Introduction
Queer politics has not resulted in radical, transformative activism.
I argue that a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism. In many instances, instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of sexual identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything “queer.”
This essay queries lessons to be learned from queer activism.
Cohen envisions a queer politics where one’s relationship to power, and not some homogenized “queer” identity, determines one’s political commitments and offers coalition building. Hence, the inclusion of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens as nonnormative subjects that resist dominant norms.
I query in this essay whether there are lessons to be learned from queer activism that can help us construct a new politics. I envision a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades. I’m talking about a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work. Thus, if there is any truly radical potential to be found in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, it would seem to be located in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms, a space where transformational political work can begin.
Emergence of Queer Politics and a New Politics of Transformation
Regular use of the term “queer” emerged in the early 1990s, denoting an emerging politics and a cohort of academics (Butler, Sedgwick, Warner, etc.) producing “queer theory.”
Queer theorists worked from a variety of postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives, challenging dominant cisheteronormativity and the stability, fixity, and limits of sexuality categories.
Theorists and activists alike generally agree that it was in the early 1990s that we began to see, with any regularity, the use of the term “queer.” This term would come to denote not only an emerging politics, but also a new cohort of academics working in programs primarily in the humanities centered around social and cultural criticism. Individuals such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, and Michael Warner produced what are now thought of as the first canonical works of “queer theory.” Working from a variety of postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical perspectives, these scholars focused on identifying and contesting the discursive and cultural markers found within both dominant and marginal identities and institutions which prescribe and reify “heterogendered” understandings and behavior. These theorists presented a different conceptualization of sexuality, one which sought to replace socially named and presumably stable categories of sexual expression with a new fluid movement among and between forms of sexual behavior.
Queer was reclaimed in the 1980s by activists (especially groups like ACT UP) taking a radical, confrontational stance.
By the early 1990s, queer politics emerged as a confrontational political formation, most notoriously in the actions of Queer Nation and its “in your face” politics. They sought to make queer function as more than a shorthand for LGBT individuals.
Queer politics emphasized the instability, fluidity, subversive performance of sexual subjects and expression.
The assumption that stable collective identities are necessary for collective action is turned on its head by queerness, and the question becomes: When and how are stable collective identities necessary for social action and social change? Secure boundaries and stabilized identities are necessary not in general, but in the specific, a point social movement theory seems currently to miss.
While queer politics of the mid 90s claimed to reject fixed, stable categories of sexuality, Cohen observed that queer activists often acted in ways that reinforced a binary conception of sexuality and power (e.g., queer vs. straight).
Queer activists who evoke a “single-oppression framework” misrepresent how power operates, ignoring differences with respect to race, class, and gender.
Cohen wants to examine “queer” in order to understand how we can instead create a truly transformative and inclusive politics for everyone who stands outside the dominant norm of white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality.
Recognizing the limits of current conceptions of queer identities and queer politics, I am interested in examining the concept of “queer” in order to think about how we might construct a new political identity that is truly liberating, transformative, and inclusive of all those who stand on the outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality.
Black feminists such as Kimberly Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Cheryl Clarke, and Audre Lorde have emphasized the intersectional workings of oppression. And the Combahee River Collective notes the interlocking systems of domination.
Conclusion
Closing statement of the essay…
Only by recognizing the link between the ideological, social, political, and economic marginalization of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens can we begin to develop political analyses and political strategies effective in confronting the linked yet varied sites of power in this country. Such a project is important because it provides a framework from which the difficult work of coalition politics can begin. And it is in these complicated and contradictory spaces that the liberatory and left polities that so many of us work for is located.