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

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

Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding

knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected

with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom,

the state, public speech, consumption and desire,

nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial

and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship,

intimate life and social display, terror and violence,

health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of

the body. Being queer means fighting about these issues all

the time" (p. xiii).

And being a "true" (homosexual) agent seems to mean being queer, as specified very precisely here and elsewhere, its claim to eluding definition aside. In fact, the laundry list of voluntarily assumed positions that become necessary--if not sufficient--grounds for claiming oneself as queer produce a more monolithic identity than lesbian or gay ever was, replete with its own insider/outsider politics (that is, resisters/antiassimilationists versus assimilationists). In the words of Eve Sedgwick, "some lesbians and gays would never count as queer" (1993b, p. 13, emphasis added). The conceptual misrepresentation of "queer" seems to bespeak a tendency on the part of certain writers to imagine that it inhabits a realm beyond language (Edelman, 1994), a category unlike other categories because it is immune to deeply entrenched patterns of cultural and linguistic formation that favor stabilization. Such a claim is belied not only by its increasing crystallization as a meaningful and coherent category, but also by the circumstances of its own relational emergence--as a response to the established categories of gay and lesbian (which, Warner's comments aside, it self-consciously distinguishes itself from) and as a positive inflection of an even earlier category that gay/lesbian sought to replace.

Given this at least partial misconceptualization of queer as always in the process of becoming, it is perhaps not surprising that resistance to existing, normative forms of being--however defined--is its modus operandi. However, in its effort to construct a human agency open to possibility, it categorically excludes one very large set of possibilities--namely those that could be considered normative. By situating questions of social, personal, and political agency within a developmental framework, we can begin to understand how particular socially embedded life histories get mapped onto culturally available sexual lifeways, without making a priori assumptions about which identities constitute agency and which do not. Only by paying attention to how individuals balance cultural demands, political commitments, and deeply socialized life-desires--some concordant, others discordant with cultural norms--can we arrive at a deeper, more complicated conceptualization of individual subjectivity and agency. Thus, social research should seek to understand how individuals, in negotiating the tensions between norms and desires, devise personal solutions, and/or even creative innovations across the course of life and in the face of the existential concerns shared by all humans; we refer to this phenomenon as developmental agency (Hostetler, unpublished manuscript).