Marcus-Queer_Theory_for_Everyone.pdf

Sharon Marcus

Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay

L ibrary shelves tell interesting stories. Thirty or forty years ago, it took

almost no time to get from feminism to homosexuality—in the stacks.

Neither category took up much space, and few books stood between

them, since the Library of Congress system classiﬁes feminism and ho-

mosexuality together in Subclass HQ, “The Family. Marriage. Women.”

That subclass has ﬁlled out rapidly in the past forty years, and in the past

two decades much of the growth has been in HQ 74-77—“Bisexuality.

Homosexuality. Lesbianism. Transvestism. Transexualism.” Books that

once huddled together for warmth on a few shelves now proudly occupy

many linear feet in most major research collections. Paralleling the growth

of gay studies has been the even more substantial increase within HQ

1101-2030.7: “Women. Feminism.” 1

One ironic result of the surge in lesbian-gay studies and feminist studies

is that the distance between these sections in the library has grown even

as sexuality and gender have coalesced in feminist and queer scholarship.

The more books there are in HQ 74 and HQ 1101, the longer it takes

to get through each section, and the longer it takes to get from one to

the other. That homosexuality and feminism are neighbors at all is an

artifact of a classiﬁcation system that absorbs both “sexual life” and

“women” into “family” and “marriage,” the ﬁrst two words in the over-

arching HQ subclass heading. Although “family” and “marriage” unite

“homosexuality” and “women,” they also separate them. Between HQ74-

77 and HQ 1101-2030 we ﬁnd HQ503-1064: “The family. Marriage.

Home.” Stuffed into those call numbers are “parents,” “single people,”

“man-woman relationships,” “adultery,” “divorce,” “widows,” “geron-

tology,” and—as if when marriage ends, so does life—“Thanatology.

Death. Dying.”

For their keen comments on this essay, I thank Ellis Avery, Diana Fuss, Anne Higonnet,

Vanessa Schwartz, Judith Walkowitz, Sandra Harding, Kathryn Norberg, and the Signs ed-

itorial staff.

For more information on the Library of Congress’s subclasses in the social sciences,

see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco_h.pdf (last accessed April 5, 2005).

[ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2005, vol. 31, no. 1]

192

Marcus

It is not surprising that those who devised the Library of Congress

headings in the late nineteenth century deﬁned homosexuality as a sexual

deviation to be sandwiched between bestiality and incest, on one side, and

prostitution, sadism, fetishism, masturbation, and emasculation, on the

other. 2 Nor is it astonishing that the system’s inventors asserted, well before

Monique Wittig, that lesbians (HQ 74.2) are not women (HQ1101; Wittig

1993, 108). Scholars may try to overturn these divisions, but classiﬁcation

systems designed for bookshelves transform intersections into sequences

that then become hierarchies. The ﬁrst term in any Library of Congress

data entry is the most visible because it governs where and therefore how

we see a book. A scholar may argue that at the turn of the century race,

gender, and homosexuality were all mutually constitutive categories, but

the book in which Siobhan B. Somerville (2000) makes this assertion is

classiﬁed as ﬁrst and foremost about gender identity (HQ1075.5.U6S6S:

1. Gender identity—United States—History).

Like the sexological categories Somerville analyzes, Library of Congress

descriptions often reveal more about the values of the classiﬁers than about

the books they categorize. For example, Esther Newton’s Margaret Mead

Made Me Gay (HQ76.3.U5 N49) includes several essays on the relation-

ship between feminism and lesbianism, but the library’s third subject list-

ing for the book is “Lesbian feminism—United States.” Lesbian feminism

is a term associated much more with separatism than with the sexually

mixed consciousness-raising groups Newton describes in her essays on

feminism. But either out of ignorance of such nuances or in accordance

with a one-drop rule of sexual deviance, the library rubric reduces New-

ton’s account of knotty encounters between women to a single political

movement and ﬁlters lesbians out of feminism: books on “lesbian femi-

nism” are shelved with “homosexuality,” not “feminism.”

Those who write, read, and teach books that strain the limits of clas-

siﬁcation systems can pride themselves on how poorly those schemes reﬂect

new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. The library is ﬁlled with

works that dissolve the dictates governing their placement. We now have

the tools to pry off the labels that segregate homosexuality from the family,

queer studies from feminism, and lesbians from women. This essay begins

with an overview of how we acquired those tools and then inventories

the equipment provided in some recent queer scholarship, most of it

focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, France, and the

United States, for understanding not only sexuality and gender but also

See Chan 1986 for the history and usage of the Library of Congress system.

S I G N S

Autumn 2005

193

modernity and its offshoots—science, liberalism, democracy, and con-

sumer culture.

Genealogies of sexuality and gender

Feminism in the United States has, since the 1960s, understood sexuality

as both an arena for women’s liberation and as a crucial vector of women’s

oppression. Manifestos such as Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal

Orgasm” ([1970] 1971) and encyclopedic works such as Our Bodies,

Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective [1970] 2005) claimed

women’s rights to sexual pleasure, autonomy, and knowledge. The de-

mand for female sexual autonomy also required understanding the forces

arrayed against it: hence the focus on rape, sexual harassment, and male

domination in early writings by Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, and

Catharine MacKinnon. Lesbians played an important role in those early

feminist formulations, as we see in two recent collections whose essays

chart the intertwined history of lesbianism and feminism since the 1960s:

Newton’s Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas

(2000) and Amber Hollibaugh’s My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl

Dreaming Her Way Home (2000). Both books express frustration with

1960s and 1970s feminist tenets—that heterosexuality embodies men’s

oppression of women, that male domination suppresses lesbian love and

bonds between women, and that lesbianism liberates women from male

oppression by refusing men and all things masculine. One classic for-

mulation of those tenets was Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosex-

uality and Lesbian Existence,” ﬁrst published in Signs in 1980, which

summoned feminist theory to go beyond “token allusion to lesbians”

(Rich [1980] 1983, 140). To do so, Rich argued, would require under-

standing “the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male

dominance” (141) and lesbianism as women’s resistance to “male tyranny”

(160). But prescribing lesbianism as an antidote to everything toxic about

heterosexuality excessively sanitized lesbianism, purifying it of power, gen-

der, and desire. 3 Butch women were censured for being male-identiﬁed,

and femme women were criticized for cleaving to patriarchal codes of

femininity (Hollibaugh 2000, 63, 123; Newton 2000, 161, 172).

Feminist arguments about sexuality as the site of women’s oppression

depend on an interesting circularity: they deﬁne gender as the sexual

On lesbianism as a desexualized fantasy of feminism, see also de Lauretis 1994, 185,

and Dever 2004.

194

Marcus

conﬂict between men and women, and sexuality as the gender conﬂict

between men and women. As a result, early feminist manifestos for les-

bianism either had little to say about gay men or saw gay men as having

much more in common with male oppressors than with lesbians. Rich

cited “the prevalence of anonymous sex, . . . the justiﬁcation of pederasty

among male homosexuals,” and the “pronounced ageism” of gay men’s

“standards of sexual attractiveness” as examples of the “differences” be-

tween lesbians and gay men, expressing the sense of strict sexual difference

now associated with radical feminism ([1980] 1983, 157). But Rich,

MacKinnon, and Brownmiller also articulated a fundamentally liberal pol-

itics, since they assumed that to deprive women of autonomy, equality,

individuality, and happiness is to commit unacceptable violence on rights-

bearing human beings. Feminists in the United States diagnosed sexual

difference as the cause of the heterosexual conﬂict they aimed to eradicate,

but even as they made sexual difference paramount, they also located its

disappearance as the horizon of equality.

The continental versions of feminism that circulated in the United

States in the 1980s through the work of H´l`ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray,

and Julia Kristeva also took up a sexualized opposition between femininity

and masculinity. Irigaray’s writings described male homosexuality in ways

uncannily similar to Rich’s work. But French feminist theory was inter-

ested in neither individual liberty nor the eventual eclipse of sexual dif-

ference. For thinkers inﬂuenced by Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjec-

tivity, freedom was a necessary casualty and sexual difference an inescapable

condition of being human. Feminists in the United States understood

lesbianism as the rejection of the masculinity embedded in heterosexuality.

French feminists theorized female homoeroticism as the embodiment of

the feminine difference on which true heterosexuality depended but which

phallocentrism suppressed. In the late 1990s, that embrace of heterosexual

difference led a different set of French feminists to denounce lesbians and

gay men who demanded political and social recognition. French oppo-

nents of gay marriage included conservative womanists, such as Fran¸oise

H´ritier and Sylviane Agacinski, who warned that sexual difference is the

universal basis of culture and that psychic health, sound parenting, and

mature sexuality ﬂourish only when a couple unites the complementary

opposites Man and Woman (see Eribon 2000; Butler 2002).

The French model of sexual difference once exerted a strong inﬂuence

on U.S. feminist scholarship. In the past two decades, however, that in-

ﬂuence has waned as psychoanalysis and deconstruction have become in-

creasingly specialized, as students have lost interest in France, and as the

fall of communism and increasing U.S. conservatism have combined to

S I G N S

Autumn 2005

195

make liberalism more appealing to progressives. 4 Liberalism has become

a prominent ingredient in arguments for the rights of women and sexual

minorities. In both instances the grounds are similar: respect for difference

and interest in promoting equality and autonomy. Newton, for example,

includes “the right to be different without being persecuted” and “the

right to a greater measure of sexual freedom and choice” among the causes

gays embody (2000, 237). Claims for equality, such as the demand to

legalize gay marriage, are not uncontroversial, and many queer theorists

warn that equality will be the death of difference because it will force

minorities to adapt themselves to a norm that was formulated to exclude

them (Warner 1999). But even warnings about its homogenizing con-

sequences afﬁrm liberal values: nonconformity and individual dissent.

Where French feminists valorize gender difference as a universal difference

(Schor 1995), liberals in the tradition of John Stuart Mill value the idi-

osyncratic difference of the sexual minority.

The inﬂuence of liberalism provides one genealogy of how feminism,

instead of dividing homosexuality into a positive feminine version and a

negative masculine one, can make common cause with gay rights in the

name of freedom of sexual choice. Other important factors in the rap-

prochement of feminism and queer theory have been the increased visi-

bility of women in gay movements, increased contact between feminist

lesbians and gay men, and the academic dialogue between queer and

feminist theorists that became possible when queer scholars claimed an

academic presence. In the 1980s, scholars objected to the ways that fem-

inists like Rich and Irigaray characterized male homosexuality (Sedgwick

1985, 26; Owens 1987), and in recent years many men doing queer studies

give equal weight to feminist research agendas. 5 Parallel lines can some-

times converge. Feminist theory shifted from studying women to studying

gender as a set of relations, and lesbian and gay studies analogously moved

from tracing historically stable identities based on object choice to deﬁning

queerness in relation to sexual norms. Those parallel shifts have created

intersections between queer and feminist scholars who now share gender

and sexuality as objects of analysis.

The queer turn began as a gambit to reclaim a slur whose lack of

Henry Abelove offers a more optimistic genealogy when he argues that authors who

laid the ground for gay liberation in the United States were inﬂuenced by a liberal ideology

whose strength derived not from U.S. global domination but from decolonization struggles

that challenged Western powers to live up to their liberal principles (2003, 70–88).

Examples include Bagemihl 1999; Goldberg 2001; Nealon 2001; and Lucey 2003.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: