Queer Theory positions women and feminity in a negative position as the “other”

There are, then, three senses in which queer theory may be problematic from a feminist point of view. First, it is sometimes a study of men to which women are appended as an afterthought. In this mode, it may slip from seemingly neutral uses of the terms “queer” or “homosexual” to what is then revealed to be male sexuality in particular, only to move back out to ostensibly universal claims, which remain underwritten by masculinity. Second, it favors a poststructuralism so thorough and enthusiastic that the hardening of gender over time, the way its masquerades tend to calcify and continue to matter even in queer contexts, is effectively wished away. Third and most subtly, it tends unconsciously to position women, gender, femininity, and feminism as normative “other” to its antinormative project— and this may occur even when its project centers on female subjectivity— with the result that its own gender codings may be quite conventional.

A central goal of this chapter is to press further on Martin’s suggestion that the feminine and feminist are at moments relegated by queer theory to an ensnared and ensnaring “swamp,” and that this swamp is somehow “maternal.” In fact, I argue that when women occupy the place of “other” within queer discourse it is frequently because they occupy the place of “mother”; and because “mother,” in turn, is reduced to biology, heterosexuality, traditional family, coercive normativity. Cherrié Moraga’s book claiming queer motherhood is one of several recent challenges to just this set of assumptions. 15 It is nevertheless more often the case that a particular construction of the maternal functions as the means by which women and feminism become negatively charged from a queer point of view. This antagonism toward the maternal contrasts strongly with— indeed, quite pointedly reverses— lesbian feminist paradigms cherishing the mother’s body and taking early mother-daughter ties as a trope for lesbian love. De Lauretis, for one, is glad to abandon the “homosexual-maternal metaphor” (see note 183– 84 n 5). As we have seen, however, another effect of the new antimaternalism has been a tendency to disown queer theory’s feminist antecedents both for valuing and for being, intellectually speaking, the mother. Given cultural views of mothers and older women generally, it follows easily from such an equation that feminism should be seen as negative about sex and antithetical to sexiness. As for the “feminine,” it too is readily conflated with a female embodiment most fully expressed by pregnancy and lactation. Like a textbook illustration of naturalized gender difference, the blissfully pregnant or postpartum woman, whose chromosomes neatly match cultural expectations, is put up against queer theory’s transgressive hero, who happens to be biologically male but whose body doesn’t line up with either his gender presentation or his sexual practices.