The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

  As Denis Dutton, who established the Bad Writing Contest, explained in a 1999 issue of the Wall Street Journal, “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.” Dutton emphasized that saying such a thing about Judith Butler’s prose did not make one a philistine: “As a lifelong student of Kant,” he pointed out, “I know that philosophy is not always well-written. But when Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein are most obscure, it’s because they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems the human mind can encounter.” By contrast, prose like Butler’s amounts to “a kind of intellectual kitsch” produced by self-styled “theorists” who “mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work” and whose “jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight.” (Or, to quote Nietzsche, “Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”) Sarah Salih, writing in Critical Quarterly, defended Butler, in good Queer Studies fashion, by invoking the concept of performativity: “Butler is attempting to do something with her prose; in other words, the language she deploys is performative rather than constative”—the latter being a philosophical term that means “relating to a statement, question, or command that can be considered true or false.” (Salih was on firm ground, given that Butler is in the habit of making statements—such as the claim in her 1990 book Gender Trouble that even the idea that there are two biological sexes is a social construction—that cannot be taken seriously as “constative.”) But Butler herself, presumably having decided that using the performativity defense would only expose her to further public ridicule (performativity, after all, being a concept that one could hardly expect noninitiates outside the academy to understand or appreciate), fell back, in a New York Times op-ed and a letter to the London Review of Books, on the safer argument that difficult ideas require difficult language.

  In the summer of 2010, Butler again drew a degree of attention outside the academy. While in Berlin for Gay Pride events, she praised Hamas and Hezbollah, which she described admiringly as organizations of the left, and turned down an award from a German gay organization, which she accused of “Islamophobia” because it had criticized the Muslim-on-gay violence that is widespread in Germany. In this instance, it seemed clear that Butler was not being “performative” but was, rather, making “constative” remarks that were meant to be seen as applying to the real world. Her readiness to side with the tormentors of gay people because those tormentors belonged to a group that is generally considered sacrosanct on the orthodox left underlines the fact that Queer Studies is not about advancing the rights and security of gay people, but is rather a movement of the left whose leaders are prepared to support allegedly leftist groups and causes even if they represent a clear and present danger to gays.

  In any event, one question about performativity has never been satisfactorily answered by any Queer Theory practitioner I know of: what is the point of the “performance”? And here’s a second question: why must the “performance” be so dull?

  In 2001, Arthur Kramer, the rich heterosexual brother of Larry Kramer, cofounder of the AIDS activist group ACT UP and author of the play The Normal Heart, gave Yale a million dollars to establish the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies (LKI). “I wanted gay history to be taught,” the playwright explained in a 2009 speech at that university. “I wanted gay history to be about who we are, and who we were.” But it didn’t work out that way. What LKI actually turned out to be was a potpourri of courses with titles like “Gender and Sexuality in Popular Music,” “Gender Transgression,” “Beauty, Fashion, and Self-Styling,” “Gendering Musical Performance,” “Gender Images: A Psychological Perspective,” “Queer Ethnographies,” and “Music and Queer Identities.” Kramer was stunned and outraged. “When I set LKI up I didn’t know that gay studies included all kinds of other things and these other things ruled the roost: gender studies, queer studies, queer theory.” Had he known, he said, he’d have

  insist[ed] that my brother’s money be funneled via the history department rather than leave it up to Yale, which plunked LKI just where it should not have been, in the women’s and gender studies department. The various queer and gender theories I came to quickly realize as relatively useless for a people looking to learn about our real history drowned us out completely. Month after month, over these five years, as I was sent constant email announcements of lectures and courses and activities that reflected as much about real history as a comic book, I slowly began to go nuts.

  He protested vehemently and won the support of the celebrated gay historians George Chauncey and Martin Duberman, both of whom, according to Kramer, said, in effect, “Yale is doing it wrong. You do not teach gay history via gender studies, via queer theory. You are making the same mistake every other gay program makes.” But the complaints were to no avail. To the outrage of the man whom it was named for, LKI remained a “queer” institution. Kramer made his feelings about this word clear in his Yale speech: “I am not queer! And neither are you! When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world.” Surely Ulrichs and Hirschfeld would have agreed.

  To be sure, not all practitioners of Lesbian and Gay Studies are hard-core adherents of Queer Theory. Some lesbians, for example, resist the disappearance of “lesbian” under the rubric of “queer” and feel more at home with Women’s Studies than with Queer Studies. There are also lesbians as well as gay men who practice a less theory-intensive version of Gay Studies (usually at less prestigious institutions). This doesn’t mean, however, that their approaches to the subject are necessarily more responsible than those of the Queer Theorists. Indeed, if the Queer Theorists’ offense can be summed up by saying that their heads are stuck in thick clouds of rhetoric that float far above the quotidian preoccupations of the real world, some Gay Studies teachers err in the opposite direction, teaching classes that are devoted to banal, often subliterate personal confession in the form of coming-out stories, diary-writing, and the like. The course descriptions make them sound like self-help groups, and indeed they tend to encourage students to consider every aspect of their daily lives fascinating and meaningful simply because they are gay.

  An example of this strain of Lesbian and Gay Studies can be found at the website of the oldest Gay Studies department in the United States, which was founded in 1989 at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF). The site looks and reads less like an academic department’s website than like the home page of, say, a ladies’ bowling team. When you click on “faculty,” you’re presented with a mishmash of casual snapshots of the professors; click further—for example, on the picture of Ardel Thomas—and you’ll get her astrological data: “I am an Aries—a fire sign. I am born in the year of the Dragon—another fiery symbol. That means I have tons of energy and am very excited about life.” She tells us that she received a Ph.D. from Stanford, after which she went on to direct the Community Service Writing Program at that institution. Then:

  In 2004, I decided to leave Stanford University because I wanted to teach in the community college setting. I go
t a tenure track job in Lexington, Kentucky. I had also lived in San Francisco (not Palo Alto) for 12 years! YIKES! CULTURE SHOCK!

  Then, in January 2005, I found an ad for LGBT Studies at CCSF. City College of San Francisco?????? LGBT Studies???????? My dream job if only I could land it! Soooo. . . . . . . . . .

  Here I am now in my second year—my first year as chair. I am having such a FABULOUS time teaching LGBT Studies and English 1A at CCSF!!!!!

  One wonders if Professor Thomas tells her students that it is a good idea to use all caps and multiple question marks and exclamation points in expository prose.

  When I looked at CCSF’s website in 2010, instructor Mo Brownsey, who was identified as a stand-up comic, solo performer, director and writer of films and videos, and columnist for Match.‌com (a dating website), was teaching a course in “Queer Creative Process” in which “[f]inal projects are a personal work of art, highlighting your unique process.” Herb Green, who has master’s degrees in American Studies from Brown and in Ethnic Studies from Berkeley, was teaching “Gay Culture and Society,” which “examines significant styles from leather to lipstick and from drag to disco and assesses the evolution of sensibility and identity in various Queer cultures and communities.” Now, “gay culture and society” is certainly a subject worthy of academic study, but when I read about Green’s focus on “leather to lipstick” and “drag to disco” I couldn’t help thinking about Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, who could discourse eruditely about the epiphenomena of homosexuality in Periclean Athens, and about Dynes’s Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, which contains a wealth of knowledge whose surface is barely scratched by curricula like Green’s.

  Then again, Green’s course sounded like heavy lifting compared with the rest of the department’s course offerings, the emphasis of which was largely therapeutic. Ed Kaufman’s faculty page explained that his “joy in teaching the course Gay Male Relationships comes from the opportunity to help gay and bisexual men develop and sustain meaningful intimate relationships.” Trinity Ordona was teaching “Issues in Lesbian Relationships,” for which the required books were Lesbian Couples: A Guide to Creating Healthy Relationships and If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path. The 2010 schedule also included such courses as “Healing through Journal Writing,” “Commitment to Self: Singlehood, Solitude & Being Myself in Relationship(s),” and “Healing a Broken Heart: Recovery & Reconciliation.” This is a long way from social constructionism and Queer Theory—but it’s also a long way from anything that might remotely be considered serious higher education.

  There are, to be sure, Queer Studies professors who manage to combine the “performative” jargon of Queer Theory with a relatively engaged (if predictably radical) approach to actual human life. Meet Ian Barnard, a gay white South African who teaches at California State University, Northridge, and whose stock-in-trade is bringing race and sexuality together. In the first line of his book, Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory (2004), he writes that the term “queer race”

  juxtaposes two nonanalogous demarcations of identity, sexuality and race (assuming for the moment that “queer” refers to sexuality and that the word “race” is self-explanatory) in order to inaugurate a third term that conjured up a cacophony of new epistemological questions, identificatory possibilities, and theoretical problematics I want to variously pursue, articulate, and contest precisely as each problematic is suggested, enabled, abjured, and reinvented by the others.

  Barnard says that he does “not see sexuality and race as disparate constituents of subjectivity or axes of power” but rather as two “systems of meaning and understanding that formatively and inherently define each other.” While other Queer Theorists might describe, say, a Chicana lesbian as “triply oppressed” because she is a woman, a Chicana, and gay, Barnard argues that breaking down such a person’s identity into three individual categories “erases” her compound identity as a Chicana lesbian, the properties of which, in his view, are no closer to being the sum of its constituent elements’ properties than, say, sulfuric acid combines the properties of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. For this reason, Barnard celebrates Gloria Anzaldúa’s “disrupt[ion]” of “canonical genre designations” as offering a “vision for the future of queer theory,” saying that “a political queerness is an especially urgent imperative now, given the increasing visibility of right-wing gays in the United States in recent years.” (As examples of these “right-wing gays,” he names me, Stephen H. Miller, and Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, authors of the 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)

  Barnard clearly considers the “visibility” of gays who reject Queer Theory and radical-left politics a menace. Part of what makes Miller, me, and others so threatening, as he sees it, is that we’re gay white men who choose not to flail ourselves for being white and male; and one reason why he’s so high on Anzaldúa is that her way of using the word queer “allows for . . . a conceptualization of identity that is different from definitions of lesbianness and gayness revolving around sexual orientation only, and thus normalizing middle-class white (often male) experience.” He praises Anzaldúa for insisting that “[a]ll parties involved in coalitions need to recognize the necessity that women-of-color and lesbians define the terms of engagement.” This “principle,” Barnard argues, must be followed by queer activists and theorists: “feminism and antiracism, queers of color and white female queers and their experiences, and colored female queer theory must set the agendas and delineate the parameters of these agendas if queer is not to become a synonym for gay white men.” And this is a gay white man talking! If he really believes what he’s saying, how can he justify writing Queer Race, in which he certainly seems to be setting agendas and delineating parameters?

  Barnard discusses at length, and admits to being fascinated by, both O. J. Simpson and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. This fascination is disturbing, and Barnard’s way of writing about these two men has the effect of trivializing the murders they committed. For Barnard there appears to be no such thing as objective morality, just group categories and group justice; he refers repeatedly to the “erasure” of this or that kind of compound identity—black women, gay black men—and it can sound as if such perceived “erasures” are, for him, realer and more offensive than an actual “erasure” in the form of cold-blooded murder. Although he is careful not to explicitly label Dahmer a hero, Barnard’s discussion of Dahmer’s serial killings frames them in large part as strikes against conventionality, homophobia, and racial and sexual pigeonholing—as, in short, “queer” actions. Because Dahmer was an apparently racist white man who denied he was homosexual, but had sex with (and killed and ate) men of color, most of whom also identified as heterosexual, Barnard feels that “[t]he Dahmer case helps us to redefine queer in several ways.” For “only to discern queer in terms of a conventional understanding of progressive politics is to impoverish the potential of queer theory to diagnose the function of codifications of desire precisely where such discourses are successively formative: the moments when the meanings of queer generated by the interstices of gay desire and racial identification are most elusive and disturbing. This is something like the invention or discovery of queer race. The queer in queer race is thus doubly queer both insofar as it queers queer and destabilizes the (dis)‌connection between queer and race.”

  In short, Dahmer, in a grotesque way, becomes for Barnard a poster boy for queerness. To be sure, a few pages after telling us that “queer race” “queers queer,” Barnard says that it “unqueers queerness . . . by eroding sexuality as a unique ground of knowledge.” (Presumably we are expected to accept this bald contradiction on the understanding that Barnard is being performative, not constative.) Barnard devotes an entire chapter to Dahmer, and later returns to him, this time dropping the jargon and diving into confession:

  What is so special about Dahmer? Or
is this about me being white and gay? Or is it about something else for me? My desire for Jeffrey Dahmer? My desire for Jeffrey Dahmer’s desire? I feel sorry for him. I was born in the same year that he was. He played the clarinet; so do I. I am attracted to him, his voice, his glasses at his sentencing.

  Dahmer isn’t the only mass murderer whom Barnard turns into an erotic object; elsewhere in Queer Race he claims that “some gay men were infatuated by the white, boyish, crew-cut [Timothy] McVeigh’s television images, an infatuation that had subversive potential in the context of the mainstream media’s racist and imperialist first assumption that the bombing had been the work of Middle-Eastern terrorists.” (So having a crush on a terrorist who took the lives of 168 people, including nineteen small children, somehow strikes a blow against racism and imperialism?) Barnard also spends several pages on the O. J. Simpson trial, maintaining that because Simpson was a black man who was accused of murdering a white woman, “black women disappear from the O. J. Simpson trial as completely as it renders any possibility of queer black men unthinkable”—a statement that can hardly be improved on as a representative example of Queer Studies hyperbole.

  On a sunny day in September 2010, I stroll up Unter den Linden in Berlin to the main building of Humboldt University, where I will soon be hearing Susan Stryker’s opinions about democratic capitalism. A plaque facing the street informs passersby that it was here that Max Planck came up with quantum theory. Alas, I’m here for a conference about another theory whose name begins with a q. Organized by the university’s Queer Research Group and by the Department of English and American Studies, the conference is titled “Queer Again? Power, Politics, and Ethics.”

  As I’m signing in at the registration desk, the young woman on duty prepares me for “an embarrassing question.” It turns out to be “Do you have a Ph.D.?” Not that I would be turned away if I didn’t; they just want to know which attendees have Ph.D.s and which don’t. Queer Studies pretends to be about fearlessly overturning all established categories, but here, as everywhere else in academe, establishment credentials actually matter a great deal.