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

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

The latter three objections follow from each other and lead into our critique. The second objection, more specifically, is that queer--conceptualized as an unspecified form of sexual difference, a fluid and unfixed horizon of sexual and political possibility (de Lauretis, 1991; Warner, 1993; Berlant and Freeman, 1993; Patton, 1993)--creates a new "closet," a rhetorical erasure of the gay or lesbian subject, thus undermining the specificity and concrete embodiment of his or her experience and subjectivity (Halperin, 1995). This argument has at least two, more specific variants, one feminist, the other antielitist. Feminist commentators (Jeffreys, 1993; Castle, 1993; Grosz, 1994) have complained that queer theory's merger of gender and sexuality, and its categorical elision of lesbian and gay, subordinates feminist concerns in service of what they see as a gay white male agenda. Similarly, others (Escoffier, 1990; Malinowitz, 1993) have decried what they see as an elitist and exclusionary movement--a lofty, abstract, and inaccessible set of textual practices produced by and for a narrow academic audience far removed from the concerns of average gays and lesbians.

This general objection to queer's tendency toward despecification opens the third area of active contestation, what Cindy Patton (1993, p. 167) has referred to as the "evacuation" of the social (roles, institutions, political structures) in favor of the cultural (the symbolic and the textual). Specifically, some critics argue that queer theory ignores the ways in which existing social formations, having transformed the homo/hetero binary into the force of law, significantly inflect the everyday subjectivities and social struggles of lesbians, gay men, and other sexual minorities.

Finally, both self-described queer theorists and their detractors have worried about the political stance suggested by queer social and literary criticism. As both Seidman (1993) and Patton (1993) have noted, poststructuralism in general and queer theory in particular are widely perceived as being much more effective in identifying problems than in specifying solutions, and are thus considered apolitical or even reactionary by some. Focusing specifically on Judith Butler's (1990) notion of gender "performativity," others argue that the politics of queer theory are purely theatrical and parodic (Weston, 1993; Grosz, 1994). Yet another reading of the implicit politics of queer theory, which most substantially informs our own critique, posits an endless "queer" reactivity, a resistance in the name of resistance; a politics that valorizes and idealizes the "sexual outlaw" (Halperin, 1995).

The various debates and exchanges spurred by these objections have been productive in moving gay/lesbian and queer scholarship forward. Scholars in the more established fields of gay and lesbian and gender studies have incorporated some of the fundamental insights of queer theory into their own work, if sometimes only grudgingly, while queer theory scholars have refined and sharpened their own analyses. Many of these refinements stem from a more careful specification of the significations and the most effective deployments of "queer," deployments that are not inimical to established modes of social and political engagement. As Michael Warner (1993, p. xxvii) has suggested: