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

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

Queer activists are also lesbians and gays in other

contexts--as for example where leverage can be gained

through bourgeois propriety, or through minority-rights

discourse .... Queer politics has not just replaced older

modes of lesbian and gay identity; it has come to exist

alongside those older modes, opening up new possibilities

and problems whose relation to more familiar problems is

not always clear.

Others, such as Steven Seidman (1993, p. 134), have attempted to clarify the queer objection to sexual taxonomies in general, arguing that "[i]dentity constructions are not disciplining and regulatory in a self-limiting and oppressive way; they are also personally, socially and politically enabling." And Jeffrey Weeks (1995, p. 33) grounds his analysis in the principle that we are all "simultaneously subjected to and subjects of sex." Weeks offers a qualified defense of identity constructions by questioning, "[I]f we assert [our identities] too firmly are we fixing identifications and values that are necessarily always in flux; and if we deny their validity too completely, are we disempowering ourselves from the best means of mobilizing for radical change?" (p. 37).

But despite these and other concerted efforts to disentangle agency from resistance against normative taxonomic structures, queer theory inevitably cycles back to this equation. Thus, Seidman (1993, pp. 135-37) goes on to discourage the "normalization" of gay in favor of a "politics of resistance," and Weeks (1995) advocates "interrogating and challenging the normalizing and imposed forms of identity" (p. 44) and the "living out of individual acts of defiance [that] can challenge the status quo" (p. 47). This formulation of individual agency as resistance--against norms or hegemonic culture in general--is echoed again and again in the work of even the most self-reflexive writers. Michael Warner, for example, argues that "queer politics oppose society itself" (1993, p. xxvii), and he encourages "a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal" (p. xxvi). In his book Homos, Leo Bersani (1995) is even more direct in his dismissal of "assimilationist" political strategies and life choices:

Suspicious of our own enforced identity, we are reduced to

playing subversively with normative identities--attempting,

for example, to "resignify" the family for communities that

defy the usual assumptions about what constitutes a family.

These efforts, while valuable, can have assimilative rather

than subversive consequences; having de-gayed themselves,

gays melt into the culture they like to think of themselves as

undermining (p. 5).

(In his defense, this commentary was offered in the context of a larger critique of the ways in which radical social constructionism tends to erase the specificity of gay and lesbian lives.) Similarly, in his tribute to Foucault, Halperin (1995) asserts:

what Foucault recommends to us, as we've seen is to keep

working at being gay [that is, not simply accept existing

modes of being gay] .... Not to work, in a context shaped