Culture, sexual lifeways, and developmental subjectivities: rethinking sexual taxonomies

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Andrew J. Hostetler, Gilbert H. Herdt

Let us briefly review this textual theory, which is informed by continental poststructuralism, best exemplified by the work of Althusser, Derrida, Barthes, de Man, Lacan, and particularly Foucault. In line with the general poststructural critique, queer theory debates the relative merits of the following assumptions: 1) The existence of transparent, natural, timeless, and purely descriptive gender and sexual categories is a modernist myth. 2) Although homoerotic behavior has most likely occurred in all times and places, the forms, meanings, and social formations associated with same-sex (and cross-sex) behavior are culturally and historically contingent, and the emergence of the "homosexual" as a distinct category of personhood is a late-modern Western phenomenon. 3) Identity and subject position are multiply determined, dynamic, and fluid, while the existence of a unitary and coherent "gay," "lesbian," or "homosexual" subject is also an illusion. 4) Male/female and homosexual/heterosexual binaries are deeply embedded in Western epistemology and discourse, and these binaries inevitably structure processes of self-construction and social and political engagement. 5) Cultural discourse and social movements that attempt to legitimize gay and lesbian identifies, most commonly through the procurement of civil rights, reinscribe normative taxonomic structures that can operate only through the articulation of an excluded other. 6) Queer, a formerly pejorative term reclaimed by nonheterosexual and/or antihomophobic subjects, signifies an open, multiperspectival, and fluid--if slippery--conceptual space from which to contest more effectively a heteronormative and heterosexist social order (Martin and Piggford 1997). While assumptions 1 and 2 are now widely, if not universally accepted among feminist and lesbian and gay scholars, assumptions 3 and 4 are more controversial, and assumptions 5 and 6 have generated heated debate between different schools within gender and sexuality studies. These latter two assumptions are the most relevant to our own concerns regarding subjectivity and agency.

Contestations of queer theory may be provisionally categorized in the following way: First, there are semantic objections to the use of the word queer perceived by some to carry too much negative cultural baggage to ever be socially or politically effective (others maintain that the meanings of the term are not static or fixed, and that it derives its power precisely from the inversion and positive reinflection of its original meaning [Martin and Piggford 1997]). Second, there are objections to the term's tendency to obscure or erase the specificity of gay and lesbian experience and concerns. Third, there are objections to the perceived denial of structural and material realities in favor of the symbolic and cultural. And, fourth, there are objections to the forms of political strategy and agency that seem to follow from queer theory, forms that appear to be either radically apolitical, eternally reactive, or strictly parodic and performative.(2)