Things are queer - Duane Michal's photo series as a trope for queer studies - We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History

The first photograph of Duane Michals's series Things Are Queer [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] depicts a simple bourgeois bathroom. Picture 2 introduces a pair of enormous hairy legs. As the series continues, the camera moves back, revealing that it is not the legs that are unusually big, but the toilet, sink, and bathtub that are small. The camera retreats again, and we become aware of an enormous thumb on a page. It turns out that what we have really been seeing is someone looking at a picture in a book of a man standing in a tiny bathroom. As if in a film, the camera keeps panning back. The man reading the book is in a dark corridor. In the penultimate photograph we find that this walking and looking man is merely a blowup of an, image that is in the mirror in the bathroom. With the final image in the series we have come back full circle to the original toilet, sink, and bathtub.

On the face of it, Michals's subject has nothing to do with homosexuality (though its landscape of bathroom, dark corridor, and voyeurism may have vague sexual connotations). The queer of Things Are Queer is not a matter of specific sexual identities but of the world itself. The world is queer, because it is known only through representations that are fragmentary and in themselves queer. Their meanings are always relative, a matter of relationships and constructions. In contradiction to its title, the series seems to say that things themselves are not queer, rather what is queer is the certainty by which we label things normal and abnormal, decent and obscene, gay and straight.

Michals's series could stand as an allegory for the current ambitions of lesbian and gay studies to go beyond documenting specific homosexual identities and cultural practices. Increasingly its charge is to investigate the mechanisms by which a society claims to know gender and sexuality. Homophobia is not a mere byproduct of the ignorance and prejudice of a segment of the population, but an aspect of the way power is organized and deployed throughout society. As lesbian and gay theorists are fond of pointing out, the word heterosexual was only coined after homosexual - both terms are late nineteenth-century inventions. It is as if the dominant culture needs the Other to be certain of itself. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet begins with the claim that "the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western Culture as a whole are structured . . . by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition."(1) Queering the text is more than pointing to potentially gay and lesbian characters or insisting on the sexual identity of an author; it involves revealing the signs of what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality."(2)

The very terms lesbian and gay may seem tied to an outmoded identity politics. Several of the authors in this Art Journal issue prefer the term queer. Queer is more encompassing. It can be taken to refer to a whole range of possible identities - gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender - or even a kind of fluid state between these orientations. As a field of inquiry, queer studies potentially shifts the emphasis away from specific acts and identities to the myriad ways in which gender organizes and disorganizes society. However, there is a danger in this shift. If homophobia is everywhere, and everything and everybody is potentially queer, then the specific stories of how gay and lesbian people have lived and represented their lives, as well as the record of their persecution and struggle for civil rights, may be passed over. Robert Atkins's essay, "Goodbye Lesbian/Gay History, Hello Queer Sensibility," warns that what may be missed in queer theory is the politics and history of lesbian and gay communities. This danger is particularly strong in art history, which among the humanities has been relatively late to raise the issue of the relationship of art and sexual identity in a sustained fashion. Although there has been an increasing number of essays on lesbian and gay themes in art, there are still only a handful of full-length studies of the subject. This lack is even more acute when it comes to lesbian themes. Queering all works of art - that is, making them strange in order to destabilize our confidence in the relationship of representation to identity, authorship, and behavior - is a potentially political act, but it should not replace the task of recovering gay and lesbian iconographies and historical moments. As Christopher Reed insists in the introduction to "Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment," queer and queerness are themselves historically specific terms that have their own social and political context and their own genesis. It is impossible to imagine queer theory existing without the identity politics of the pre- and immediate post-Stonewall era, or the later street actions of ACT UP. Queer theory is deeply indebted to feminist and African-American writings, just as lesbian and gay liberation itself was built on the model of the women's movement and on the struggle for black civil rights.