Marxism and Queer Theory—Socialism 2012—Dana Cloud
Key Concepts in Queer Theory
Concept
Definition
Author
Queer
epithet; convenient shorthand; captures
additional dimensions to the experience of those
suffering from gender and sexuality-based
oppression; label that signals solidarity
(post)identity politics meets Foucaultian
poststructuralism; outgrowth of queer
nationalism of 1980s; scholarship emerging from
and speaking to that experience; “the study of
sexuality (among other things) as a “field of
regulation, therapy, and liberation
simultaneously”
how social and linguistic practices make
heterosexuality and the heterosexual family
appear as not only norms, but as the baseline
definition of any conceivable social relationship
the idea that there are no gender or sexual
essences. Instead, every person is continually
performing gender roles and expectations.
the basic oppressive impulse to sort people and
objects out in dualistic categories like
man/woman, homosexual/heterosexual, and
attendant concepts of secrecy/publicity,
reason/emotion, mind/body; must be “undone”
premise that psychical drives motivate desire in
ways that can challenge the categories society
attempts to fit us into.
idea that every human identity, including the idea
of ourselves as having free will, is a social
construct
“an enabling disruption” that could offer “the
occasion for a radical rearticulation of the
symbolic horizon in which bodies come to matter
at all.”
politics of rejecting integration into
heteronormative institutions and expectations
deLauretis, Halberstam
Queer Theory
Heternormativity
Performativity
Binaries
Affect/Desire
Anti-essentialism
Abjection
Anti-normal
Warner
Halberstam
Butler
Sedgwick
Sedgwick
Multiple (including Marx)
Butler
Warner
Marxist Critique of Queer Theory
Critique
Example
Marxist thought
Elitism
“Thousands of gay people forget their prior hopes
for social movement that exceeds this demand for
one legal right. They do not consider what social
forms of kinship they are delegitimizing along the
way.” (Butler)
Who is they in that sentence? It seems to
be a thoughtless ignorant mass of LGBT
people who have allegedly forgotten that
they ever wanted more.
Idealism
“Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood:
the slow and difficult practice of producing new
possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of
history, and in the context of very powerful norms
that restrict our intelligibility as human
beings. They are complex struggles, political in
nature, since they insist on new forms of
recognition. I only offer a radical language for
these struggles.”
“Hitherto men have constantly made up for
themselves false conceptions about
themselves, about what they are and what
they ought to be. They have arranged their
relationships according to their ideas of
God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of
their brains have got out of their hands.
They, the creators, have bowed down
before their creations. Let us liberate them
from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas,
imaginary beings under the yoke of which
they are pining away. Let us revolt against
the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says
one, to exchange these imaginations for
thoughts which correspond to the essence
of man; says the second, to take up a
critical attitude to them; says the third, to
knock them out of their heads; and -existing reality will collapse.” (Marx)
“Disidentification is the practice of working on
and unlearning the identities we take for granted,
denaturalizing and uprooting them. The
disidentifying subject expresses outlaw needs that
are affective, cultural, ideological. The narrow
resentment of ideology politics is replaced with
monstrous collective opposition of all capitalism’s
disenfranchised subjects.” (Hennessy)
Utopianism
The political aspects of abjection could assist in “a
radical resignification of the symbolic domain,
deviating the citational chain toward a more
possible future to expand the very meaning of
what counts as a valued and valuable body in the
world.”
Reform and
Revolution
The fight for reforms toward a more “live-able”
life is part and parcel of a program that assumes
that revolution against neoliberalism cannot
happen by “thinking differently.”
“The solution of the social problems, which
as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic
conditions, the Utopians attempted to
evolve out of the human brain . . . and to
impose this upon society from without by
propaganda, and, wherever it was possible,
by the example of model experiments.
These new social systems were
foredoomed as Utopian; the more
completely they were worked out in detail,
the more they could not avoid drifting off
into pure phantasies.” (Engels)
“Reform and revolution are not different
methods of historic development, they
cannot be picked out from the counter of
history among different factors in the
development of class society as if one were
choosing hot or cold sausages. These
different factors condition and
complement each other.” (Luxemburg)
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