Queer is not enough

At a moment when queer studies has gained momentum in the academy and forged a space as a legitimate disciplinary subject, much of the scholarship produced in its name elides issues of race and class. While the epigraphs that open this essay suggest that the label ‘‘queer’’ sometimes speaks across (homo)sexualities, they also suggest that the term is not necessarily embraced by gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color. Indeed, the statements of Mack-Nataf, Blackman, and Cohen reflect a general suspicion that the label often displaces and rarely addresses their concerns.4 Some queer theorists have argued that their use of ‘‘queer’’ is more than just a reappropriation of an offensive term. Cherry Smith, for example, maintains that the term entails a ‘‘radical questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the family’’ (280). Others underscore the playfulness and inclusivity of the term, arguing that it opens up rather than fixes identities. According to Eve Sedgwick, ‘‘What it takes—all it takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person’’ (9). Indeed, Sedgwick suggests, it may refer to pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or [. . .] people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such. (8) For Sedgwick, then, it would appear that ‘‘queer’’ is a catchall term not bound to any particular identity, a notion that moves us away from binaries such as homosexual/ heterosexual and gay/lesbian. Micheal Warner offers an even more politicized and polemical view: The preference for ‘‘queer’’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. For academics, being interested in Queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the public from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform. (xxvi) The foregoing theorists identify ‘‘queer’’ as a site of indeterminate possibility, a site where sexual practice does not necessarily determine one’s status as queer. Indeed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer is ‘‘more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history’’ (344). Accordingly, straight identified critic Calvin Thomas appropriates Judith Butler’s notion of ‘‘critical queerness’’ to suggest that ‘‘just as there is more than one way to be ‘critical’, there may be more than one (or two or three) to be ‘queer’ ’’ (83). Some critics have applied Butler’s theory of gender to identity formation more generally. Butler calls into question the notion of the ‘‘self’’ as distinct from discursive cultural fields. That is, like gender, there is no independent or pure ‘‘self’’ or agent that stands outside socially and culturally mediated discursive systems. Any move toward identification, then, is, in her view, to be hoodwinked into believing that identities are discourse free and capable of existing outside the systems those identity formations seek to critique. Even when identity is contextualized and qualified, Butler still insists that theories of identity ‘‘invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc’.’’ (Gender 143). Butler’s emphasis on gender and sex as ‘‘performative’’ would seem to undergird a progressive, forward-facing theory of sexuality. In fact, some theorists have made the theoretical leap from the gender performative to the racial performative, thereby demonstrating the potential of her theory for understanding the ontology of race.5 But to riff off of the now popular phrase ‘‘gender trouble,’’ there is some race trouble here with queer theory. More particularly, in its ‘‘race for theory’’ (Christian), queer theory has often failed to address the material realities of gays and lesbians of color. As black British activist Helen (Charles) asks, ‘‘What happens to the definition of ‘queer’ when you’re washing up or having a wank? When you’re aware of misplacement or displacement in your colour, gender, identity? Do they get subsumed [. . .] into a homogeneous category, where class and other things that make up a cultural identity are ignored?’’ (101–102). What, for example, are the ethical and material implications of queer theory if its project is to dismantle all notions of identity and agency? The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which ideology functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing, but what is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma? Beyond queer theory’s failure to focus on materiality, it also has failed to acknowledge consistently and critically the intellectual, aesthetic, and political contributions of nonwhite and non-middle-class gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people in the struggle against homophobia and oppression. Moreover, even when white queer theorists acknowledge these contributions, rarely do they self-consciously and overtly reflect on the ways in which their whiteness informs their critical queer position, and this is occurring at a time when naming one’s positionality has become almost standard protocol in other areas of scholarship. Although there are exceptions, most often white queer theorists fail to acknowledge and address racial privilege.7 Because transgendered people, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals of color often ground their theorizing in a politics of identity, they frequently fall prey to accusations of ‘‘essentialism’’ or ‘‘anti-intellectualism.’’ Galvanizing around identity, however, is not always an unintentional ‘‘essentialist’’ move. Many times, it is an intentional strategic choice.8 Cathy Cohen, for example, suggests that ‘‘queer theorizing which calls for the elimination of fixed categories seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival’’ (‘‘Punks’’ 450). The ‘‘communal ties’’ to which Cohen refers are those which exist in communities of color across boundaries of sexuality. For example, my grandmother, who is homophobic, nonetheless must be included in the struggle against oppression in spite of her bigotry. While her homophobia must be critiqued, her feminist and race struggles over the course of her life have enabled me and others in my family to enact strategies of resistance against a number of oppressions, including homophobia. Some queer activists groups, however, have argued fervently for the disavowal of any alliance with heterosexuals, a disavowal that those of us who belong to communities of color cannot necessarily afford to make.9 Therefore, while offering a progressive and sometimes transgressive politics of sexuality, the seams of queer theory become exposed when that theory is applied to identities around which sexuality may pivot, such as race and class. As a counter to this myopia and in an attempt to close the gap between theory and practice, self and Other, Audre Lorde proclaims: Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. [. . .] I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. (112–13, emphasis in original) For Lorde, a theory that dissolves the communal identity—in all of its difference— around which the marginalized can politically organize is not a progressive one. Nor is it one that gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, and lesbians of color can afford to adopt, for to do so would be to foreclose possibilities of change.