Their totalizing rejection of identity goes too far—contextualized analysis is key

Just like Michel Foucault, queer theory has always regarded identity with deep suspicion and it upholds this aversion as an antidote that redresses the constraints posed by the subject, ones that various feminist, critical race, and lesbian and gay identity politics are said to leave intact (Ryan 2001, 325-326; Ford 2007, 479-482).2 Queer theory enlists Foucault’s politics of non-identity, and variations thereof, to ferret out and undo the limits of the subject so that you might “cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity” (Miller 1993, 264). The distrust of identity that drives queer theory is so ingrained that it often turns its suspicion back in on itself in that even “queer anti-identity narratives” are now located, for instance by Jasbir Puar (2007), on the same “continuum that privileges the pole of identity as the evolved form of Western modernity” (222). Queer practices of non-identity, it turns out, are just as vulnerable to (re) presenting the subject through homonationalist re-territorializations that institute queer non-identity as an identity politic after all.3 Turned back on itself, queer theory’s mistrust of identity politics has lead it to take up the politics of assemblage and to pursue identity’s collapse: with a “cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices that undermine coherent identity and even queer anti-identity narratives” (222), “to conceive the pure experience, event and dramatization of many sexes without falling back onto the ontological constitution of queer sexuality” (Parisi 2009, 72), by “opening up to the fantastical wonders of futurity” and affect to resist forces that rationalize identities into finite and narrow existence (Puar 2007, 222), and to evade “singularity” in favour of “collectivity, imagination and a kind of situationist commitment to surprise and shock” (Halberstam 2011, 29).4 As a result, queer Deluezean approaches also demonstrate the deep suspicion of identity that reverberates throughout queer theory and Foucauldian approaches; as Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (2009) explain, Deleuzean approaches set out to “queer the queer” by circumventing the question of (non-)identity, because they are “not just against this or that particular identity as not being politically useful, but against the very concept of identity and the thinking it engenders” (5).5

Where queer theory more recently engages Gilles Delueze to undercut the influence of Foucault’s politics of non-identity, as an identity politic, the similarity of purpose to which both philosophers have been put is uncanny, because it was always with “flows,” “intensities,” “bodies,” “practices,” and new “pleasures,” or affect, that queer theories set out, originally with Foucault, to disrupt the trap of identity. To this extent, the suspicion of identity with which queer theory, like a reflex, turns on itself again and again, must also demand, if it hasn’t already, this inevitable conclusion: the queer politics of assemblage recreates the same problems of (non-)identity that Deleuze is used to dodge, for instance, via the claim that queer non-identity is penetrated by the pole of identity.

To illustrate, consider for a moment that the opposition of queer assemblages against queer non-identity to reduce the latter to identity politics, by virtue of being a non-identity politics, really is a (queer) critique to which assemblage is susceptible too. Queer assemblage politics sets out to “escape[s] the traditional strategy of negation (queer as the non-, anti-, contra-)” and thereby avert the binary thought it locates in queer non-identity politics; it claims to do so because it avoids questions of (non-)identity altogether (Nigianni and Storr 2009, 2). This is the appeal of Deleuzian approaches to queer theory: they appear to avoid the binary thinking that anti-identity politics, as such, find unavoidable. The logic behind a queer move to avoidance, Margaret Shildrick (2009) explains, is that it is only when “queer theory explicitly intervenes in the parameters of social exclusion,” for instance, as anti-identity politics must, that queer theory “to an extent must always reiterate binary thinking in order to contest it” (129; emphasis added).6

However, the strategic avoidance of identity can be exposed as just as much of a negation as any explicit rejection of identity because queer theorists, like myself, are groomed from the outset to be on the lookout for identity everywhere; the only difference between the two is that an avoidance is a covert mode of rejection that is implicit, subterranean, and passive—like centers and margins, the explicit and implicit are extant co-operatives in negation, even if they “cannot be naturalised as ‘having always existed’” (Deleuze qtd. in Conley 2009, 26). So regardless of the opacity of its anti-identity strategy, queer assemblage politics can also be placed on a continuum with queer non-identity politics; it is just as buggered by the pole of identity if and when queer theory renders it suspect, as I have here. Moreover, as long as the suspicion of identity is allowed to remain totalizing in queer theory, queer theory is going to eat its tail. All of which causes me to say that queer theory really needs to ask a different question: is identity precisely the problem that faces queer theory or is it the rejection of identity, as queer reflex, that poses today’s greatest threat to queers?

This paper responds to what I think is the largely uncritical belief that operates implicitly and explicitly throughout queer theory: it is the belief that identity politics must always be rejected. As Hiram Perez (2005) observes, “a great deal of queer theorizing has sought to displace identity politics with an alternative anti-identitarian model,” one he also challenges, because it conflates queerness uncritically and too often with a “race-neutral objectivity” (172). The central claim in this paper is that queer theory’s totalizing rejection of identity is socially and politically incautious; and since queer praxes of non-identity and assemblage are on a continuum in that both are suspicious of identity politics, this essay makes no attempt to differentiate between them—they are equally anti-identitarian.7 It argues that it is a mistake to think that either identity or anti-identity politics, solely, is fitting in every context that demands a social-political response. It also demonstrates that a balance must be struck between identity politics and queer politics that intends to interrupt the subject and visibility politics.