Thirty Years of Theory

Activist demands that have been most palatable to cisgender heterosexuals are those that foreground the right to privacy, individual autonomy, and equal access to social institutions like marriage and the military. However, queer activism and scholarship reject mainstream liberal ideals of privacy, the goal of formal equality under the law, and the desirability of assimilation into existing social institutions. Instead, queer theory and activism demand publicness, reject civility, and challenge the legitimacy, naturalness, and intrinsic value of institutions—whether marriage or the military—that regulate gender and sexuality.

• 1950s: homophile movement: demand equal rights for homosexuals in US and UK following identification through sexology
  • intertwined with sexology and anti-sodomy
• following Stonewall, 1969
• 1970s: lgs courses
• 1972: Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, Esther Newton
• mid-1970s: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, constructivism discourse
• 1980s: lgs programs
• 1980s: transgender coinage
• 1987, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP): Larry Kramer, Vito Russo, etc.; “Silence = Death”
• 1990, Queer Nation
• 1990, Epistemology of the Closet: sexual identity assignment, overlap with Western culture and construct
• 1990: Gender Trouble: gender performativity
• February 1990, Teresa de Laurentis, UCSC: “queer theory”
  • study gay and lesbian sexuality on its own merit
  • study as forms of resistance to “cultural homogenization”
  • non-normative modes of relationship, transformation
  • uncollapsing differences: unprioritizing white, middle-class gay men in studies; focus on “constructed silences” created by further intersectionality
• early 1990s, Anne Fausto-Sterling
• 1992: Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come
• 1993: Clinton, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
  • “The U.S. military’s policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clinton’s administration. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons.”
• 1999: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
• 2011: repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
• 06/26/2015: same-sex marriage legality

Lesbian and Gay Studies

• “and” “obscured differences instead of revealing them”
• essentialist, perverse presentism views; sexual identity fixed at a universal and transhistorical understanding; reclamation of lost history

Queer Theory

• constructionism: identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation
• “For Foucault, power does not repress a preexisting sexual identity; it provides the conditions needed for sexual identities to multiply.”
• “According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. He argues that medical discourse, particularly the field of sexology, which applies scientific principles to the study of sexuality, intersected with legal discourse to simultaneously create the need and the means to identify and produce knowledge about sexual identity, particularly “the homosexual.””
• Foucault, David Halperin, John D’Emilio, Jonathan Ned Katz
• Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology: minoritizing and universalizing
  • minoritizing: homosexuality viewed only as relevant to a minority group, homosexuals
  • universalizing: sexuality viewed as relevant to all

Normativity

• “Although inclusion in these institutions is contingent, precarious, and not evenly distributed among all members of the LGBTQ+ community, these two shifts in policy secured access and rights for some LGBTQ+ persons—specifically, white middle-class gay men for whom marriage equality has often been a primary political concern.”
• procapitalist, limited views, non-trans-inclusive; assimilationist, single-issue policies, non-radical social change
• homonormativity: attempts by LGBTQ+ persons to assimilate into institutions like marriage and the military that reproduce hierarchy and are associated with oppression
  • neoliberalism: a political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government; it accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization.
• Lisa Duggan
• Jasbir Puar
  • Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times: assimilation under intersectionality
  • “the deviancy and abjection previously associated with gay and lesbian sexualities is redirected to brown Muslim bodies and instrumentalized to justify the war on terror. That is, the United States appeals to its tolerance of some queers to construct itself as civil and progressive. It then attaches sexual backwardness and violent homophobia to Islamic nations.”

Transformative Politics

• José Esteban Muñoz’s: “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.
  • transforming politics radically vs. assimilation into society: critical race theory, queer theory, intersectionality
• Charlene A. Carruthers: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements; “Black queer feminist lens” renouncing middle-class public sphere
  • public sphere: identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality
  • decentering queerness
  • importance of Black imagination: non-procapitalist imaginings, alternative structures outside of norms
• Joshua Chambers-Letson: After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life: effects of queer creative work and creativity; “How can we queer the existing social world to make it habitable by queers?”

Gender

• early suggestion that “sex correlates with nature and gender correlates with nurture”
• “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, Gayle Rubin: constructivism and social constructionism as affecting women’s oppression and gender within heterosexual patriarchal cultures
  • sex-gender system: social structure which creates female oppression
  • “One begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and fashions domesticated women as products. […] As a preliminary definition, a ‘ sex-gender system’ is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”
  • sex is raw material and not influenced by society
• Anne Fausto-Sterling
  • social institutions maintain a dyadic sex system, but nurture vs. nature
  • intersex work: herms, ferms, merms for anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal variations
  • critics: Suzanne Kessler
• deprivilege body and genitals; “suggesting that the appearance of binary sexed bodies is actually an effect of binary gender discourse and, as discussed in the next section, binary performances of gender. In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature”

Gender Performativity

• drag culture: separation of sex, gender expression, sex roles, physical attributes, ‘natural’ behavior; drag reveals gender as a performance
• Judith Butler
  • performativity: the capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being
  • gender performativity: gender identity is unnatural and made cohesive through repeated performance; “an ongoing project with no origin”
  • argument that sex is “a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system”; “although discourse does not produce material sex differences, it organizes these differences, gives them meaning, and renders them legible”
• Jack Halberstam
  • Female Masculinity
  • gender vs. genitals, constructs of femininity/masculinity
• “For Newton, femininity is not the property of women, just as for Halberstam masculinity is not the property of men. Instead, we are all citing, at times contesting, at others complying with, existing ideas about gender and sexuality. Additionally, these ideas, and the value hierarchies that adhere to them, are maintained only by their reproduction.”

Transgender Studies

• “transgender studies challenges naturalized links between the material body, psychic structures, and gendered social roles”
• different but similar emergence to queer theory and activism; gender variance politics vs homosexuality politics
• 1992, Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: transgender → discomfort with role norms, queerness, permanent changes to life and health interventions
  • prior definition: social transition without medical intervention
  • “By refusing to accept that there is a right way to be transgender and encouraging coalition building under the newly flexible term transgender, Feinberg hoped transgender persons could build a transformative activism-oriented community.”