Shakespeare and Queer Theory

Melissa E. Sanchez, Evelyn Gajowski

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781474256681
• eBook ISBN: 9781474256698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare and Queer Theory is an indispensable guide on the ongoing critical debates about queer method both within and beyond Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Clearly elucidating the central ideas of the theory, the field's historical emergence from feminist and gay and lesbian studies within the academy, and political activism related to the AIDS crisis beyond it, it also illuminates current debates about historicism and embodiment.

Through a series of original readings of texts including Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Venus and Adonis, as well as film adaptations of early modern drama including Derek Jarman's The Tempest and Edward II, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and Julie Taymor's Titus, it illustrates the value of queer theory to Shakespeare scholarship, and the value of Shakespearean texts to queer theory.

1

Queer Theory (Without Shakespeare)

When the field of ‘queer theory’ first arrived on the academic scene in the 1990s, it appeared to many to have emerged already fully formed, like Athena bursting forth from Zeus’s skull. We can appreciate just how unexpected queer theory’s rise to prominence and prestige was by contrasting its seemingly instant celebrity with the embattlement and marginalization experienced by scholars of gay and lesbian studies in the years prior. Writing in 1990, Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr, describe the anxiety and resistance with which academics had met the grass-roots assemblage of gay and lesbian histories:

Some [professional historians] have been reluctant to publish in the field due to fear of the possible consequences for their careers; sympathetic faculty still caution graduate students to avoid linking themselves to so ‘controversial’ a topic. Many scholars still consider the history of homosexuality a marginal field, if not an embarrassing or distasteful subject of study. (1990: 2)

Within a few years, a sea-change had occurred. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner note in a 1995 essay on the field that ‘Queer theory has already incited a vast labor of metacommentary, a virtual industry … Yet the term itself is less than five years old,’ and they wonder, ‘Why do people feel the need to introduce, anatomize, and theorize something that can barely be said yet to exist?’ (1995: 343). The same year, Leo Bersani could sardonically comment that

There have been moments at some universities … when, to read a bulletin board of upcoming lectures and colloquia, a visitor might think that all the humanities departments had been merged into a single gay and lesbian studies programs. Liberal straights respectfully attend lectures at which their own sexual preferences are confidently assigned to the erotic junkheap of compulsory heterosexuality – a practice into which millions of human beings have apparently been forced and from which they are now invited to liberate themselves. (1995: 14–15)

Writing in retrospect, David Halperin recalls that ‘the moment that the scandalous formula “queer theory” was uttered … it became the name of an already established school of theory, as if it constituted a set of specific doctrines, a singular, substantive perspective on the world, a particular theorization of human experience’ (2003: 340).

The apparent speed with which queer theory gained visibility and prestige in US universities, however, obscures the decades of activism and scholarship that laid its political and intellectual foundations. In the first section of this chapter, I examine the history of the term ‘queer theory’. Subsequent sections explain the theoretical and political movements that preceded and made possible queer theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism; psychoanalysis; the history of sexuality; gay and lesbian activism and scholarship; the feminist sex wars; women of colour feminism; and HIV/AIDS activism. In the final two sections, I discuss key tenets of the classical queer theory of the 1990s and the more recent concerns and debates of the past decade.

Why ‘queer’?

The term ‘queer theory’ as the name of this field of study is usually credited to Teresa de Lauretis. As de Lauretis explains in the ‘Introduction’ to a 1991 volume of differences on the topic, she chose ‘queer’ in order to ‘problematize some of the discursive constructions and constructed silences in the emergent field of “gay and lesbian studies”’ (1991: iii–iv). In conversation with but distinct from gay and lesbian studies, queer studies can analyse and challenge ‘the respective and/or common grounding of current discourses and practices of homo-sexualities in relation to gender and race, with their attendant differences of class or ethnic culture, generational, geographical, and socio-political location’ (1991: iii–iv). In choosing the non-identitarian and non-academic term ‘queer’, de Lauretis repurposes what had previously been a homophobic slur into a term whose capaciousness would enable analysis of the imbrication of sexual normativity with other sources of hierarchy and privilege.

In his introduction to another formative collection of essays, Fear of a Queer Planet (1993), Michael Warner explains the utility of the term ‘queer’ at even greater length. Queer theory, he argues,

rejects the minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. Rather than treat gays and lesbians as a distinct minority group defined by same-sex object choice and the demand for tolerance and legal protection, ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. (1993: xxvi)

Queer theory, in other words, maintains that securing a just and safe world for sexual minorities requires critique of the very concepts of the normal, the private and the political. This means beginning from the premise that the subject of queer politics is neither knowable nor namable in advance.

Whereas gay and lesbian studies generally focus on the history and significance of the homosexual–heterosexual distinction, queer theory examines the relation between queerness and normativity. Because gender of object choice was (and is) the most visible dimension of normativity, gay and lesbian and queer analysis often converge. But as I noted in the introduction, a (perhaps the) signal intervention of queer theory is to differentiate heterosexuality (which I’ll define as desire for genital contact exclusively with members of the opposite sex assignment) from heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexual desire is uniquely natural and healthy). As Berlant and Warner explain, queer theory allows us to see that heterosexuality’s ‘coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms … Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative’ (1998: 548, n. 2, original emphasis). Berlant and Warner vividly illustrate the distinction between heterosexuality and heteronormativity by describing a leather-bar performance of erotic vomiting. ‘A boy, twentyish, very skateboard, comes on the low stage at one end of the bar, wearing lyrca shorts and a dog collar’ and ‘sits loosely in a restraining chair’; his (male) partner slowly force-feeds him, keeping him just ‘at the threshold of gagging’. The performance climaxes when the top inserts his fingers into the boy’s throat to induce vomiting, ‘insistently offering his own stomach for the repeated climaxes’. Significantly, this ‘scene of intimacy and display, control and abandon, ferocity and abjection’ excludes the specifically genital contact and gendered desire usually associated with sexuality. Reporting that ‘Word has gone around that the boy is straight,’ Berlant and Warner ask, ‘What does that mean in this context?’ (1998: 565). To be ‘straight’ or ‘heterosexual’ is not necessarily to be ‘normal’.

The project of queer theory is to consider the numerous ways that erotic fantasy, desire and practice exceed and fracture what Berlant and Warner elsewhere call a ‘fantasized mainstream’ accorded legal, social and economic benefits (1995: 345). To focus only on gender of object choice, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in a frequently cited explanation of the value of queer theory, is to overlook ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (1993: 8). Any firm distinction between the ‘queer’ and the ‘straight’ or the ‘normative’, in this analysis, already seeks to manage and limit gendered and erotic possibilities. Judith Butler, likewise, argues that ‘if identity is a necessary error, then the assertion of “queer” will be necessary as a term of affiliation, but it will not fully describe those it purports to represent’. The value of the term lies in its ‘contingency’ and ‘specific historicity’, which permit future generations of scholars and activists to ‘expose, affirm, and rework it’ (1993: 230).

The ethical, political and hermeneutic value of ‘queer’, for a number of critics, lies in its resistance to assimilation and categorization. David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, for instance, argue that queer theory offers a ‘“subjectless” critique’ that ‘disallows any positing of a proper subject of or object for’ the field, ‘no fixed political referent’ or ‘positivist assumptions’ (2005: 3; original emphasis). How this resistance to a fixed agenda or subject would shape queer politics has been the subject of vigorous debate. Lee Edelman insists that ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’; accordingly, politics understood as a collective project of building a better future is antithetical to queerness (2004: 17). By contrast, Muñoz argues that ‘The future is queerness’s domain … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ even as he critiques ‘the ontological certitude’ that he understands as ‘partnered with the politics of presentist and pragmatic contemporary gay identity’ (2009: 1, 11). In other words, while they disagree about the political value of a focus on the future, Eng, Halberstam, Muñoz and Edelman share a rejection of identitarian queerness anchored on substantial or ontological definitions of ‘the queer’. The instability of the term itself requires a certain humility about its positions and procedures. As Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz put it, ‘one of the field’s key theoretical and political promises’ is its openness ‘to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations’ and recognition that ‘we must sometimes relinquish not only our epistemological but also our political certitude’ (2005: 3, 15).

The expansiveness and non-referentiality of ‘queer’ has not been without detractors from within queer and gay and lesbian studies. For some scholars, the shift from gay and lesbian studies to queer theory came at the cost of intellectual rigour and political urgency. Just three years after coining the term ‘queer theory’, de Lauretis would explicitly distance herself from the field with the charge that it had ‘quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry’ (1994: 296). If ‘queer’ theory amounts to nothing more than ‘ludic postmodernism’, Donald Morton charges, the material and historical dimensions of sexual desire and identity, along with any serious political agenda, might disappear altogether (1996: 2–3). In its attention to the instability, indeterminacy and constructedness of sexuality, Bersani notes, queer theory can de-specify and disembody homosexuality altogether: ‘gays have been de-gaying themselves in the very process of making themselves visible’, with the logical end that ‘there is no longer any homosexual subject to oppose the homophobic subject’ (1995: 32, 56). This de-specification, Brad Epps points out, carries its own ironically identitarian agenda. When queer theory ‘makes fluidity a fetish’, the result is that ‘queer’ itself ‘becomes a term, if not an identity, to be protected, defended, and preserved, to be fixed, that is, as designating a lack of fixity, a generally free fluidity’ in order to disavow its own materiality and limitations, or ‘the ideological baggage and national limits of the term queer itself’ (2001: 413, 415; original emphasis). As a prestigious and politically correct ‘game the whole family can play’, in Halperin’s acerbic evaluation, queer theory is too easily taken up by ambitious scholars with no investment in gay and lesbian politics or the transformation of academic protocol or practice (2003: 342, 343). Or, in Sharon Marcus’s more measured précis of this critique, ‘if everyone is queer, then no one is – and while this is exactly the point queer theorists want to make, reducing the term’s pejorative sting by universalizing the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power’ (2005: 196).

As I will discuss in the final section of this chapter, debates over the conceptual and political value of ‘queer’ theory persist. These differences are not a bad thing; they are a sign that the field continues to change and evolve, with obsolescence and invention mutually constitutive elements of the queer endeavour. First, however, I want to move systematically through the manifold perspectives that have shaped this unwieldy, self-contradictory field.

Deconstruction and poststructuralism

The insights of deconstruction and poststructuralism have significantly enabled queer theory’s challenge to definitions of subjectivity and sexuality as coherent, rational or monolithic. Deconstruction and poststructuralism at once build on and critique the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. In Saussure’s structuralist view, ‘language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms’ ([1916] 1994: 80). No individual element can be understood apart from the larger structure that determines its identity and significance. Words do not convey any metaphysical substance, and nothing has meaning in isolation of the rest of the system: ‘In language there are only differences’ ([1916] 1994: 121). So ‘black’ signifies, or conveys meaning, only in contrastive relation to ‘white’, ‘woman’ only in relation to ‘man’, and so forth. We do not have access to reality except through the medium of language, which itself structures thought and experience. And language is itself at once arbitrary (there is no intrinsic connection between words and the things or concepts they name) and systematic (the individual inherits rather than invents or determines it). For many scholars writing in the wake of Saussure, structuralism reshaped understandings of self and society beyond language. The structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, adapted Saussure’s systematic view of language to the relation between human beings and their cultures, on the one hand, and among different cultures, on the other. In its attention to system rather than individual, structuralism radically questions humanist and Enlightenment views of human autonomy, agency and authenticity. Nonetheless, structuralist thought remains optimistic that systems are themselves orderly and rational. Consequently, observation, data-collection and logical deduction give us access to reliable knowledge about language, culture and the world they mediate.

Deconstructive and poststructuralist theorists agree that such confidence is unwarranted. Jacques Derrida, a founding theorist of deconstruction, argues that the binary oppositions that create significance themselves require a fixed, metaphysical centre of meaning that holds the structure in place. Logically, then, structuralism depends on the presence of something beyond the structure – a belief in extra-linguistic essence or truth that Derrida calls a ‘metaphysics of presence’ – to which one term in any binary set is attributed greater proximity and therefore greater value (for instance, reason is valued over matter, culture over nature, man over woman). Yet, Derrida further argues, such transcendental meaning is itself a product of language and so always deferred. This is because any given term in a binary set is itself at once overdetermined (it has multiple significations that cannot be fully reconciled) and indeterminate (because we cannot decide which of the irreconcilable meanings to exclude). Rather than presence at the centre of human language, Derrida finds an aporia – a lack conceptualized not as non-existence but as a space from which something inarticulable is missing.¹

Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist writings on authorship have profoundly impacted queer conceptions of subjectivity and agency. In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes proposes that the agency, intention and singularity that we associate with authorship and, more generally, individuality is itself a product of competing and contradictory linguistic and cultural forces ([1967] 1977). Writing is not ‘expressive’ in the sense of Romantic individualism that intentionally conveys singular truth or meaning; writing is a system of signs whose significance is indeterminate, dependent on readers who help create its meaning beyond anything its writer might have thought or intended (Barthes [1973] 1974: 10–16). Foucault considers writing in terms of ‘discourse’ that challenges the ‘author-function’, or the construction of a single and controlling origin of a text’s meaning. Rather than seek to establish the ‘real’ author of a text or ask what that text really means, Foucault maintains, we must ask about the discursive conditions that produce particular appearances of individual subjectivity ([1969] 1977: 138).

Barthes and Foucault’s challenge to a humanist idea of intentional, original authorship is not limited to studies of literature; it is also a broader challenge to the belief in a subject that precedes the discursive systems that, deconstructive and poststructuralist philosophers argue, create the possibilities of meaning and identification. This emphasis on the contradiction and inconsistency inherent to any system helped enable a queer critique of identity by questioning the ideals of agency, subjectivity and authenticity on which normative views of selfhood, desire and sexuality rest.

Psychoanalysis

Originated by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis remains a rich and nuanced system for discussing sexuality. To be sure, Freud’s work was appropriated by a medical and psychiatric establishment that for decades would contribute to the oppression of sexual minorities. In the United States, for instance, the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973, and both medical practice and popular culture treated same-sex desire as a pathology to be cured in the interest of individual and societal health. Yet the work of Freud and his interpreters (some of the most notable were Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche) has also provided a consistent resource for a queer questioning of the view that heterosexuality is natural and normal.

One of Freud’s key insights for queer theory is that perversion is innate and universal; ‘normality’ is imposed for particular social ends but never with complete success. In a 1905 essay on ‘Infantile Sexuality’, Freud observes that children are ‘polymorphously perverse’, and that the ease with which they ‘can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities’ reveals that ‘an aptitude for them is innately present in their disposition’ ([1905] 1975: 57). Moreover, ‘this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic’, one that is inhibited to varying degrees by ‘shame, disgust, pity and the structures of morality and authority erected by society’ ([1905] 1975: 97).² As Jonathan Dollimore neatly summarizes Freud’s position, ‘one does not becomes a pervert but remains one’ (1991: 176).

The view that we all remain perverts – or queers – is central to Freud’s development of theories of ambivalence, narcissism and masochism, which he sees as complex and counterintuitive responses to both organic and cultural hindrances to satisfaction and mastery.³ In his later works, especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that in its perversity and aggression, the sexual instinct is irreconcilable with the demands of civilization. Positing that ‘the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Shakespeare and Queer Theory
• 1. Queer Theory (Without Shakespeare)
• 2. Homoeroticism in Shakespeare Studies
• 3. Queerness Beyond Homoeroticism
• 4. How Queer Is the Shakespearean Canon?
• 5. The Politics of Form: Queer Shakespearean Film
• Conclusion: Whose Shakespeare?
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint