InterAmerican Wiki

Queer (Theory)

Rather than being defined by what it is, "queer" is often defined in opposition to that which it is not - primarily that which is normative. It "does not name some natural kind of referent to some deterministic object, [but] acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm" (Halperin 62). Today, use of "queer" is most often in opposition to heterosexual, heteronormative, and binary gender norms. It may be used (1) as an adjective, describing an individual's identity category, or (2) to describe someone who does not fit within normative expectations, related to gender and sexuality, or otherwise. It's use as an adjective (3) at times describes an act of understanding something from a non-normative perspective, such as conducting a "queer reading" of a text. It may also be used as a verb, as in (4) "queering" a norm, practice, or political position. Finally, it may still be used as a noun, though less common in current practice, (5) in reference to an individual or group as "a queer" or "the queers", usually with a derogatory connotation. This encyclopedia entry focuses on the first four of these definitions.

Queer across the Americas

Of course, thinking through the concept of queer in the Americas requires us to consider the specific language used to refer to "queer" situated between and throughout concepts of identity, political stance, sexual practice, and desire. The notion instantiated in the English word "queer" has been utilized in a number of ways in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of the Americas, with words roughly analogous to "queer identity" including raro [weird/strange], loco/a [crazy], de los otros [of the others], de ambiente [of the ambience], entendidos [those in the know], q'iwa [Two-Spirit person in Quechua] and kwir/cuir . These uses tend to highlight the idea of difference and understanding something tacit.

While queer theory in the United States is heavily engaged with deconstructing binaries, in Spanish speaking Latin America at times it is precisely the recognition of simultaneously co-existing dualities that make up notions of the queer. As Anzaldúa writes, "I made this choice to be queer... Like writing and being Chicana queerness means to live in the borderlands, a way of balancing, mitigating duality" (19). Equally important is the fact that issues of nationalism are also at the center of conceptions of queerness in Latin America (Bergman). In Cuba, as elsewhere the modern definition of homosexual identity is closely related to that of modern national identity and nationalist discourses tend to perceive some bodies as healthy and desirable and others as queer and dangerous; however, movements "from below" are now countering these derogatory messages in many locations. Overall, literature has been a central part of queer theory in Latin America, from introduction to notions of queerness (Anzaldúa; Contardo; Robles), to queer re-readings of important works.

History of Queer

For years, speakers of U.S. English used the term queer to identify something odd or peculiar, and if tied to gender or sexuality, the term's reference was highly derogatory and often intended to be. But the term's meaning began to shift during the 1980s, in response to the AIDS crisis, unmet lesbian health care needs, and other signs that "gay liberation" benefited only a privileged (often white, often male-bodied) few. Writers such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and the women of the Combahee River Collective also began to take up the term in their writings, often critiquing hegemonic feminism by expressing intersectional oppressions experienced by lesbians and women of color. In fact, as far as non-conforming sexual subjects were concerned, the term queer was a very useful point of reference. If outsiders called homosexuals queer, they no longer shied away from the invective, but embraced it, turned its meaning inside out, and hurled the offensive claim back in the face of the oppressor: "We're here, we're queer, so get used to it!"

In the 1990s, a tradition of scholarship began as critiques of gender theory and lesbian/gay theory, creating frameworks of analysis that were oriented around categories of identity and tightly defined homo-/hetero-sexual binaries. What that new tradition proposed was a non-conforming theory - a queer theory - which offered alternative perspectives on normative academic practices, while questioning the authority proclaimed by academic norms. While often non-conforming by academic standards, the alternative perspectives were but also innovative and provocative. Their "oppositional relation to the norm" generated "...a diverse, often conflicting set of interdisciplinary approaches to desire, subjectivity, identity, relationality, ethics and norms" (Giffney 2).

Thus, there was

… no "queer theory" in the singular, only many different voices and sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent perspectives that can loosely be called "queer theories" (Hall 5).

From the beginning, queer activists hoped that "queer" would create a terrain within which distinctions of gender, class, racial, ethnic, linguistic and other social hierarchies could find common ground. But an outcome different from oppositional relations also emerged: While some "queers" used non-conformity as a site for challenging structures of discrimination and exclusion, other "queers" leveraged non-conformity into opportunity and privilege, gaining entry into the heteronormative mainstream and otherwise embracing a stance of queer normativity. Borrowing Duggan’s description of the homonormative, queer normativity can be described as

... a politics that does not contest heteronormative assumptions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized [queer] constituency and a privatized [queer] culture anchored in domesticity and consumption (Duggan  50, adapted).

Duggan uses "gay" not "queer" in her wording, but this substitution makes a point: When "queers" (however self-defined) claimed their "place at the table", what emerged were new forms of subjectivity, fusing same-sex desire and heteronormative values, associated now with stances of conformity.

Hence the following statement from the white male couple, both "successful professionals", who talked to anthropologist Ellen Lewin about all of the activities consuming their personal time now that they had adopted two African American boys, ages two and four. After "chatting for a while about how they went about adopting the boys and how parenthood had affected their lives," Lewin then asked: "has becoming parents changed what it means to you to be gay?" The two men "exchanged a knowing look and then one of the men said: "Oh we’re not gay anymore. We pick our friends by what time their kids’ nap time is" (Lewin 2009 153).

These forms of normativity did not disrupt the continuing affirmations of a "we're here, we're queer, so get used to it" non-conformity offered by other queer subjects. As a result, queer came to

... signif[y] the messiness of identity, the fact that desire and thus desiring subjects cannot be placed into discrete identity categories, which remain static for the duration of people’s lives (Giffney 2f).

Queer Analysis

Still, queer theory was not a site of academic anarchy, however, even in its plurality. These "sometime overlapping, divergent perspectives" shared certain approaches to studying queerness, three of which we review here.

Performativity of Sexuality

Judith Butler, in her early writings, described gender as performative, that is, a process based on imitation and approximation that produces the effect of originality but never fully duplicates the pre-existing original (21). Sexuality, even more than gender, is also performative, e.g. always in formation, always being modified, and never limited by the values that regimes of power assign to particular desires, erotic preferences, or identities.

Queer Critique

David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz used Butler's critiques of identity categories as related to sexuality to create a "queer epistemology" opposing the categories of gay and lesbian in both the academy and politics. They suggested queer theory was a necessary form of epistemological intervention in order to de-normalize not only sexuality, but other forms of identity related to gender, race, and nationality.

That argument served well in North American contexts. But queer theory's critique of identity raised questions about its usefulness in Latin American contexts where sexual preference was often not a basis for identity and where social and political communities lacked the strength of organization around same-sex desire (Bergman 10). Similarly, as queer theory tends to question the continuity and integrity of identity and community, it has troubling implications for the political agency of Spanish speaking gays and lesbians often doubly disadvantaged by culture and sexuality (Bergman 2).

Roderick Ferguson notes that sexuality is not an isolated formation. It intersects with gender race, class, and similar social features, and these intersections are "... disconnected rather than mutually constitutive" as well as "messy, chaotic and heterodox” (66). Studies of sexuality require a “… broad critique of multiple social antagonisms", not only studies exploring examples of performative practice. Otherwise, "the political promise of the term queer" is undermined (Eng 1).

Queer theory has also at times been understood in Latin America, as part of a postmodern turn, as an accessory of Anglo-European dominance, maintaining that it underlies the foundation necessary for the production of an oppositional subjectivity and an oppositional politics (Garcia-Moreno 66). In particular, it has been critiqued for using homosexuality from places of privilege, and particularly places of Anglo-American privilege, to "explain" the rest of the world (González Ortuño). It has even been understood by some feminists as an attempt to masculinize Latin American feminism (Gargallo). Indeed "queering" gender performance does not modify the patriarchal domination already instantiated in bodies, subjectivities, and communities, but rather maintains the exclusions of the existing heteropatriarchal order (Paredes and Guzmán).

Yet queer in Latin America has also been used as a way of situating Latin American LGBT people and scholars within larger debates about gender and sexuality, and as a point of critical observations of margins, norms, and hegemonies. In locating discussions of queerness in Latin America, local and regional epistemologies as well as North/South and South/South debates on the concept of “region” operate not only in a geographical sense but also as a position of knowledge production going beyond discussions about the possibility or impossibility of translations of the term queer.

The challenge for queer theory(s) has been to find ways to display entailments of difference without artificially reproducing conditions of hierarchy. Claiming simply that all expressions of sexuality are equally contingent, regardless of circumstance, has not been a workable solution. There are structures in difference, and by ignoring those structures, discussions dissolve quickly into face-value endorsements of diversity.

Queer of Color and Queer Diaspora Critique

With these challenges in mind a number of scholars of color have engaged with queer analysis. Muñoz explains how queer people of color must negotiate their identities within structures that attempt to erase and punish those who are non-normative, noting that queer people of color, as a result of colonialism, have been doubly placed outside dominant ideologies of both racial and sexual normativity. In order to survive, these subjects must employ a strategy which "tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form," (12) reworking mainstream cultural codes in order to read themselves into this mainstream. Jasbir Puar has drawn connections between gay rights discourse, the necessity of consumption within homonormativity, and the war(s) on terror, arguing that homonormative ideologies replicate the hierarchical ideals of heteronormative ideologies in reference to race, class, gender, and nation-state, giving rise to "homonationalism".

Larry La Fountain-Stokes discusses the migration of gay and lesbian Puerto Ricans, arguing that drag can serve to both question gender and sexuality norms, as well as explore commodification, diasporic displacements, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. Finally, E. Patrick Johnson has proposed a "quaring" – from "quare" is Johnson's spelling of his grandmother’s pronunciation of "queer", her insights into things irregular or excessive inspired Johnson's proposals for "quare studies" –  of queer theory, a project intended to provide "an epistemology [a way of knowing- WL] rooted in the body" that "... moves beyond simply theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that mediation may propel material bodies into action." As a "theory in the flesh" (see below), quare studies proposes an understanding of difference that "refocus[es] our attention on the racialized bodies, experiences and knowledges of transgendered people, lesbians, gays and bisexuals of color" and builds directly on the "material existence of 'colored' bodies (Johnson 135f). Here the racial and class related dimensions of "homosexuality's entrance into white supremacy" (Ferguson 65) now come into even sharper focus, allowing attention to the "gendered" and "sexual" reframing of racial difference as well as to mechanisms that use gender, sexuality and racial status as criteria for social gate-keeping.

Materializing queer-ness

Quare studies' proposals to foreground "racialized bodies, experiences and knowledges" has its parallels in efforts to build "theory in the flesh" – to materialize theory – in other areas of queer inquiry and may in fact move theoretical queer into closer alignment with queer political struggle outside of academe. For example, Beasley and Bacchi are concerned that the "materiality of the body (its substance, its limits and particularity)" is rendered politically insignificant when the body is uniformly assigned the status of a cultural product (346). This critique, a prelude to broader arguments in transgender theory, takes deliberate aim at Butler's discussions of performativity: not all bodies are equally malleable, and only certain subjects can make an imperfect copy of the phantasmic original and survive. Indeed, as McRuer argues (301), the normative obligations of heterosexuality include assumptions of able-bodiedness. As a result, meanings of queerness and meanings of disability are interconnected and from the point of view of the able-bodied mainstream, they are inseparable: queerness is a marker of disability, just as disability is marker of something queer. Of course, certain disabilities - those not written on the body could still enter into respectability, just as other forms of queerness enter into "white supremacy." Disability, as queerness, ceases to be a single formation and diversifies in relation to details of race, ethnicity, class, spatial location, as well as fantasy and other forms of desire.

As these previous points suggest, a recurring concern in queer analysis is to resist limiting discussions of queerness with discussions of sexual identity. Queer inquiry (like queer politics) is concerned with the sense of self that circulates around desires and erotic practices; but the point here is to view desires and erotic practices as social formations, embedded within what Eng terms "multiple social antagonisms." As Halberstam explains, as soon as we stop limiting discussions of queerness to domains of personal action and "... try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules and eccentric economic practices..." we begin to understand why "homosexuality threatens people as a 'way of life' rather than as a 'way of having sex'" (Halberstam 1, citing Foucault 310.)

Queer in Circulation

This sense of a threatening queerness is shaping new directions in queer theory that resonate across the Americas, especially where non-conforming sexualities continue to be situated within the aftermath of colonialism, the discontents of nationalism and the regulatory oppression of neocolonial rule. These situations question whether the term "queer" as defined by North American or North Atlantic scholarship effectively captures local meanings of non-conformity, or simply recolonizes local meanings under new forms of normative demand. These are questions of translation, and they highlight demands that gender and sexuality in all of their forms be located across or between categories of race, ethnicity, able-bodiedness, and national identity, rather than being lodged entirely inside of them (Menon; Ochoa; Viteri 2014; Viteri, Serrano and Vidal-Ortiz).

Nell Haynes and William L. Leap

Please cite as:

Haynes, Nell and William L Leap. 2017. “Queer (Theory)” In Online Dictionary Social and Political Key Terms of the Americas. Version 1.0 (2018).
https://uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/cias/wiki/q/queer-theory.xml

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