Money, Sex and Power 2011-12 Week 19

1. Money, Sex and Power2011-12Week 19 Queer Theory

2. Queer theory is hard because it pushes against the taken-for –granted, and the apparently obvious, it disrupts knowledge rather than clarifying it: • J. Weeks says in a discussion of one queer theorist, Eve Sedgwick, that in sociology and history we ‘attempt to produce order and pattern out of the chaos of events. In contrast queer theory tries to show conflict and disorder under the appearance of consistency and uniformity’ (Weeks, Making Sexual History, p. 68)

3. QUEER derived from the Latin TORQUERE – ‘to twist’ • Queer as odd, strange, out of place • Queer as insult, i.e. queer as a term of abuse taken up as a positive identification. • Popularisation of Queer – Queer as Folk; Queer Eye for the Straight Guy etc.

4. Outline • Outline what QT is • Its origins • Its key arguments on gender and sexuality. • Critiques of QT

5. Historical origins • Emergence of Queer through ‘in your face’ grassroots activism around gender and sexuality – ACT UP (Aids coalition to Unleash Power) New York 1987) • QUEER NATION 1990 – “In calling ourselves Queer we take back a name that has been used as a weapon against us, and turn it into a symbol of our power and our pride”. • It was a critical response to lesbian feminism which seemed to submerge sexuality into feminism, for instance Rich’s lesbian-feminism, and celebrate sameness rather than difference. Its relation to feminist theory therefore complex, as seen in title of the book Coming Out of Feminism? • Sections of gay community also were valorising gender conformity, leaving little room for effeminate men.

6. Queer theory • Shares characteristics of post-structural thinking – not a new –‘ism’, but interested in breaking things down (de-constructing). This makes it easier to say what it is against than what it says. • Disrupts alleged stability between ‘biological sex’, gender and sexual desire. • Challenges heterosexuality. The apparent coherence of heterosexuality, which is actually unstable and insecure, depends on carefully constructed individual performances and also the constant denial and exclusion of homosexualities as an equal possibility for sexual desire.

7. Different from lesbian, gay and bisexual studies that are argued to aim only to make the mainstream more accepting of marginal lesbian and gay lifestyles – but in doing so reproduce binary distinction between heterosexuality as the ‘normal majority’ and homosexuality as the ‘minority other’. QT queers the mainstream – showing it to not be ‘normal’ at all.

8. Different from feminist approaches which tend to reproduce the binaries between ‘men and ‘women’. QT aims to break down these differences and show that the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are artificial and not rigid binaries.

9. Judith Butler-fictional, performative character of identities • Gender is a fiction. We are not ‘really’ ‘women’ and ‘men’ – we just perform it. • Sexual identity categories are also fictions. People don’t fit into these categories, ‘discover themselves’ to be gay or lesbian. Rather, • ‘Instead of assuming that collective identities simply reflect differences among persons, we need …to look closely at the process whereby [social] movements remake identities’ (E. Stein, cited by Jagose (1996), p. 71

10. Judith Butler • Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter • Develops the idea that gender is performative, i.e. the stability of the fiction of gender depends on the repetition of performative acts. This begins with the declaration of the sex of the baby

11. Sex and gender are not natural but we must work hard to make them real. Butler - we are gendered as either man or woman in the interests of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ – which ‘designates that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, gender and desires are naturalised’ (Butler \91990) Gender Trouble, cited by Andermahr et al. (2000) Glossary of Feminist Theory. There is nothing natural about heterosexuality and so in order for us to accept it and conform to it our genders must be forcibly assigned and rigorously policed to keep us correctly gendered. • Gender is ‘performative’ in the sense that performing it brings it brings it into being. • What does this mean for feminism?

12. But we do not all keep correctly gendered. One in every 2,000 infants INTERSEX and gender forcibly assigned (see UK Intersex association http://www.ukia.co.uk/) Multiple examples of ‘queer’ subjects showing the ‘failure’ of the gender binary. • Drag is a ‘copy of a copy’

13. Sexual identity categories are also performative • Butler influenced by Foucault too: social construction of ‘the homosexual’, and its maintenance/naturalisation by the gay movement. • Identities are ‘regulatory fictions’, so challenge political movements based around identities (e.g. the gay movement, feminism) since they only entrench these identities and naturalise them, rather than exposing their their artificiality.

14. What can we learn from queer theory? • Exposes the sexual power that is embodied in social life (particularly enforced through boundaries and binary divisions). Gender and sexual categories are regulatory.  Important to study the centre and not just the margins. How is the apparent transparency of normality maintained?.  critically about gender and not just take it for granted – this can be hard as we are all invested in the gender order and cannot escape it even if we choose to be critical of it.  Identities are not fixed but constructed, potentially fluid and transitive.  Rather than just focusing on civil rights strategies, queer tactics involve carnival, transgression and play.

15. Criticisms Theoretical work can be abstract - accused of being elitist.  Erasure of gender? What about gender inequalities?  By using Queer as a gender neutral term it is possible that lesbians’ experiences will be ignored or subsumed under gay men’s.  Neglects the material conditions of people’s lives? • Takes social constructionism too far? • Problem for, but also productive interplay with feminism

16. Websites featuring interviews with Butler • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc&feature=related Judith Butler on gender • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqvCndtYCg&feature=relmfu • How discourse creates homosexuality