Gender & Society
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Not Yet Queer Enough: The Lessons of Queer Theory for the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
Stephen Valocchi
Gender Society 2005; 19; 750
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294
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GENDER/ NOT
10.1177/0891243205280294
Valocchi
& SOCIETY
YET QUEER
/ December
ENOUGH
2005
NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
The Lessons of Queer Theory for
the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
STEPHEN VALOCCHI
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the
insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory
in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor (2003), Seidman (2002), Bettie (2003), and Schippers (2000).
The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical
direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and
performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its
emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes.
Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological
analysis.
Keywords:
queer theory; performativity; power; ethnography
In 1994, Steven Seidman edited a volume of Sociological Theory on queer theory
(Seidman 1994) that introduced a queer theoretical perspective to a sociological
audience and suggested how queer insights might be useful in rethinking gender
and sexuality. Two years later, he followed up his appeal to sociologists to take
queer theory seriously by editing a collection of essays in which the contributors
utilized queer theoretical insights in their empirical work (Seidman 1996). Despite
these promising beginnings a decade ago, sociologists of gender and sexuality are
only now beginning to see queer theory as a legitimate and useful contemporary
social theory. This article will reassert the original appeal by reviewing some of the
recent work in gender and sexuality to highlight the insights garnered using queer
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Mary Bernstein, Rob Corber, Stephanie Gilmore, Steve
Seidman, Arlene Stein, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Gender & Society,
Christine Williams, for their thoughtful and thorough comments.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Stephen Valocchi, Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
06106.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 19 No. 6, December 2005 750-770
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
751
theory. Four monographs are evaluated in light of the main tenets of queer theory as
they have developed during the past decade. Using these tenets, the article engages
in a critical evaluation of the texts and, in so doing, indicates how they can be
extended in an even queerer theoretical direction. Conversely, the analysis also
indicates how queer theory can be pushed in more sociological directions to deal
with the materiality of sex, gender, and sexuality and the role of institutional power
in the construction of identities.
The article proceeds in three parts. I first describe the central concepts and
claims of a queer analysis. These involve a different way of understanding the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality; a focus on the performativity of gender
and sexuality in the formation of identities; and a refusal of the easy conflation of
sexual identity with the whole range of sexual desires, dispositions, and practices
that constitute sexuality. These concepts are also based on and operate within a discursive understanding of power where sexual and gender subjectivities are fashioned from the signifying systems of the dominant sexual and gender taxonomies.
These taxonomies, in turn, regulate subjectivity and social life in general.
Sociologists have made several different kinds of critiques of queer theory
(Edwards 1998; Green 2002; Jagose 1996; Seidman 1997; Walters 1996). These
critiques have pointed to its predominant focus on literary texts (Gamson 1994), its
lack of attention to the institutional and material contexts of discursive power
(Seidman 1997), and the critical deconstruction of identity or group empowerment
categories (Collins 1998; Walters 1996). The analysis below shares some of these
critiques but at the same time insists that because the insights of queer theory are
significant, we must find ways to make these insights amenable to empirical
analysis.
After laying out the central elements of a queer analysis, the next, larger section
of the article uses these elements to evaluate and extend the arguments of four
recent studies: Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor’s (2003) Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, Steven Seidman’s (2002) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and
Lesbian Life, Julie Bettie’s (2003) Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity,
and Mimi Schippers’s (2000) Rockin’out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock.
These monographs were chosen for several reasons. First, these texts stand as
excellent examples of utilizing key components of a queer perspective in empirical
research; in this way, they serve as templates for future queer work in the area of
gender and sexuality. But while these works use elements of a queer perspective,
they do not go far enough. Thus, these texts provide perfect springboards for
addressing the ongoing tensions between sociology and queer theory. By pushing
the work in this direction, my analysis opens up new questions and important
insights into the sociology of gender and sexuality. Second, this research is
ethnographic in nature, and as I argue in the conclusion, ethnography is especially
well suited to handle the methodological challenges associated with distinguishing
practices, identities, and hegemonic structures of gender and sexuality, an important component of a queer perspective. Third, these monographs, taken collec-
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GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
tively, point to some weaknesses of queer theory as a social science perspective and
suggest ways to address these weaknesses. The final section of the article builds on
the insights of these monographs and offers guidelines for doing queer work in gender and sexuality.
THE COMPONENTS OF QUEER ANALYSIS
Rethinking Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Sociologists are used to thinking of sex, gender, and sexuality as separate variables with discrete attributes defined in binary terms: Bodies are either male or
female; our gender presentation, behavioral dispositions, and social roles are either
masculine or feminine; our sexuality is either heterosexual or homosexual (Lorber
1996). We see each of these variables as signaling important social dynamics that
affect attitudes, behavior, and life chances. We also tend to see them as identities, as
bundles of norms, roles, and interests that are important indicators of the social self.
Thus, we are men or women, masculine or feminine, gay or straight. Of course,
sociologists admit that these are social constructions, but they are social constructions with consequences.
Sociologists further acknowledge the normative relationship across these variables. As Lorber (1996, 144) states, “sociology assumes that each person has one
sex, one sexuality, and one gender, which are congruent and fixed for life. . . . A
woman is assumed to be a feminine female; a man a masculine male. Heterosexuality is the uninterrogated norm.” Although sociologists do recognize this alignment
as ideological and hence as a source of power, we conspire in reproducing this
alignment by treating the categories and the normative relationship among them as
the starting assumptions on which our research is based and the major lens through
which we interpret our data. The conflation of these variables with identities further
encourages this tendency. We look, for example, for sex differences in earnings or
in the time balance between work and home (Bittman et al. 2003); we examine
dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities among men and women
(Connell 1995); we narrate the changing nature of lesbian and gay communities
(Armstrong 2002; Stein 1997).
These projects are essential, but the danger lies in their implicit recognition that
the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual as well
as the normative alignment across them are more than ideological constructs but are
somehow naturally occurring phenomena. By taking these categories as givens or
as reified, we do not fully consider the ways that inequalities are constructed by the
categories in the first place. These categories exert power over individuals, especially for those who do not fit neatly within their normative alignments.
Queer theory turns this emphasis on its head by deconstructing these binaries,
foregrounding the constructed nature of the sex, gender, and sexuality classification systems and resisting the tendency to congeal these categories into social
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
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identities. Because the binaries are revealed to be cultural constructions or ideological fictions, the reality of sexed bodies and gender and sexual identities are fraught
with incoherence and instability. In other words, these binaries incompletely or
imperfectly represent a broad range of complicated social processes surrounding
the meaning of bodies and the social cues, practices, and subjectivities associated
with gender and sexuality (Jagose 1996; Lorber 1996). This gulf between the ideological construct and the lived experience is one contribution of queer analysis.
Queer theory focuses on the “deviant” cases, or the anatomies, genders, sexual
practices, and identities that do not neatly fit into either category of the binaries or
that violate the normative alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality (Corber and
Valocchi 2003). It also pays attention to how the dominant taxonomies fail to capture the complexity of individual gender and sexual subjectivities and practices
even among those who may define themselves in terms of those dominant taxonomies (Delaney 1999; Halperin 2002). While the dominant classification scheme
encourages us, for example, to view gender and sexuality as separate and independent dimensions of social and psychic life, queer analysis explores their interrelationships and their unanticipated manifestations: the ways, for example, gender is
sexed and sexuality is gendered in nonnormative ways (Gagne and Tewksbury
2002).
As we will see below, rethinking sex, gender, and sexuality queerly opens up
new questions for sociologists and new ways of thinking about old concepts. For
example, what happens to the study of gay men and lesbians when gender is made
central to the analysis? In other words, what happens when the relationship
between gender and sexuality becomes an empirical question and individual
subjectivities and practices are not assumed to be easily read off the dominant taxonomies or identity categories? Gay femininity and lesbian masculinity may be
more useful analytical categories than the ones suggested by our dominant taxonomies of male and female, lesbian and gay. Also, what happens to the study of heterosexuality when sexuality and gender are understood queerly and used to analyze
subjectivities, practices, and subcultural formations? Queer analysis reveals the
instabilities in this hegemonic sexual formation and is sensitive to the ways individuals may subvert the normative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the
construction of heterosexuality.
Rethinking Gay Identity
While a queer analysis deals centrally with the gulf between the normative
alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the lived experience of individuals, it
also pays special attention to one particular binary that has served as the trope of
difference structuring social knowledge throughout the twentieth and into the
twenty-first centuries: the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Seidman 1997). As literary theorists, film scholars, and cultural and social historians (Corber 2005;
Duggan 2000; Halperin 2002; Sedgwick 1991) have shown, the emergence of the
category homosexual at the end of the nineteenth century became a way not only of
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ordering, classifying, and regulating bodies, personalities, and human types but
also of organizing knowledge, social life, and public discourse. Normal and abnormal, secrecy and disclosure, public and private—these became the derivative tropes
of the homosexual/heterosexual binary.
Many sociologists, however, do not readily acknowledge the centrality of this
binary to the study of social life but limit their attention to it as an identity formation
much like any other socially constructed identity formation such as race, ethnicity,
and gender (Adam 1985; Epstein 1987; Murray 1979; Stein 1997). These identities
are socially constructed in that the number of social categories; the meanings,
expectations, and behavioral norms associated with the classification systems; and
the hierarchy of prestige and power across the categories of these systems vary culturally and historically and are constructed and altered in the process of social interaction (West and Fenstermaker 1995). This historically and culturally variable process aside, many people experience these identities as fixed and stable with a fairly
predictable relationship between the subjective awareness of one’s identity, the
behaviors that correspond to or enact the identity, and the social institutions that
enforce this identity. This experience, of course, does not invalidate the constructed
nature of these categories. It simply attests to the ideological power of categorical
thinking and the modernist assumption of coherent selves.
A queer analysis challenges this understanding of sexual identity by focusing
not only on the historically constructed and hence contingent nature of the homosexual/heterosexual binary but also on the many ways in which individual desires,
practices, and affiliations cannot be accurately defined by the sex of object choice.
Sexual and gender practices and modes of embodiment such as sadomasochism,
leatherplay, intersexuality, and transsexuality, for example, cannot be reduced to
the categories of homosexuality or heterosexuality, and these practices and modes
of embodiment, rather than sex of object choice, may become the basis for identity
formation (Chase 1998; Hale 1997; Kessler 1998). Transnational research also
reminds us that these categories of sexual identity are Western categories. In many
Latin cultures, to take one example, sexual subjectivity is not based on sex of object
choice but on the scripted sexual role (i.e., active/passive, masculine/feminine) that
one plays in the sexual act, again, pointing to the need to interrogate the gendering
of sexuality (Almaguer 1993; Kulick 1998).
Another way in which a queer analysis calls into question the salience and
coherence of sexual identity categories is through its attention to intersectionality:
the crosscutting identifications of individuals along several axes of social difference. Building on feminist work that criticized the collective identity of woman for
minimizing the different interests and power among women with respect to class,
race, ethnicity, and nation, queer analysis adds sexuality to this set of differences
and by so doing points again to the limitations of identity-based analysis (Collins
1991; Crenshaw 1995). First, sex of object choice may be irrelevant to an individual’s identity formation: racial, ethnic, and class differences may be more important. Second, the understanding of sexual identity may be inflected in unique ways
depending on racial, ethnic, or class affiliations; thus, the practices, expressions,
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and interests emergent from this intersection of differences cannot be captured by
the dominant categories of homosexual or heterosexual or any other single identity
category.
As we will see below, rethinking gay identity in these ways poses several new
questions in the study of gender and sexuality: How does gay identity operate as a
form of regulation in both the development of social subjectivity and social life in
general? How are gender and sexual practices that are not subsumed by the heterosexual/homosexual binary experienced and organized? How do crosscutting social
differences affect how individuals experience sexual identity and desire, and conversely, how are sex and gender organized and experienced in terms of these other
social differences?
Performing Identity, Rethinking Power
Most sociologists understand sexual and gender identities as products of the
interaction between structure and agency. One way that socially constructed identities become shaped and stabilized, according to many sociologists, is through their
institutionalization in social structure and culture. In this way, the learning and
enactment of these identities are partly constrained by the social scripts, social
labeling, and material resources associated with various identities and by the force
of externally imposed political naming (Giddens 1987). Racial and gender identities, for example, are not infinitely flexible but are imposed by the power of the state
and various other social institutions (Omi and Winant 1986). Within these broad
institutional parameters, however, individuals and groups can exercise agency and
enact their individual identities in different ways or mobilize their identities collectively to change the institutional structure to gain material and cultural support for a
different understanding of the meaning of those identities. For example, civil
rights, antiracist, and feminist movements are precisely about challenging the
meaning of the categories of Black, Latino, woman, and so on.
This structure/agency paradigm of identity enactment encourages a view of the
social self as partly autonomous from the power structures that construct the self;
these constraining forces exist mainly external to the individual and thus these individuals are capable of rejecting these forces or altering the operation of these forces
in their lives (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Stein 1989). In other words, even
though the self is a social creation according to this paradigm, there is a core self
that has the capacity to reflect on and interact with the social environment in ways
that can either reproduce or change that environment.
A queer approach to the enactment of gender and sexual identities complicates
this understanding of the relationship between structure and agency. Rather than
situating identity as the term of agency in this structure/agency dualism, a queer
approach to the social self collapses this dualism (Stein 1989). It sees the self as
“human subject,” that is, as derived from the manifold social, cultural, and economic forces that construct the false notion of the autonomous self, and provide the
discursive material for the conscious and unconscious enactment of that self. In this
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view, agency itself is a social creation, and the resistance registered by social actors,
if any, occurs within the manifold forces that both call the social actor into existence
and shape the resistance of that social actor against these same forces. For example,
the gay liberation movement did not eliminate the category homosexual or make
sex of object choice an irrelevant or unmarked social characteristic; it simply
“reversed the discourse” (Foucault 1980, 101) by changing the meaning of the category from sick and deviant to healthy and normal. The category was still marked as
heterosexuality’s opposite, and sex of object choice continued to hold sway as the
sole signifier of sexuality and as a core component of self.
This understanding is best captured by Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender and sexual identity (Butler 1989). For Butler, rather than the expression of a core self or an essence that defines the individual, identities are the effect
of the repeated performance of certain cultural signs and conventions. There is no
original from which gender and sexual identities are derived. In this view, sexual
and gender identities are “performatively constituted by the very expressions of
gender and sexuality thought to produce them” (Corber and Valocchi 2003, 4). The
conscious and unconscious adherence to the norms and cultural signifiers of sexuality and gender both bring the subject into being and constrain the identity
enactments of that subject (Butler 1993).
Butler’s (1993) understanding of performativity, identity, and subjectivity derives
from a model of power different from that used by most sociologists of gender and
sexuality (Stein 1989). Sociologists tend to view power as an external force operating through social institutions to limit the life chances of some groups and expand
those of other groups. But for Butler, power is constitutive of the self: The subject is
constituted in and through the meaning systems, normative structures, and culturally prescribed taxonomies that circulate in society. Individuals internalize the
norms generated by the discourses of sexuality and gender as they are circulated by
social institutions such as schools, clinics, mass media, and even social movements.
In so doing, individuals become self-regulating subjects (Foucault 1977, 1980).
Institutional change and changes in political economy operating from above the
social actor are backgrounded in this approach; meaning systems and discourses
existing in the culture, internalized by individuals, but unanchored in social institutions are foregrounded.
This understanding of power is captured by queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity. For queer theorists, heteronormativity means the set of norms that
make heterosexuality seem natural or right and that organize homosexuality as its
binary opposite. This set of norms works to maintain the dominance of heterosexuality by preventing homosexuality from being a form of sexuality that can be taken
for granted or go unmarked or seem right in the way heterosexuality can (Corber
and Valocchi 2003, 4). As a result, the dominance of heterosexuality often operates
unconsciously or in ways that make it particularly difficult to identify. It is this normative and discursive structure that is foregrounded, not the ensemble of social
institutions that organize and promote that structure.
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As we will see below, thinking about power, structure, and agency in these ways
opens up new questions about the construction of gendered and sexual selves. Can
the concept of performativity be extended beyond the conscious transgressions of
sexual and gender norms to explain the adoption of our everyday gendered and sexual selves? How can we incorporate an analysis of discursive power that operates
subtly but pervasively into a discussion of gender and sexual power inequality that
still recognizes the material and political impact of social institutions?
In the following section, I use the elements of a queer analysis and the sociological questions posed by that analysis to evaluate and extend the arguments of four
important monographs. Each monograph focuses on a particular component of the
queer theory paradigm outlined above (and some focus on more than one component). Rupp and Taylor (2003) and Seidman (2002) explore the nonnormative
alignments across the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality and how these alignments are experienced and enacted in everyday life. Bettie (2003) and Schippers
(2000) explore heterosexuality, the various discourses that construct it, and the
instabilities and incoherences associated with that identity formation. They apply
the concept of heteronormativity to the study of heterosexuality and, in so doing,
engage another important concern of queer analysis and an ongoing point of contention between this analysis and sociology, namely, the nature of power. Finally,
these two monographs offer another opportunity to apply a queer analysis to the
sociology of gender and sexuality in their treatment of intersectionality. Collectively, these four works engage every component of the queer theory paradigm
described above.
My purpose here is to build on the queer aspects of these monographs and to
show the additional sociological insights that can be gained by taking queer analysis seriously. These works are the products of a serious engagement between queer
theory and sociology especially in their concerns with the performativity of identity
and the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality. The following section will describe this engagement but also use the tenets of a queer analysis outlined above to push that engagement in queerer ways.
APPLYING A QUEER ANALYSIS
Gendering Sexuality: Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret
In Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, Rupp and Taylor (2003) use their extensive
participant observations to make several claims regarding the coherence of gender
and sexual categories and the relationship between anatomical sex, gender, and
sexuality. As they argue, drag performances quite explicitly and intentionally
“reject or mock traditional femininity and heterosexuality” (p. 117). The drag
queens use the fact that femininity and heterosexuality are being performed by gay
men to challenge audience members to rethink the naturalness of sexual and gender
boundaries. The drag queens “combine maleness and femaleness in a way that is
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GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
hard to describe” using conventional categories (p. 126). They evoke “erotic desire
that cannot be characterized as heterosexual or homosexual” (p. 126). In sum, these
drag queens perform cultural critique by highlighting the performativity of sexual
and gender identities and the constructed nature of the normative alignments
between anatomical sex, gender role, and sexual identity.
This work’s interest in the performativity of gender and sexuality and how these
performances critique essentialist notions of identity clearly engage several of the
core components of a queer analysis: the performativity of gender and sexuality in
everyday life; the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality in the construction of identity; and the inability of the available taxonomies to capture these
identities.
Rupp and Taylor’s (2003) theoretical focus is on the collective identity of “drag
queenness,” “a gender category outside femininity or masculinity” (p. 5). If we
look closely at their ethnographic evidence, we find several additional observations
regarding gay gender in the construction of the drag queens’ sexual subjectivity.
Two men who describe themselves as gay experience their sexual subjectivity in
transgendered terms. Their desire does not seem to be homosexual in nature as
defined by the sex of object choice. As Rupp and Taylor (2003, 34-36) point out, for
Sushi and Gugi, “being a drag queen has to do with being in some sense
transgendered” (p. 36). Gugi makes this relationship explicit when she talks about
her sexual and gender subjectivity: “I don’t know if it is because I wanted to be a
woman or because I was attracted to men that I preferred to be a woman. . . . Out of
drag, I feel like I’m acting. In drag, I feel like myself” (p. 37). When discussing boyfriends and the norms of sexual relationships, the drag queens state that they are not
attracted to one another, and the only time they had sex together was with a differently gendered man (i.e., in a threesome). In addition, the drag queens bemoan the
fact that “gay guys aren’t attracted to drag queens,” yet at the same time, they say
that they are attracted to normatively masculine men. The gendered nature of the
object is the primary feature of their sexual desire (p. 78).
Although Rupp and Taylor (2003) do not pursue this point, implicit in these
statements and observations is a critique of the dominant taxonomy of sexual identity categories that defines sexuality on the basis of object choice and drains those
categories of their gendered desire. Clearly, the category gay is inadequate to capture these men’s sexual subjectivity, whether in terms of how it is experienced, who
they are attracted to, and who is attracted to them. In these ways, they seem more
heterosexual in their sexual desire than homosexual (i.e., desiring someone who is
differently gendered and not having sex with someone of the same gender). But
again, these categories seem inadequate to capture this complexity.
When compared to the life histories of the other drag queens, these statements
also suggest that there are differences in the extent to which the public performance
of their gendered sexuality is congruent with their off-stage identities. As Rupp and
Taylor (2003) note, some do not think of themselves as “between genders or as
women” (p. 38), but that does not mean that their sexuality has no gender. The performance of it in their everyday lives presents an opportunity to extend Butler’s
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(1989) analysis of the performativity beyond the public performances of the drag
queens and into their everyday lives. This extension could provide much needed
empirical grounding to the concept of performativity, particularly about the power
of norms regarding gender and sexuality and how these norms are taken up, consciously or unconsciously, by different groups of individuals. Since performativity
is a theory of gender and sexual identity formation, sociologists can utilize it more
fully to explore how gender and sexuality socialization occurs. Rupp and Taylor’s
drag queens suggest that this process of “taking up” norms is an unstable, fragile,
and variable process.
Rupp and Taylor (2003) illustrate how a queer analysis highlights the limitations
of the dominant identity categories for capturing the complexity of people’s lives,
yet at the same time, they demonstrate the continued power of these categories in
shaping people’s understandings of themselves. The drag queens say they are gay
men even as they tell the ethnographers stories that foreground gender and background sexuality. The drag queens consider themselves part of the gay community
even as they report varying degrees of marginality within that community. The drag
queens announce their gay identity on the stage even as they construct performances that highlight the “trials and tribulations” of gender nonnormativity. By
separating conceptually sex, gender, and sexuality and then noticing the ways in
which they interrelate in concrete social situations, by recognizing the dominant as
well as alternative ways in which these axes of difference are combined in particular cultural and historical contexts, and by paying attention to the performative
nature of sexed and gendered subjectivities, a queer analysis pushes us toward a
deeper and more complicated understanding of the intersection of gender and
sexuality.
The Limits of Gay Identity: Beyond the Closet:
The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life
Steven Seidman’s (2002) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and
Lesbian Life seeks to uncover the changing meaning of gay and lesbian identity by
interviewing men and women who came of age at different historical periods
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the concept of the closet to
refer to the structure of power affecting the changing shape of identity, Seidman
interviews men and women of different generations and finds that only the older
generation uses the language of the closet. For the most recent generation of gays
and lesbians he interviews, the closet is not the metaphor these individuals use to
narrate their sexual lives or their relationships with family, at work, or in their
neighborhoods or communities. To account for this shift, Seidman argues that the
culture has changed from one of “homosexual pollution and state-driven social
repression” (p. 24) of the 1950s and 1960s to a culture of normalization and sexual
liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite this change, however, Seidman
argues that a culture of heterosexual dominance is still firmly in place. Using an
analysis of Hollywood film from the 1960s through the 1990s, Seidman illustrates
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how the image of homosexuality has shifted from “the polluting gay” to “the normal gay.” In other words, gays and lesbians are made visible and included as citizens as long as “we are gender conventional, as long as we link sex to love and marriage-like relationship, as long as we defend family values, personify economic
individualism, and display national pride” (p. 189). Thus, notions of gay and
lesbian identity have changed as the material and discursive nature of power that
shapes them has changed.
It is this understanding of power that queers Seidman’s (2002) analysis of the
closet. His coupling of a materialist analysis of state-sponsored homophobia with a
discursive analysis of dominant images of homosexuality in Hollywood film
reflects a view of power as circulating at many levels, both constraining and
enabling particular identity formations. Related to this insight is his rejection of a
unitary gay and lesbian identity and his demonstration that these identities are historically constructed—another feature of a queer analysis.
I want to build on these queer features of the analysis to historicize more deeply
and thus deconstruct further the notion of gay identity that Seidman’s (2002)
ethnographic participants use to describe themselves. This notion derives from a
gay liberation discourse of “coming out” and “the closet” of the 1970s and is itself a
formation of discursive power that shapes and limits self-understandings and sexual politics. Without that deconstruction, the analysis of the closet and sexual identity risks reading a post-Stonewall definition of lesbian and gay identity back into
the 1950s and 1960s. The Stonewall Inn was a Greenwich Village bar where a routine bar raid by police in the early morning hours of 28 June 1969 touched off a
series of riots and spurred a new era of organizing by gays and lesbians premised on
the construction of a gay collective identity.
As sociologists writing about the fifties and sixties suggest, these decades
encouraged role segmentation and a public reticence about one’s sexuality (Mills
1963; Reisman 1961). This applied to everyone. Many men and women who had
homosexual desire organized it in ways necessary for the times, as something
engaged in periodically alongside other engagements or as something important to
their lives but practiced carefully in a national climate of hostility and repression.
Men and women “came out” during this period, but that meant something different
from the post-Stonewall meaning and involved admitting to oneself and to one’s
social circle that one was a homosexual (Lexnoff and Westley 1956).
The meaning of the closet—of being in and out—changed dramatically with the
gay liberation movement. A key component of this change was the transformation
of the meaning of homosexuality from a role to a core component of the self
(Chauncey 2000). Greatly influenced by the counterculture’s assertions about
authenticity and “finding yourself” and by the social movement’s need to mobilize
a constituency, “lesbian” and “gay” became public identities cast increasingly in
minority terms (Valocchi 1999). Thus, by historicizing the notion of gay identity, a
queer analysis uncovers the incoherence in the nature of identity-based thinking in
general and demonstrates the limitations of reducing understandings of sexual
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
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subjectivity or sexual self-awareness to the currently dominant taxonomies of gay
and straight.
That most of Seidman’s (2002) interviewees used the language of the closet
and “coming out” to describe their lives speaks to the power of the metaphor and
the success of the movement in institutionalizing the language in our culture. Evidence from diaries (Russell 1993; Vining 1979), memoirs (Duberman 1991; Fellows 1994), novels (White 1982), and other historical texts (Chauncey 1994;
Howard 1999; Katz 1975) suggests that these stories are, like most life histories,
“stories of the past told in the present.” This language is now readily available in the
culture to narrate the self, of constructing a linear narrative, the goal of which is
self-knowledge. It was not the operative language of the pre-Stonewall era for
understanding sexuality. Approaching these interviews queerly would reveal several departures from the identity-driven language of the closet and the associated
notion that sexual identity is the core component of the self.
Approaching these interviews queerly also requires listening closely once again
to the intersection of gender and sexuality. As a matter of fact, several stories of living in the closet and coming to sexual self-awareness can be read as attempts to
manage gender nonconformity and gender queerness. As Seidman (2002, 49)
notes, “managing gender has been and still is at the heart of managing sexual identity.” Queer analysis can explore this insight for what it tells us about the utility of
our dominant classification system to describe sexual subjectivities and the adequacy of the concept of homophobia to describe the forces that construct the closet.
Both this system and this concept are based on sexuality and are drained of
sexuality’s relationship to gender.
Although there are no stories of men that foreground gender, the story of Renee,
who describes herself as a “masculine woman,” can easily be read in transgendered
terms where her differently gendered self was the key to her sexual subjectivity. As
Seidman (2002, 53) reports, “gender nonconventionality was at the core of her
sense of self,” and because of this, “the closet proved a tough accommodation.”
Here we see slippage between Renee’s gender and sexual subjectivity and the heterosexual/homosexual binary. It is a binary constructed in part by the gay and lesbian movement that after Stonewall, marginalized gender queers (e.g., drag queens,
transsexuals, butch lesbians) from the organizations, social networks, and subculture of “the community” (Wilchins 2002, 55). We also see the important place of
gender conformity in policing that binary. Renee’s narrative, especially if it elicited
information about the nature of her sexual desire, has the potential to unsettle the
dominant sexual classification system by providing an empirical example of an
alternative sex/gender system much like a queer analysis of Rupp and Taylor’s
(2003) drag queens does for gay gender.
One of the ironies of Seidman’s (2002) analysis is that the naming of and then
the fight against the closet, a process that is taken as a mark of progress for gays and
lesbians, has the consequence of inscribing the homosexual/heterosexual binary
deeper in public life and in the official commitments of the gay and lesbian move-
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GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
ment. By critiquing this binary, a queer analysis deepens the analysis of power. Not
only do state-sponsored homophobia and cultural representations limit sexual
autonomy, but the language of the movement—the notion that sexual identity
defined by sex of object choice is a core component of self—also limits sexual
autonomy and any sexual politics to realize that autonomy. A queer sociological
analysis calls attention to both these sources of power: the material power of the
state and the discursive power of the movement that responded to the state.
Performing Intersectionality:
Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity
As stated earlier, a queer analysis goes beyond the study of homosexuality to
bring its conceptual and theoretical apparatus to the study of heterosexuality and
heterosexuality’s relationship to gender and other axes of social difference such as
class, ethnicity, and race. Queer theory asserts that the homosexual/heterosexual
binary is a regulatory regime that structures many aspects of social and political
life, but it has, for the most part, limited itself to addressing how that regime affects
homosexual identity, culture, and politics (Gagne and Tewkesbury 2002; Warner
1999). If it is to be useful to sociology in general, it must extend its concerns with
the instabilities and incoherences of gay identity to all identity-based thinking, to
demonstrating the discursive power of the specifically heterosexual component of
the hetero/homo binary, and the utility of performativity as a mode of acquiring
social subjectivity for the study of heterosexuality. The following two studies go a
great distance in accomplishing this: Women without Class takes up Butler’s (1989)
notion of performativity and applies it to intersectional identities; Rockin’out of the
Box takes up heteronormativity as a regime of power and demonstrates how
individuals can use the instabilities inherent in heterosexual identity to resist this
regime.
Julie Bettie’s (2003) ethnography Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity examines the multiple racial, class, and gender subjectivities within ostensibly
heterosexual identities. Bettie analyzes the ways that different social and racial
groupings of high school girls make sense of themselves, their schooling and family experience, and their life chances. Refusing to collapse one form of social difference into another, Bettie argues that these working-class and middle-class Mexican
American and white girls experience their social world complexly and intersectionally: Their gender subjectivity is class and racially inflected, their ethnic
subjectivity is class inflected, and their class subjectivity is ethnically and racially
inflected.
Bettie’s (2003) thinking about intersectionality is informed by queer theory, particularly Butler’s (1989, 1993) notion of performativity. Recognizing class as the
less visible axis of social difference among these girls, Bettie nonetheless views
these girls as class subjects who are constructed by their class performances. These
girls do not preexist the performance; “rather the subject is constructed by the performance” (Bettie 2003, 53), “caught in unconscious displays of cultural capital
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
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that are a consequence of class origin or habitus” (p. 52). In this way, Bettie extends
Butler’s analysis of the performativity of gender and sexuality to the arena of class
subjectivities and in so doing grounds those subjectivities in material conditions.
Class identities are the effect of the repeated performance of certain cultural signs
and conventions associated with class origins, yet unlike Butler’s treatment of
performativity, Bettie’s is rooted in but not dictated by material conditions. The cultural capital unconsciously displayed by these girls derives in large part from their
location along various axes of resource allocation, those deriving from their ethnicity, their immigrant status, their gender, and their family’s economic situation. The
power of the ethnography lies in the variable interplay between the imitation of
norms and signifiers of class, on one hand, and the resource limitations rooted in
material conditions, on the other.
In several instances in the ethnography, for example, the girls consciously performed class in ways not predicted by their material conditions. Some “middle
class performers of working class origins,” for example, “learned the cultural content of middle-classness, began to acquire cultural capital by association, and
learned to perform a class identity they did not originally perceive as their own”
(Bettie 2003, 192). In these ways, Bettie (2003) constructs class queerly by showing its complexly performative nature and in so doing points to a way of rethinking
the axes of social difference that form the basis of intersectional analysis. These
axes are discursive, comprising the norms and signifying systems associated with
different class, racial, and ethnic statuses, but they are also material, rooted in the
inequalities of economic and political resources. She refers to behaviors that result
from the conscious manipulation of these norms and systems as performance and
those behaviors more firmly rooted in material resources, and thus less able to be
changed, as performative.
Additional theoretical possibilities open up when we apply Bettie’s (2003)
insights to these girls’ performances of their sexual identities. By foregrounding
sexuality in the intersectional analysis and asking about the ways that gender and
class operate in the formation of these girls’ sexual subjectivities, the ethnography
could also explore the meanings, incoherences, and ambivalences surrounding
fledgling heterosexual identities. We hear working-class Mexican American girls
(the chicas) adopting the discourse of heterosexual romance as a way of resisting
the postfeminist discourse of the middle-class white girls (the preps) and the
middle-class staff of the school who excoriate these girls for being childlike and
naïve. This gendered discourse of class resistance by these girls also extends to the
arena of sexuality and coupling. To the extent that we see the chicas exploring sexual desire and sexual pleasure, they do so with an openness and autonomy that we
do not see within the prep girl subculture. We also see a rejection of the traditional
heterosexual couple among the chicas in that they seem to possess an inchoate
awareness that they can get affection, intimacy, and family without marriage or
without a relationship where they will be dependent. Although never explicitly
explored, these girls have an ambivalent relationship to normative heterosexuality,
which can be seen as a function of their class position.
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GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
Another place where we observe the utility of shifting Bettie’s (2003) intersectional lens to foreground gender and sexuality rather than class is in her brief discussion of Kate, a lesbian student whom Bettie comes to know, and “the smokers,”
the group of white working-class girls with whom Kate associates (p. 132).
Although Kate comes from a middle-class background, she “hangs out” with the
smokers and enacts a smoker’s identity. Part of this downwardly mobile class performance has to do with the meanings of gender and sexuality in this working-class
subculture. Bettie mentions that one way this group of high school students resists
the prep culture is through a blatant “rejection of normative conventions of femininity and masculinity” (p. 134). Since one way that sexuality is expressed is
through gender, this subculture then proves more comfortable and less homophobic than prep culture and thus is more comfortable for Kate. Here again, we see the
utility of further queering Bettie’s intersectional analysis.
Performing Gender and Sexuality:
Rockin’ out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock
A fourth recent book in the area of gender and sexuality that uses a queer analysis is Mimi Schippers’s (2000) ethnography, Rockin’ out of the Box: Gender
Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Schippers’s analysis of the alternative rock
subculture of Chicago in the early nineties focuses on the ways that the participants
do gender and sexuality differently by using the practices, identities, and symbolic
systems associated with the hierarchical binaries of man/women and homosexual/
heterosexual and subverting their meaning. Schippers refers to this practice as gender maneuvering: “taking the existing gender order and twisting or changing it so as
to not reproduce the patterns of structuration that keep the hierarchical relationship
between masculinity and femininity in tact” (p. 119).
Time and again, Schippers’s (2000) ethnographic participants engage in gender
maneuvering whereby they rework the dominant meaning systems associated with
masculinity and femininity and straight and gay through interactional strategies
that create, reinforce, or alter the norms of the subculture. Girl bands “rock”: They
eschew the misogynist lyrics typically associated with rock music and pair their
hard-hitting guitars, drums, and vocals with feminist, antisexist, and nonhomophobic lyrics. Girls “kick ass”: women in this subculture adopt many signifiers of
traditional femininity but deploy them in ways that assert these women’s leadership
role in rock bands and the music scene in general or these women’s privileged position as groupies or audience members. Men do not “hit on” women: The norms and
rules of interaction subvert the typical male-focused sexual culture of rock music.
The culture is still highly sexualized, but that ethos is not rooted strictly in terms of
male and female or sex of object choice: Women “make out” with other women and
express sexual attraction for female band members, men get crushes on male band
members, and the music, instruments, and vocals make the participants in the subculture “hot.” Here is a good example of using the queer insights about the
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
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performativity of gender and sexuality to illustrate resistance to the binaries and the
inequalities built into those binaries. Here we have ostensibly heterosexual rockers
acting in nonheteronormative ways.
Similar to the approach taken by Bettie (2003), Schippers (2000) is careful to
couple her mainly discursive analysis of gender with a structural analysis of gender
and sexual inequality, even as some of these inequalities are contested in the social
interactions within the subculture. Their gender resistance still exists within a
larger structure of inequality, and the impact of their transgressions is indeed limited by that larger structure. The women of the subculture, for example, fashion
their bodies, their subjectivities, and their interactions to transform traditional signifiers of femininity into signifiers of power, but the structure of male violence
toward women goes unchecked. The women and men of the subculture may
unhinge erotic desire from heterosexual identity, but the heterosexual/homosexual
binary still retains its force in fashioning their identities, and the subcultural space
is still unambiguously heterosexual. In these ways, the analysis is explicitly guided
by the queer insights regarding the discursive power of the binary and the ways in
which gender and sexuality can be deployed in nonidentitarian ways. It also is
guided by the sociological insights about the rootedness of these binaries in
systems of material and political power.
These insights about power can also be used to foreground issues of class and
race when analyzing the discursive (and nonnormative) use of gender and sexuality
in this subculture. A queer analysis that takes intersectionality seriously would
push the ethnography further to investigate the ways in which these participants’
class and racial identities are performed in this subculture and how gender and sexuality are used to articulate those identities. For example, many young women in
the subculture revalorize the “slut” and “bitch” labels to claim power; this ability is
of course race and class inflected since it is precisely the distance of these middleclass white women from the class and racially coded stereotypes of slut and bitch
that make possible their claim to those labels with no negative consequences. In
addition, some of the gender and sexual maneuvering they perform is accomplished discursively through naming sexist and homophobic behavior and attitudes
as lower class or “red-neck,” thus using class stereotypes to construct their middleclass gender subjectivities as enlightened and progressive. In addition, the fact that
this subculture existed in the midst of neighborhood gentrification and a suburban
“invasion,” a frequent topic of conversation among the participants in the subculture, presents the additional possibility that the alternative gender and sexual
subjectivities of the young middle-class participants of this subculture are ways
they symbolically distance themselves from their new neighbors with whom they
have much in common, at least in material if not in aesthetic terms.
In these suggestive ways, a sociologically informed queer analysis can explore
the discursive and material nature of power embedded in the homosexual/heterosexual binary, the possibilities that exist for dismantling that binary, and the relationship of that binary to other axes of inequality.
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THE FUTURE OF QUEER SOCIOLOGY
In examining these four monographs, I have wanted to highlight the advantages
of using a queer approach to study gender and sexuality and also to identify a number of ways in which queer approaches in sociology can be extended to better capture the complicated reality of gender and sexual subjectivities, identities, and practices. Unlike other queer sociological analyses, this article presents a set of
concepts and analytical lenses that sociologists can use when doing empirical work
in the area of gender and sexuality. These are (1) queering the relationship between
sex, gender, and sexuality; (2) taking seriously the nonnormative alignments across
these variables; (3) resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or to conflate it
with the broad range of gender and sexual practices; (4) broadening an understanding of power to include identity formations as well as other discursive formations;
and (5) treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed
and performative. Using these conceptual guidelines derived from queer theory, we
can rethink the nature of power and resistance and interrogate the gendered nature
of sexuality, the sexualized nature of gender, and the complex but patterned nature
of human subjectivity across various axes of social difference.
As is also suggested by this examination, a queer analysis can benefit from sociology’s insistence on the material grounding of the discursive constructions of
sexed bodies, masculinity and femininity, and sexual identities. As Bettie (2003)
and Schippers (2000) quite rightly point out, the enactment of identities is an
accomplishment or performance, but these identities are also constrained by an
array of institutional forces that contribute to the power of heteronormativity. In
this way, a sociological queer analysis embellishes Butler’s (1993) notion of
performativity by rooting the repeated enactment of norms in the rules, resources,
and regulations of social institutions. It also theoretically enriches queer theory’s
understanding of intersectionality by rooting the discursive possibilities of identity
construction in the social hierarchies of power resulting from class, race, ethnicity,
and gender. In other words, these works combine a queer sensibility about the
performative nature of identity with a sociological sensibility about how these
performances are constrained, hierarchical, and rooted in social inequality.
The analysis of these texts also suggests one mechanism through which the
performativity of gender and sexuality is accomplished. Although Butler (1993)
and other queer theorists would emphasize the unconscious repetition of the cultural signs and normative conventions of gender and sexuality (and that is undoubtedly part of this dynamic), the work of Bettie (2003) and Schippers (2000) shows
that class, racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities are also interactional accomplishments. As these two texts illustrate, this symbolic interactionist understanding
of identity can be combined with a queer analysis to illustrate the ways in which
subjectivities are deeply constrained, the ways in which they can be reconstructed,
and the ways in which power pervades each of these dimensions. It also dovetails
nicely with queer theory’s anti-identitarian posture in that symbolic interaction’s
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
767
focus on practices can point to the inconsistencies and incoherences of individuals’
identity enactments in relation to the dominant taxonomies.
Finally, and related to this emphasis on practices rather than identities, it is not
surprising that each of the monographs used here to illustrate the utility of queering
the sociology of gender and sexuality employs ethnographic methods. As these
texts amply demonstrate, the application of the concepts mentioned above to
achieve this queering of gender and sexuality requires a sensitivity to the complicated and multilayered lived experiences and subjectivities of individuals, to the
social settings within which these experiences and subjectivities take shape, and to
the larger cultural, discursive, and institutional contexts of these lives where
resources are allocated, images created, and taxonomies are given power. Ethnographic methods, with their emphasis on how individuals create meaning, seem
best suited to this enterprise. For example, many times throughout these ethnographies, individuals claim certain identities even as they undercut these claims
through their practices and their (sometimes unstable) desires and subjectivities.
This affinity between queer theory and ethnographic methods derives from
some common epistemological assumptions not necessarily shared by other variable-based, quantitative methodologies used in sociology. First, both queer theory
and ethnography are ambivalent or agnostic about their capacity for discerning
“objective” truth. Both emphasize social reality as representation: queer theory in
its reliance on discourse and ethnography in its culturally mediated relationship
between observer and observed. Quantitative, variable-based methodologies, by
contrast, assume that the indicators used to measure social processes do indeed capture something real and objective. Second, both queer theory and ethnography do
not always assume that the classification systems named in the culture or used by
social scientists accurately correspond to or help elucidate practices, motivations,
or interests of those who may be subsumed within those systems. Ethnographic
methods rely on a more processual model of concept development done in interaction between the initial concepts or classification schemes and the observations and
participation conducted in the field; queer theory focuses on the gap between the
categories used and people’s lived experiences. Quantitative approaches that rely
on surveys, interviews, or secondary numerical data, by contrast, have classification systems already laid out or developed prior to research. Using these methodologies, it is hard to observe the incongruities between classification systems and
individuals’ actual behaviors and even harder to develop alternative classification
schemes in the process of the research. Ethnography gives researchers the tools to
identify, describe, and understand these incongruities provided that this method is
coupled with a theoretical framework that can call attention to these different levels
of interpretation.
The concepts used in this article can serve as a queer theoretical framework that
ethnographers can use going into the field: paying attention to the practices individuals engage in and how these practices construct their sexual and gender subjectivities, the degree to which these practices are organized into coherent identities,
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GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
and the correspondence between these identities and the dominant sexual and gender taxonomies. Combining the sensitivities of ethnography with the sociologically
informed queer concepts elaborated in this article can result in gender and sexuality
research that represents individuals’ lived experience in ways that honor the complexity of human agency, the instability of identity, and the importance of institutional and discursive power.
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Stephen Valocchi is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. He is the coeditor, along with Robert J. Corber, of Queer Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Reader. He has published several articles on the gay and lesbian movement in
the United States and is currently working on an oral history of progressive activism in Hartford.
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© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.