What Queer Has Been
“Queer” Twenty Years in the Making (1990–2010). I wrote this in 2012, I wonder if it holds up, and if there is more to add now…. let me know in the comments.
Queer has the bad reputation of being undefinable, but we will nonetheless offer three or four ways of understanding “queer,” here organized from the most general to the most narrow or particular.1 The most general understanding of queer is as an umbrella term that includes categories referring both to sexualities and to gender identities — gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and straight-but-not-narrow, but also intersex, transgender, transvestite, genderqueer, two spirit, etc. Queer also includes the refusal of all and any categories. Queer can also include practice based identities like top/bottom/switch, femme/butch and other relational and role based identities too numerous to list. These forms of queerness can be combined in an infinite number of ways: “transgender lesbian fierce femme,” or “asexual genderqueer top.” I find queer identities to be animate by a seriously playful rebelliousness. There is a lot of hard earned joy there.
For many queers, identity is context driven and changes over time and in relation to others, so these queer identities can be largely provisional, although for some others these identities do solidify and become more or less fixed. Finally, while many of these queer formations are no more than variations on the binary structure of the sex/gender system, to the extent that some identity formations move beyond these, they also become “unbelievable,” as with sexualities that are premised on animal identities (horses, bears, and cats, for example), or ones that take non-human objects as beloveds (like streams, lamp-posts, statues or other works of architecture, art, or nature), or which otherwise fail to be “coherent.” Consider, for example, the “unicorn” known as the “male lesbian” (sexuality), the “straight fag” (gender) or the “Log Cabin Republicans” (class), for all of whom a place in queer communities is contestable. Thus, clearly the queer umbrella does not provide cover for all non-normative sexualities, but the tent does hold a motley crew. There is no one thing that unifies this “identity,” no essential characteristic, but it is a series that depends upon always changing sexual-aesthetic and political practices for its coherence. But the use of “queer” as an umbrella terms is both the most general, colloquial, and the least precise use of the term, as the following other definitions (below) make apparent.
The second way to understand “queer” is as it refers to theories of sex/gender/sexuality that follow from postmodern and poststructuralist theories of identity. (It is in this sense that Halberstam taeks up the term.) As such, “queer” is often referred to David Halperin’s definition of queer as “identity without essence,”2 a rejection of the Aristotelian definition by identity as essence underlying change and difference; queer as such is also a rejection of the substance ontology (of “things” versus nothing) and the metaphysics of presence. In order to understand this, a slight detour through Aristotle is necessary.
Aristotle divides the world into things reproduced in nature, and man made things produced through techne. The essence of a thing is understood as the end towards which the thing aims, which also coincides with its origin — e.g., an acorn, which comes from oak trees, fulfills its end as an oak tree. Products produced by human ingenuity and skill offer a variation of this; their end is given in the object’s purpose, that for which it was made; e.g., the essence or purpose of a chair is to hold the weight of the sitter, so that a chair with a missing leg can no longer serve this purpose and is not a good chair.
Where it comes to humans, things are a little trickier, for the end of human life is not a given, as it is with objects. Neither natural reproduction nor human production is the sole end of human life. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is an attempt to define the purpose of human life, which Aristotle determines is eudaimonia or human flourishing (sometimes translated as “happiness,” but this is not “hahaha” happy). Everyone, he tells us, can agree that eudaimonia is the highest human good, but of what eudaimonia consists is still radically undefined. We are political animals, according to Aristotle, which means that human flourishing is to be found in the political organization of life, and not in the singular instance of the individual. When Foucault writes, quite famously, that homosexuality is a threat as a way of life, and not as a way of having sex, this is what he means.3 It’s a life form unencumbered by capitalism’s breeder norms.
As Sartre observed in the early twentieth century, man is a thing unlike any other in that it falls to him alone to define his existence in and through the course of living — we are cursed to be free. Aristotle is not yet operating within humanism and or conceptions of the individual, so that while the single human being is the seat of human flourishing, flourishing is understood not pertaining to the individual, but as pertaining to the genus, the collective human spirit. Existentialism (which, unlike Heidegger’s phenomenological existential analysis, is a humanism) reframes Aristotle’s ethics within a humanist framework that privileges individual freedom, a much narrower understanding than the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia. Not coincidentally, and so that we do not loose track of the gendering and sexualization of these concepts such as “human” and “freedom,” Beauvoir observed the delimitation of the human freedom to man, since what it mans to be a woman is commonly referred to, and determined by, woman’s “natural” and reproductive capacity — woman as womb. As we will see, the reduction of woman to the space of the womb is premised on the naturalization of space as empty and passive container for joiussance and for man’s reproduction and through time.
What it means for queer to be an identity without essence sometimes aligns with the existentialist view of the radical indeterminacy of the life of the individual (a view I believe to be reduced and politically retrograde), and sometimes with identity as it emerges in socio-political situations, which is to say inherent in no individual, but produced through social relations and manifest in the organization of social spaces and of life. In its simplest form, “queer” is a refusal of the causal link between sex and gender. It represents the unhinging of the sex/gender system of compulsory sexuality. In its most complicated form, “queer” represents the re-modeling of subjectivity and identity in a spatial matrix of desires. Elsewhere, I develop the spatial aspects of mapping or modeling the relations between sex, gender, sexual, identities alongside parallel and sometimes intersecting racialized representations. Racist and sexists ideologies have long borrowed iconography, scientific methods, and models for representation, all of which are constituted in and through little examined spatial ontotologies.
Finally, and more specifically, “queer” refers the re-appropriation of what was once a term of derision by Queer Nation, officially formed in 1990 in New York City in response to the rise of anti-gay violence in the wake of the AIDS crisis, and known for their controversial tactics, including the outing of public figures and the action at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in NYC. In the grass-roots political activism context, “queer” was a word that started to be used also in San Francisco as early as the early nineties to refer to new kinds of political coalitions forming in response to the AIDS crisis in coalitions with multiple social justice movements. Historian and transgender theorist, Susan Stryker describes the emergence of “queer” through her phenomenological description of an underground S/M sex party that was called LINKS:
LINKS, as its name suggested, forged connections where they otherwise might not have existed. I first encountered there the word queer, as it is since has come to be used in academic and community discourse, in chill-out conversations after dungeon sessions, in the summer of 1990. We used to name the previously unnamed social formation taking shape at our parties, which we saw as part of a larger political and conceptual shift in identity-based movements, related to the AIDS crisis and, few moths later, to anti-Gulf War activism. “Transgender” was a word I first encountered on a flyer advertising a LINKS “Gender Play Party’, early 1991. For most of us there, gender was something we explored, analyzed and experimented with in the context of a broader engagement with bodily practices and power; people came at questions of gender from many different angles and emotional investments, with no one right way to proceed (Stryker 2008).
In this sense, queer is a term around which activism and community coalesced at a particular moment in our history. This moment can also be read as a repetition of other eruptive moments, other activists coming together in the face of the threat of no future.
Also in this context, “queer” has been used anachronistically to extend the sprit of queerness back through history, and through a lineage of queer kinship that includes the lives, works, and ideas of those in the past whose radical non-conformity informs our contemporary queer aesthtic. Examples of this can be found with Duane Michals’ photography (e.g. “Things Are Queer” here) and Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s collaborative work. Together, Cahun and Moore produced a photographic archive in the years before and following World War II, much of which was destroyed by the Nazis, that arguably imagines a lesbian and queer iconography and aesthetic long before the birth of Queer Nation.
As you might imagine, there is also a futural, utopian use of queer as that which we have yet to become — Jose Esteban Muñoz and Jill Dolan, amongst others, have been developing this queer sensibility in a performance studies context.
