The Big Names in Queer Theory
All queer roads lead back to Michel Foucault. His History of Sexuality examines not just sex itself, but how sex acts are discussed and categorized. Many of his ideas center around power and the social constructions of control that grow up around these centers of power.
Why should one well-connected, white male—cough cough Sigmund Freud cough cough—get to tell the rest of us that sexual attraction between members of the same sex is abnormal?
Judith Butler, as part of third-wave feminism, applies Foucault’s ideas to the categories of gender and sexual orientation. She asks some really awesome questions, like:
Are there really masculine and feminine traits that come exclusively with the genes that make us male and female? Why do we care? Is anything really “abnormal”? Isn’t every behavior just a performance, meant to please someone or something? We’re all actors and all the world’s a stage, right?
Right. Like we said, gender seems to be about living up to (or not living up to) a society’s expectations of what men and women should do and should be… not what’s between your legs. So if that’s true, what’s the biggest performance of all?
Coming out of the closet, of course. Eve Sedgwick’s book The Epistemology of the Closet is the other important work that shows how hiding and revealing secrets influences most all of human behavior.
And if you still think there are just two gender categories—guys and dolls—think again. There are so many thoughts, behaviors and desires that just don’t fit neatly into the categories of masculine and feminine. All of us have secrets we are unable to talk about. So all of us come in and out of closets all of the time, when you think about it.
This choosing to share, or to not share, crucial elements of our selves heavily influences the way we view the world. Not to mention that all this acting can be exhausting. Seriously. Isn’t it nice to leave the house without putting makeup on or even brushing your hair?
Butler and Sedwick really shook things up, to say the least. But after they bring queer theory onto the scene, the whole school of thought kind of explodes, with different thinkers moving off in myriad directions. And beware—nobody’s way of thinking is safe from critique with this next generation of theorists.
Enter Michael Warner and his colleague, Lauren Berlant. These two introduce and critique the concept of the heteronormative. This idea basically states that dominant sexual practices—i.e. there’s a Mom + a Dad and they = a Baby or eight—structure everything from how businesses are run to what food we eat to how movies are made.
Yikes. Our lives seem pretty out of our own control sometimes, don’t they?
At the much more provocative and edgy end of the queer spectrum is Lee Edelman. This guy views the queer as a champion of the “death drive”; he wants us to reassess why we make such a big deal out of having kids. Because, we’re like, breeding new little people who will ensure the survival of our species, right?
Well, people like Edelman believe that way of thinking is so outdated that it practically belongs on the prehistoric era. So why don’t we just live our lives how we want before we die?
Judith Jack Halberstam is partly in Edelman’s camp. (He builds the fires that he warms himself by, so to speak.) Halberstam examines failure as a queer ethic. What does that mean? He wants us to look for, and embrace, alternatives conventional understandings of success in our heteronormative, capitalist society.
So if “success” is defined by white, middle class, hetero men, then Judith Jack Halberstam wants us to go ahead and fail. That’s right, kiddos. Now, he’s not talking about getting an “F” in your English class. He’s talking about rejecting schools of thought that seem to exist only to support the current cultural order, with rich white dudes at the top and the rest of us at the bottom.
Jose Muñoz complicates the queer picture by discussing the place of racial/ethnic minorities in queer theory. Since even queer theory was primarily founded by white people, he questions whether existing notions of queerness should be destabilized.
He’d prefer to think of being queer as less of a static quality and more of a state of mind that is always open to change. For Muñoz, queer theory is kind of like that wacky aunt that always has some crazy new hair-do at family gatherings—you never know what she’s going to say next.