Queer Theory is Depoliticized and captured by neoliberalism

Queer theory has lost sight of the ways political power and identity come to be and hold meaning in the present. Once a powerful advocate for queer concerns, queer theory today finds itself in an unfamiliar terrain with archaic tools in a rapidly evolving technological era. Concerns of the disciplinary age do not hold the weight they once did; Gay marriage has been legalized, LGBT+ characters have emerged on television, and information technologies absorb queer identity and experience along with everyone else’s. Deconstructing oppression does not hold much weight when LBGT+ bodies are being appropriated at rapid speeds by information technologies and neoliberal policies. For queer theory, the threat of extinction via irrelevance now looms. It is my intention to reimagine critique of identity and power through a reassessment of goals, tactics, and ontology, by way of a sober assessment of neoliberal politics and technology.

Queer studies began to emerge in the 1980’s with works such as those of Adrienne Rich, Catherine Mackinnon, and Eve Kosofksy Sedwick which questioned and interrogated an inherent heteronormativity that permeates Western ways of knowing and being. It was the argument of these scholars that without recognizing the internalized heterosexual structure within our thinking and culture, that critical scholars could not adequately grasp or make strides in the plight of gender and sexual inequality. Queer theorists are concerned with the ways that language and other symbolic modes of human comprehension are mediated through a heterosexual lens, such as those which dominate law, medicine, and the media, normalizing and disciplining bodies to heteronormative practices and knowledges, while violently excluding those who do not perform gender and sexuality in ways that adhere to heterosexual norms and logics (Wittig, 1992, p. 21-22). Thus, the task of queer theory is to locate, deconstruct, and reimagine these closed discourses through a plurality of techniques that open up possibilities for non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative expressions of bodies and minds. Queer theorists borrow from feminist theorists the notion of partiality, and place a necessary ethical and epistemological focus on the social location of the researcher and the possibilities that emerge from one’s distinct and unique social vantage point. Acknowledging partiality is in part a relation to a skepticism of the mastery of any discourse that works to promote discovery and ways of knowing that speak to a wider representation of bodies and ways of being in the world (Hall, 2005, p. 6).

The goals of queer studies historically speak to the disciplinary age and utilize identity politics as their tool of choice. Deconstruction of othering binaries, the dismantlement of heteronormative master discourses, and the dethroning of a patriarchal logocentrism are inherently the rhetorical tasks that mark the goals of queer theory. To locate critique, and open these discourses creates the possibility to set the “terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence of definition” within them, and this amounts to a “discursive power” through “rhetorical leverage” (Sedgwick, 2008, p. 11). This kind of critical and generative discursive work can be evidenced by landmark queer texts such as John Sloop’s Disciplining Gender and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which by way of evidencing and illuminating the construction of discursive heteronormative regimes that discipline and regulate the use of minds and bodies to heterosexual knowledges and practices, also move to create the possibility of agency through their transgression. Works such as Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, Roderick Fergusons (2004), Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics, Jose Munoz (1999), and Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, are among the numerous works that continue this trend, interrogating the ways in which non-normative performances of bodies and identities work to open closed discourses of sexuality and gender, generating new conceptions of temporality and ways of being and knowing in the world.

It is my argument, and I think one that the aforementioned LaTour article sums up nicely, that identity critique has become stale and formulaic. In The Straight Mind, Monique Wittig argues that our task is to challenge and bring down the heteronormative discourses that order and limit our realities, and not simply to create new categories of being, as those new identities would simply be rendered and mediated through the same terms of heterosexuality if this unconscious and overarching system is not challenged first (Wittig, 1992, p. 21- 32). Despite the fact that this essay is a landmark and foundation text in queer theory, its tenets seem to have been forgotten or watered down through the materialization of a formula in the field. A common reading that has emerged in queer theory is one of equivalence, in which theorists conflate queer ways of being with heteronormative resistance. The examples are plentiful, as the aforementioned text by Jack Halberstam sits as a prime example, alongside the work of Judith Butler, and the work of queer rhetorical scholars such as Karma Chavez (2010), Gayle Salamon (2010), and Emily Dianne Cram (2012), which all take up performativity as a liberatory, ontological tool. It will late be my argument that Judith Butler’s widely popular notion of performativity in the early 90’s is what solidified this trend.

Academically, these works all utilize or attempt to theorize arguments that generally speak to the social phenomenon of identity politics, and the possibilities that arise with struggle based on racial or sexual difference. In short, identity politics attempt to bring a kind of subjectivity to notions of being and social organization, examining the ways that individuals are shaped and informed by their cultural experience, with an interest in how these social formations might challenge or speak to power. In queer theory, this has amounted to the ways in which queer ways of being might challenge or intervene in heterosexual discourses, thus locating selfdetermination as the ability to shape the ways in which notions of gender and sexuality are dictated. To draw a parallel, Malcom X famously wrote about the binaries and definitions of black and white, and Stokely Carmichael (2015) advocated for the recognition of Black experience to inform a new kind of politics in America, both referencing the need to disrupt and ultimately gain a voice in the master discourse, illustrating the function of a politics organized around a shared political and social experience (p. 150- 174). Thus, identity politics rest on the ultimate belief that the experiences, knowledge, and practices of those who exist outside dominant conceptions of power and privilege contain the epistemological tools to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor, from the dominant paradigms that determine their relations, by revealing the inherent oppression in their lived relationships.

But what does a dominant discourse do or mean in 2018, when today, each click of the mouse turns information into capital, and data is packaged, repackaged, and sold all over the world in seconds, as economic wars are waged with virtual funds through algorithms? In his 1993 essay, “Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist view,” Richard Rorty asks a controversial and important question: Even if all the logocentrisms, binaries, and technical discourses, which mediate heteronormative ideologies, were done away with, wouldn’t patriarchal power still persist? (p. 232). Rorty was speaking of the problematic force behind discourse, referencing systems of power and inequalities themselves, but today things are only more complicated as individual thought and expression are appropriated through our daily use of internet technologies. In short, today it is not only power itself which poses a reasonable concern to those doing discourse analysis, but the appropriation of discourse and power into the singular flow of information and resources in the networks of neoliberal power. It will be my argument that queer theory will need a theoretical overhaul to form a viable system of critique to make sense of and challenge the ways which we emerge as postfordist subjects through our mediation via information technologies. It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation on the internet. Today, dominant discourses are algorithms and all voices are equally commodifiable. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri speak of this totalization in their notion of Empire: “Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow” (p. xii-xiii). Again, how can queer identity challenge power when neoliberal power is already queer, decentralized, without temporal boundaries, and completely immersive?