E-Response

Keywords for American Cultural Studies

Edited by

Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

New York and London

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Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund.

N EW YORK U NIV ERSITY P RE S S

New York and London

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© 2007 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keywords for American cultural studies I

edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9947-5 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-9947-7 (alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9948-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-9948-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Vocabulary. 2. United States-Civilization.

3. Social structure-Terminology. 4. Culture-Terminology.

I. Burgett, Bruce, 1963- II. Hendler, Glenn, 1962-

PE1449.K49 2007

428.1-dc22 2007015067

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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49

Queer

Siobhan B. Somerville

"Queer" causes confusion, perhaps because two of its

current meanings seem to be at odds. In both popular

and academic usage in the United States, "queer" is

sometimes used interchangeably with the terms "gay"

and "lesbian" or occasionally "transgender" and "bi­

sexual." In this sense, it is understood as an umbrella

term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are

"not straight." But in some political and theoretical

contexts, "queer" is used in a seemingly contradictory

way: as a term that calls into question the stability of

any categories of identity based on sexual orientation.

In this second sense, "queer" is a critique of the ten­

dency to organize political or theoretical questions

around sexual orientation per se. To "queer" becomes a

way to denaturalize categories such as "lesbian" and

"gay" (not to mention "straight" and "heterosexual"),

revealing them as socially and historically constructed

identities that have often worked to establish and po­

lice the line between the "normal" and the "abnormal."

Fittingly, the word "queer" itself has refused to

leave a clear trace of its own origins; its etymology is

unknown. It may have been derived from the German

word quer or the Middle High German twer, which

meant "cross," "oblique," "squint," "perverse," or

"wrongheaded," but these origins have been con­

tested. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that, while

"queer" seems to have entered English in the sixteenth

187

Queer Siobhan B. Somerville

century, there are few examples of the word before

1700. From that time until the mid-twentieth century,

"queer" tended to refer to anything "strange," "odd,"

or "peculiar," with additional negative connotations

that suggested something "bad," "worthless," or even

"counterfeit." In the late eighteenth and early nine­

teenth centuries, the word "queer" began to be used

also as a verb, meaning "to quiz or ridicule," "to puz­

zle," "to cheat," or "to spoil." During this time, the ad­

jectival form also began to refer to a condition that

was "not normal," "out of sorts," "giddy, faint, or ill."

By the first two decades of the twentieth century,

"queer" became linked to sexual practice and identity

in the United States, particularly in urban sexual cul­

tures. During the 19 10s and 1920s in New York City,

for example, men who called themselves "queer" used

the term to refer to their sexual interest in other men

(Chauncey 1994). Contemporaneous literary works by

African American writers such as Nella Larsen ( 1929)

and Jean Toomer ( 1923/ 1969) suggest that the term

could also carry racialized meanings, particularly in

the context of mixed-race identities that exposed the

instability of divisions between "black" and "white."

But it was not until the 1940s that "queer" began to be

used in mainstream U.S. culture primarily to refer to

"sexual perverts" or "homosexuals," most often in a

pejorative, stigmatizing way, a usage that reached its

height during the Cold War era and that continues to

some extent today. In the early twenty-first century,

"queer" remains a volatile term; the American Heritage

Dictionary even appends a warning label advising that

the use of "queer" by "heterosexuals is often consid-

188

ered offensive" and therefore "extreme caution must

be taken concerning [its] use when one is not a mem­

ber of the group." The term has also carried specific

class connotations in some periods and contexts. On

the one hand, as one participant in a recent online fo­

rum put it, "'Queer' is a rebellion against those posh

middle-class business owners who want to define gay­

dam as being their right to enjoy all the privileges de­

nied them just cos they like cock" (Isambard 2004).

On the other hand, these class connotations are unsta­

ble. "If I have to pick an identity label in the English

language," wrote poet and critic Gloria Anzaldua, " I

pick 'dyke' o r 'queer,' though these working-class

words . .. have been taken over by white middle-class

lesbian th-eorists in the academy" ( 1998, 263-64).

The use of "queer" in academic and political con­

texts beginning in the late 1980s represented an at­

tempt to reclaim this stigmatizing word and to defy

those who have wielded it as a weapon. This usage is

often traced to the context of AIDS activism that re­

sponded to the epidemic's devastating toll on gay men

in U.S. urban areas during the 1980s and 1990s. An

outgrowth of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash

Power), a powerful AIDS activist group, Queer Nation

became one of the most visible sites of a new politics

that was "meant to be confrontational-opposed to

gay assimilationists and straight oppressors while in­

clusive of people who have been marginalized by any­

one in power" (Escoffier and Berube 199 1, 14-16).

Queer political groups have not always achieved this

goal of inclusiveness in practice, but they have sought

to transform the homophobic ideologies of dominant

U.S. culture, as well as strategies used by existing les­

bian and gay rights movements, many of which have

tended to construct lesbian and gay people as a viable

"minority" group and to appeal to liberal rights of pri­

vacy and formal equality (Duggan 1992).

The more recent movement to gain the legal right

to same-sex marriage demonstrates some of the salient

differences between a lesbian/gay rights approach and

a queer activist strategy. While advocates for same-sex

marriage argue that lesbians and gay men should not

be excluded from the privileges of marriage accorded

to straight couples, many queer activists and theorists

question why marriage and the nuclear family should

be the sites of legal and social privilege in the first

place. Because same-sex marriage would leave intact a

structure that disadvantages those who either cannot

or choose not to marry (regardless of their sexual ori­

entation), a more ethical project, queer activists argue,

would seek to detach material and social .privileges

from the institution of marriage altogether (Ettelbrick

1989; Duggan 2004b).

Sometimes in conversation with these activist ef­

forts and sometimes not, queer theory emerged as an

academic field during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, scholars who

are now referred to as queer theorists argued that sex­

uality, especially the binary system of "homosexual"

and "heterosexual" orientations, is a relatively modern

production. As Foucault ( 1978) argued, although illicit

acts between two people of the same sex had long

been punishable through legal and religious sanctions,

these practices did not necessarily define individuals as

Queer Siobhan B. Somerville

"homosexual" until the late nineteenth century.

While historians have disagreed about the precise pe­

riods and historical contexts in which the notion of

sexual identity emerged, Foucault's insistence that sex­

uality "must not be thought of as a kind of natural

given" has been transformative, yielding an under­

standing of sexuality not as a psychic or physical drive,

but as a "set of effects produced in bodies, behavior,

and social relations by a certain deployment" of power

( 127). Moving away from the underlying assumptions

of identity politics and its tendency to locate stable

sexual subjects, queer theory has focused on the very

process of sexual subject formation. If much of the

early work in lesbian and gay studies tended to be or­

ganized around an opposition of homosexuality and

heterosexuality, the primary axis of queer studies

shifted toward the distinction between normative and

non-normative sexualities as they have been produced

in a range of historical and cultural contexts.

For this reason, a key concept in queer theory is the

notion of "heteronormativity," a term that refers to

"the institutions, structures of understanding, and

practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem

not only coherent-that is, organized as a sexuality­

but also privileged" (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548 n.

2). Heteronormativity, it is important to stress, is not

the same thing as heterosexuality (though the two are

not entirely separable); indeed, various forms of het­

erosexuality (adultery, polygamy, and interracial mar­

riage, among others) have historically been proscribed

rather than privileged (Rubin 1984; C. Cohen 1997;

Burgett 2005). Rather, heteronormativity is a form of

189

Queer Siobhan B. Somerville

power that exerts its effects on both gay and straight

individuals, often through unspoken practices and in­

stitutional structures.

Because queer critique has the potential to destabi­

lize the ground upon which any particular claim to

identity can be made (though, importantly, not de­

stroying or abandoning identity categories altogether),

a significant body of queer scholarship has warned

against anchoring the field primarily or exclusively to

questions of sexuality. Instead, these scholars have ar­

gued, we should dislodge "the status of sexual orienta­

tion itself as the authentic and centrally governing

category of queer practice, thus freeing up queer the­

ory as a way of reconceiving not just the sexual, but

the social in general" (Harper et al. 1997). In local, na­

tional, and transnational contexts, such a formulation

allows us to contest constructions of certain issues as

"sexual" and others as "non-sexual," a distinction that

has often been deployed by U.S. neoconservatives and

neoliberals alike to separate "lesbian and gay" move­

ments from a whole range of interconnected struggles

for social justice.

The field of queer studies has increasingly chal­

lenged this tendency by using "intersectional" ap­

proaches that begin from the assumption that

sexuality cannot be separated from other categories of

identity and social status. Whereas some early queer

theorists found it necessary to insist upon understand­

ing sexuality as a distinct category of analysis, one that

could not be fully accounted for by feminist theories

of gender, it is now clear that sexuality and gender can

never be completely isolated from one another (Rubin

190

1984; Sedgwick 1990). Indeed, Judith Butler ( 1990, 5)

has shown that our very notions of sexual difference

(male/female) are an effect of a "heterosexual matrix."

A significant body of scholarship, largely generated

out of questions raised by transgender identity and

politics, has insisted on the pressing need to revisit

and scrutinize the relationships among sex, gender,

and sexuality, with an emphasis on recalibrating theo­

ries of performativity in light of materialist accounts

of gender (Stone 1991; Prosser 1998).

If queer theory's project is characterized, in part, as

an attempt to challenge identity categories that are

presented as stable, transhistorical, or authentic, then

critiques of naturalized racial categories are also crucial

to its antihormative project. As a number of critics

have shown, heteronormativity derives much of its

power from the ways in which it (often silently) shores

up as well as depends on naturalized categories of

racial difference in contexts ranging from sexology

and psychoanalysis to fiction and cinema (Somerville

2000; Eng 200 1). Heteronormativity itself must be un­

derstood, then, as a racialized concept since "[racially]

marginal group members, lacking power and privilege

although engaged in heterosexual behavior, have of­

ten found themselves defined as outside the norms

and values of dominant society" (C. Cohen 1997,

454). This insistence on putting questions of race at

the center of queer approaches has been vigorously ar­

gued most recently in a body of scholarship identified

as "queer of color critique" (Ferguson 2004).

At the same time that intersectional approaches

have become more central to queer studies, the field

has also increasingly turned to the specificities of na­

tion-based models and the dynamics of globalization

and imperialism. Scholars have begun to interrogate

both the possibilities and the limitations of queer the­

ory for understanding the movement of desires and

identities within a transnational frame, as well as the

necessity of attending to the relationship between the

methods of queer theory and colonial structures of

knowledge and power (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999;

Manalansan 2003; Gopinath 2005). The resulting in­

terest in the "nation" and its constitutive role in

processes of racialization and sexualization has raised

new questions about the ways that queer theory might

usefully interrogate the nation's less charismatic com­

panion-the state. Jacqueline Stevens (2004, 225), for

instance, has envisioned queer theory and activism as

a site for articulating "a revolution against all forms of

state boundaries . . . the unhindered movement and

full-fledged development of capacities regqrdless of

one's birthplace or parentage. "

If the origins of the term "queer" are elusive, its fu­

ture horizons might be even more so. While the term

itself has a contested and perhaps confusing history,

one of the points of consensus among queer theorists

has been that its parameters should not be prema­

turely (or ever) delimited (Sedgwick 1993; Berlant and

Warner 1995). The field of queer studies is relatively

young, but as it has made inroads in a number of dif­

ferent academic fields and debates, some critics have

asserted that the term is no longer useful, that it has

become passe, that it has lost its ability to create pro­

ductive friction. Pointing to its seeming ubiquity in

popular-cultural venues such as the recent television

shows Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or Queer as Folk,

others criticize the ways that the greater circulation of

"queer" and its appropriation by the mainstream en­

tertainment industries have emptied out its opposi­

tional political potential. Whether we should be

optimistic or pessimistic about the increasingly visibil­

ity of "queer" culture remains an open question.

Meanwhile, scholars continue to carefully interrogate

the shortcomings and the untapped possibilities of

"queer" approaches to a range of diverse issues, such

as migration (Luibheid and Cantu 2005) or temporal­

ity (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005). Whatever the

future uses and contradictions of "queer," it seems

likely that the word will productively refuse to settle

down, demanding critical reflection in order to be un­

derstood in its varied and specific cultural, political,

and historical contexts.

191