by Bruce Bawer
In the 1990s, the conflict between us so-called gay conservatives and the gay left was widely framed as a debate between “assimilationists” (I have always preferred “integrationists”) and “liberationists.” Today it’s clear that the “assimilationists” won the battle among ordinary gay Americans. Our arguments, once mocked by the gay left, are now taken for granted as common sense by the overwhelming majority of gay people.
Yet you’d never know this if you spent some time in a typical Gay Studies classroom today.
I’ve outlined the conquest of Lesbian and Gay Studies by social constructionism. But this was only the beginning of the discipline’s slide into irresponsibility, irrelevance, and incoherence. It provided the foundation for something even worse—namely, Queer Theory, founded by two women who studied philosophy at Yale at a time when it was the American headquarters of French poststructuralist theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), who became a professor at Duke and, later, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York; and Judith Butler (born in 1956), who has taught at Johns Hopkins and Berkeley.
The term “Queer Theory” itself was coined in 1990 by Teresa de Lauretis, an Italian-born author of several books on feminist theory and lesbian sexuality, at a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she still teaches. Indeed, for Queer Theory today, it’s almost as if time stopped somewhere around 1990. For as far as most of its proponents are concerned, the arguments presented by Sullivan, me, and others in the 1990s might never have been made; and if they are acknowledged, they’re treated as wildly reactionary. Similarly, Queer Theory’s practitioners recognize the advances made by gays in American society over the last couple of decades—how could they do otherwise?—but the fact that these changes represented a triumph of so-called assimilationist ideas over their own views is dropped down the memory hole.
What is Queer Theory? In A Genealogy of Queer Theory (2000), William B. Turner affirms its debt to Foucault as well as to feminism: “the concerns of queer theorists for sexuality, gender, and the relationships between the two, as well as their political and intellectual ramifications, grow distinctly out of feminist political and scholarly activity as much as, if not more than, out of gay political and scholarly activity.” If earlier practitioners of Lesbian and Gay Studies had made it clear that their work didn’t necessarily have anything to do with homosexuality, and if social constructionists had further weakened this connection, Queer Theory entailed, among other things, an even greater distancing of what had been called Gay Studies from its putative subject. Being “queer,” in the eyes of Queer Theory, isn’t about sexual orientation at all, really, but about the same kind of marginality, radicalism, and differentness preached by Kushner, Vaid, Queer Nation, and company in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Could it be that everyone is queer?” asks Turner quite seriously.
“Queerness indicates merely the failure to fit precisely within a category. . . . Sedgwick has suggested that the only definitive indicator of queerness is the inclination of an individual so to designate her- or himself.” In the tradition of Foucault, moreover, Queer Theory is also about power. Queer theorists reject what they regard as the use of simplistic identity labels (aside from the label queer, of course) because such labels result in people having more or less power based on the label that is attached to them, with the power always going to those who are committed to an “unqueer reading of identity.”
Indeed, Queer Theory is preoccupied with what its practitioners purport to regard as the endlessly problematic concept of identity and with what Turner calls the “working through of the specifics of variously overlapping, disjunctive, cooperative, clashing identity categories.” As a result of this “working through,” he says, “[t]he logic of identity looks increasingly peculiar—increasingly queer—under the lens of queer theory.” Turner approvingly quotes David Halperin’s explanation that “‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object” but rather “acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” Sedgwick herself was a perfect example of the term’s flexibility: although she identified herself as “queer,” she was a heterosexual woman who spent forty years in a monogamous marriage to a man. Note, however, that while Turner accepts that a straight woman can legitimately be labeled “queer,” he would refuse to use the word to describe, say, a man who is married to a woman but who secretly has sex with men. Nor would he call such as man gay. For in the eyes of Queer Theory, identity—sexual or otherwise—is not about an individual’s intrinsic nature (such as a sexual orientation that the individual may act upon or not, may either acknowledge to himself or be in denial about, and may admit to others or dissemble about). No, what matters—all that matters—is that the individual in question embrace the label. It’s all about the act of declaration, of self-labeling—an action that exists entirely apart from any essential quality, desire, or identity, let alone activity.
Like Halperin, Turner targets Richard D. Mohr, in this case for defending the view that an individual’s sexual orientation is what it is, and that whether he owns up to it or not doesn’t change the facts. By taking this position, complains Turner, Mohr is missing “the performative aspect of sexual identity.” A person’s sexual identity, you see, does not exist in and of itself, apart from what that person says about it to other people; you are what you call yourself. You may be a man who has no attraction to other men at all and has never had sexual conduct with another male, but if you choose to call yourself “queer,” that’s what you are; by the same token, you may be a man who is exclusively attracted to men and has had sex with thousands of them, but if you present yourself to others as heterosexual that’s what you are. This emphasis on “performance” derives from Sedgwick, who argues, in Turner’s paraphrase, that “[i]n order to prove oneself ‘truly’ queer, one need only have the impulse so to designate oneself.”
For its practitioners, Queer Theory is nothing less than the Grand Unified Theory of human nature, and any other intellectual discipline, any other form of knowledge, is necessarily subordinated to it. Take, for example, Turner’s statement that “[a]ttempts to find biological bases for either gender difference or sexual orientation reflect the desire to shift political discussions into the realm of science.” In short, never mind sexual orientation; even gender difference, in the eyes of Queer Theory, is not properly a biological but a political question upon which it is the prerogative not of biologists but of Queer Theorists to pronounce. For a reader who, like Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, actually cares about the psychological well-being, social acceptance, and legal rights of gay men and women, Queer Theory can feel like a mischievous, exploitative activity—a vacuous, pretentious, and ultimately pointless rhetorical game that detached, self-absorbed academics—some of whom aren’t even gay—play on the backs of gay people.
Queer Theory, manifestly, exists in a bizarre academic time-warp. Even as homosexuality has grown increasingly accepted in mainstream America, and as the institutions of the closet and the gay ghetto have steadily evaporated, Queer Theorists continue to cling to the old separatist agenda—continue to try to reinforce the idea that gays are strange, marginal, anti-establishment, contrarian, and rebellious—and continue to try to pretend that when they echo the tired twenty-year-old platitudes of Kushner, Goldstein, and Vaid they are saying something new.
It is one of the curiosities of Queer Studies that the person who is almost universally considered its founding mother made a point of the ordinariness of her private life. In her 1999 book A Dialogue on Love the stout, grandmotherly Sedgwick described herself as engaging in “vanilla sex, on a weekly basis, in the missionary position, in daylight, immediately after a shower, with one person of the so-called opposite sex, to whom I’ve been legally married for almost a quarter of a century.” Yet this is the woman who, as Maria Russo put it in an obituary fo
r Salon, made “literary studies . . . sexy.” Wrote Russo: “Through the lens of high theory, scholars began injecting libido into once dry and staid academic realms.” This seems to me the very opposite of what Sedgwick really accomplished: there is nothing “sexy” whatsoever about the ugly, murky language of Queer Theory, and to speak of the glories of literary criticism—from Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Hazlitt through Arnold, Macaulay, Pater, and Ruskin to Eliot, Jarrell, Trilling, and Orwell (to name only a few of the great critics who have written in English)—as “dry and staid” is to not know what you are talking about. When Russo calls Sedgwick’s work “sexy” she is thinking about such notorious efforts as the 1989 MLA lecture “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” the very title of which, at the time, caused a stir in academic circles and became a touchstone for this odd new species of critical activity. Sedgwick claims, in her lecture, that she has discovered an undercurrent of repressed sexuality in Sense and Sensibility—a claim that she supports by laboriously reading sexual meanings into innocuous statements and gestures throughout Austen’s novel. This, in a nutshell, is the approach Sedgwick takes throughout her oeuvre; this is what it means to “queer” literary works. If one expects substance, meaning, and insight from literary criticism, the spectacle of Sedgwick’s “queering” of the masterpieces of the ages cannot seem anything but a distortion of the literary works themselves—just as her rhetoric can seem a reckless game being played with gay people’s lives by a heterosexual woman who finds in those lives a convenient screen onto which to project her fantasies.
Epistemology of the Closet (1990) is regarded by all and sundry not only as Sedgwick’s most important book but as a (if not the) founding text of Queer Studies. In Sedgwick’s own words, the book’s central argument is “that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.” But Sedgwick “proves” this point by focusing on a handful of literary works (among them Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Melville’s Billy Budd, Proust’s À La Recherche du temps perdu, and Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”) whose homosexual content has never been a state secret, and—as in “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”—by forcing sexual interpretations upon these works at every turn.
Sedgwick also engages in the now-popular academic pastime of comparing different kinds of oppression and insisting on the complexity and ambiguity of the plight of individuals who are the supposed victims of multiple kinds of oppression (such as gay black women): “it was the long, painful realization, not that all oppressions are congruent, but that they are differently structured and so must intersect in complex embodiments that was the first great heuristic breakthrough of socialist-feminist thought and of the thought of women of color.” Sedgwick calls this a “realization,” but it sounds like a commonplace—assuming that one buys the proposition that everybody in America other than straight white men is “oppressed.” She goes on: “This realization has as its corollary that the comparison of different axes of oppression is a crucial task, not for any purpose of ranking oppressions, but to the contrary because each oppression is likely to be in a unique indicative relation to certain distinctive nodes of cultural organization.” In other words, every kind of oppression works in a somewhat different way. And the oppression of gays? “The special centrality of homophobic oppression in the twentieth century . . . has resulted from its inextricability from the question of knowledge and the processes of knowing in modern Western culture at large.” She speaks of “the now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male”—apparently meaning, as Mark Masterson (now of the Victoria University of Wellington) has explained, that our culture is unable to answer the following questions: “Is sexuality an orientation or is it a choice?; are homosexuals born or are they made?; essentialism or social construction?; nature/nurture? These are all part of the effect of this crisis in modern sexual definition. Sedgwick believes, and I agree with her, that it is impossible to adjudicate between these.”
Yet although Masterson goes on to speak of this “mass of contradictions that adhere to homosexuality,” the pairings in his list are all really different ways of putting the same thing—and there is no reason whatsoever to claim that it is “impossible” to ultimately decide between them. On the contrary, most gay people will testify, and an increasing majority of heterosexuals have come to understand, that sexuality is a matter of orientation and not of choice, period. To pretend that there is some “crisis of definition” surrounding this question is to create an appearance of confusion and melodrama where there is none. Plainly, Sedgwick’s purpose here is not to ascertain or clarify objective facts but to be “performative.” As Masterson himself admits, she is not out to resolve questions but to make the purportedly unresolved questions themselves her subject.
Unlike most of her female colleagues in Queer Theory, Sedgwick is often described as having identified with gay men. But she was consistently sarcastic and dismissive of heterosexual men. She referred with imperial condescension, for instance, to any sign of “heterosexual male self-pity,” sneering contemptuously about the “vast national wash of masculine self-pity” that she claimed to witness regularly in the New York Times “About Men” column, in “dying-father-and-his-son stories in The New Yorker,” and in “any other form of genre writing aimed at men.” She mocked the “sacred tears of the heterosexual man,” that “rare and precious liquor whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrimae Christi. . . .” Is there any other group that could get away with mocking like this in today’s academy? Sedgwick, note well, was not just criticizing sentimentality; she was essentially suggesting that straight men’s feelings are in some way illegitimate. “What charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous,” she writes, “can reside in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about?” The point here is that straight men, by definition, have nothing to cry about, ever—since, after all, they hold all the cards in contemporary society. What’s bizarre is that the author of these words spent forty years of her life married (happily, by all accounts, including her own) to a straight man. The only way to reconcile such rhetoric with her actual life and feelings is to recognize that Sedgwick truly is engaged in an act of performance here—playing a role, putting one over on us.
For the most part, however, the “performance” in Epistemology of the Closet, as throughout her work, consists of an often impenetrable display of jargon—an exhibition whose primary purpose is not to communicate ideas but to create an impression. Meandering and repetitious, Epistemology of the Closet fails again and again to build toward any clear point; Sedgwick wanders through the texts under consideration—summarizing plots, describing characters, pouncing on this or that word or expression and going on at length about its supposed hidden meanings—yet nothing remotely resembling a coherent argument ever comes into focus. One feels somewhat as if one is watching the rushes of a movie—scenes that have been shot over and over but have yet to be edited together in a way that make narrative sense. And then there is the prose:
In dealing with the multiple valences of sexuality, critics’ choices should not be limited to crudities of disruption or silence of orthodox enforcement.
In “The Beast in the Jungle,” written at the threshold of the new century, the possibility of an embodied male-homosexual thematics has, I would like to argue, a precisely liminal presence.
[I]t is mostly in the reifying grammar of periphrasis and preterition [in “The Beast in the Jungle”] . . . that a homosexual meaning becomes, to the degree that it does become, legible.
[T]he structuring metaphor . . . here seems to be peculiarly alimentative.
Sedgwick’s most distinctive stylistic attribute is the tendency to insert words like liminal and preterition and al
imentative into sentences, much in the manner of a malicious child shoving a stick into the spokes of a moving bicycle. The intent in both cases is the same: to show off—and to throw off.
Naturally her disciples take a different view. Masterson says that it is precisely because Epistemology of the Closet is “one of the key texts of queer theory” that it is “a challenging book to read. It is primarily for an academic audience. Others perhaps could follow its arguments, but without a connection to an academic setting, the persons who read it may find that they will have to keep the interesting insights they have acquired to themselves. This book is not for the layperson.” Masterson’s candor here is refreshing. For in these few sentences he points to a hard fact that is central to Queer Theory: none of it is meant for the educated common reader, whether gay or straight; unlike Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, its practitioners do not seek to bring understanding and insight to the multitudes (or to anybody) or to have any impact whatsoever upon public thinking about homosexuality and gay rights. On the contrary, Queer Theory is—and is intended to be—the exclusive property of ivory-tower initiates.
If anything, to be sure, Sedgwick’s prose style is less opaque than that of her fellow Queer Theory founder Judith Butler. From 1995 to 1998 the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature sponsored a Bad Writing Contest, and in 1998 Butler won first prize for the following sentence from her article “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which had appeared the year before in the journal Diacritics: