Queer Theory excludes women and oversimplifies “maternity”

Since Walters there have been, indeed, two entire collections devoted to the tensions between lesbian-feminist and queer paradigms, both published in 1997. Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance , edited by Dana Heller and sympathetic to the former perspective, featured essays by old-guard lesbian feminists Bonnie Zimmerman and Lillian Faderman, who angrily defended their work from queer charges of “essentialism, ethnocentrism, separatism, puritanism, political correctness, and so forth” (157– 58). Even Sue-Ellen Case, no fan of mainstream lesbian feminism, complained in this volume that “the privileging of gay male culture by queer dykes, along with the . . . mis-remembering of lesbian feminism, has produced the dwindling away of lesbian cultural resources” (211). Ironizing the “new queer dyke” who impersonates gay male styles, Case noted that, if “testosterone is better in the hands of women, appropriating the masculine is not, obviously, beyond gender” (210). Feminism Meets Queer Theory (edited by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor), though more balanced overall, reprinted one of the aforementioned articles by Martin (“Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary”) and opened with an essay by Butler herself (“Against Proper Objects”) conceding that queer theory had been guilty of mischaracterizing work on gender— erasing radical feminism, antiracist feminism, pro-sex feminism, antiessentialist feminism, and feminist sex radicalism (18– 19). Noting that Gender Trouble (1990) was written to contest feminist frameworks fixated on the male/female binary, here Butler would temper that challenge by doubting that queer theory’s inquiry into sexuality could “ever fully be divorced from questions of gender” (2– 3).

Such moments in Butler point to the fact that questions about gender within queer theory have been raised not only by those invested in older feminist paradigms but also by those identified with recent queer ones. Another striking example is de Lauretis, credited with actually coining the term “queer theory” in her 1991 introduction to differences . Arguing that so-called “lesbian and gay studies” had frequently elided lesbian difference while seeming to include it, her introduction called on queer theory to address “the enduring silence on the specificity of lesbianism in the contemporary ‘gay and lesbian’ discourse” (vii). Three years later, however, de Lauretis would criticize Sedgwick along with a general state of queer affairs continuing to prioritize gay men and often dismissive of earlier feminist scholarship. In a paper given at the 1994 MLA and published in Cross Purposes (“Fem/Les Scramble”), de Lauretis declared that “queer theory,” in failing to differentiate and historicize female as well as male sexualities, had had in practice “the opposite of the effect I had hoped for” (46). 7 All of which is to say that, since 1991, we have seen both the elaboration of an exciting left political practice and body of theory under the rubric of “queer” and the voicing of a complaint from queer as well as lesbian feminists to the effect that queer erotics and politics are made available primarily through masculinity. Among their many charges: as gay male sexualities are glamorized and radicalized, women are left out of major queer texts (which are no less influential for that); “women” is dismissed as a homogenizing identity category (leaving “men” to function as such); lesbianism is untheorized as a discrete desire or theorized in terms derived from models of male sexuality; “masculinity” is fetishized while “femininity” and “maternity” are disparaged, often by queer women as well as men; lesbian scholarship is caricatured, lesbian histories are oversimplified, and lesbian cultures are allowed to dwindle away. 8