Queer and Then?

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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

Queer and Then?

By Michael Warner JANUARY 01, 2012

Duke University Press ends its influential

Series Q this month. It has been an impressive
ride since the first book in the series: Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick's landmark 1993
collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading
her introduction, "Queer and Now," I am
reminded of the potent sense of possibility
opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is
strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick's optimism was far from naïve; the
same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against
until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous
collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.

Taken together, Sedgwick's death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to
be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press's decision, many in the field were
already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing
Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the
last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though
the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their
introduction: "What has queer theory become now that it has a past?"

The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that
the phrase itself generated in the 1990s. The label, after all, came into circulation only after
the major theoretical innovations that defined it—in the work of Michel Foucault, Gayle
Rubin, Leo Bersani, the early Sedgwick, Judith Butler, as well as many others. Those writers
had already developed an analysis of sexuality that looked to relations of power rather than
to individual psychology or "orientation." And they had already shown that sex, pleasure,
and the formation of sexual cultures posed deep challenges to the normative frameworks by
which some kinds of sex are legitimated and institutionalized as the proper form of
sexuality. As several contributors to After Sex? point out, queer theory's intellectual concerns
have given rise to newer kinds of work, and are continued under other rubrics.

When Teresa de Lauretis and her colleagues at the University of California at Santa Cruz
organized a conference called "Queer Theory" in 1990, it was manifestly provocative. The
term "queer" in those days was not yet a cable-TV synonym for gay; it carried a high-voltage
charge of insult and stigma. The term caught on because it seemed to catalyze many of the

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key insights of previous years and connect them to a range of politics and constituencies
that were already developing outside academe, in a way that looked unpredictable from the
start. At the 1991 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University at New
Brunswick—the fifth to be held since John Boswell started the meetings at Yale University in
1987 and exponentially larger than its predecessors—the informal talk about "queer" was
almost as frisky as the cruising.

Most of us were using the term in those years with not entirely straight faces. Many early
theoretical expositions, including the collection I edited titled Fear of a Queer Planet (1993),
cautioned (briefly, at least) about its potential utopianism—as though "queer" were a happy
umbrella term for the rainbow coalition that would exclude no one—and its American bias.
By 1994, de Lauretis was already complaining that the term had "very quickly become a
conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry."

A look at the subsequent history of Series Q shows that judgment premature. Far from being
conceptually vacuous, queer theory now has the shape of a searching and still largely
undigested conversation, rich enough to have many branches, some different enough to be
incommensurate with one another. Still, one knows what de Lauretis meant. A kind of hype
had set in, and looking back at the writing from the period now, what strikes me is how
many people were on guard about it, even as they found it intellectually generative.

What is often forgotten about that moment is that the term came from grass-roots politics
before it became theory. Act Up had already made possible a politics directed against shame
and normalization, and aiming at a complex mobilization of people beyond sexual identity.
It in turn gave rise to other groups, including Queer Nation—whose name seemed, as I
recall, mainly hilarious to all of us who heard it.

The emblematic example of that kind of street politics, for me, was an anonymous,
photocopied broadside that was handed around during the 1992 primary season. (Its
author, the artist Zoe Leonard, was a member of Fierce Pussy, a lesbian feminist group with
roots in Act Up.) It began with a simple declaration that looked like a familiar kind of lesbian
politics: "I want a dyke for president." (In queer studies, that would now be called
"homonationalism.") But very quickly, the prose morphed into a set of wishes that, from
clause to clause, gained in evocative power as they moved away from anything that might be
imagined within legitimate politics. I quote the remainder in full, because it is not widely
remembered or reprinted:

I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want
someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the
earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I
want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser
of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their
eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were
dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the
clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually
harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the

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tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has
been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from
them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude,
someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done
drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I
want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere
down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a
boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

Here, in a text that obviously did not come across the desk of an English professor before it
hit the copier, were many of the basic impulses from which queer theory took its point of
departure: a broadening of minority politics to question the framework of the sayable;
attention to the hierarchies of respectability that saturate the world; movement across
overlapping but widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a
series of margins that have no identity core; an oddly melancholy utopianism; a speculative
and prophetic stance outside politics—not to mention an ability to do much of that—
through the play of its own style.

Almost 20 years later, the resonance with the Occupy Wall Street movement is
unmistakable. Like Occupy Wall Street, queer theory worked by magnetizing attention, at
the right moment, to problems that existed before it, and which it could not fix. Like OWS, it
maintained a skeptical distance from legitimate political processes in order to cast light on
their distortions. Like OWS, its moment in the spotlight was only a strobelike illumination of
a lingering state of affairs, in which a lot of people felt that we would all be happier keeping
that damn light off, thank you very much.

From the moment of the first reports of queer politics and queer theory, many gay men and
lesbians hated the idea. For using the term positively, I was denounced by The New York
Native as "the gay Lyndon LaRouche." Lo these many years later, straight and gay people
alike continue to deride queer theory as the ultimate joke of a debased and fraudulent
academy. The playwright Larry Kramer, without showing much sign of understanding queer
theory, nevertheless bewails that "gay people are the victims of an enormous con job, a
tragic heist." In his view, people throughout history have been gay in exactly the way we
understand the term today, and the purpose of gay studies should be to celebrate them.
Queer theory's attention to the historical variety and complexity of sexual cultures is, for
Kramer, a betrayal of gay people and common sense alike.

One thing that language registers is that queer theory opened up a conceptual divergence
from lesbian and gay studies (ironically at a time when that field was just coming into its
own), as well as a political divergence from the lesbian and gay movement (which also burst
into mainstream politics with the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton).

The intellectual part of queer theory had in fact begun long before, at least with Foucault's
History of Sexuality (first published in French in 1976). Foucault's book was clearly
unassimilable to movement politics. Early debates about it within gay studies focused on its
critique of psychoanalysis and its turn to a constructionist account of gay identity.

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Foucault's remark that "the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage" became

the most famous phrase in the book. But the bigger challenge, one that took longer to digest,
was the way Foucault had flipped the lens on the whole project of studying sexuality.
Instead of starting with sexual identities, he wanted to think about the prior structuring of
sexuality by several techniques distinctive to modern societies. He drew attention to the way
sexuality is stabilized for us by secular expert knowledge and anchored in individuals both
by genres of therapy and self-representation. In his account, sexuality became visible as a
field of regulation, therapy, and liberation simultaneously. He opened new questions about
the deep ties between modern knowledge of sexuality and various forms of what he called
"state racism," including colonialism and, in the extreme forms, genocide and eugenics; the
process by which the categories of experts can be taken up as mobilizations by the
individuals to whom they are applied; the kinds of normalization specific to modern
societies; and the variety of alternative formations throughout history in which the pleasures
of the body have been developed within entirely different purposes and imperatives.

The politics of sexuality, in Foucault's treatment, led not just to an affirmative study of
sexual minorities, but to a thorough and radical re-evaluation of the techniques of defining
modernity. Lesbian and gay studies quickly took on board Foucault's constructionist
account of the hetero-homo opposition, but the rest of his argument necessarily lay beyond
the study of same-sex attraction, and indeed beyond the study of sexuality as a stable object.

Eve Sedgwick accomplished something similar in her early work. Her 1985 book Between
Men was a watershed, for me at least. Published just when I was completing graduate
school, it approached homophobia—the organizing problematic of lesbian and gay studies
—as a constitutive byproduct of modern styles of straight-male homosociality. Sedgwick
was envisioning a way for gay studies and feminism to find a common perspective on
straightness, masculinity, and the dynamics of domination in modern culture. Like
Foucault's, her analysis flipped the lens: The real problem, for her, was the mechanism of
male sociability that, in envisioning the domination of women, made its own homoerotic
dimensions abject, projecting the homosexual as a failed but dangerous and repudiated
version of itself.

In that turn, Sedgwick was already beginning to imagine what she

would boldly declare in the first paragraph of her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet: "An
understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely
incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a
critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." If anything, subsequent queer
theory has tended to argue an even stronger version of that claim, suggesting that the
normative field of sexuality is so dispersed that it requires us to understand such things as
racialization, the dynamic between developed countries and colonies or postcolonies, the
stabilization of sex biomorphism, and so on.

Those last questions had also been raised by Judith Butler before they had come to be called
queer theory. Butler's 1990 Gender Trouble, in addition to its well-known (but still widely
misunderstood) arguments about performativity of gender, had its deepest impact through

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the same kind of shift in perspective. Instead of starting with the nature of sex, she urged us
to analyze the normative frameworks by which gender and sexuality are constituted and
inhabited in the first place. Fusing insights from phenomenology and Pierre Bourdieu's
practice theory together with a long history of feminist thought, Butler foregrounded a
problem that has still not been fully grasped in most philosophy or the social sciences.
Where most accounts of norms imagine an agent who acts on the basis of beliefs or desires
and reflects on what ought to be done, Butler called attention to the ways we find ourselves
already normatively organized as certain kinds of agents, for example by having gender in
ways that must be intelligible to others. The problem, she said, was the "regulatory fiction of
heterosexual coherence," which "disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the
sexual field that it purports to describe."

That approach immediately opened up new problems, occasioning, for example, a debate
about "antinormativity" within queer theory. (Does the embrace of queerness entail a
romantic opposition to all normativity whatsoever? Is there something inherently antisocial
in the experience of sexuality?) But it also gave a vocabulary for a kind of analysis that the
disciplines otherwise lacked.

In all these ways, the tremendous intellectual energy of what would come to be called queer
theory was already casting a much broader net than lesbian and gay studies. One result over
the years has been a succession of movements in which the critical project is joined and
adapted by those who have different constituencies in view: trans studies, postcolonial
queer studies, queer race studies. Each of those—like the parallel development of queer
affect studies, which was not as closely tied to any political constituency—often begin by
distancing themselves from what they take to be a narrower version of queer theory. Thus
queer theory has often seemed, from its very inception, to be elsewhere or in the past.
(Lauren Berlant and I noted that pattern in a 1995 PMLA essay called "What Does Queer
Theory Teach Us About X?")

A good example of queer theory's ambivalence about itself is Jasbir K. Puar's influential 2007
book Terrorist Assemblages. Puar does battle with a succession of polemical opponents:
queer liberalism, queer neoliberalism, queer exceptionalism, etc. If all of one's identities
"must be constantly troubled," she points out, one imagines "an impossible transcendent
subject who is always already conscious of the normativizing forces of power and always
ready and able to subvert, resist, or transgress them." That seems undeniable as far as it
goes, but it also restates one of the generative problems in Butler's early work. So while Puar
seems to want to associate queer theory with a liberal imperial imagination, she does so in
terms that she takes from queer theory itself. Despite its criticisms of (some) queer theory,
then, Puar's book is itself an example of the kind of vital work that queer theory enables,
with or without the rubric. Terrorist Assemblages would very likely sit on any queer-theory
syllabus today.

Queer theory in this broader sense now has so many branches, and has developed in so
many disciplines, that it resists synthesis. The differences have often enough become bitter,
sometimes occasioning the kind of queerer-than-thou competitiveness that is the telltale
sign of scarcity in resources and recognition. That impulse can be seen, for example, in the

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title of a special issue of Social Text called "What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?" And
given queer theory's strong suspicion of any politics of purity, it is ironic that queer theorists
can often strike postures of righteous purity in denouncing one another. The Gay Shame
Conference at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2003, for instance—to discuss
aspects of lesbian and gay male sexuality, history, and culture that "gay pride" had
suppressed—featured a remarkable amount of mutual shaming, as though everyone had
missed the point.

The scarcity of resources that feeds such a dynamic has a lot to do with university structure.
At many colleges, queer theory is now institutionalized as a minor subfield of LGBT studies.
Some projects, such as queer ethnography, flourish in this structure better than others. The
broader provocation to the disciplines has been neatly compartmentalized, with the
consequence that many of queer theory's greatest challenges—for example, in the analysis
of normativity, which should have become central to philosophy and the social sciences, but
has been scrupulously ignored by them, or the connections between sexuality and
secularism that are central to so many kinds of conflict around the world—remain
undeveloped. Thus to my mind, the widespread impression that queer theory is a thing of
the past, that we are now at some point "After Sex," seems tragically mistaken.

At its best, queer theory has always also been something else—something that will be left
out of any purely intellectual history of the movement. Like "I want a dyke for president," it
has created a kind of social space. Queer people of various kinds, both inside and outside
academe, continue to find their way to it, and find each other through it. In varying degrees,
they share in it as a counterpublic. In this far-too-limited zone, it has been possible to keep
alive a political imagination of sexuality that is otherwise closed down by the dominant
direction of gay and lesbian politics, which increasingly reduces its agenda to military
service and marriage, and tends to remain locked in a national and even nationalist frame,
leading gay people to present themselves as worthy of dignity because they are "all-
American," and thus to forget or disavow the estrangements that they have in common with
diasporic or postcolonial queers.

That effect has been possible not just because of the theories themselves, but because of the
space of belonging and talk in which theory interacts with ways of life. Much of the social
effervescence is only indirectly felt on the page. But it has always been also there on the
page, in the work of writing.

That might seem like an odd thing to say, since for mainstream journalists (as for Larry
Kramer) queer theory is the extreme case of "difficult" academic prose, and Judith Butler
and Eve Sedgwick were both singled out for mockery by the self-appointed guardians of
accessibility. We are often told that queer theory lacks "clarity." But technical clarity and
journalistic accessibility are not the same, and the attack on difficult style has often been a
means to reassert the very standards of common sense that queer theory rightly challenged.
Moreover, even the most difficult prose has given people room for being serious in ways
sanctioned nowhere else.

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And so much of the writing is remarkable. Think of Sedgwick's bristling, coiled paragraphs;
or Berlant's ability to work so unpredictably across registers to produce a knowledge that is
both live and speculative (as in ​"Beyonding is a rhetoric people use when they have a desire
not to be stuck"); or all those astonishing shoes-on-the-table moments like the opening
sentence of Bersani's still-controversial essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?": "There is a big secret
about sex: most people don't like it."

Sex, as Bersani astutely observed, distresses people, and they don't like to be reminded of it.
Perhaps he had already noticed, at a moment when "queer theory" was not yet the name for
what he was doing, the very reason why people seem to long for a present in which they can
be postqueer.

Michael Warner is a professor and chair of the department of English, and a professor of American
studies, at Yale University. Among his books is The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of
Queer Life (Free Press, 1999).

1255 Twenty-Third St., N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20037

Copyright © 2016 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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