Post-Queer Politics

David V. Ruffolo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754676751
• eBook ISBN: 9781317077169
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Post-Queer Politics, Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics. He offers a radical and intersectional new way of thinking about class, race, sex, gender, sexuality and ability that extends beyond queer studies to be truly transdisciplinary in its focus and political implications. It will appeal to readers across a range of subjects, including gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and education.

1 Post-Queer Mappings

DOI: 10.4324/9781315601724-1

“What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?”

Queer has reached a political peak. Its theoretical movements have become limited by its incessant investment in identity politics and its political outlook has in many ways attained dormant status due to its narrowed interest in heteronormativity. This is, of course, not to suggest the end of queer but instead a potential deterritorialization of queer as we know it today. Over the past two decades, a significant body of work has contributed to what is referred to as queer studies. Queer theorizations are at the heart of this anti-canonical genre where the intersection of bodies, identities, and cultures continue to be a central focus.¹ Although queer theory informs much of this work vis-à-vis the queering of theory and the theories of queer, important feminist, postcolonial, and ability theorizations have more recently informed the body of queer studies. So while I consider queer studies and theories to be interconnected (and at times interchangeable), the theoretical and philosophical movements of queer studies are certainly not restricted to or by queer theories. What remains consistent amongst these various theorizations, however, is a shared politics embedded in significations, representations, and identifications where language has become somewhat of a unified trajectory for thinking through experience. These important works without question continue to offer many insightful ways to account for the intersection of bodies, institutions, cultural practices, social traditions, political movements, and economic initiatives. Michael Warner's introduction of heteronormativity in the early 1990s monumentally framed the ways in which we think about how subjects are subjected to the normative discourses of heterosexuality and in doing so created the important spaces to challenge and reimagine these productivities.² As a result of this and many other significant contributions, queer theory has become almost exclusively interested in challenging heteronormative ideologies by examining and exposing how subjects come into being through discursive interactions. It offers a critical politics for thinking about how subjects are constituted through heteronormative discourses. Most notable, perhaps, is bringing to light how subjects become intelligible through binary identity categories such as male/female, masculine/feminine, and straight/gay.³ It queers—disturbs, disrupts, and centers—what is considered “normal” in order to explore possibilities outside of patriarchal, hierarchical, and heteronormative discursive practices. We see this, for instance, in the works of Butler (1990), Fuss (1995), and Muñoz (1999) as they explore a shift from identities to (dis)identifications. I outline elsewhere (Ruffolo 2006a) how such readings confront binary identities so as to appreciate third spaces: fixed and stable identities are reconfigured as mobile and fluid identifications, where the “I” is no longer determined by the Other but is discursively negotiated through others. Queer theory critically redefines the relationships amongst bodies, identities, and culture through a particular commitment to subjectivity as seen through significations, representations, and identifications. The vigor of queer is its commitment to disrupt ideologies, practices, concepts, values, and assumptions that are essentially normal in order to expose what is normatively essentialized. Having said this, what, you might ask, are my post-queer intentions?

¹ Teresa de Lauretis is credited for coining the term queer theory in a conference on lesbian and gay sexualities at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990. In agreement with Judith Butler, “[queer] will not fully describe those it purports to represent” (1993, 230). Consequently, queer theory can not be defined by any particular group of theorists. The following is a list of some sources that contribute to the existing body of literature known as queer theory: for introductory texts on queer theory, see Jagose (1996), Sullivan (2003), Wilchins (2004); Foucault's History of Sexuality (1978) rethinks body politics and sex/uality; Butler (1990, 1991, 1993) is credited for rethinking the relationship between sex and gender as “natural” categories through her conceptualization of performativity; Sedgwick (1990) offers a critical reading of binary oppositions; Fuss (1991, 1995) explores sexual difference through psychoanalytic identifications; Halberstam (1998, 2005), Namaste (2000, 2005), Prosser (1998), and Wilchins (1997) offer perspectives on trans theories; Stryker and Whittle (2006) also offer a collection of essays in The Transgender Studies Reader; Alexander and Mohanty (1997), Eng (2001), Ferguson (2003), Muñoz (1999), Rodriguez (2003), and Roman (1998) offer critical contributions intersecting race with queer studies; Clare (2001) and McRuer and Wilerson (2003)queer disability studies; for readings linking queer theory and education see Garber (1994), Kumashiro (2001), Pinar (1998), Ristock and Taylor (1998), Rodriguez and Pinar (2007), Ruffolo (2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008a), Talburt and Steinberg (2000); Britzman (1995, 1998, 2000) provides an important psychoanalytic reading of education; David Morton's edited collection The Material Queer (1996) includes many prominent theorists that provide “a materialist understanding of marginal sexualities”; for an edited collection linking queer theory with cultural criticism, see Morland and Willox's Queer Theory (2005). ² Michael Warner is often credited for coining the term heteronormative, where he claims that “so much privilege lies in heterosexual culture's exclusive ability to interpret itself as society” (1993, xxi). ³ I am specifically using the binaries inherent to sex, gender, and sexuality here to reflect the Western and Eurocentric discourses that have pervaded queer studies and theories over the past few decades.

In the Fall-Winter 2005 issue of Social Text, David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz ask a necessary question of queer studies today: “What's queer about queer studies now?”⁴ In the introduction, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz provide an overview of queer that sets a foundation for my critique of queer:

⁴ This edition of Social Text provides an excellent collection of responses to the question what's queer about queer studies now? The issue critically rethinks queer studies in response to the “global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.” It offers an interesting comparison between queer studies in the past with queer studies in the present: “While queer studies in the past has rarely addressed such broad social concerns, queer studies in the present offers important insights. In recent years, scholars in the field have produced a significant body of work on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). Consequently, what is offered in the following plateaus is an engagement with a “renewed queer studies” by creating a new line of flight through a politics of post-queer dialogical-becomings.

Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. (1)

By asking the question “what's queer about queer studies now,” this edition explores the purpose and value of queer in a time of global economics marked by a post-9/11 politics embedded in war and terror. It offers a critical comparison between the “broad social concerns” of queer studies in the past with the more intensely interconnected focus of queer studies in the present—work interested in “theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). Post-Queer Politics engages Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz's call for a “renewed queer studies” by taking into consideration the various interconnections amongst the wide range of contributors of this edition. It is well known that queer theory is interested in challenging binaries through an interrogation of heteronormative practices using queer as a verb (a radical process of disruption) rather than a noun (an umbrella term encompassing multiple identities). My introductory comments on the peaking of queer are situated in this relationship between queer and heteronormativity. I make the argument here and throughout this book that the queer/heteronormativity dualism is unproductive considering the contemporary complexities of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. Post-Queer Politics is primarily interested in challenging the queer/heteronormative dyad that has informed much of the theorizations of queer and the queering of theories over the past few decades. I consider the “peaking” of queer as a plateau that negotiates contemporary queer theories and post-queer theorizations. Post-Queer Politics is interested in examining the current politics of queer and the queering of politics through a renewed sense of queer that is differentiated from queer's current implications in subjectivity. Its vision is twofold: to consider what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. I am interested in the doings of post-queer rather than the beings of it so as to avoid unnecessary binaries that have resulted in the current desire for something post. This project is about the politics around “post-” and “queer” rather than a post-identitarian landscape that would situate “post-” and “queer” as binaries.

Despite my explicit intention to avoid a reading of “post-” as a definitive time and space that come after something, I must draw a somewhat stark delineation here: the “post-” of post-queer is in many respects post-subjectivity. I say this not because queer is subjectivity and post-queer is not. This, of course, would produce an unnecessary binary. Rather, as I will argue in the plateaus that follow, notions of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and dialogism (Bakhtin) can speak to the creativities and potentialities of contemporary politics that can not be accounted for in the representations, significations, and identifications inherent to subjectivity. I am therefore not suggesting that post-queer comes after subjectivity but that it functions within a creative terrain of potentialities that functions quite differently from subjectivity of which the queer/heteronormative dyad is a part of. In other words, the current politics of queer, as seen through its relations to subjectivity, are limiting for the future of queer studies because of its unequivocal commitment to the queer/heteronormative binary where the politics of such discourses are restricted by the endless cycle of significations that reposition subjects on fixed planes—bodies that are either resituated in predetermined significations (moving from one identity category/norm to another) or are represented through differentiated significations (new representations that differ from already emerged significations). My use of bodies extends beyond the ways in which queer theories think about “the body,” embodiment, corporeality, and flesh in terms of subjectivity where, for instance, movement is often accounted for through resignifications. These readings more often than not limit bodies to physical or abstract binary representations. Consequently, my use of “bodies” reaches the virtualities of politics through a consideration of bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, institutional bodies, bodies of thought, systemic bodies, and cultural bodies. I am not so much arguing for the desire to maintain or favor the terms “body” and “bodies,” but instead to challenge how these terms are read through significations, representations, and identifications and therefore the overall privileging of subjectivity.

Nomadic Becomings

My response to the question what's queer about queer studies now is an interrogation of contemporary (queer) politics that is situated in and limited by subjective capacities. I will explore post-queer intensities, creativities, and potentialities of contemporary politics by moving beyond (yet dialogically connected to and therefore never completely after) the centripetal aspects of heteronormativity and the centrifugal dynamics of queer.⁵ This necessitates a movement away from thinking about politics as a resignifying practice and instead focuses on a politics of becoming as seen through, for instance, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. Although queer continues to offer a critical politics, in agreement with Bobby Noble, the vulnerability of queer is upheld in its circulation as a centripetal and centrifugal term_ “it seems that ‘queer’ is beginning to become an unusable term; it has the potential to be centripetal or stabilizing the space it marks, or centrifugal, that is, destabilizing the spaces it flags” (2006, 9). In addition to the binary relationship between queer and heteronormativity, the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of queer also operate through a similar dualism. The centripetal and centrifugal forces suggested here are limiting because of how this inherent dualism is restricted to subjective capacities that, for instance, represent bodies through unified (centripetal) and differentiated (centrifugal) significations. Movement is therefore always restricted by the embodiment of centripetal and centrifugal forces that are only intelligible in relation to their binary counterparts. Consequently, I am less interested in disrupting queer's occupation with centripetal and centrifugal forces for this requires us to work within the existing capacities of subjectivity that I argue are limiting from the onset. In contrast, I am more concerned with creating new Bakhtinian and Deleuzo-Guattarian lines of flight that are not restricted by subjectivity and language but are instead stimulated by the potentialities and creativities of an intensive politics of becoming.

⁵ The reference to centripetal and centrifugal forces is informed through Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin describes centripetal as follows: “Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given (dan) but is always in essence posited (zadan)—and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia” (1981, 270). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Series Editors’ Preface TwO (Theory without Organs)
• Acknowledgments
• Plateau 1 Post-Queer Mappings
• Plateau 2 A Critical Politics of Becoming
• Plateau 3 Dialogic Creativities
• Plateau 4 The Materialities of Life Itself
• Plateau 5 Schizo-Academia
• Plateau 6 Biovirtualities
• Plateau 7 Involutionary Matters
• Bibliography
• Index