Queer+Theory

Queer/Queer Theory:

There are various readings of "queer" and "queer historiography." In this essay I follow Scott Bravmann in understanding queer critical approaches as having emerged in the Western academy from the recognition that early conceptions of gay identity as a single phenomenon masked the diversities and differences of those brought together under that label. Queer emerged because race, ethnicity, and other sources of difference remained sites of oppression in the supposedly liberated zone of gay. From this perspective queer can be seen as an attempt to expunge racism and other minoritizing discourses from gay, to preserve the political gains and to further the early radical promise of gay by opening that identity up to its internal variety and differences. To facilitate this opening up, queer critical studies often focus on exposing multiplicities represented as false unities. In this essay I take it that one of the false unities in need of critique is the proposition that gay is a globally uniform phenomenon. As Bravmann states, "Gay and lesbian history can be criticised for reiterating culturally specific identity categories as universal." 7 Most queer critiques have focused on exposing the internal diversity and contradictions of gay and lesbian identities in Western societies. This essay contributes to an internationalization of the queer project, exposing the differences between constructions of gay in Western and non-Western societies. Gay is not only an internally diverse construct. There are also multiple forms of gay in different localities, and each distinctive form operates as a marker for a diverse range of practices and identities in its social context. Despite appropriating the term queer, Altman undermines the queer project by placing a modernist search for unity above postmodernist explorations of difference. While claiming that he does not wish "to argue for a transhistoric or essentialist position," Altman defines his inquiry into global queering as an investigation of whether there is "a universal gay identity linked to modernity." 8 Modernist [End Page 364] gay politics argues that the way forward is to recognize a common unity beyond apparent diversity. In contrast, this essay is predicated on a postmodern queer politics that argues that the way forward is to recognize rather than resolve or overcome difference. Such a queer politics does not rule out the possibility that men and women in non-Western societies at times find it strategically effective to emphasize the commonalities between local and Western formulations of gay in their efforts to legitimate their identities and lifestyles. However, it is one thing for non-Western men and women to appropriate the "international" cachet of gay in their local struggles and quite another thing for Western queer observers looking out on the rest of the world to presume to find near replicas of themselves in foreign settings. The lesson to be drawn from queer critiques of Western gay historiography is that it is extremely easy for authors writing from a position of comparative privilege to fail to see the difference of those who do not share that privilege. Queer investigations of difference and specificity then represent both a political and a methodological corrective to the patterns of power that inflect all intellectual production.--[|Jackson, Peter A. “An American Death in Bankok: The Murder of Darrell Berrigan and the Hybrid Origins of Gay Identity in 1960s Thailand"]

Although a lesbian and gay framework has been very useful politically in mobilising for civil rights, it may be less useful pedagogically.4 This article proposes that queer theory, an emerging body of work that draws on poststructuralist theories of identity, may be of practical use in both explaining why gay-friendly teaching practices are important and suggesting how such practices might be accom- plished. Queer theory shifts the focus from gaining civil rights to analysing discursive and cultural practices, from affirming minority sexual identities to problematising all sexual identities. Pedagogies of inclusion thus become pedagogies of inquiry (following Nelson, 1998). But with poststructuralism came "the troubling of identity" (Seidman, 1995, p. 117). Identities began to be theorised not as facts but as acts (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985), not attributes but positionings (Hall, 1990), not essences but strategies (Spivak, 1990), not "museum pieces or clinical specimens" but "works in progress" (Phelan, 1994, p. 41). Lesbian and gay identity theory began to seem too fixed and narrow to account for a diverse range of sexual identities (including bisexuality and transgenderalism), relationship types, sexual practices and values, multiple identities, and responses to AIDS. In the 1980s and 1990s the theoretical and practical challenges to identity politics led to the emergence of queer theory and activism (Seidman, 1995). The word queer, once a term of derision, has been reappropriated and is now used, somewhat paradoxically, in two different ways. Queer serves to protest, or at least blur, clear-cut notions of sexual identity, but it also can be used as shorthand for the somewhat lengthy phrase lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgenderal (Warner, 1993).--[|Nelson, Cynthia. “Sexual Identities in ESL: Queer Theory and Classroom Inquiry]

Understanding sexuality as a relational construct underpins recent work in queer theory. As a form of cultural study, queer theory acknowledges the polyvalent ways in which desire is culturally produced, experienced, and expressed. As Morton suggests, "Queer theory is seen as making an advance by opening up a new space for the subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary." 5 Following Sedgwick, this means universaliz- ing sexuality as an analytic category." Elaborated by Britzman, this process begins by interrupting commonsense understandings of what constitutes sex, sexuality, pleasure, desire, and the relationships among these and the technologies for learning about and enacting their differences.7 Bridged to the work of curriculum theory, queer theory asks that the forms of curriculum and the relations of pedagogy be appropriated as sites to interpret the particularities of the perceived differences among persons, not merely among categories of persons. "Queer" is not meant as a signifier that represents gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered identities. Rather, "queer" functions as a marker representing interpretive work that refuses what Halley has called "the heterosexual bribe"-that is, the cultural re- wards afforded those whose public performances of self are contained within that narrow band of behaviors considered proper to a heterosexual identity. In so doing, the possibilities for what might count as knowledge are broadened-not just knowledge about sexuality, but knowledge about how forms of desire are inextricable from processes of perception, cogni- tion, and interpretation. Queer theory does not ask that pedagogy become sexualized, but that it excavate and interpret the way it already is sexualized- and, furthermore, that it begin to interpret the way that it is explicitly heterosexualized. Moreover, rather than defining queer identities in strict reference to particular bodily acts and aberrant or quirky lifestyles, queer theory asks that the continued construction of narratives supporting that unruly category "heterosexual" be constantly interrupted and renarrated.--[|Sumara, Dennis and Brent Davis. “Interrupting Heteronormativity: Toward a Queer Curriculum Theory]

Second, dance provides a unique entrance into theorizations of the body, temporality, and sociality, yet it remains marginal to discussions in cultural studies, queer theory, and lesbian and gay scholarship. My essay responds to recent calls in my own field, performance studies, to incorporate dance and dance research into the mix.--[|Román, David. "Not-About-AIDS." GLQ 6:1 (2000): 1-28]

The main reason that I could not find any men to write about men and lesbianism, it would seem, is that those working most closely to the field, that is, men working in queer studies, that is, for the most part, gay men, are also the group traditionally least inclined to take an interest in lesbianism. And straight men—themselves the problem, as it were—were not talking.--[|Ladenson, Elisabeth "The Special Issue that Shagged Me"]

So while we may grant the reversal of original and copy in queer theoretical formulations of heterosexuality and homosexuality, the question I want to tackle here is how drag-king performances (copies, supposedly) influence the representation of male performativity (original, supposedly).-- [|Halberstam, Judith "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings"]

I use the terms gay and lesbian rather than queer in this essay in keeping with the terminology employed by the gay and lesbian tourism industry and by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. While the queer project attempts to destabilize and transcend binary notions of straight/gay, masculine/feminine, and so on, I do not believe that gay and lesbian tourism currently does this. Similarly, up until the writing of this piece, there have been few “queer moments” in the Mardi Gras parade—many, many gay and lesbian moments, and a few bisexual moments, but even fewer that could be regarded as queer. In other words, the parade has consistently privileged the presentation of sexualities in terms of “gay” and “lesbian,” as opposed to “bisexual” and “queer,” identities.--[|Markwell, Kevin. "Mardis Gras Tourism and the Constuction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City"]

The question of who counts as a proper subject in queer history has long been a vexed one; the prison’s associations with criminality and especially with sexual coercion and violence push against the parameters of a history often motivated by the impulse to recover and celebrate gay identity and community.--[|Kunzel, Regina G. "Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States"]

In exploring how music functions in this questioning process, I use the word queer as a sexually freighted synonym for questioning. The etymology of queer is uncertain. One source suggests its origin in the early English cwer [crooked, not straight].2 Another possible origin is the Indo-European root -twerkw, which yielded the Latin torquere [to twist] and the German quer [transverse]. The word first appears, however, in early-sixteenth-century Scottish sources as an adjectival form of query, from the Latin quaerere [to question].3 The question associated with queer clearly became one of sexuality and gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the word peppers such novels as Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898) and Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) and appears as a label for dissident sexuality in at least one sociological study from 1922.4 In the early 1990s the word queer emerged as a term of resistance to the 1970s identity labels gay and lesbian; these identities were rooted to a large extent in gender separatism and in a naturalized hetero/homosexual binary.5 “Queer,” according to David M. Halperin, describes a subject position “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. . . an identity without an essence.”6 In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, it is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”7

Queer theory, then, questions given concepts of identity based on same-sex desire, expanding their scope to include intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, ethnicity, and institutions such as family, religion, and nation-states. As a term of relation, queer describes neither a simple binary opposition to normative heterosexuality nor a position outside in dialectic with the status quo, but a threat—the sexual ignition of cultural phobias. These phobias, primarily about gender confusion and the displacement of the patriarchal heterosexual family, become anxieties about the integrity of the self, subjectivity, and social identity.--Peraino, Judith A. "Listening to the Sirens: Music as Queer Ethical Practice."

Endnote: Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1996),-- [|White, Patrick. “Sex Education; or, How the Blind Became Heterosexual.]”

Queer theorists critiqued feminist, gay and lesbian, and even gender studies for excluding various sexual constituents (transsexuals, bisexuals, transgendered people, S/M practitioners, nonheteronormative straights, etc.) and for advocating inclusion and representation in, rather than replacement of, existing social structures. Consider, for example, how the term queer has been defined by some of its proponents. In The Queer Renaissance Robert McRuer describes queer as a fluid designation for identities that “are shaped and reshaped across differences and that interrogate and disrupt dominant hierarchical understandings of not only sex, gender, and sexuality but also race and class.”5 I think that McRuer would agree to adding disability to that list. Michael Warner, in Fear of a Queer Planet, argues for an even broader definition: “The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation. in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.”6 Disability studies’ stance against “regimes of the normal” may appear to be more of the same; as Judith Butler argues in Bodies That Matter, the term queer, rather than describing a specific identity, can be considered “a site of collective contestation. . . the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings.” Thus it must “remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes.”7 Because disability civil rights could be considered just such an urgent political purpose, one might assume that queer could be redeployed in its service. Moreover, the term cripple, like queer, is fluid and ever-changing, claimed by those whom it did not originally define. As a pejorative, the term queer was originally targeted at gays and lesbians, yet its rearticulation as a term of pride is currently claimed by those who may not consider themselves homosexual, such as the transgendered, transsexuals, heterosexual sex radicals, and others. The term crip has expanded to include not only those with physical impairments but those with sensory or mental impairments as well. Though I have never heard a nondisabled person seriously claim to be crip (as heterosexuals have claimed to be queer), I would not be surprised by this practice. The fluidity of both terms makes it likely that their boundaries will dissolve. Warner, who argues for the potential strategic expansiveness of the term queer, would seem to offer a corrective by reminding his readers that queer theory’s vitality depends on its willingness to recognize difference: “Theory has to understand that different identity environments are neither parallel—so that the tactics and values of one might be assumed to be appropriate for another—nor separable. Queer struggles and those of other identity movements, or alternatively of other new social movements, often differ in important ways—even when they are intermingled in experience.”--[|Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.”]

From what we trace as the first coining of the phrase "queer theory" its use by film theorist Teresa de Laurentis in a June 1991 edition of the journal Differences: A Journal ofFeminist Cultural Studies the term has maintained a somewhat uneasy alliance with the discourse surrounding the epidemiC of AIDS. The issue of Differences edited by de Laurentis appeared shortly after Butler's Gender Trouble, the groundbreakingbook that established the important aspect of queer theory called "performativity," the notion that gender identity is not a stable essence b~t is in fact performed, and thus might be defined as "that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names" ("Gender" 33). Yet, while Butler's work informed some early AIDS activism, particularly the politics of representation of groups like Queer Nation those who write and theorize about AIDS today have generally not take~ up the notIon of performativity. Instead, the discussion of AIDS has followed a different trajectory, one in which the discourses ofsexuality and deSire so central to establishing the basis ofgay identity have become distanced from the discourses of disease and death. The result, the emergence ofpost-AIDS discourse, has effectively worked to normalize gay identity in a manner that can best be described as heterosexist. In the process, post-AIDS discourse has posited conservative voices that herald the "end of AIDS" against more theoretical voices that challenge such an hlstoncal and apolitical reading of the AIDS epidemic. While Butler's notion of performativity has not been envisioned in ways that directly address the material aspects of the AIDS epidemic either among the gay male population in the United States or on the global scale of the disease some scholars suggest her theory may deserve a second look for the potentialities it offers, particularly in combating the homophobia associated with the disease.

As David Halperin suggests, "Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence" (62).

Despite his assertion that queer theory achieves its force by calling into question stable and coherent identities, Crimp's conclusion that queer theory is therefore "fundamentally ... antihomophobic" does not address the problem posed by post-AIDS discourse (289). I argue that queer theory has not been successful as a way to theorize gay issues surrounding AIDS. While Crimp suggests that the failure is attributable to conservative gay journalists and others who have accepted the "normalization and vilification ofanyone whose way oflife might challenge an uncritical compliance with institutionalized norms" (288-89), the real problem, I argue, is that the notion of shifting identities does not adequately address the abjection of homosexuality, by gays and straights alike, in light of AIDS. Crimp himself describes this concern when he writes, "The abjection of homosexuality is not a simple matter of ignorance to be overcome with time, education, and 'progress,' but a deep-seated psychic mechanism central to the construction ofnormative subjectivity and thus of social cohesion" (300-01). Whereas gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals resisted that normative subjectivity for years, the pressure to conform to it in light of the AIDS epidemic has not been changed by the shifting identities made possible by queer theory. In fact, queer theory, in the possibility it offers to liberate characterizations of gender and sexuality, seems to increase the likelihood of a normative post-AIDS discourse, one that constructs selves that are not about- AIDS. Thus, ironically, the queering of AIDS has brought about just the opposite of its intended purpose.--[|Butler, Paul. “Embracing AIDS: History, Identity, and Post-AIDS Discourse.”]

Basically, the main tenets of queer theory that we believe are applicable to writing pedagogy are as follows:
 * identities are constructed and performed rather than essential and “natural”
 * all spaces (both inside the classroom and out) are saturated with gendered and sexualized constructions of identity, which are never entirely our own but are given to us as “narrations” of self
 * we negotiate multiple identities through multiple social spaces, creating complex intersections between self, perception of self, other and perception of other
 * our conceptions of selves are sexualized and gendered beings are intimately connected to ways power is shaped, shifted, and shared between self and other in the social milieu
 * understanding the construction and negotiation of these identities allows us to resist normalizing identity, which robs our differences–and the differences of others–of their critical power (see Jagose)
 * queer theory moves us beyond the multicultural task of accepting and validating identity and moves us toward the more difficult process of understanding how identity, even the most intimate perceptions of self, arise out of a complex matrix of shifting social power. In this way, we believe queer theory has uses and applications for self-understanding that engage all students as they narrate their identities for us, tell us who they are, and give us–and themselves–the stories of their lives, past, present, and future (3)

However, to understand queer theory’s concerns as simply political is to miss how deeply and even intimately rhetorical queer theory is, for queer theory asks us to question, at the most fundamental levels and in the most essential ways, the nature of authorship, representation, and the process of coming into being through language (7-8).--[|Alexander, Jonathan and Michelle Gibson. " Queer Composition(s): Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom."]

Building on queer approaches, Halley ultimately urges her readers to move beyond identity-based frameworks altogether, to foreground not “who we are but how we are thought,” but she also acknowledges the stubborn and seemingly intractable persistence of analogous thinking in the American legal system, and perhaps in American culture more broadly.--[|Somerville, Siobhan B. "Queer Loving."]

It is perhaps worth remembering that one of the reasons that scholars found queer theory so invigorating in the early 1990s was that it allowed us to concentrate not on how social phenomena became intelligible but on how they became unintelligible. In other words, it taught us that the problem was not homosexuality; the problem was the processes that made homosexuality the problem. Queer theory taught us to look at the processes by which gay and lesbian relations came to seem incomprehensible. It encouraged us to examine the strategies that made certain sexual subjects unspeakable. It insisted that we document the ways that heterosexuality’s investment in power was unseen, unacknowledged, unimagined.--[|Kulick, Don. “Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts.”]

Gibson and I have recently attempted to extend this discussion in our own essay, "Queer Composition(s): Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom," in which we argue that "queer theory asks us to question, at the most fundamental levels and in the most essential ways, the nature of authorship, repre- sentation, and the process of coming into being through language" (7-8). Specifically, in its questioning of the essentialist nature of identities based on sexual orientation, queer theory can be used to highlight for all students how our identities are shaped and communicated through a variety of intersecting social processes. For instance, how we understand ourselves as gay or straight-our "personal" identities-is socially inflected by labels that, on one hand, stigmatize certain behaviors and, on the other hand, reify others. Homophobic taunts, for ex- ample, show how language use intervenes in the composing of socially accept- able identities; having one's actions, mannerisms, or interests labeled "gay" can force a reexamination of how one narrates his or her "story"-both to him- or herself and to others.2

Jay Prosser, in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, critiques "the equation 'camp = queer = performativity = transgender' that per- vades [queer theory]" in that it "not only misrepresents reality but ignores the important 'narrative' of becoming a biological man or woman" (qtd. in Dickemann 463).--[|Alexander, Jonathan. "Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body."]

Meanwhile, queer theory was rapidly spreading through academic halls in the United States in 1991. “Flaunting It!” the first annual national graduate student conference in lesbian and gay studies, took place in Milwaukee in April; the excitement peaked at the Fifth Annual Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University that November; and high-profile anthologies appeared just as those transformative books, Gender Trouble and Epistemology of the Closet, both published in 1990, were taking root.9 Queer theory pushed the boundaries of feminism and rejected as theoretically naive the empiricism of social science approaches that in the postwar period had dominated studies of sexuality (in history, psychology, and sociology, for example). Taking sex to be a mode of transacting cultural business, queer theory assumed different materials — including pop culture artifacts — as grist for the new queer mill. For our journal we lined up a film/video review editor — B Ruby Rich, from outside the academy — alongside our book review editors as a gesture toward that new material, and we inaugurated an Archive section to expand the range of traditional materials that had ignored or “disappeared” sexuality. Later we added a Gallery section as well. Now, as evinced by its use on sitcoms and reality TV, queer is rapidly losing its edge and becoming a bland synonym for gay, indexing mainstream liberal values and lifestyle consumer culture.11 Beyond the United States and western Europe queer has opened up progressive social and political possibilities — in Taiwan, for example.12 The term is not uncontroversial there, though: some activists, it must be noted, have questioned the usefulness of queer because of its Americanness, its implication in specifically American social contexts informed by racial tensions and reactions against the term gay.--[|Dinshaw, Carolyn. “The History of GLQ, Volume I: LGBTQ Studies, Censorship, and Other Transnational Problems.”]

A queer phenomenology might turn to phenomenology by asking not only about the concept of orientation in phenomenology, but also about the orientation of phenomenology. This article hence considers the significance of the objects that appear in phenomenological writing, as orientation devices. At the same time, to queer phenomenology is also to offer a queer phenomenology. In other words, queer does not have a relation of exteriority to that with which it comes into contact. A queer phenomenology might find what is queer within phenomenology and use that queerness to make some rather different points. Phenomenology, after all, is full of queer moments, moments of disorientation, which involve not only “the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our own contingency and the horror with which it fills us.”3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives an account of how these moments are overcome, as bodies are reoriented in the “becoming vertical” of perspective.4 A queer phenomenology might involve a different orientation toward such moments. It might even find joy and excitement in the horror.--[|Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.”]

Wittig was at least fifteen years ahead of what would become queer theory. And, like most prophets, Wittig has been often ignored in her own “country,” in this case not France but queer theory. A key concept in queer theory is performativity. According to Butler’s definition in Gender Trouble, “gender proves to be performative — that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. . . . There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender: that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”16 Long before Butler and others set their sights on performativity, however, Wittig had pushed to its logical conclusions Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”17 For Wittig, not only gender but also the very categories of sex themselves at all levels — physical, social, psychological — are constructed by a totalitarian regime of heterosexuality. This regime forces, in many instances literally under pain of death, the division of humanity into two and only two sexes/genders through the daily repetition of mental and physical acts. In her critique of such a division, Wittig is clear: for human beings, there is no preexistent human nature.

Jennifer Burwell offers a particularly clear and condensed account of the differences between Wittig’s strategies and those of queer theory, writ large: What differentiates Wittig and queer theory is their understanding of the place and role of lesbian subjectivity: Wittig locates this place outside of gender and identifies the role to be that of speaking a language that escapes gender; queer theory locates this place at a “point of systemic failure” within gender and identifies the role to be that of dismantling gender by working its weakness from within.35 For Wittig, this queer strategy is itself doomed to failure, since it relies upon the very categories it seeks to displace. Since the system already casts gays and lesbians as “queer” and “monstrous,” even as “damned souls” (the term in Virgile, non for the oppressed), emphasizing our difference by performing it (however differently) risks merely replicating the roles that society prescribes for us.

At this point, and as I move toward an impossible conclusion, let me summarize. Wittig anticipates queer theory with her anti-essentialism, her focus on resistance, her ideas on the proliferation of sexual possibilities, and her emphasis on discourses as tools of power. But there are differences that are too important for us to classify her as a queer theorist ahead of her time. While I do not have space here to develop all the criticisms of queer theory proffered by many lesbian feminists, I believe that many contemporary queer theorists have taken a number of Wittig’s key insights in directions that are foreign to her thought. The aspect of queer theory that is arguably at the greatest remove from Wittig’s philosophy is what Louise Turcotte has called queer theory’s “virtual” aspect and what others have called its “ludic” aspect.38 As a materialist who understands the materiality of discourse, Wittig does not believe that the heterosexual regime can be modified or subverted by playing or citing roles differently, inasmuch as these roles are still scripted by that regime. (Butler has responded to earlier criticisms of her work as voluntaristic by distinguishing performance from performativity and by emphasizing the obligatory nature of the latter.)39 Mathieu reminds us that in many queer or postmodern theories the emphasis all too often falls on the cultural, psychological, or symbolic aspects of identity while giving short shrift to the underlying economic, legal, and social institutions that reinforce a hierarchy in which women and others remain exploited.40 Iris Young has cogently argued that as movements of social critique, feminism and queer theory must account not only for “individual experience, subjectivity, and identity, but also [for] social structures” that limit access to the power to express one’s subjectivity.--[|Crowder, Diane Griffin. “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory Implications for Political Movement.”]

Lee Edelman: But what if time’s collapse into history is symptomatic, not historical? What if framing this conversation in terms of a “turn toward time” preemptively reinforces the consensus that bathes the petrified river of history in the illusion of constant fluency? What if that very framing repeats the structuring of social reality that establishes heteronormativity as the guardian of temporal (re)production? These questions shape my recent book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004), which suggests that the logic of repetition, associated with the death drive, though projectively mapped onto those read as queers, informs as well the insistence on history and on reproductive futurism that’s posited over and against them.--[|Dinshaw, Carolyn et al. "Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion."] I explore the possibility of a queer theory that does not foreclose the support of what I provisionally term same-sex marriage. Such a stance remains aligned with scholars like Warner and Duggan in terms of an attention to how marriage has been deployed in the service of normalization, in linked symbolic and political economic registers. But many queer theoretical positions against same-sex marriage share a temporal horizon with both the Right and “pro-gay” arguments for same-sex marriage. This conceptual, practical, and ultimately political horizon is at its core the linear, millenarian framework of apocalypse that I name “straight time.” This is not just a pun: straight time is an emically salient, socially efficacious, and experientially real cultural construction of temporality across a wide range of political and social positions. I hypothesize that straight time is shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse, and that naming this temporality and speculating on possible alternatives might productively inform discussions of same-sex marriage. Note that I have purposely chosen queer theory as the critical object here, leaving to the side the political institutions, cultural norms, and forms of commodity capitalism that sustain marriage’s hegemony. For queer theory, working within the horizon of straight time produces a temporality in which the present is regressive: the “presence” of the “present” is, in this implicit understanding and the practices based on it, hopelessly compromised by its copresence with systems of domination. The inability of straight time to provide a framework for theorizing co-incidence founds the “paranoid imperative” with which Sedgwick sees queer studies as having “a distinctive history of intimacy.” I am struck by the failure of queer theory to account for the threat same-sex marriage is taken to pose, and the concurrent manner in which forms of sexuality termed radical or queer are often quite legible and unthreatening to conservatives. It is interesting, for instance, to consider how few queer critiques there are of the extension of legal recognition for marriage regardless of ethnicity or race, culminating in the United States in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision.--[|Boellstorff, Tom. “When Marriage Falls Queer Coincidences in Straight Time.]

While some professors encouraged me to study gender theory and queer theory and to critically challenge cultural patterns outside the academy, they opposed any radical change in the structure of the academy itself. Within two years, the majority of the 'marginalized' students had chosen to leave the PhD program: the only two people of color, three out of six women, and myself, the only queer man. I left the academy in 1990 with a clear sense that it was the academy itself, perhaps even more than the culture at large, that needed rupturing and an infusion of queerness--something that theory did not seem to offer. Coincidentally, I had just discovered a network of queer communes in the U.S., and decided to move to one-in essence to let theory arise from praxis, rather than to wait for praxis to arise from theory. So, I stand here today with a great deal of skepticism about the academy, about theory in general, and queer theory in particular.--[|Long, Nathan. “If Queer Theory Were My Lover.”]