Outline+for+Exam


 * Note from J: For the first two sections, how Foucault and Butler are being handled in the scholarship, try grouping their uses thematically, so it feels like you are making claims, and so I feel like I know why I'm getting the influx of data. Ultimately, I feel like points two and three are the most important, and the first point is just about getting your groundwork down. Keep up the good work--I'm very proud of you.

Point 1: Foucault lends discourse of sexuality to Queer Theory as well as other ideas from History of Sexuality and is the most cited figure in random sample. However, it is Butler's theory of performativity that is crucial to the postmodern aims of Queer Theory. Thus, Butler's performativity is cited more often consistently, even though she is cited less overall.

I How Foucault is handled themes:1999 works mention & summarize Foucault; 2000-2003 he is mainly mentioned in passing; 2003 Pariaino uses him extensively; 2004-2005 he is discussed in reference to other's work; 2006 critiques come into play; 2006-2007 back to brief mention whereas Butler is quoted early on 1999-2001; 2003-2005 she is mentioned in lists as well as incorporated; 2006 mentioned in list of other theorists; 2007 she is criticized II How Butler is handled: III Citational Patterns: Point 2: What is pattern in Queer Theory that we can compare citational patterns to? IV How is Queer Theory understood?
 * 1999 Cynthia Nelson mentions Foucault along with Butler's performativity. With Foucault, Nelson focuses on a “tradition of how identity is made to seem natural”
 * 1999 Peter Jackson uses Foucault to discuss "discourse of sexuality, such as Foucault traces in nineteenth-century European discourses"
 * 1999 Dennis Sumera & Brent Davis state: "In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault2 explains how Western culture has fashioned an entangled relationship between knowledge and sex. Following Foucault, Sedgwick3 has further explained that because sexuality has been expressive of both identity and knowledge, it has be- come the centering force of the heterosexism and of the generalized and pervasive homophobia that continues to exist."
 * 2000 David Halperin mentions Foucault in his article, but does not directly cite or quote him.
 * 2001 Butler mentions Foucault in passing, in particular politics of truth and desubjugation of the subject
 * 2002 Ragina Kunzel mentions briefly the creation of homosexuality as a species, which is from Foucault
 * 2002 brief mention in terms of his historiography by Evan Towle
 * 2003 Patrick White mentions Foucault's repressive hypothesis twice
 * 2003 Judith Paraino cites "genealogy of desire as an ethical problem and technologies of the self", methodologies and “care of the self, and a summary and explanation of sadomasochism--this is the most extensive use of Foucault up to this point
 * 2004 Robert McRuer summarizes how Foucault is used in the work of Thornton in an endnote
 * 2004 Jan Cooper
 * 2004 Paul Butler mentions terms of homosexuality and Foucault's influence on Butler
 * 2005 Don Kulick cites case history of homosexuality, mentions deployment of sexuality, and mentions "I do not plan to wait for a Foucault of the future" cited the decrease in Foucault's influence on "current" scholarship
 * 2006 Carolyn Dinshaw briefly mentions Foucault in reference to critiques of his work, which is where her own project also picks up "Their critiques of Michel Foucault, insisting that he imperialistic dimensions of modern power be reckoned with, form the deep background of my thinking about the racialization of history"
 * 2006 Sara Ahmed makes a brief quotation about incitement to discourse
 * 2007 Tom Boellstorff cites at length Foucault's thoughts on "reverse discourse"
 * 1999 Nelson cites performativity
 * 1999 DeLuca quotes parodic proliferation
 * 2001 Halberstam quotes "copy for which there is no original" in her seminal article on drag kings
 * 2003 White links Butler with Wittig for the term heterosexual matrix; white uses Butler at length in his piece
 * 2003 Sandahl uses Butler for the term queer and queer drag
 * 2004 Cooper conflates Butler with a list of other theorists like Katz, Fuss, Sedgwick, mentions but does not cite or quote
 * 2004 McRuer incorporates Butler, particularly the idea of performativity
 * 2004 Paul Butler discuss Butler's term performativity, as well as the idea of homosexuality as conflated with the disease AIDS, meaning homosexuality is inverted bearer of death; Butler analyzes performativity in terms of AIDS at length
 * 2005 Alexander in Transgender Rhetorics summarizes Butler through scholars who have used her (David Gauntlett, performativity); he also integrates Butler via other's work at length (Elizabeth Flynn, Bornstein, Jay Prosser, Stryker quoted at length)
 * 2006 Ahmed mentions her in a list of other feminists, as well as summarizes performativity, and integrates about the spatial orientation of the hetersexuality as Butler discusses it; she uses different work Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” & Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
 * 2007 Boellstorff quotes Butler's work on same-sex marriage at length “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” x3
 * 2007 Crowder mentions how Butler claims feminist label, but then adds her to a list of queer scholars (Jagose, Fuss, Wittig); uses performativity; Butler is compared to Wittig (criticizing Wittig for her imperialistic use of term lesbian, criticism of Wittig, Wittig’s assertions came before Butler); uses her own citation of her argument in Gender Trouble (Wittig proposes we do not play the game, instead of just playing by different rules); host of work used (Undoing Gender x4, Gender Trouble & “Critically Queer”, Bodies that Matter x6, “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”)
 * heyday of Butler & performativity: 2003-2004
 * 1999 & 2004 Foucault cited most
 * while citation ranges from page 1 to page 15, he averages a citation half-way through most essays and History of Sexuality is often summarized
 * Butler is often cited on average near pages 6-8, earlier in the draft and a wider range of her work is cited
 * Foucault is not integrated as much into the articles as Butler, as we seen in the years they are most popular (White uses Butler at length in his piece, Crowder, McRuer, Butler, and Boellstorff use her work at length whereas Judith Paraino cites "genealogy of desire as an ethical problem and technologies of the self", methodologies and “care of the self, and a summary and explanation of sadomasochism--this is the most extensive use of Foucault)
 * perhaps the best example of how Foucault is used is in Halperin, Butler and Paul Butler in which Foucault is mentioned in passing, mentioned as if he was already widely read, and mentioned in terms of how much he influenced the work of Judith Butler
 * Foucault is only comparatively mentioned with Sedwick and Butler, whereas Butler is often conflated with Wittig, Sedgwick, Jaogse, queer theorists and feminist theorists
 * in 1999, QT was understood as: queer critical studies often focus on exposing multiplicities represented as false unities; 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 & 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).
 * then QT gets most often defined in terms of Halperin and Sedgwick in 2003 “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.”...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.
 * then QT defined by others prominent in the field 2003 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.”
 * in 2005, Alexander and Gibson articulate clear and large tenents of QT: 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)
 * in 2007 QT is defined in terms of it's lack: how it didn't account for Wittig, how it limits the conceptions of same-sex marriage etc
 * QT in 1999 was still in a definitional stage in which it was being defined, formed and discussed in terms of what it was and did; by 2003 QT was being discussed in correlation with practioners: Halperin, Sedgwick, McRuer, Butler, but never Foucault because he provides geneology of sexuality, not a framework for queer or QT in specific; by 2005, practilners had solidified key components of QT, which were then being applied to realms previously left unattended (language, geography, tourism, academic publication); by 2007, the term is fractioning off depending on the interest it is being applied to, which could also signify that it is so mainsteram so as to not need another list, another enumeration of what it is

Point 3: Later citation patters, those from 2005-present, demonstrate that Foucault is losing importance, which demonstrates that he is limiting Queer Theory. Butler, however, is holding steady which signifies that her contribution to Queer Theory is still being examined.
 * the citational patterns suggest that Foucault was always incorporated due to his geneology of sexuality as well as the termonlogy he provides for discussing sexuality, but he was never integral in academic work. While that sounds contradictory, Foucault is often mentioned in passing, briefly summarized, or minorly quoted, which means his work is being attributed, but not foundational. Butler, on the other hand, is often used for her work in Gender Trouble and that work continues to be used in 2007 works, even if its being problematized by scholars looking to reframe Wittig in the canon. Butler is integral to several key works in a way that Foucault is not. Indeed, Butler is what gives QT its postmodern sentiment.
 * this random sample also suggests that QT has moved beyond the definitional phase to be criticized for its lack. Butler is still a part of this discussion, but Foucault has dropped off severally. This suggests that Foucault is not as foundational or as integral to the survival of QT.
 * what is also interesting from this random sample is that while Foucault is often mentioned and Butler is often integrated, Sedgwick, Halperin and Wittig are all crucial to defining, deploying and troubling QT. While these figures are cited less often as the top two, the way they handle Foucault further solidifies my speculatie claim that he is deminishing in importance and his importance is seemingly less steadfast as Butler.
 * QT's postmodern factors, its ability to be applicable beyond categories of binary rely on Butler, but conceptualizing a history of sexuality at one time relied on Foucault.

Foucault cited most in 1999 & 2004, whereas Butler cited most in 2003-2004.

Butler integrated most 2003-present, whereas Foucault integrated most 2001 & 2003 but drops to endnotes and mentions from 2004-present.

Foucault's range of work is cited more than Butler, who is 90% //Gender Trouble//.

To facilitate this opening up, queer critical studies often focus on exposing multiplicities represented as false unities & 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.
 * Conceptions of Queer in sample of scholarship:**
 * 1999:**

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 & 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).

"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 universalizing sexuality as an analytic category." Elaborated by <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.

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 <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.
 * 2002:**

I use the word queer as a sexually freighted synonym for questioning...<span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">“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.”...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.
 * 2003:**

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. <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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 <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.”

<span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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) ...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.
 * 2004:**

Basically, <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">the main tenets of queer theory that we believe are applicable to writing pedagogy are as follows:
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">identities are constructed and performed rather than essential and “natural”
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">we negotiate multiple identities through multiple social spaces, creating complex intersections between self, perception of self, other and perception of other
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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)
 * <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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 <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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).

It is perhaps worth remembering that one of the reasons that scholars found queer theory so invigorating in the early 1990s was that it <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.
 * 2005:**

<span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">"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.

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).

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 <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.
 * 2006:**

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, <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.

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.
 * 2007:**

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.

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 <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.

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. <span style="color: rgb(9, 119, 17);">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.

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.