Academic Essay, Master’s Program, Literary & Cultural Studies

When tracing and analyzing trends in queer theory, one cannot help but note the stubbornness with which queer theory, regardless of its work in ideological critique, cultural production, or aesthetics, clings to its ambiguity. However, queer theory’s ambiguity has also caused some concern amongst scholars as to what the future holds for the field with a past rooted in instability. In “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories”, while Kadji Amin acknowledges the way that queer theory’s mobility has been problematic for its longevity, the author suggests that this very ambiguity enables queer theory to undergo constant requeering in an effort to seek “political urgency” and thus remain culturally and academically current (176). This “mutation” (or requeering) calls for othering queer theory from its former lives, while always remaining aware of its past (176).  Thus, this ambiguity becomes mobility, enabling queer theory to power simultaneous circles: aesthetics, ideological critique, and cultural production. Queer aesthetics examines Leo Bersani and Edelman’s notions of negativity and the anti-social turn in queer theory; the conversation in queer cultural production examines the normalization of the notion of queer in mainstream culture, and the conversation in queer ideological critique explores fields which would benefit from queer theory’s frameworks. This bibliographical review examines the topography of queer theory through three lenses: aesthetics, cultural production, and ideological critique: aesthetic critics who call for a death of queer theory in society, cultural critics who explore its current state in mainstream culture, and ideological critics who call for queer theory’s iteration in ideological critique to continue questioning heteronormative order.

Queer Theory and Aesthetics: The Anti-Social Turn of Queer Theory

Queer theorists who argue for a shift to aesthetics point out that queer theory’s ideological attempts to disruptive the heteronormative social order only demonstrates an implicit desire to assimilate into that social order, thus the anti-social turn in queer theory was born. “The anti-social turn,” writes Justaert, “can be said to divide queer theorists into two camps: those fighting for inclusion into the social (heteronormative) order, equal rights, participation, etc., and those who refuse to do this” (231). The resistance to inclusion in social order and celebration of queer theory’s existence outside this order comprises much of queer aesthetics. Prominent queer theorists whose work is often cited in this celebration are Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, their notions of self-shattering and death drive, respectively, being key foundational concepts of the anti-social turn, as found in Penney’s “From the Anti-Social to the Immortal”, Dean’s, “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence”, Halberstam’s “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”, and Justaert’s “Dancing in the Dark”. Other areas of queer aesthetic study explore how art can expose erasures of queer identities and disrupt the identity of art itself, as found in Dean’s “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence” and Ehnenn’s “Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s “Sight and Song””.

Queer Theory and Cultural Production: Mainstreaming Queer Theory

In a similar manner as aesthetics, queer theorists examining queer cultural production also note disappointment with queer theory. This selection of scholarship focuses on queer representation in television and film, which could be a conduit for representation, but has primarily functioned as one way in which social norms are sustained and queer erasure, stereotyping, and commodification occurs. In her essay, “Popular Culture and Queer Representation”, Ruth Goldman notes:

As “queer” gains currency, it is increasingly being appropriated and commodified, and thus increasingly risks collapsing into another term for white lesbians and gays, and ultimately white gay men. This is due to the fact that we live in a society in which the hegemonic discourses center around whites, men, and monosexuals, and so as “queer” becomes more popular amongst these “dominant” groups, it will increasingly come to represent these “dominant” groups. (Goldman 171)

Thus, while queer theory has gained traction in popular culture, it has failed to maintain its disruptive nature to normativity. In fact, in Smith’s New York Times interview, “Queer Theory is Entering the Literary Mainstream” with Eve Sedgwick, one of the original pioneers in queer theory, was noted ironically by the author as being a straight white woman who asked not to be identified as straight. In another article, Hodgeson’s “Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain”, the author suggests that Matthew Tinkerton’s Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain has the “daunting task of providing an introduction to queer theory for readers unfamiliar with this sprawling, chimeric body of work, and offers an entry to the topic in an accessible-enough register for most undergraduate students”, a film which centers around two white gay males (278). Scholars like Goldman, Raymond, and Miller discuss in “Who is that Queer Queer?”, “Popular Culture and Queer Representation”, and “Queer Recalibration” respectively, how queer theory has failed to bring diverse, inclusive, and accurate queer representation into mainstream cultural production and instead has become, as aesthetic critics feared, assimilated into social order by representing only white gay males as queer.

• Goldman, Ruth. “Who Is That Queer Queer? Exploring Norms around Sexuality, Race, and Class in Queer Theory.” ed. Brett Beemyn & Mickey Eliason, Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Anthology. New York University Press, 1996. pp. 169-182.
• Hodgson, James. “Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain.” Cinema Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, pp. 278–282, doi:10.5195/cinej.2018.211.
• Miller, Quinn. “Queer Recalibration.” Cinema Journal, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 140–144, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653575.
• Raymond, Diane. “Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective.” A Cultural Studies Approach. 99-110.
• Smith, Dinita. “Queer Theory is Entering the Literary Mainstream.” The New York Times. 17 January 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/17/books/queer-theory-is-entering-the-literary-mainstream.html.

Queer Theory and Ideological Criticism: Benefitting Other Fields

While there are queer theorists arguing for queer theory to resist assimilation into the social order, other scholars argue that queer theory still holds a critical place in ideological critique. While queer theory’s historical roots in political reformation in the 1990s has led to its association with gay and lesbian studies and feminist criticism (Amin, “Haunted”), there are a multitude of other fields of study and areas of society and culture that could benefit from queer theory’s notions of disrupting heteronormative binaries of gender and sexuality, including but not limited to: coding (Bivens, “The Gender Binary will not be Deprogrammed”); biomedicine (Spurlin, “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice”); intercultural communication (Eguchi and Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)ing Intercultural Communication Theory”); management and organization studies (Rumens, Souza and Brewis, “Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies”); and social work (Turner, Pelts, and Thompson, “Between the Academy and Queerness: Microaggressions in Social Work Education”). 

• Bivens, Rena. “The Gender Binary Will Not Be Deprogrammed: Ten Years of Coding Gender on Facebook.” New Media & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, June 2017, pp. 880–898, doi:10.1177/1461444815621527.
• Eguchi, Shinsuke, and Godfried Asante. “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)Ing Intercultural Communication Theory.” Communication Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, May 2016, pp. 171–189, EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/comt.12086.
• Rumens, Nick, et al. “Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies: Notes toward Queering Heterosexuality.” Organization Studies, Feb. 2018, doi:10.1177/0170840617748904.
• Spurlin, William J. “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/The Cultural Politics of Biomedicine.” Journal of Medical Humanities. March 2019, vol. 40, no. 1, pp 7–20. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10912-018-9526-0#citeas
• Turner, George W., et al. “Between the Academy and Queerness: Microaggressions in Social Work Education.” Affilia, vol. 33, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 98–111, doi:10.1177/0886109917729664.

Discussion & Conclusion: Queer Theory’s Way Forward

The anti-social turn in queer theory comes in response to the heteronormalization and commodification of “queer”. Its initial upheaval to heteronormative social order in the 1990s gay and lesbian civil rights movement has since stilled, with current mainstream representation normalized into a white, gay, male character for viewing audiences. As Raymond drily notes in “Popular Culture and Queer Representation”, this normalized version of queer “represents failures” of queer theory to sustain its disruptive energy in heteronormative social orders (109). However, other scholars argue that failures in queer theory simply expose areas where further discussion and exploration “can yield insights into how sexuality and gender can be lived differently” (Rumens, Souza, Brewis 16) Thus, it’s critical queer theory remains active in ideological criticism as its persistent disruption to normative social orders benefit other disciplines, fields, and aspects of daily life such as software programming, communications, the biomedical field, management and organizational practices in the workplace, and social work. 

Queer theory’s influence in aesthetics, cultural production, and ideological criticism is profound: its disruptive ambiguity necessitates constant motion; any attempt to constrain queer theory to a permanent location risks the immediate resistance of its scholars; social, cultural, and academic stagnation; and irrelevance. While one might argue that queer theory’s ambiguity is its Achilles heel, Amin concludes that it also enables queer theory to remain on the forefront of possibility: “The transformative and intellectually generative effects that may come from recontextualizing queer are not the sign that queer has yet again elastically adapted itself to a new object. Rather, they are the product of queer’s dense affective histories undergoing chemical reactions with new contexts” (“Haunted”, 186). Queer theory’s fluidity holds the capability to be both its saving grace or its undoing. Queer theorists’ work in aesthetics brings about the necessary “requeering” of queer theory called for in Amin’s “Haunted by the 1990s”: “Queer can never be queer enough; that is, that the future of queer scholarship depends on always queering and being queerer than what came before” (176). And with this death or requeering, queer theory has currency to continue iterating and pioneering in academic critique, cultural production, and queer representation with an even stronger will, as Halberstam states, “to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate” (154) to whomever or whatever needs it.

Appendix of Works

Amin, Kadji. “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, 2016, pp. 173-189, http://navigator-sru.passhe.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy-sru.klnpa.org/docview/1831357228?accountid=13901.

Bivens, Rena. “The Gender Binary Will Not Be Deprogrammed: Ten Years of Coding Gender on Facebook.” New Media & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, June 2017, pp. 880–898, doi:10.1177/1461444815621527.

Dean, Tim. “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence.” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 387–392, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25704436.

Eguchi, Shinsuke, and Godfried Asante. “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)Ing Intercultural Communication Theory.” Communication Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, May 2016, pp. 171–189, EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/comt.12086.

Ehnenn, Jill. “Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s ‘Sight and Song.’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 43, no. 1, 2005, pp. 109–154,  http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002811.

Goldman, Ruth. “Who Is That Queer Queer? Exploring Norms around Sexuality, Race, and Class in Queer Theory.” ed. Brett Beemyn & Mickey Eliason, Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Anthology. New York University Press, 1996. pp. 169-182.

Halberstam, Judith. “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies.” Graduate Journal of Social Science, vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, pp. 140-156.

Hodgson, James. “Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain.” Cinema Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, pp. 278–282, doi:10.5195/cinej.2018.211.

Justaert, Kristien. “Dancing in the Dark: Marcella Althaus-Reid and Negative Queer Theory.” Feminist Theology, vol. 26, no. 3, May 2018, pp. 229–240, doi:10.1177/0966735018759450.

Miller, Quinn. “Queer Recalibration.” Cinema Journal, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 140–144, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653575.

Penney, James. “From the Antisocial to the Immortal.” After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics, Pluto Press, 2014, pp. 175–196, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183p7nq.10.

Raymond, Diane. “Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective.” A Cultural Studies Approach. 99-110.

Rumens, Nick, et al. “Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies: Notes toward Queering Heterosexuality.” Organization Studies, Feb. 2018, doi:10.1177/0170840617748904.

Smith, Dinita. “Queer Theory is Entering the Literary Mainstream.” The New York Times. 17 January 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/17/books/queer-theory-is-entering-the-literary-mainstream.html.

Spurlin, William J. “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/The Cultural Politics of Biomedicine.” Journal of Medical Humanities. March 2019, vol. 40, no. 1, pp 7–20. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10912-018-9526-0#citeas.

Turner, George W., et al. “Between the Academy and Queerness: Microaggressions in Social Work Education.” Affilia, vol. 33, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 98–111, doi:10.1177/0886109917729664.