosexuality. Marjorie Garber (1995) has offered the most comprehensive study on bisexuality, demonstrating the centrality of bisexuality to manifestations and meanings of human eroticism. While she traces bisexuality in a wide range of cultural, historical, and literary texts, she is less concerned with historicizing bisexuality as an epistemological category. Garber’s book, like most of the texts on bisexuality cited above, is motivated by questions of visibility and representation, and of providing concepts and models for thinking about how we might better understand, theorize, and represent bisexual identities and desires in history and culture.¹ This is a very different enterprise than one concerned with historicizing (and deconstructing) the epistemological conditions of possibility of the very category of bisexuality (and thus of homo- and heterosexuality). Yet it is a diachronic historical analysis of bisexuality in relation to categories of hetero- and homosexuality that is missing in the historiography of sexuality.

It seems to me that there are at least two reasons for the erasure of bisexuality from the historiographical field of sexuality. Dominated by the field of gay and lesbian history, the historiography of sexuality has been marked by a methodological reliance on an identity paradigm. Central to this paradigm has been a distinction between sexual behavior and sexual identity. Constructionist historians, cautious of conflating homosexuality and homosexual identity, have found it useful to examine the history of sexuality through this distinction. This approach has been effective, as Jeffrey Weeks (1990, p. 3) has observed, as a way of distinguishing “between homosexual behaviour, which is universal, and a homosexual identity, which is historically specific.” However, this introduces conceptual problems of its own. While homosexual identity is not universalized, a homosexual act is, and this only defers and displaces the problem of identity. The result is that bisexuality is completely erased from the historical record.² Chris Cagle (1996, p. 236) describes this approach as “monosexual gay historiography.” The “claim that homosexual behavior is universal,” he quite rightly points out, “ignores the monosexual presumption of that ‘universal.’” Neither an act nor a palpable identity–at least until the late 1960s in the case of the latter–bisexuality merely vanishes into the categories of hetero- or homosexuality.

The second reason for bisexuality’s disappearance in the historiography of sexuality is the assumption that bisexuality is merely a by-product or after-effect of the hetero/homosexual opposition. There has been tendency to assume that bisexuality is merely determined by the two poles of this opposition, and that it has no role in the diachronic formation of the opposition and of the identity categories of hetero- and homosexuality. As George Chauncey (1994) declares, “Even the third category of ‘bisexuality’ depends for its meaning on its intermediate position on the axis defined by those two poles” (p. 13, emphasis added). In the anthology Bisexualities (Haeberle & Gindorf, 1998), Erwin Haeberle argues something similar, stating that the category of bisexuality “did not arise,” indeed, “could not come into existence,” until after “the simple opposition of homo/heterosexuality had been invented” (p. 14). Embedded in these claims of Chauncey and Haeberle is both a historical question, about the actual invention and formation of the category of bisexuality, and a theoretical, or epistemological, question, about the relationship between the three terms heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. I am not convinced that either of the fields of gay/lesbian history or queer theory have fully grasped the extent to which these historical and theoretical questions are mutually informing and, indeed, indissociable. This speaks, I will argue, to the fraught nature of the disciplinary relationship between the two enterprises.

The queer intervention in critical theory and cultural studies has held out enormous promise in its deconstructive critique of identitarian frameworks and of the hetero/homosexual opposition. As Lisa Duggan (1995, p. 197) has suggested, these “critiques, applied to lesbian and gay history texts, might produce a fascinating discussion–but so far, they have not.” Outlining the “strained relations” between the fields of queer theory and lesbian and gay history, Duggan goes on to argue that the former have too often failed to acknowledge their debt to the latter; while the latter “have largely ignored the critical implications of queer theory for their scholarly practice.” I would like to go some way in initiating a productive exchange between the two fields. While my focus in what follows is the terrain of queer deconstructive theories and not specific lesbian and gay history texts, it is through a queer deconstructive rereading of the historiography of sexuality produced in large part by these texts that has enabled me to mount an historical critique of queer theory itself. My aim in this article is not to ascribe any positive ontological or epistemological meaning to the categories of hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, but rather to insist on the impossibility of ever finally delimiting their meaning. Hence, my goal is to further the project of de-construction.³ I aim, therefore, not to produce yet another theory of sexuality, but rather, to demonstrate the epistemological consequences for anyone attempting such a project. I hope to show how the category of bisexuality, contrary to its marginalization and erasure, is implicated in any attempt to conceptualize hetero- and homosexuality as distinct categories. And this, as I will argue in the conclusion, has profound implications for deconstructive reading practices. However, before I embark on an analysis of some of the early influential works of queer deconstructive theory, and to lay the groundwork for my argument, it is necessary to provide a brief but rather differently oriented examination of some influential moments in the early history of modern categories of sexuality. I shall do this by tracing the important, and largely ignored, role of bisexuality in the epistemological formation of the hetero/homosexual opposition.⁴

The Invention of (Bi) Sexuality

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of enormous social contestation. Movements for racial and sexual equality, and the proliferation of categories of ‘effeminate’ men, ‘masculine’ women and New Women, served to challenge patriarchal boundaries of race, gender and sexuality (Chauncey, 1982-83; Cohen, 1993; Duggan, 1993; Newton, 1990; Smith-Rosenberg, 1990). A new discursive economy for the organization of the sexes and their pleasures was in the making. I call this the economy of (hetero)sexuality, the creation of two distinct but interrelated epistemic registers, sex/gender and sexuality. Through a historically strategic alliance, this newly emerging western economy began at the turn of the century to subsume human subjects under a new and more complex ontological order. That is to say that there emerged during this period a significant distinction between sex role (active/passive, masculine/feminine behavior) and sexual object choice (Chauncey, 1982-83). In response to the crisis of gender boundaries and in order contain and codify deviations of sex role behavior, the category of sexuality was individuated and produced as a somewhat distinct but additional component of individual ontology (Davidson, 1987). To qualify as a human being, therefore, an individual was not only bestowed with a distinct sex and gender, but as well, with a sexuality; the latter, if all goes to ‘nature’s’ plan presumed to be the consequence of the former. One was thereby conceptualized as both a man, and a heterosexual or homosexual, a woman, and a heterosexual or lesbian.

The newly emerging registers of sex/gender and sexuality were inextricably entwined through the hegemonic discourse of evolutionary theory. Determined to reorder dominant social hierarchies, scientists explained deviations of normative being and behavior in terms of a hetero-teleological scale of evolutionary development. Blacks, homosexuals, children, and women were situated at lower points on this scale than white heterosexual men, not able (or not yet able) to reach the highest stage of (hu) man evolution. The category of bisexuality played a central role in this linear model, and thus in the epistemological configuration of the category of sexuality (Angelides, 2001). The human differences of race, age, gender and sexuality were thought to be the effect of a specific temporal and spatial relation to what evolutionists and sexologists referred to as primordial hermaphroditism or embryological bisexuality. Believed to be the earliest form of human ancestry, primordial hermaphroditism, or bisexuality, as Frank Sulloway (1979, p. 179) points out, became the evolutionists “missing bisexual link.” This was confirmed by recapitulation theory, which posited that the human embryo repeated “in its own life history the life history of the race, passing through the lower forms of its ancestors on its way to maturity” (Russett, 1989, p. 50). In other words, as Charles Darwin (1927 [1871], p. 525) posited, every individual “bears rudiments of various accessory parts, appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong[s] to the opposite sex.” This meant that blacks, women, children and homosexuals were thought to be the effect of an unsuccessful evolution, closer to, or retaining many more elements of, the originary (prehistoric) bisexuality of the human race and individual embryo. Put differently, an individual’s distance from this state of primordial bisexuality dictated the degree of one’s evolutionary advancement. Within this framework, therefore, the axes of race, age, gender and sexuality were defined and aligned by their very relation to bisexuality.

However, bisexuality posed a problem for sexological discourse. In the attempt to catalogue human sexual behavior, sexologists were confronted with the dilemma of containing its variant forms within the nascent and rigid oppositional categories of hetero- and homosexuality. After all, even in his 1897 publication, Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis (1897, p. 133) acknowledged the “person who is organically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both” (emphasis added). Similarly, Krafft-Ebing (1965, pp. 373-385) had identified what he called “psychical hermaphroditism.” Yet, sexology was unable to account for bisexuality as a form of sexuality. For instance, on the one hand, Ellis (1928 [1901], p. 88) claimed that “[t]here would seem to be a broad and simple grouping of all sexually functioning persons into three comprehensive divisions: the heterosexual, the bisexual, and the homosexual.” Yet, on the other hand, he affirmed like Krafft-Ebing, that “[m]ost of the bisexual prefer their own sex … [and that this] would seem to indicate that the bisexuals may really be inverts.” “In any case,” stated Ellis (1928 [1901], p. 278), “bisexuality merges imperceptibly into simple inversion.”

The difficulty for sexologists constrained by a linear logic of temporal succession was how to reconcile bisexuality as at one and the same time a biological cause (embryol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Guest Editors
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Theoretical Debates and Interventions
• Intersections
• Contexts
• Index