The state is key to solve --- queer theory needs state power to achieve its goals AND empirics prove it has helped and can help a great deal.

]ETang

By the 1990s, though—as queer theory began to emerge from a heady concatenation of poststructuralist philosophy, the history of sexuality and literary studies—rumblings of discontent could be heard. In 1994, Lisa Duggan, a prominent scholar who later coined the term “homonormativity,” warned against the political quietism of queer critique. In a short essay on “queering the state,” she skewered faux radicals who “presented as the progressive cutting edge of politics as well as theory,” but who in truth were guilty of “avoiding (if not outright despising) lesbian/gay/queer activism,” and argued that politics could make use of the strategic insights queer theory had to offer. It’s a frustration I think many of us share, wedged between queer theory’s utopian aspirations and the mucky reality of day-to-day politics.

Duggan was right. For if the decades-long experiment with neoliberalism has taught us anything, it is that we do need the state. Hollowed out by both liberal and conservative parties, many contemporary states have become unable to redistribute wealth, care for citizens, address climate change or forge genuine social equality. If nothing else, the massive, though flawed, state efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years (and the government’s current to stanch the spread of monkeypox, which is primarily affecting queer men) have demonstrated the need for powerful states that can dictate public-health measures and convince citizens to behave in responsible ways.

Viewed from the perspective of queer people, the need for a muscular, progressive state seems no less great. We want health services that offer gender-affirming care, do we not? We want a state that will provide universal childcare to ensure a less gendered division of labor. Surely, we hope for a state that will protect minorities from social discrimination and violence. It may not be sexy or edgy to admit, but, especially at a time when the radical right is turning to state power in service of its patriarchal social vision, we queers do need the state.

The question, then, is if it’s possible to work out a theory of the state that weds the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory to the empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be. But could any queer thinker today figure out what such a polity would look like? A fault line separates radicals who reject political compromise from pragmatists who begrudgingly embrace it. Neither has been able to give a positive account of state power, one that would legitimate its exercise in service of a 21st-century progressivism. To put it in more personal terms: I, a scholar with an abiding commitment to queer theory, have found myself unable to leverage its insights to explain why I also favor a powerful, progressive state.

But the challenge is also an opportunity. If there is any hope that progress will be more than an empty slogan for the sclerotic parties of the left, then it must be in a politics that takes seriously the kinds of violent marginalization and insidious operations of power that are the special preoccupations of queer studies, while at the same time offering a positive vision of state action.

None of this is to say that queerness is opposed to politics. Far from it. Most queer intellectuals see their work as deeply political, and queer texts have had a profound impact on activist movements that took up anti-normativity as a battle cry. Especially in the United States, where the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, intensified by the Reagan administration’s willful neglect of victims, not only led to renewed queer activism but also shaped the emergence of queer theory, the fields of queer studies developed a particularly oppositional politics. As new queer activists mobilized against AIDS, queer theorists contemporaneously analyzed the strategies and effects of their efforts. These groups were critical of pragmatic gay and lesbian efforts to work with the state, and for good reason: the president refused to so much as utter the word “AIDS” for four long years. ACT UP, which was founded in New York City in 1987, pioneered new direct-action strategies, such as die-ins and ashes actions, that drew attention to government inaction.