Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
1
Queer Sex the Bomb
Holbrook/Nielson
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Queer Sex the Bomb
Holbrook/Nielson
Queering Shell
The affirmatives obsession with life is a symptom of futurist compulsory reproduction.
This type of thinking is heterosexist and fascist, leading to the idea that queers are not
worthy of being part of society.
Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004.
(Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 74-76, JCE)
This conflation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of sinthomosexuality continues to shape our
social reality despite the well intentioned efforts of many, gay and straight alike, to normalize queer
sexualities within a logic of meaning that finds realization only in and as the future. When the New
York Times Magazine, for example, published in 1998 an issue devoted to the status items specific to various
demographic groups, Dan Savage found in a baby's gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast: "Gay
parents," he wrote, "are not only making a commitment to our political future, but to the future, period.... And
many of us have decided that we want to fill our time with something more meaningful than sit-ups, circuit
parties and designer drugs. For me and my boyfriend, bringing up a child is a commitment to having a future.
And considering what the last I5 years were like, perhaps that future is the ultimate status item for gay men."
The messenger here may be a gay man, but the message is that of compulsory reproduction as inscribed
on the anti-abortion billboard I mentioned in chapter I: choose life, for life and the baby and meaning hang
together in the balance, confronting the lethal counterweight of narcissism, AIDS, and death, all of
which spring from commitment to the meaningless eruptions of jouissance associated with the "circuit
parties" that gesture toward the circuit of the drive. This fascism of the baby's face, which encourages
parents, whether gay or straight, to join in a rousing chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," suggests that if
few can bring up a child without constantly bringing it up-as if the future secured by the Child, the one
true access to social security, could only be claimed for the other's sake, and never for one's own- then that
future can only belong to those who purport to feel for the other (with all the appropriative implications
that such a "feeling far" suggests). It can only belong to those who accede to the fantasy of a compassion
by which they shelter the infant future from sinthomosexuals, who offer it none, seeming, instead, to
literalize one of Blake's queerest Proverbs of Hell: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires." 13 Who would side with such "gravediggers of society" over the guardians of its future? Who
would opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage's "something more meaningful"? What might Leonard
teach us about turning our back on what hangs in the balance and deciding-despite the rhetoric of
compassion, futurity, and life-to topple the scales that are always skewed, to put one's foot down at last,
even if doing so costs us the ground on which we, like all others, must stand? To figure out how we might
answer that question, let's think about Leonard as a figure, one metonymically figured in North by Northwest
by the terra-cotta figurine ("a pre-Columbian figure ofa Tarascan warrior" [90], according to the screenplay,
that is referred to throughout the Mount Rushmore episode simply as "the figure" [e.g., 138]), which
contains, like a secret meaning, the secrets on the microfilm hidden inside it. In Leonard, to be sure, the
figure of the sinthomosexual is writ large-screen, never more so than during what constitutes his anti-Sermon
on the Mount, when by lowering the sole of his shoe he manages to show that he has no soul, thus showing
as well that the shoe of sinthomosexualiry fits him and that he's wearing it-insofar as he scorns the injunction
to put himself in the other's shoes. But the gesture by which he puts his stamp on sinthomosexuality-by
stamping on the fingers with which Thornhill holds fast to the monument's ledge with one hand while he
holds fast to Eve with the other-constitutes, as the film makes clear, a response to an appeal, even if his mode
of response is intended to strike us as unappealing.
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already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this!" 55 The image of
suffering adduced here is always the threatened suffering of an image: an image onto which the face of the
human has coercively been projected such that "I.e, by virtue of losing it, must also lose the face by which
we (think we) know ourselves. For "we are, in effect," as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding
of the self, "at one with everything that depends on the image of the other as our fellow man, on the
similarity we have to our ego and to everything that situates us in the imaginary register." 56 To be anything
else-to refuse the constraint, the inertia, of the ego as form would be, as Zupancic rightly says, "impossible,
inhuman." As impossible and inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him or fuck him; as
impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to Thornhill by crushing his hand; as impossible and
inhuman as the sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure of the future and, for refusing the call to
compassion, finally merits none himself. To embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the
sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out. Leonard affords us
no lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond desire, to a sinthomosexuality of our
own-one we assume at the price of the very identity named by "our own." To those on whom his ethical
stance, his act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the irony of trying to read him as an allegory, as one
from whom we could learn how to act and in whom we could find the sinthomosexual's essential
concretization: the formalization of a resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the
substantialization of a negativity that dismantles every substance. He leaves us, in short, the impossible
task of trying to fill his shoes -shoes that were empty of anything human even while he was wearing them,
but that lead us, against our own self-interest and in spite of our own desire, toward a jouissance from which
everything "human," to have one, must turn its face.
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And put away your perms. Radical inclusivity is NOT the goal. The excluded is a future
horizon of unending, unrepresentability. The result is a disruptive site which rocks the
reason of the masters discourse.
Butler, noted for her studies on gender & teaches composition and rhetoric at Berkeley, 93
(Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) pp. 52-53 LRP
The regulation of sexuality at work in the articulation of the Forms suggests that sexual difference operates in
the very formulation of matter. But this is a matter that is defined not only against reason, where reason is
understood as that which acts on and through a countervailing materiality, and masculine and feminine
occupy these oppositional positions. Sexual difference also operates in the formulation, the staging, of
what will occupy the site of inscriptional space, that is, as what must remain outside these oppositional
positions as their supporting condition. There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number
of exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being the
animal, not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property,
national and racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality. To the extent that a set
of reverse-mimes emerge from those quarters, they will not be the same as each other; if there is an
occupation and reversal of the master's discourse, it will come from many quarters, and those
resignifying practices will converge in ways that scramble the self-replicating presumptions of reason's
mastery. For if the copies speak, or if what is merely material begins to signify, the scenography of reason
is rocked by the crisis on which it was always built. And there will be no way finally to delimit the
elsewhere of Irigaray's elsewhere, for every oppositional discourse will produce its outside, an outside
that risks becoming installed as its non-signifying inscriptional space. And whereas this can appear as
the necessary and founding violence of any truth-regime, it is important to resist that theoretical
gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is
to refigure this necessary "outside" as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is
perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the
outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given
regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating
the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that
regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. In this sense, radical
and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every
marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its
limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference. If there is a violence necessary to
the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin,
without ending, without mastering, to ownand yet never fully to ownthe exclusions by which we
proceed.
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Link: Feminism
Feminism fails to account for an encompassing view of the subject which rejects the ridgid
gender binaries defined by the Heteronormative. Radical feminism is an example of
Heteronormativity par excellence.
Butler, Judith Butler is a noted for her studies on gender, she teaches composition and rhetoric at
U.C. Berkeley, 93( Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex), pp. 238-239
. LRP
In theories such as Catharine MacKinnon's, sexual relations of subordination are understood to establish
differential gender categories, such that "men" are those defined in a sexually dominating social
position and "women" are those defined in subordination. Her highly deterministic account leaves no
room for relations of sexuality to be theorized apart from the rigid framework of gender difference or
for kinds of sexual regulation that do not take gender as their primary objects (i.e., the prohibition of
sodomy, public sex, consensual homosexuality). Hence, Gayle Rubin's influential distinction between the
domains of sexuality and gender in "Thinking Sex" and Sedgwick's reformulation of that position have
constituted important theoretical opposition to MacKinnon's deterministic form of structuralism. My sense is
that now this very opposition needs to be rethought in order to muddle the lines between queer theory
and feminism.2' For surely it is as unacceptable to insist that relations of sexual subordination
determine gender position as it is to separate radically forms of sexuality from the workings of gender
norms. The relation between sexual practice and gender is surely not a structurally determined one,
but the destabilizing of the heterosexual presumption of that very structuralism still requires a way to
think the two in a dynamic relation to one another.
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Link: Nationalism
The modern nation state is defined by what it opposes and excludes, it uses difference to
enshrine a collective national identity. Our conception of state hood is heteronormative.
Gaard, educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, and environmental justice, 97 (Greta, Toward A Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia. Volume: 12.
Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 114.LRP)
In her study of race and gender in international politics, Cynthia Enloe finds important connections between the conceptions of
nationalism and of masculinity. In colonialist discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the subordinated countries are
feminized, the subordinated men are emasculated, and the colonized women are often depicted as sex objects by foreign men. One male
writer described colonialism as the condition wherein a man's women are "turned into fodder for imperialist postcards. Becoming a
nationalist requires a man to resist the foreigner's use and abuse of his women" ( Enloe 1989 , 44). in her study of U.S. polar expeditions,
Lisa Bloom finds that "the explorations symbolically enacted the men's own battle to become men," and the recorded narratives left by
the explorers present "U.S. national identity as essentially a white masculine one" ( Bloom 1993 , 6, 11). Both Enloe's and Bloom's texts
reprint popular colonial postcard images of naked or partially clothed native women reclining on the ground in what Bloom calls the
"odalisque pose" ( Bloom 1993 , 104). Like the colonizers of three and four centuries past, the explorers and
imperialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have used the perceived eroticism of native
peoples as a justification for their colonization. Serving as a foundation for all imperialist exploits,
colonial nationalism offers a definition of identity that is structurally similar to the master identity.
Enloe defines a nation as "a collection of people who have come to believe that they have been shaped
by a common past and are destined to share a common future. That belief is usually nurtured by a
common language and a sense of otherness from groups around them" ( Enloe 1989 , 45; emphasis added).
Nationalism, then, is "a set of ideas that sharpens distinctions between 'us' and 'them'. It is, moreover,
a tool for explaining how inequities have been created between 'us' and 'them' " ( Enloe 1989 , 61). Similarly,
the editors of Nationalisms and Sexualities explain that "national identity is determined not on the basis of its own
intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not" ( Parker et al. 1992 , 5). Inevitably
"shaped by what it opposes," a national identity that depends on such differences is "forever haunted
by [its] various definitional others" ( Parker et al. 1992 , 5). The feature of masculine identity that Enloe and Bloom seem to
overlook and that Plumwood does not explicitly address is sexuality. Here again, feminist and ecofeminist theories fall short without a
queer perspective. As Gayle Rubin has noted, "Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To automatically assume that this makes it
the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other" (1989, 307).
Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues that gender and sexuality are "inextricable . . . in that each can be expressed only in terms of the
other . . . in twentieth-century Western culture gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as
being as distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or class and race" (1990, 30). From a queer ecofeminist perspective, then, it
is clear that notions of sexuality are implicit within the category of gender. Simply stated, the masculinity
of the colonizer and of Plumwood's master identity is neither homosexual, bisexual, nor transgendered.
Heterosexuality -- and a particular kind of heterosexuality as well, a heterosexuality contained within certain
parameters -- is implicit in conceptions of both dominant masculinity and Plumwood's master model. In the
preceding examples, the discourse of nationalist colonialism contains specific conceptions not only of race and gender but also of
sexuality. The native feminized other of nature is not simply eroticized but also queered and animalized,
in that any sexual behavior outside the rigid confines of compulsory heterosexuality becomes queer
and subhuman. Colonization becomes an act of the nationalist self asserting identity and definition
over and against the other -- culture over and against nature, masculine over and against feminine,
reason over and against the erotic. The metaphoric "thrust" of colonialism has been described as the
rape of indigenous people and of nature because there is a structural -- not experiential -- similarity
between the two operations, though colonization regularly includes rape.
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The queer is the figure of the death drive standing in opposition to the future. Saving our
children represents saving our ideal citizens and preserving our social institutions
Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004.
(Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 9-11, JCE)
The drive-more exactly, the death drive-holds a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the logic of
the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer, in the
order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability. Lacan
makes clear that the death drive emerges as a consequence of the Symbolic; indeed, he ends Seminar 2 with the claim
that "the symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about
the death instinct as being what is most fundamental-a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming,
insisting on being realized." This constant movement toward realization cannot be divorced, however, from a
will to undo what is thereby instituted, to begin again ex nihilo. For the death drive marks the excess embedded within the
Symbolic through the loss, the Real loss, the advent of the signifier effects. Suzanne Barnard expresses this well in distinguishing between the
subject of desire and the subject of the drive: "While the subject of the drive also is 'born' in relation to a loss, this loss is a real rather than a
symbolic one. As such, it functions not in a mode of absence but in a mode of an impossible excess haunting reality, an irrepressible remainder
that the subject cannot separate itself from. In other words, while desire is born of and sustained by a constitutive lack, drive emerges in relation
to a constitutive surplus. This surplus is what Lacan calls the subject's 'anatomical complement,' an excessive 'unreal' remainder that produces an
ever-present jouissance. This surplus, compelling the Symbolic to enact a perpetual repetition, remains spectral, "unreal," or impossible insofar as
it insists outside the logic of meaning that, nonetheless, produces it. The drive holds the place of what meaning misses in much the same way that
the signifier preserves at the heart of the signifying order the empty and arbitrary letter, the meaningless substrate of signification that meaning
intends to conceal. Politics, then, in opposing itself to the negativity of such a drive, gives us history as the
continuous staging of our dream of eventual self-realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire,
what we take to be reality itself. And it does so without letting us acknowledge that the future, to which it
persistently appeals, marks the impossible place of an Imaginary past exempt from the deferrals intrinsic to the operation of the
signifying chain and projected ahead as the site at which being and meaning are joined as One. In this it enacts the formal repetition distinctive of
the drive while representing itself as bringing to fulfillment the narrative sequence of history and, with it, of desire, in the realization of the
subject's authentic presence in the Child imagined as enjoying unmediated access to Imaginary wholeness. Small wonder that the era of
the universal subject should produce as the very figure of politics, because also as the embodiment of futurity
collapsing undecidably into the past, the image of the Child as we know it: the Child who becomes, in Wordsworth's
phrase, but more punitively, "father of the Man." Historically constructed, as social critics and intellectual historians including Phillipe Aries,
James Kincaid, and Lawrence Stone have made clear, to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child
has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is
held in perperual trust." In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived
experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse-to prescribe what will count as political
discourse- by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose
figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix's iconic image of Liberty leading us
into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility- her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it's held out while the
boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself-to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the
"politics" of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the "inspirational" "One Day More"), we are no more able to conceive of
a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the
Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share
in the nation's good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social
order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly
valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a
freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the
collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social
order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on
which meaning always depends.
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The future of the child is a promise to shield ourselves against the threat of apocalypse. The
fetish fixation on the Child is a mark of heteronormativity. Edelman, Professor of English
Literature , 2004.
(Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 18-21, JCE)
The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory
investment in the misrecognition of figure. It takes its place on the social stage like every adorable Annie
gathering her limitless funds of pluck to "stick out [her] chin! And grin! And say: 'Tomorrow!! Tomorrow!! I
love ya! Tomorrow! You're always! A day! Away.' "And lo and behold, as viewed through the prism of
the tears that it always calls forth, the figure of this Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent
promise of Noah's rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that shields us against
the persistent threat of apocalypse now- or later. Recall, for example, the end of Jonathan Demme's
Philadelphia (1993), his filmic act of contrition for the homophobia some attributed to The Silence of the
Lambs (199r). After Andrew Beckett (a man for all seasons, as portrayed by the saintly Tom Hanks), last
seen on his deathbed in an oxygen mask that seems to allude to, or trope on, Hannibal Lecter's more
memorable muzzle (see figures I and 2), has shuffled off this mortal coil to stand, as we are led to suppose,
before a higher law, we find ourselves in, if not at, his wake surveying a room in his family home, now
crowded with children and pregnant women whose reassuringly bulging bellies (see figure 3) displace
the bulging basket (unseen) of the HIV-positive gay man (unseen) from whom, the filmic text suggests, in
a cinema (unlike the one in which we sit watching philadelphia) not phobic about graphic representations
of male-male sexual acts, Saint Thomas, a.k.a. Beckett, contracted the virus that cost him his life.
When we witness, in the film's final sequence, therefore, the videotaped representation of Andrew
playing on the beach as a boy (see figure 4), the tears that these moving pictures solicit burn with an
indignation directed not only against the intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this
boy would later become, but also against the homosexual world in which boys like this eventually grow
up to have crushes on other men. For the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys
and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large as for Philadelphia in particular, is understood
as bringing children and childhood to an end. Thus, the occasion of a gay man's death gives the film
the excuse to unleash once more the disciplinary image of the "innocent" Child performing its
mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction. We encounter this image on every side as the lives,
the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference to
imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted to have them except as they consist in the
prospect of passing them on to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social disease as
which queer sexualities register. Nor should we forget how pervasively AIDs-for which to this day the
most effective name associated with the congressional appropriation of funds is that of a child, Ryan Whitereinforces an older connection, as old as the antigay reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom's
destruction, between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity. This, of course, is the
connection on which Anita Bryant played so cannily when she campaigned in Florida against gay civil rights
under the banner of "Save Our Children," and it remains the connection on which the national crusade against
gay marriage rests its case. Thus, while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to
marry, to serve in the military, to adopt and raise children of their own, the political right, refusing to
acknowledge these comrades in reproductive futurism, counters their efforts by inviting us to kneel at
the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might witness lewd or inappropriately intimate behavior;
the Child who might find information about dangerous "lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who
might choose a provocative <CONTINUED>
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<CONTINUED>
book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in short, who might find an enjoyment that
would nullify the figural value, itself imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adult's
adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults,
an Imaginary fullness that's considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As Lauren Berlant argues
forcefully at the outset of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, "a nation made for adult
citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children." On every side, our enjoyment of
liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening
shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of
potential encounters, with an "otherness" of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve,
uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in
check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history
unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the
historical construction of the homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with the appearance of such
literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour, and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today
in the uncannily intimate connection between Harry . Potter and Lord Voldemort, a Symbolic resistance to
the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer, Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort's name makes
clear, a wish, a will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child. That Child, immured
in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness
of queer sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value
for which queerness regularly finds itself condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore
an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically
charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of
reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death
struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support the legal
availability of abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bomb making guide it produced for the
assistance of its militantly "pro-life" members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of
reproductive futurism: to "disrupt and ultimately destroy Satan's power to kill our children, God's children.
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<CONTINUED>
A line is then drawn across the column, and underneath it the following words appear in heavy type:
Nothing has been added to the fertilized ovum who you once were except nutrition.
The fetus here is all mouth, the mother all food, and the pregnancy entirely spermatic. The line between
these last sections is particularly interesting, given what we already know of Dr. Wilke's attitude to fathering.
The text here "draws the line" at a point where biological knowledge constrains it from asserting something it
really believes. If we put this line under a microscope, it would probably read as follows:
Did you "come from" your father's sperm?
No! You once were your father's sperm.
Where does the pro-life fetus exist, if not in living woman's body? The front cover of this flyer gives us one
answer: the dead fetus is in the man's hands. One pro-life lawyer has been , quoted as saying "the fetus might
well be described as an astronaut in an interuterine space ship."" He is correct: the fetus is a
decontextualized abstraction of Jupiter Space, which here means patriarchal consciousness. It is an
overblown symbol of the parasitic male ego, and more generally, of the corporate Superbabies which
feed off the Earth while pretending it doesn't exist.
Its associations with an anti-erotic repressive morality and pro-militarist sentiments make the
movement to protect the fetal person seem less about life and more about preventing its termination:
the New Right is not so much "pro-life" as "anti-abortion." Like the Star Child, the pro-life fetus
arises as the negation of life's negation, through which the male ego resurrects itself as a spermatic
creation. And like the Star Child, this other inhabitant of Jupiter Space may also stand for extinction.
One pro-choice activist has claimed that the notion of fetal personhood is a relatively new one, which is
"taking a form that has its own energy, almost like a religious cult." We look again to the film 2001 for
clues to the source of this energy. The astral fetus is visually equated with the planet, and in the last frame,
substituted for it: it becomes a world of its own. At one level, then, the fetus is working as a symbol for the
Earth. It is a cosmic symbol. It is not entirely inappropriate that the planet be represented by a signifier
of unborn life, for it presently contains all of the possibilities for future life forms. From this
perspective, disarmament might be seen as an act to prevent a cosmic abortion.
But there are three major dangers in using the fetus as a cosmic symbol:
If the cosmic associations are left unspecified, then anxieties over the fate of the Earth can be
unconsciously expressed in hysterical or abstract discussions of individual fetal life, while leaving
untroubled that part of the belief system which favors further development of doomsday machines.
The cult of fetal personhood can thus serve as a safety valve for the right's bad conscience over its
exterminist policies. More generally, the individualist rhetoric on both sides of the abortion debate
prevents proper recognition of the radical reproductive choices being made daily by the militaryindustrial complex, and tends to keep questions of reproductive morality confined to the private sphere
Even where the connections between cosmic and individual unborn are explicitly recognized, as in the
Pro-Lifers for Survival position, there is no guarantee that extinction anxieties wont continue to be
displaced onto the more manageable issue of abortion, a tendency already encouraged by moral
absolutism, and which may gain further impetus as people lose hope of dismantling the nuclear
apparatus.
The Earth is usually pictured as a Mother, and there is something disturbing about its image as fetusthe profound individualism of it perhaps, and the way it appears at the moment we're threatened with
nuclear abortion. But there is also a space oddity involved: for if the Earth is an embryo, then its womb is
space. Although we know of no other living worlds, centuries of extraterrestrial fantasies capped off by
several decades of off-world practice have encouraged us to think of space as a good womb, full of
inhabitable planets. From this view, the Earth is just one of many cosmic pregnancies. It doesn't really
matter if we abort it, for we can always escape to one of the new Star Children we pluck from the
vacuum; we might even mutate into extraterrestrial cyborgs.
<CONTINUED>
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<CONTINUED>
Apart from the space oddities it shares with 2001, the cult of fetal personhood employs termporal distortions
remarkably similar to those of science-fiction culture. Dr. Wilke's embryological catechism attempts to
persuade us that we did not just "come from" an embryo (the future conditional), we "once were" that
embryo (collapsed future); that embryo was always already what we are now, an adult person. The embryo
faces no alternative futures, but one single destiny, which is moreover collapsed back onto all previous
states of being, allowing the conceptus to be spoken of as a "tiny person" and the deliberate arrest of
its development equated with homicide. Contrasting with this collapsed future tense of antiabortion
rhetoric is the future conditional of feminists, who understand conception as an occurrence with a
number of possible outcomes, to be determined by the future events or decisions which might influence
or terminate its development.
The collapsed future tense lies at the heart of our culture of space and time travel. It is the "bound to be"
of the ideology of progress, operative in the discourse of those who tell us that since nuclear reactors,
deep-sea mining, Star Wars, and space colonies are inevitable parts of our future, we might as well quit
griping about their bad side-effects and get on with making the future happen; after all, there's no time
like the present. Trouble is, the collapse of the future leaves the present with no time, and we live with
the sense of the preapocalyptic moment, the inevitability of everything happening at once.
The perversity of the collapsed future tense lies in its ability at once to invoke and deny the future. For
if the future is already upon us, we have no need to consider the survival needs of future generations: we
are the future generation. The collapse of adulthood into the fetus-world symbol helps render
extinction conscionable by reductively equating the megadeath of the cosmic unborn with the
individual deaths we all know we must face. The pro-life prosition is therefore continuous with all of
those other discourses of future collapse which work to paralyze people into inaction in the face of the
extraterrestrial and exterminist technologies which seem destined to take over our lives.
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<CONTINUED>
shattered the label, and in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first listed, all those attributes with which
the label is associated. . . . Though Baldwin doesn't mention it, a worthy novel about a Heterosexual would also
seem to be ruled out, for the reasons he discusses: A novel insistently time, to tell us something about it. . . . Without
this passion, we'may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and
separate us from ourselves.53 The differentiation of homosexual and heterosexual persons, the young Baldwin
suggests, is linked inextricably to a system of moralizing judgments about men and women: Before we were
banished from Eden and the curse was uttered, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman," the homosexual did
not exist; nor, properly speaking, did the heterosexual. We were all in a state of nature.54 The homo/hetero
distinction, Baldwin hints, is not natural but social and value-laden, and tied to a problematic cultural connection of
men and women. The "present debasement" of the male homosexual, "and our obsession with him," Baldwin
stresses, "corresponds to the debasement of the relationships between the sexes."55 The division between man and
woman, Baldwin declares, "can only betray a division within the soul of each." The either/or, man/woman
distinction is a problem for the psy che. It won't help our souls to declare "that men must recapture their
status as men and that women must embrace their function as women." That "rigidity of attitude" puts to
death "any possible communion." Anyway, "having once listed the bald physical facts," it's difficult to
"decide, of our multiple human attributes, which are masculine and which are feminine. "56 "The recognition
of this complexity"this ambiguity of the sexes and sexual divisions"is the signal of maturity, it marks,"
says Baldwin, "the death of the child and the birth of the man."
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The hetero/homo binary is a homophobic production. We must break out of this binary
hierarchy
Halperin 95
David M. Halperin, American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture
and visual culture, "Sain Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, " New York Oxford University Press, pg. 44-46,
1995, DES.
The heterosexual/homosexual binarism is itself a homophobic production, just as the man/woman
binarism is a sexist production. Each consists of two terms, the first of which is unmarked and
unproblematized--it designates "the category to which everyone is assumed to belong" (unless someone
is specifically marked as different)--whereas the second term is marked and problematized: it designates
a category of persons whom something differentiates from normal, unmarked people. 70 The marked
(or queer) term ultimately functions not as a means of denominating a real or determinate class of
persons but as a means of delimiting and defining--by negation and opposition--the unmarked term. If
the term "homosexuality" turns out, as we have seen, not to describe a single, stable thing but to operate as a
placeholder for a set of mutually incompatible, logically contradictory predicates, whose impossible
conjunction does not refer to some paradoxical phenomenon in the world so much as it marks out the limits
of the opposed term, "heterosexuality," that is because homosexuality and heterosexuality do not
represent a true pair, two mutually referential contraries, but a hierarchical opposition in which
heterosexuality defines itself implicitly by constituting itself as the negation of homosexuality. 71
Heterosexuality defines itself without problematizing itself, it elevates itself as a privileged and
unmarked term, by abjecting and problematizing homosexuality. Heterosexuality, then, depends on
homosexuality to lend it substance--and to enable it to acquire by default its status as a default, as a
lack of difference or an absence of abnormality. 72 ("A source of heterosexual comfort," Paul Morrison
suggests: "'Whatever else you might say about [heterosexuality], at least it's not that.'" also "a source of
heterosexual anxiety: 'There is nothing else to say about it but that.'") 73 Although the unmarked term
claims a kind of precedence or priority over the marked term, the very logic of supplementarity entails the
unmarked term dependence on the marked term: the unmarked term needs the marked term in order to
generate itself as unmarked. In that sense the marked term turns out to be structurally and logically prior to
the unmarked one. (In the case of heterosexuality and homosexuality, the marked term's priority to the
unmarked term is not only structural or logical but historical as well: the invention of the term and the
concept of homosexuality preceded by some years the invention of the term and concept of heterosexuality-which was originally the name of a perversion [what we now call bisexuality] and only gradually came to
occupy its familiar place as the polar opposite of homosexuality.) 74 "Homosexual," like "woman," 75 is
not a name that refers to a "natural kind" of thing; it's a discursive, and homophobic, construction
that has come to be misrecognized as an object under the epistemological regime known as realism.
Which is not, of course, to say that homosexuality is unreal. On the contrary, constructions are very
real. 76 People live by them, after all--and nowadays, increasingly, they die from them. You can't get
more real than that. But if homosexuality is a reality, it is a constructed reality, a social and not a
natural reality. The social world contains many realities that do not exist by nature.
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Holbrook/Nielson
Link: Military
The military solider is premised on an ideology of manliness. Violence and denigration of
the other are a way of constituting the masculine self by making feminine or homosexual
the target nation or enemys body.
Richter-Montpetit, Political Science Department, York University, 2007
(Melanie, Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner 'Abuse' in Abu
Ghraib and the Question of 'Gender Equality,International Feminist Journal of Politics; Mar 2007, Vol. 9 Issue 1,
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
In stark contrast to the seemingly benign intentions articulated in this hegemonic national fantasy, the four
reports came to a similar conclusion whereby between October and December 2003, numerous incidents of
sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees in Abu Ghraib prison
(Taguba 2004: 16). At this point, we should note a large body of feminist literature challenging the supposed
exceptionalism of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses among soldiers in war zones and at home
(see Seifert 1996; Barrett 1999;
Whitworth 2004). This feminist scholarship on militarism suggests that being a soldier is, in short, about
violence and about preparing people to destroy other human beings by force (Whitworth 2004: 151).
Yet the problem goes beyond military training, it is about what constitutes becoming and being a soldier
it is about militarized masculinity. Drawing on Cynthia Enloe, Whitworth (2004: 16) argues that militaries
rely on a certain kind of ideology of manliness in order to function well, an ideology premised on
violence and aggression, individual conformity to military discipline, aggressive heterosexism,
misogyny and racism. The military compensates the soldier for subordination and physical stress with the
promise of community, and physical and emotional toughness (Whitworth 2004: 16). Militarized
masculinity is inherently fragile, due to the discrepancies between the myths and promises associated
with militarized masculinity as
experienced and enacted in military training as well as in simulations of warfare, and the lack of control in
the actual lives of soldiers (Whitworth 2004: 166). Whitworth further argues that, through violence and the
denigration of Others who undermine their promised entitlements, soldiers seek to (re)constitute their
militarized masculine self. Following Whitworth, I suggest that the various forms of torture enacted by the
soldiers on the bodies of Abu Ghraib detainees were a way of reasserting control and reconstituting the
soldierly Self, particularly after the emasculating events on 9/11 and the daily resistance against the
occupation of Iraq. The heavy involvement of female-identified soldiers in the torture of prisoners seems to
stand in clear contradiction to feminist theories of militarized masculinity. How can we make sense of this
tension? I argue that we can do so if we understand Operation Iraqi Hope as a colonial endeavour, the
racialized encounter between prison guards and detainees as a colonial one and the torturing of detainees as
acts of colonial violence rooted in the desire to enact Whiteness.11 I will now turn to the ways the acts of
torture were staged. According to the military reports male detainees were sodomized by prison guards,
forced to masturbate themselves and/or perform indecent acts on each other (Fay and Jones 2004: 72),
such as simulating and/or performing oral or anal sex on fellow male detainees. The prison guards also
arranged naked male detainees in a human pyramid, in such a way that the bottom guys [sic] penis would
touch the guy on tops [sic] butt (Taguba 2004), and called them names such as gay. Many of these
homosexual acts 14 indecent acts were photographed and/or videotaped. Moreover, the soldiers stripped
male detainees and forced them to wear female underpants, often on their heads.I suggest that these torture
practices are embedded in colonial narratives and practices that, first, paint the colonies or dark
corners of the earth as feminized and spatially spread for male exploration (McClintock 1995: 23) or
penetration; and, second, equate the lack of potency and domination of the male body (and the
nation) with femininity and male homosexuality.
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The affs taming of the military is an illusion. The US militaries saving civilization fantasy
require placing the Other into an association of feminity with subordination, weakeness,
passivity, and inferiority
Richter-Montpetit, Political Science Department, York University, 2007
(Melanie, Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner 'Abuse' in Abu
Ghraib and the Question of 'Gender Equality,International Feminist Journal of Politics; Mar 2007, Vol. 9 Issue 1,
p38-59, 22p) Hdo
As my analysis of the sexed, racialized torture practices has shown, the save civilization itself-fantasy,
that is, the hegemonic national fantasy envisaging the First World civilized Self bringing (liberal)
democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, and the subject-position
Whiteness, depend on the association of femininity with subordination, weakness and passivity, in
short, inferiority. While the (hetero)sexualized humiliation of racialized men at the hands of White
western women disrupts the fictitious clear-cut male/female dichotomy underpinning this fantasy, the
violent practices constitute merely a reversal of that logocentrism, they do not displace it. To remain
within Ehrenreichs problematic framework, the female-identified soldiers ironically contributed actively
to gender inequality.
Moreover, I think Ehrenreichs hope of taming/civilizing the military is an illusion. The military cannot
be transformed, as its mission is to prepare and organize its workers to kill people; the reproduction of
the New World Order continues to depend heavily on the deployment of military force. As discussed
earlier, physical violence and aggressive Othering play a constitutive role in the construction of the
soldier Self. In sum, the acts of violence perpetrated by the female-identified soldiers on the bodies of
prisoners should be located within colonial desires. Given the systematic, simultaneously racialized and
heterosexed character of the acts of torture, and given that their effect is to re/produce the identity and
hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order, the
participation of the three female-identified soldiers is not a sign of gender equality. Further, as Whiteness
and the concomitant World (Dis)Order are also a classed project,19 both female- and male-identified prison
guards occupy the subject-position White but not quite (Agathangelou 2004).
Though none of the torture pictures published depict soldiers of colour, the Fay-Jones Report (2004: 77, 80)
twice mentions Black soldiers engaging in torture of prisoners, and one of the seven soldiers convicted of
prisoner abuse self-identifies as a Black male. These reports do not contradict my argument that the soldiers
desired and enacted a fantasy of racial supremacy. I argue that the essentially colonial character of
Operation Iraqi Hope, the commonsensical fantasy of the First World civilized Self that brings (liberal)
democracy to the Third World Other incapable of self-determination, creates discursive space for the
interpellation and participation of the sexed, classed and racialized bodies of some of the US Empires
internal Others.
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Link: Feminism
Feminism is a theory of gender oppression because it distinguishes between gender through
biological means; sex has replaced gender
Rubin, a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex
and gender politics, 1993 (Gayle S., , "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,"
Social Perspective in Lesbian and Gay Studies, NY Routledge, , DES)
.
Whichever feminist position on sexuality right, left or center - eventually attains dominance, the existence of
such a rich discussion is evidence that the feminist movement will always be a source of interesting thought
about sex. Nevertheless, I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged
site of a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To assume automatically that
this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand,
and erotic desire, on the other.
In the English language, the word "sex" has two very different meanings. It means gender and gender
identity, as in "the female sex" or "the male sex." But sex also refers to sexual activity, lust,
intercourse, and arousal, as in "to have sex." This semantic merging reflects a cultural assumption
that sexuality is reducible to sexual intercourse and that it is a function of the relations between women
and men. The cultural fusion of gender with sexuality has given rise to the idea that a theory of
sexuality may be derived directly out of a theory of gender.
In an earlier essay, "The Traffic in Women," I used the concept of a sex/gender system, defined as a "set of
arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity. "94 I went
onto argue that "Sex as we know it - gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood - is
itself a social product. "95 I did not distinguish between lust and gender, treating both as modalities of the
same underlying social process.
"The Traffic in Women" was inspired by the literature on kin-based systems of social organization. It
appeared to me at the time that gender and desire were systemically intertwined in such social formations.
This mayor may not be an accurate assessment of the relationship between sex and gender in tribal
organizations. But it is surely not an adequate formulation for sexuality in Western industrial societies. As
Foucault has pointed out, a system of sexuality has emerged out of earlier kinship forms and has
acquired significant autonomy:
Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, Western societies created and deployed a new apparatus
which was superimposed on the previous one, and which, without completely supplanting the latter,
helped to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment of sexuality . .. For the first
[kinship], what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite statutes; the second [sexuality] is
concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions. 96
The development of this sexual system has taken place in the context of gender relations. Part of the
modern ideology of sex is that lust is the province of men, purity that of women. It is no accident that
pornography and the perversions have been considered part of the male domain. In the sex industry,
women have been excluded from most production and consumption, and allowed to participate primarily as
workers. In order to participate in the "perversions," women have had to overcome serious limitations on
their social mobility, their economic resources, and their sexual freedoms. Gender affects the operation of
the sexual system, and the sexual system has had genderspecific manifestations. But although sex and
gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form the basis of two distinct arenas of social
practice.
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Link: Ecofeminism
Contemporary ecofeminism just adds queers and stirs, it is time for the queers to come out
of the words and speak for ourselves!
Gaard, an educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, social and environmental justice, 97
(Gretta Toward a Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia, Volume: 12, Issue: 1, pg. 114, DES)
"We have to examine how racism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, and sexism are all related to
naturism," writes ecofeminist author Ellen O'Loughlin ( 1993 , 148). Chaia Heller elaborates: "Love of
nature is a process of becoming aware of and unlearning ideologies of racism, sexism, heterosexism,
and ableism so that we may cease to reduce our idea of nature to a dark, heterosexual, 'beautiful'
mother" (1993, 231). But as Catriona. Sandilands astutely comments, "It is not enough simply to add
'heterosexism' to the long list of dominations that shape our relations to nature, to pretend that we can
just'add queers and stir' " (1994, 21). Unfortunately, it is exactly this approach that has characterized
ecofeminist theory to date, which is the reason I believe it is time for queers to come out of the woods
and speak for ourselves.2
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Impact: Dehumanization
Heterosexism justifies dehumanization and violence as Anti-Semitism did with the Jews in
Nazi Germany
Rozdzial, co-chair of the National Council of NOMAS, 2000
Moshe, NOMAS, Anti-Semitism and Heterosexism: Common Constructs of Oppression, Winter 2000,
http://www.nomas.org/node/139, Accessed 7-8-09, AMG
Similarly, religious attacks on homosexuals, defended under biblical precedent, echo the vilest forms of
anti-Semitism. The slander of "sodomites has replaced "Christ-killers" in the vocabulary of hatred
and heaven's retribution against a minority community has, once again, become the excuse to justify
victimizing the victim. Even the promise of "salvation" through "conversion" (Jews to Christianity;
homosexuals to heterosexuality) reflects the common perception that both minorities are "outcast in
the sight of G-d." And the stereotype of stubborn adherence to a despised lifestyle even in the shadow of
salvation is another common accusatory theme. After all, how can the "other" want to be who he is and
stubbornly hold on to a life of deprivation when the doors are, figuratively, opened to a life of safety,
privilege, and saving grace? To look at the similar language of marginalization of these two groups
without noticing the historical connection would mean yielding to ignorance. Common weapons of
oppression include the emasculation of Jews and stereotyping of homosexuals to perpetuate an excuse
for dehumanization and a perception of facile targeting for violence. Thus, Jewish men are labeled
Hymies, nerds, weaklings, just as gay men are the sissies and pansies - to mention only a few of the
epithets hurled at them. Jewish women and lesbians are, respectively, bitches and princesses, or butches
and dykes. The modern propaganda of hatred that equates AIDS to homosexuality echoes Hitler's
racial anti-Semitism that accused the Jews of spreading disease, contagion and contamination and are
reminders of past genocide and the excuses for a present violence. The recent push to find a biological
origin for homosexuality has a frightening parallel to the Nazi's eugenics response to the "Jewish
problem."
warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity
on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond
calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the
genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and
dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it
may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe
to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When
we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater
than any tools which we can currently use to measure it.
Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people
become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be
justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is
evil's most powerful weapon.
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Impact: Colonization
Colonization and environmental destruction is the relationship compulsory heterosexuality.
Gaard, educator, writer, scholar and activist working at the intersections of literature,
feminism, and environmental justice, 97 (Greta, Toward A Queer Ecofeminism, Hypatia. Volume: 12.
Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 114.LRP)
Men have done with Mother Nature this same dominance/submission flip-flop. They have by their
technologies worked steadily and for generations to transform a psychologically intolerable
dependence upon a seemingly powerful and capricious "Mother Nature" into a soothing and
acceptable dependence upon a subservient and non-threatening "wife." This "need to be above" and
to dominate permeates male attitudes toward nature ( Gray 1979 , 42).10 As I have argued elsewhere,
when nature is feminized and thereby eroticized, and culture is masculinized, the culture-nature
relationship becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality ( Gaard 1993). Colonization can therefore be
seen as a relationship of compulsory heterosexuality whereby the queer erotic of non-westernized
peoples, their culture, and their land, is subdued into the missionary position -- with the conqueror "on
top."11
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Impact: Violence
Compulsory Heterosexuality creates a norm which excludes Queers/Women and it is the
root cause of violence against the Feminine and Sexualities.
Gmez, Political theorist on Hate Crimes, 2005 (Mara Mercedes, On Prejudice, Violence, and
Democracy, la-buena-vida.info, ongoing project from 2005 until 2008, pp. 1-2, JAR)
Deconstruction and queer theories, as well as research on sexual behavior, have shown that a binary
categorization of differences is inadequate and insufficient to contain the fluidity of our desires and
our identifications. It is not only that for some people biological sex, gender roles, sexual desire and
practices do not correspond, but that they do not coincide for anyone. Our sexuality and our self is
undetermined and contingent. But the perception of this generates extreme anxiety because it not only
discloses the unsubstantiated condition of sexual binaries, but puts them at stake. It also puts at risk
the privileges that derive from such binaries.
Many of us dwell in societies of compulsory heterosexuality 3 and act and live as if the binary
construction of the world were natural and universal instead of contingent and socially constructed.
Compulsory heterosexuality operates through political, sexual, social and economic practices that
stigmatize and make targets of violence that which is perceived as feminine and sexualities, which do
not conform to the heterosexual norm. Such a norm assumes male and female bodies invested with
masculine and feminine roles, desiring the opposite sex and acting accordingly. Despite the cultural and legal
reforms that dissenting sexualities have achieved in the past decades --especially gay men and lesbians and,
in a lesser degree transgender people-- they are still submitted to second class citizenship and to
extraordinary State and non-state violence in many societies.
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Alternative: Do Nothing
The social order will always attempt to translate our negativity into a position. Our
response is to do nothing, turning ourselves against all norms. We withdraw from your
system of rules and refuse to have an alternative. Requiring us to have an alternative is a
social construction that reaffirms reproductive futurism, and we reject it.
Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004.
(Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 5-8, JCE)
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I
argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some
more perfect social order- such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of
futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer- but rather to refuse the
insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will
register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the
question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of
negativity into some determinate stance or "position" whose determination would thus negate it:
always the imperative to immure it in some stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might
do well to attempt what is surely impossible-to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a
reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism - I do not intend to propose some "good"
that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we
call the "good," can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a
futurism that's always purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure
the Symbolic's undoing, to the necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we
might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for "none of the above," for the primacy of a constant no in
response to the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law's foundational act, its self constituting
negation. The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it
does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of
this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of
political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not
redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the
Symbolic's negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the persistence of something internal to
reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can
afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can expose the
constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can
access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the
queer. In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the "grimness with which a man clings to himself, as
to the immediately sure and substantial," the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from
ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our "good." 4 Such
queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call "better," though it promises, in more
than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan's
characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes
clear, the good. Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate
and Intend[ing] toward the real." 6 Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: The quality that best
characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior.
We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no
other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from
whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The
Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of lawseven if it is
<CONTINUED>
<CONTINUED>
universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being.' Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked
to the "aberrant or atypical", to what chafes against "normalization," finds its value not in a good susceptible
to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The
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embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some
positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus
in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.' For by figuring a refusal of the coercive
belief in the paramount value of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for
dialectical access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a
faith in the consistent reality of the social- and by extension, of the social subject; a faith that politics,
whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms. Divesting such politics of its thematic trappings,
bracketing the particularity of its various proposals for social organization, the queer insists that politics is
always a politics of the signifier, or even of what Lacan will often refer to as "the letter." It serves to shore
up a reality always unmoored by signification and lacking any guarantee. To say as much is not, of course, to
deny the experiential violence that frequently troubles social reality or the apparent consistency with which it
bears-and thereby bears down on-us all. It is, rather, to suggest that queerness exposes the obliquity of our
relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally
necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic
structures, that shape them. If it aims effectively to intervene in the reproduction of such a reality-an
intervention that may well take the form of figuring that reality's abortion, then queer theory must always
insist on its connection to the vicissitudes of the sign, to the tension between the signifier's collapse into the
letter's cadaverous materiality and its participation in a system of reference wherein it generates meaning
itself. As a particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that takes both the value and the
burden of that failure upon itself, queer theory, as I construe it, marks the "other" side of politics: the
"side" where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies ofvitalization
ceaselessly turn against themselves; the "side" outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every
side, to futurism's unquestioned good.
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by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to
promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the
whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or
manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively
terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws
both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that
serves as its prop. We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions
to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist groups or generous doses of legal savvy and
electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us-a place at the political table that won't have to
come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that
future as there can be no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be
no future at all: that the future, as Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is "always! A day!
Away." Like the lovers on Keats's Grecian urn, forever "near the goal" of a union they'll never in fact
achieve, we're held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of
a day when today and tomorrow are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen
out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's
gossamer web. Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt
positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as well to
recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social
organization as such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to
say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's
words, as "politically self-destructive." But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as
mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure,
necessarily destroys -necessarily insofar as this "self" is the agent of reproductive futurism and this
"politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's
engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that
counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life. If the fate of
the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment,
intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity
by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then the only oppositional status to
which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death drive
we're called on to figure and insisting, against the cult ofthe Child and the political order it
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<CONTINUED>
enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what might become a new
form of 'social organisation,' "that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter
tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the
future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as
site of a projective identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in
Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the toad to better living. It
knows nothing about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' ... [it] knows that civilisation
alone is mortal." Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define
itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the
signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that
we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere
repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by
denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an
insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with
irony's always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest
despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively-to insist that the future stop here.
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Alternative: S&M
Sadomasochism associates pleasure with different parts of the body besides penetrative sex
for pleasure. It is an acting out of power differentials in a game. This runs contrary to
heterosexual pleasure, and avoids the patriarchical idea that penetrative sex is necessary
for pleasure.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 44-45, JCE)
Another area of embodiment is, of course, the domain of erotic practices. Jackson (1999) argues that the idea
of queering sexual practicesthat is, making them innovative and nonnormativehas little political effect.
Foucault (1989) might disagree. Using the example of sadomasochism (S/M) as the real invention of new
avenues and possibilities of erotic pleasure, Foucault debunks popular beliefs about the association of
S/M with deep-seated psychological violence and aggression. He argues that individuals who engage in
S/M are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their bodythrough the
eroticization of the body He elaborates, . . . the S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic
relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles but everybody knows very well that those
roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave
has become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a
game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either explicit or tacit, that makes them
aware of certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting. But I
wouldnt say that it is a reproduction, inside the erotic relationship, of the structures of power. It is an acting
out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure.
Contrary to heterosexual relationships where strategic relations, such as pursuit, conquest, or flight,
are played out before sex to obtain sex, S/M practices are played out within sex. In this sense, S/M
practices are transgressive. Proposing a queer praxis through the transformative potential of queer
sex Foucault suggests that S/M practices, for example, radically re-map and re-orient sites of
eroticism and pleasure in the body. This re-mapping of the erogenous zones extends beyond private
pleasures: By focusing on the entire surface of the body as a site of potential erotic pleasure, S/M
practices challenge to dissolve the monopoly of genitally-focused sexualitythat is, penetrative sex
encoded within the heterosexual matrix of meanings.
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Holbrook/Nielson
Framework
Framework is the dominant ideology of restraint. Excluding the criticism maintains the
heterosexual norm. Voting for framework makes ignorance the preferred social policy
this anti-intellectual stance has no place in an educational activity
Weber, 01 (Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; A Conceptual Framework.
Boston: McGraw Hill. LRP
The dominant ideology of sexuality is one of restraint, with the alleged sexual practices of the
heterosexual majority taken as the moral norm against which the sexual orientation and practices of
people who are gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgenderedl are seen as deviant and dangerous. The
dominant ideology of sexuality is not that we should be blind to differences, that they shouldn't matter or
don't exist, but rather that they should be denied or ignoredneither discussed in public nor condoned.
The military's policy toward homosexuals of "Don't ask, don't tell" captures the dominant ideology of
sexual restraint: "We won't ask and you shouldn't tell, because if you tell you will be punished." Think
about these ideologies. Why would we use denial and blindness as bases for social policy and the assessment
of moral rightness? To do so implies that we seek not to see and therefore not to know. It suggests that
ignorance is a preferred foundation for social policyan anti-intellectual stance that has no valid place in the
modern academy, where we use our senses to seek knowledge, truth, and wisdom. Yet these stances to race,
class, gender, and sexuality prevail for at least two basic reasons: Because members of privileged groups
are not disadvantaged and in fact benefit from these systems, people in these groups find it relatively
easy to dismiss the claims of oppressed groups as unreal. In our education and in mass media we do
not systematically learn about the totality of the experiences of subordinate groups.
Communication Scholars are deeply involved in current systems of power that produce and
disseminate knowledge. In other words, we as debaters are implicated in the maintenance
of the homo/heterosexual binary and heteronormativity. We must join queer theorists in
talking about and theorizing about how to solve the problems that heteronormativity
presents in order to prevent the social, cultural, sexual, and systemic violence that is forced
upon disenfranchised groups every day.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 47-48, JCE)
Communication scholars, like researchers in other areas of academic study, are profoundly involved and
deeply implicated in current systems of power as they produce and disseminate knowledge. In his
power/knowledge matrix, Foucault reminds us that knowledge and truth are closely interconnected. He
writes, Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which
it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and
false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the
acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980, p.
131) In other words, communication scholars are inextricably involved in current regimes of power and
knowledge. As such, communication scholars are profoundly implicated in the maintenance of the
homo/heterosexual binary, the fundamental conceptual pair that organizes modern Western discourses of
sexuality. In the academy and elsewhere, institutional heterosexuality, through the process of normalization,
becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity produces the equation heterosexual experience = human
experience and renders all other forms of human sexual expression pathological, deviant, invisible,
unintelligible, or written out of existence (Yep, 2002, p. 167). More simply put, heteronormativity is violent
and harmful to a range of people across the spectrum of sexualities, including those who live within its
borders. Aware of the mobility of power relations, queer/quare theorists from a variety of disciplines have provided
analytical tools to create new openings and
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<CONTINUED>
possibilities of change and transformation. Such scholars are not interested in speaking for others, providing
definitive solutions, proclaiming transhistorical generalizations, declaring transcultural knowledge, or making
universal pronouncements. These queer/quare theorists and activists are invested in detaching the power of
truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present
time (Foucault, 1980, p. 133). Committed to the celebration of human differences and dedicated to the
interrogation of the normalizing technologies of power, these interdisciplinary scholars and community activists
scrutinize the homo/heterosexual binary as the foundation of current discourses of sexuality, and critically examine
heteronormativity. As a communication teacher and scholar who travels across academic disciplinary
boundaries, I invite communication scholars across the spectrum of social locations to join these theorists and
practitioners in this radical project to expand, stretch, reorient, and re-map the conceptual landscape of the
field of communication. I urge communication teachers and scholars to interrogate and unpack the
homo/heterosexual binary, disentangle and demystify the power of heteronormativity in our scholarship,
pedagogy, and cultural politics, and to create and produce historically specific and embodied racialized
knowledges of the human sexual subject.
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Language Matters
Language shapes identities. The K is a way to reinvent the world
Ritchie & Barker 06, Southampton Solent University & London South Bank University
(Ani & Meg, There arent words for what we do or how we feel so we have to make them up: constructing
polymorous languages in culture of compulsory monogamy,SAGE Publications, mnc)
The social constructionist approach to sexuality is grounded in the belief that our identity, desires,
relationships and emotions are shaped by the culture in which we live (Weeks, 2003). We come to
understand ourselves in terms of the concepts that are available to us in the time and place we live in. The
language around us shapes our self-identities (Burr, 1995) and our understanding of sexual identity
depends on the language of sexuality available to us. The language and everyday experience of
sexuality are thus intrinsically linked (Weeks, 2003). There is a wealth of literature considering how
people of non-heterosexual sexualities have developed their own languages to express their identities and
experiences and to claim community, rights and recognition. For example, Weeks (2003) argues that the
emergence of the label 'gay' in the early 1970s was important in terms of the public expression of
homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity. It established a clear social identity, which offered a previously
unavailable sense of security and community, although such categorization may also be seen as restricting
and inhibiting (Plummer, 1980). The reclamation of the term 'queer' by some may offer a move away
from fixed sexual identities (Jagose, 1997). It seems that the existing language of sexual identity may
shape our experiences but that people and communities also invent, alter and reclaim language in
order to fit experiences for which there is no existing language.
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Viewing sexuality from a history of discourses enables the resistance of biopolitical control
and quasi-scientific understanding.
Halperin 95
David M. Halperin, American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture
and visual culture, "Sain Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, " New York Oxford University Press, pg. 40-42,
1995, DES.
Foucault's shift of perspective, his insistence on writing the history of sexuality "from the viewpoint of a
history of discourses" 56 rather than from the viewpoint of the history of science, 57 enables him both
to denaturalize and to politicize sexuality. Conceived according to Foucault in discursive terms, sexuality
can now be analyzed according to the strategies immanent in its discursive operation. When sexuality is
viewed from that angle, it appears not as a natural drive but instead (as we have seen) as "an especially
concentrated point of traversal for relations of power." Sexuality is in fact part of an "apparatus" or "device"
(dispositif) 58 that serves to connect new forms of power and knowledge with new objects and new domains.
It can therefore be described as "a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major
strategies of knowledge and power." 59 The political importance of sex consists in the way it supports
the modem regime of "bio-power," which Foucault defines, contrasting it with the old regime of "power
over life and death," as an "entire political technology of life." "Bio-power" refers to the modern
political procedure of regulating human life by means of expert techniques (statistics, demographics,
eugenics, sterilization, etc.)--techniques that make possible a strategic alliance between specialized
knowledge and institutionalized power in the state's management of life. Sex contributes to this
technology, specifically, by connecting the body and the nation, linking "the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines" of sexuality (the "anatomo-politics of the human body") with "an entire
series of. . . regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." 60
Foucault's conceptual reorientation of sexuality, his transformation of it from an object of knowledge
into a cumulative effect of power--"the sum of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by
a certain apparatus that emerges from a complex political technology" 61 --enables him effectively to
displace conventional ontologies of the sexual and thereby to resist the preemptive claims of various
modern expert knowledges, of positivist epistemologies that constitute sexuality as a (or as the) real
thing, an objective natural phenomenon to be known by the mind. Foucault's own discursive
counterpractice seeks to remove sexuality from among the objects of knowledge and thereby to
deauthorize those branches of expertise grounded in a scientific or quasi-scientific understanding of it;
it also seeks to delegitimate those regulatory disciplines whose power acquires the guise of legitimate
authority by basing itself on a privileged access to the "truth" of sexuality. By analyzing modem
knowledge practices in terms of the strategies of power immanent in them, and by treating "sexuality"
accordingly not as a determinate thing in itself but as a positivity produced by those knowledge
practices and situated by their epistemic operations in the place of the real, Foucault politicizes both
truth and the body: he reconstitutes knowledge and sexuality as sites of contestation, thereby opening
up new opportunities for both scholarly and political intervention.
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(Elsewhere Foucault cited gay bathhouses as an institution that heterosexuals might benefit from; 198 the
codification of "relations of provisional coexistence" might enable other "types of exchanges" equally
beneficial to heterosexuals).
We have to reverse things a bit. Rather than saying what we said at one time: "Let's try to re-introduce
homosexuality into the general norm of social relations," let's say the reverse: "No! Let's escape as much as
possible from the type of relations which society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where
we are new relational possibilities." By proposing a new relational right, we will see that non-homosexual
people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations. 199
The future Foucault envisages for us is not exclusively or categorically gay. But it is definitely queer.
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<CONTINUED>
"mean, 'Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of this love (in the first place) do him good'; but:
'Do good to thy neighbor, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men.' "21 Lacan draws out
the extent to which such a translation of "love one's neighbor," though appearing to support a
compassionate love with its roots in the Imaginary- by virtue of which "I imagine [others') difficulties and
their sufferings in the mirror of my own" - has the effect, to the contrary, of rupturing the subject's
Imaginary totalization, the image of self-completion that "love" as fantasy would sustain, by installing
the abstract logic of duty as the submission to moral law, whereby pathos becomes pathological and
reason the logical path.22 In this way the command to love one's neighbor unleashes its negativity
against the coherence of any self-image, subjecting us to a moral law that evacuates the subject so as to
locate it through and in that very act of evacuation, permitting the realization, thereby, of a freedom beyond
the boundaries of any image or representation, a freedom that, like the ground of God's power, according
to Lacan, ultimately resides in nothing more than "the capacity to advance into emptiness" (196). Kant's duty
to conform to moral law without any pathological motive, for the sake of duty alone, thus trenches, and this
marks the central point of Lacan's elaboration of Kant with Sade, on the question of jouissance: "When one
approaches that central emptiness, which up to now has been the form in which access to jouissance has
presented itself to us, my neighbor's body breaks into pieces" (202). Here, in this access to jouissance,
paradoxical though it may seem, psychoanalysis encounters the innermost meaning of the commandment to
"love one's neighbor," which, as Lacan is quick to remind us, "may be the cruelest of choices.
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Queer theory challenges essentialist theories of identity by opening up new space for the
subject of desire
Slagle, Professor @ University of Puerto Rico, 2003.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, p. 130, JCE)
The goals of queer theory are consistent with those of postmodernity. In particular, queer theory raises
challenges to totalizing theory, entrenched values, and essential identity categories. In line with
postmodern theories, queer theorists view identity as fractured and individual. Queer theorists bring
issues of sexualityissues generally considered private and personalto the fore through critical
inquiry. Morton (1996) explains that queer theory is seen as making an advance by opening up new space
for the subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary (p. 1). In terms of the emergence of
queer theory and activism, one must understand the distinction between the gay and lesbian liberation
movements and the more recent queer movements. In general, people in the liberation movements have
sought to allow gay men and lesbians participation within the dominant system. Whereas liberation theory
has explicitly reified sexual identity and gender categories, queer theory is a progressive move toward
inclusivity and the celebration of differences. In other words, the recent emergence of queer theory and
activism is a reaction to the more conservative approach to framing identity of the liberationists. More
broadly, in fact, queer theory is a reaction to other late 20th-century identity political movements that have
generally relied on essential identity constructions in order to form cohesive groups for political action.
Queer theory focuses on the uniqueness of the individual, rejecting essentialism or any
argument that attempts to say identity is universal.
Slagle, Professor @ University of Puerto Rico, 2003.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, p. 133, JCE)
Challenge of essentialism. One of the fundamental assumptions of queer theory is that essential notions
of identity are problematic. Indeed, queer critics focus on the uniqueness of individual identities and
celebrate the novelty of differences among all people (Seidman, 1993). Put another way, queer theory
rejects any perspective that approaches the construction of identity from a universal perspective.
Rather than arguing that queers communicate in a particular way, queer theory explodes the notion
that individual identities and differences are constructed, communicated, and performed by
individuals, and that individual communication varies widely from person to person. Thus, queer
critics adamantly reject the idea that identity categories are a sufficient way to label the identities of
groups of individuals. This is significant because queer critics reject any perspective that approaches
discourse from a universal perspective. Furthermore, audiences are also composed of unique
individuals; they are not the monolithic entities that mainstream theorists often assume. Queer
criticism examines artifacts for essential identity categories. Because queer theorists challenge the
notion of a static, essential, or natural identity, a queer critique must focus on how identities are
represented in the artifact. Queer criticism acknowledges that all human beings are, by their nature,
unique. That is to say that no two people experience their identities in the same way. The critic
engaged in queer criticism celebrates the diversity of humanity by emphasizing diversity and
difference of those who are oppressed by the mainstream.
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complexity of heterosexuality. Perhaps the most important reason for such a move, Smart (1996a)
argues, is that the pluralisation [of heterosexuality] might appear as if it were trying to evade the
accusation of holding institutional power. It might seem that, if we acknowledge heterosexualities,
heterosexuals as a class cannot be held responsible for heterosexism and homophobia and the range
of harms addressed to other sexualities. (p. 171) This move is neither new nor unproblematic. For
example, the classifications of white and people of color are used to highlight material and
structural power differences in racialized and racist societies. Similarly, feminists used to argue that
gender division should be primary, while keeping other categories such as race and social class as
secondary in an attempt to challenge sexism and patriarchal power. Such moves, however, tend to homogenize,
ignore, silence, and erase important differences from within and can lead to misleading hierarchies of oppression. Heterosexuality, like
other forms of human expression, is extremely complex. Heterosexuality is not merely sexual; it is social (VanEvery,
1996b). As such, Jackson (1996, 1999) suggests that, to examine its complexities, four analytical domains should be considered: (1)
Heterosexuality as an institution; (2) heterosexuality as identity; (3) heterosexuality as practice; and (4) hetero- sexuality as experience.
Although such domains obviously interconnect and intersect, Jackson (1999) argues that they are useful analytical tools for debunking
myths of monolithic heterosexuality. As an institution, heterosexuality is rooted in gender hierarchy and manifested
through its central mechanism, marriage (Jackson, 1996). Implicit in the marriage contract is mens appropriation and exploitation of
womens bodies (e.g., sexual, reproductive) and labor (e.g., domestic, emotional) (Delphy & Leonard, 1992). Through
sex is still defined as penetration for mens pleasure in which women find fulfillment primarily in the
relationship, in giving pleasure (p. 31)
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Queer is a highly inclusive terms There are enough crossing discourse for cultural
histories to remain intact.
Roen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Oslo University, 1 (Katrina, Transgender Theory
and Embodiment: the risk of racial marginalization, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3,
pg 258-259)JNF
Some aspects of Don's reclaiming fa'afafine as a highly esteemed way of being and challenging Palagi
approaches to sexuality and gender seem to me to work along similar lines to inclusive and expansive
in a way that is reminiscent of some authors' descriptions of queer (Goldman, 1996; queer and
transgendered critiques of psycho-medical discourses on transsexuality. He describes fa'afafine as Walters,
1996). He describes fa'afafine as encompassing gender-crossing possibilities similar to those discussed by
some transgender authors (e.g., Stryker, 1994). Given that there are these parallels between Don's
discourse on fa'afafine ways of being and some queer and transgender discourses, how might they
inform one another more fruitfully? How might queer be theorised to better take into account Don's
perspective of putting culture first and gender/sexuality second? Must there be such a prioritising for
issues of racism, homophobia and transphobia to be effectively combated? Perhaps fa'afafine identities
provide an example of a crossing that can be sanctioned (for Don, if not for all fa'afafine) because family
ties and the knowledge of cultural history are still sufficiently intact. This is different in cultural contexts
where such historical ties have been lost. As Besnier points out, with the possible exceptions of New Zealand
and Hawai'i, Polynesian societies were generally not subjected to systematic annihilating efforts on the part
of colonizing populations ... [so w]hile North American berdache traditions died out with the contexts that
supported them, the cultural setting in which Polynesian gender liminality is embedded never disappeared.
(p. 559, note 36) Therefore, how might Don's perspective on gender liminality differ from those of people for
whom such historical, cultural connections have been largely lost? What recourse do these people have for
reclaiming culturally specific understandings of gender crossing? Some Maaori transpeople are attempting to
map discursive pathways for the purpose of reclaiming both cultural and queer identities. They juggle Maaori
and transgendered identities in their attempts to hold specific forms of racialised gender liminality in high
esteem. Issues of specific concern are: the lack (or inaccessibility) of knowledges about pre-colonial concepts
of gender and sexuality; the relative facility of accessing western psycho-medical discourses as ways of
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understanding experiences of gender liminality, the possible contradictions between medical and Maaori
discourses on (transsexual) bodies; and the current power differential between Maaori and Pakeha which
enables New Zealand laws (and therefore transsexuals' legal rights) to be dictated primarily by Pakeha
(medical) understandings of sexed embodiment. According to New Zealand legislation at the time of writing
this paper, it was possible for documentation relating to passports and marriage certificates to carry the posttransition gender marker (M or F) only after sex reassignment surgery had taken place (Alston, 1998a, b).
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Queers are not interested in assimilating into mainstream culture, or becoming the
dominant force in society. Queers are the progressive change that will root out domination
and oppression in our current system.
Slagle, Professor @ University of Puerto Rico, 2003.
(R. Anthony, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 136-137, JCE)
Assimilation. Queer critics adamantly argue that queers are not interested in assimilating seamlessly
into an unchanged mainstream (Seidman, 1993; Tierney, 1993). For example, queer critics reject the
rhetoric of gay liberation that strives to make sexual identity something that should ultimately not be a
factor in determining who is allowed to participate in society, and who is not. Queer critics argue that
individual sexual differences are significant, that queers are unique, and that these differences still do
not justify oppression. Finally, it is important to remember that queer criticism has an explicitly
activist agenda; that is, queer criticism seeks to dismantle the existing social order that silences queer
voices in our society. Queer critics attempt to construct a world in which sexual difference is not only
acknowledged, but celebrated. Queer theorists argue that it is not sufficient to point out that
oppression and domination merely exist; instead, a major goal of queer criticism is to point to the
potential for progressive change in the social structure.
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Queer politics cannot divorce itself from its past. Critiquing the term queer will open up
new possibilities for mobalization that are not possible if only a presentist perspective is
affirmed.
Butler, Judith Butler is a noted for her studies on gender, she teaches composition and rhetoric at
U.C. Berkeley, 93( Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex), pp. 228-229
. LRP
It may be that the conceit of autonomy implied by self-naming is the paradigmatically presenrist
conceit, that is, the belief that there is a one who arrives in the world, in discourse, without a history, that this one makes oneself in and through the
magic of the name, that language expresses a "will" or a "choice" rather than a complex and constitutive history of discourse and power which compose die
invariably ambivalent resources through which a queer and queering agency is forged and reworked.
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Lucy, Research Fellow with the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University, 07 (Niall,
a Research Fellow with the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University, Beyond Semiotics: Text, Culture, and
Technology, Continuum, pg. 54-71, July 19, 2007, DES)
Other fates await us too, of course, perhaps like long-lost letters gone astray. We just have to sort our way
through all the mess. How we might go about doing so is undeniably urgent and crucial, but it's not as
simple as resolving the fate of technology by situating the nuclear question on the side of speech. The
logocentric choice is no choice at all: that way the future is already written. Instead, or perhaps by the
same token, we need to take account of the 'postal' effects of our thinking on technology, as if the
'technological' future or the 'natural' past were all there is - a choice between techno-doom and self
determination.
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interaction I have with anybody, the two things I want them to find out about me is the fact that I'm
Samoan first and foremost and ... [secondly] that I'm fa'afafine'. In stating his priorities thus, Don sets
himself in sharp relief to queer and transgender stances which often highlight gender and sexuality to
the point of obscuring race altogether. Elaborating on this contrast Don describes how, to him, fa'afafine simply 'means like
a woman', whereas: All the Palagi [4] [English] terms: gay, faggot, queer ... [they're] awful ... [Those terms] actually tell you how that
society views that person. My culture just views it 'like a woman'. And it's like a special woman. It's a knowledgeable woman but
recognised [as] ... anatomically male. (Don, interviewed: May, 1996) He describes being taught from an early age that to be fa'afafine
was to be valued and respected, despite shifting to New Zealand as a child and having to learn that fa'afafine were far less tolerated
there. I was never put down or anything ... I grew up with this really arrogant opinion of myself: for some reason the world is rather
special with me in it! Being fa'afafine was really special. Jesus, when I came to New Zealand that was soon cut out! ... I remember my
mother saying: 'You mustn't walk like that, Don'; I said: 'Why not?' [and she replied:] 'Well, they don't do that in New Zealand'. ... That's
something I never ever accepted. (Don, interviewed: May, 1996) For Don, cultural identity precedes gender/sexuality
identity in political importance, but the two are intrinsically linked: one does not make sense without
the other. Although he plays an active role in his local gaylesbitrans support networks, he is highly sceptical about the
Palagi system of dividing and labeling sexualities and genders, preferring to espouse a more holistic
approach. He is also critical of Palagi attempts to reclaim words such as queer, suggesting that this only
reflects Palagi cultures' intolerant attitudes towards sexuality and gender variance. Don points out that
the division-by-labels of sexuality and gender categories makes it hard to talk about concepts of
fa'afafine and holism, for the language assumes categories which obscure the importance of the
inclusivity of fa'afafine. For Don, being fa'afafine does not imply dissatisfaction with sexed embodiment nor does it make
specifications about partner-gender: fa'afafine is constructed across sexuality and gender. However, he echoes his
elders in expressing concern about younger fa'afafine being attracted by the glamour and lifestyle of cities where they come to think of
themselves more in terms of western transvestite and transsexual identities, rather than according to traditional understandings of
fa'afafine Some of these young fa'afafine opt for sex reassignment surgery. Don hastens to add that he is not simply opposed to sex
reassignment surgery: he has some older fa'afafine friends who have waited years, ensuring that they are making the right decision,
before going ahead with surgery. Nevertheless, he is concerned about the general westernization and subsequent degradation of
fa'afafine identities, saying: 'I know of some of the traditional fa'afafines and each time I've gone back to Samoa it's always been the case
"Oh gosh, we're being reduced to a ... cock in a frock" '. Don's willingness to accept that some of his fa'afafine friends seek sex
reassignment surgery, accompanied by his concern for younger fa'afafine who are completely seduced by Palagi understandings of
sexuality and gender, remind me of Besnier's comment: `Further discussion of gender liminality in Polynesia cannot take place without
locating the category in a specific historical context and must address its relationship to modernization and change' (1994, p. 328). To
this I add that discussion of transgenderism would benefit from further consideration of the effects of
westernisation on gender liminality: not for the sake of a simplistic reclaiming of a 'third gender' [5]
status, but for the sake of contextualising transgender theorising with respect to cross-cultural understandings of gender as those understandings change over time.
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Queer theory does not take into account issues of race. Quare studies critiques the concept
of race while also taking into account differences between sexual and social groups that
queer theory does. Queer theory doesnt do enough to focus on race issues, we need quare
theory.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 41-42, JCE)
Race Problems. Although the broad umbrella of queer may appear to include queers of all races and
social classes, it is a misleading faade (Anzalda, 1991; Johnson, 2001). Calling it a queer blind spot,
Muoz (1999) observes, Most of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized
in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed toward
analyzing white lesbians and gay men. The lack of inclusion is most certainly not the main problem
with the treatment of race. . . . When race is discussed by most white queer theorists, it is usually a
contained reading of an artist of color that does not factor questions of race into the entirety of their
project. (p. 10, my emphasis) In light of this situation, Muoz offers the notion of disindentifications as a
lens to interpret minoritarian politics based on interlocking components of race, class, gender, and
sexuality and discusses how such components affect the social. Focusing on a critique of stable
conceptions of identity and committed to racialized and class knowledges, Johnson (2001) introduces
quare theory. He explains, Quare studies . . . would not only critique the concept of race as
historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed/performed, it would also address the
material effects of race in a white supremacist society. . . . As a theory of the flesh quare necessarily
engenders a kind of identity politics, one that acknowledges difference within and between particular
groups. Thus, identity politics does not necessarily mean the reduction of multiple identities into a
monolithic identity or narrow cultural nationalism. Rather, quare studies moves beyond simply
theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that mediation may
propel material bodies into action. (p. 9) Both disindentifications and quare theory appear productive
points of engagement with mainstream queer theory about racialized knowledges and experiences. (For
a more detailed explanation of these approaches, see Johnson [2001] and Muoz [1999].)
Queer erases the ethnic and racial ties that people have ends up denying difference.
Gamson, Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, 1995
(Joshua, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in
Lesbian & Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 593-594, JAR)
In the hands of many letter writers, in fact, queer becomes simply a short hand for "gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender," much like "people of color" becomes an inclusive and difference-erasing short
hand for a long list of ethnic, national, and racial groups. And as some letter writers point out , as a quasinational shorthand "queer" is just a slight shift in the boundaries of tribal membership with no attendant
shifts in power; as some lesbian writers point out, it is as likely to become synonymous with "white gay male"
(perhaps now with a nose ring and tattoos) as it is to describe a new community formation. Even in its less
nationalist versions, queer can easily be difference without change, can subsume and hide the internal
differences it attempts to incorporate. The queer tribe attempts to be a multicultural, multigendered, multisexual,
hodge-podge of outsiders; as Steven Seidman points out, it ironically ends up "denying differences by either
submerging them in an undifferentiated oppositional mass or by blocking the development of individual and
social differences through the disciplining compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated" (1993: 133).
Queer as an identity category often restates tensions between sameness and difference in a different language.
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Without a clear and static identity, queerness makes civil rights unattainable.
Gamson, Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, 1995
(Joshua, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in
Lesbian & Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 598, JAR)
The overwhelmingly female participation in the Bay Times disputes over bisexuality and transgender
inclusion underscores this point. Lesbians are especially threatened by the muddying of male/female and
gay/straight categorizations exactly because it is by keeping sexual and gender categories hard and clear that
gains are made. Lesbian visibility is more recent and hard won; in struggles against patriarchal control,
moreover, lesbianism and feminism have often been strongly linked. Gay men react with less vehemence
because of the stronger political position from which they encounter the queer challenge: as men, as gay men
with a more established public identity. Just as they are gaining political ground as lesbians, lesbians are asked not
only to share it but to subvert it, by declaring woman and lesbian to be unstable, permeable, fluid categories. Similar
pitfalls were evident in the 1993 fight over Colorado's Amendment 2, which prohibits "the state or any of its
subdivisions from outlawing discrimination against gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals" (Minkowitz 1993). The
Colorado solicitor general, as reporter Donna Minkowitz put it, made arguments" that could have appeared in a
queer core rant, "promoting" a remarkably Foucaultian view of queerness as a contingent category, whose members
can slip in and out of its boundaries like subversive fish" (Minkowitz 1993:27). "We don't have a group that is easily
confinable," the solicitor general argued. Here, the fluidity of group boundaries and the provisional nature of
collective identity was used to argue that no one should receive legal benefits or state protection-because there
is no discernible group to be protected. Although the solicitor-general-as-queer-theorist is a strange twist, the
lesson is familiar: as long as membership in this group is unclear, minority status, and therefore rights and
protection, are unavailable.
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Queer theory emulates late capitalism by refusing the collective leading to daily lived
violence and marginalization to queer folk
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized Homophobia,
Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.)
This mirroring of late capitalism in queer theory has unforeseen consequences for the individual in
society and has hindered its practioners from engaging important ways of envisioning collective action.
Queer theory promotes the self of the individual as an alternative to wider social interaction,
disassembling the social ties that bind. Recognizing that oppression and violence, symbolic and physical,
are part of the daily reality for those of us who do not correspond to dominant standards is
compromised by queer theorys rejection of the category of identity, and indeed, categories as a whole.
The stance that it is limiting to pose categories of behavior and belief, even if those constructs are fluid
and changing, puts the individual subject in the position of internalizing thoughts and feelings without
the benefit of peer feedback. Too, this aspect of marginality can itself become an identity: if one
recognizes and embraces the fact that one is marginalized, there is no need to seek support or to
engage social action. It declares that the only way to prevent being overwhelmed by power is to
disclaim (Butler, 1993, p. 308). But to simply disclaim creates isolation, and, as I will maintain,
reinforces internalized homophobia.
Queer politics are ineffective due to their fear of essentializing and inability to unify;
reflection leads nowhere
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized Homophobia,
Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.)
If the tenets of queer theory reject strategies of mobilization for fear of essentializing identity, what
then, are its politics? The historical and ethnographic fallacies in defense of postmodernist and
poststructuralist critique aside, it is doubtful that queer theory would exist at all without new political
juncture that Rorty (1991) and Jameson (1991) both note is being produced in late capitalism, and which
Haraway (1985), Eagleton (1986) point to as having led to a new stage of politics. Be that as it may, queer
as put forward by queer theorists, has no inherent historical or social context. We continually return to the
following question: to whom does it belong and what does it represent? These advocates of queer do not
acknowledge that queer is produced by social relations, and therefore contains the attributes of
existing relationships of power.
Legitimization in queer theory means the right to be as one is, a kind of free activity that incorporates
gender, sexuality, and individual variants in thought and speech. The problem, of course, lies in the
fact that this process of legitimization does not create equality: dominance still exists; ideals still rule
the day. The problem we thus encounter is that the collective level is deemed impossible: the legitimating
function is purely personal, the ultimate statement of the personal as political. Indeed, when Judith
Butler was asked for suggestions on how to proceed in the political arena, she answered:
I actually believe that politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be predicted
at the level of theory. And that when theory starts being programmatic, such as here are my five
prescriptions. And I set up my typology, and my final chapter is called What is to be Done?, it preempts the whole problem of context and contingency, and I do think that political decisions are made
in that lived moment and that they cant be predicted from the level of theorythey can be prepared
for but I suppose Im with Foucault on this . . . It seems like a noble tradition. (Bell, 1999, p. 167)
But context and contingency, and the lived moment, are aspects of personal recognition, and a
failure to specify leads nowhere. Simply reflection on the success of movements around the world and
throughout modern history tells us otherwise.
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Queer theory will not succeed in improving lives due to the reliance on postmodern and
poststructuralist theory; identifying with social movements that appreciate difference can
create real material change
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES
The promise of queer theoryand its imagined advance over previous approaches in gay and lesbian studies
is inclusiveness. The paradox of queer theory is that while it strives for this inclusiveness in a manner
that identity politics cannota laudable goalthe reliance by its practioners on postmodern and
poststructuralist theory, the epistemology of which is the negation of political action and the reification
of the individual self, has made this strategy untenable.
Identifying with social movements in an era of global capitalist accumulation presupposes a
recognition that exploitation, prejudice, and violence are facts of everyday life that many experience. It
is not necessary to agree with all of the beliefs of your neighbor to establish a mutually supportive
alliance. Nor it is necessary to experience the reality of your cohorts to identify with common causes. In
other words, it is necessary to refocus on practiceunifying and practicegenerating principles (Bourdieu,
1977, p. 101). The ability to create a true political movement assumes identification with the struggles
and projected outcomes of that movement while recognizing the differences between members that
need to be accommodated. The process is liberatory. The characters that Duberman documents in this
exposition of Stonewall (1993) all differ in their backgrounds and in their understanding of the world at
large. The movement generated by Stonewall cut across class and status, but its general demands were the
same for all: an end to discrimination and persecution.
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The usage of the word Queer drives further down the split between generations, it
divides the community.
Gamson, Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, 1995
(Joshua, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in
Lesbian & Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 592, JAR)
In the discussion of the "Year of the Queer" theme for the 1993 lesbian and gay pride celebration, the venom
hits first. "All those dumb closeted people who dont like the Q-word," the Bay Times quotes Peggy Sue
suggesting, "can go fuck themselves and go to somebody else's parade." A man named Patrick argues along the
same lines, asserting that the men opposing the theme are "not particularly thrilled with their attraction to other
men," are "cranky and upset," yet willing to benefit "from the stuff queer activists do." A few weeks later, a letter
writer shoots back that "this new generation assumes we were too busy in the '70s lining up at Macy's to purchase
sweaters to find time for the revolution-as if their piercings and tattoos were any cheaper. "Another sarcastically
asks, "How did you ever miss out on 'Faggot' or 'Cocksucker' ?" On this level, the dispute reads like a sibling
sandbox spat.
Although the curses fly sometimes within generations, many letter writers frame the differences as
generational. The queer linguistic tactic, the attempt to defang, embrace and resignify a stigma term, is loudly
rejected by many older gay men and lesbians. "I am sure he isn't old enough to have experienced that feeling
of cringing when the word 'queer' was said," says Roy of an earlier letter writer. Another writer asserts that 35 is
the age that marks off those accepting the queer label from those rejecting it. Younger people, many point out, can
"reclaim" the word only because they have not felt as strongly the sting, ostracism, police batons, and
baseball bats that accompanied it one generation earlier. For older people, its oppressive meaning can never
be lifted, can never be turned from overpowering to empowering.
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One form of oppression is not more important or independent from all others. It is not
helpful to compare oppressions or to specify which oppression a person feels affects them
more deeply. They are all interconnected in our social institutions.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 25-26, JCE)
People inhabiting and navigating the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality experience violence
and oppression simultaneously based on such systems of social ordering (Kumashiro, 2001; Yep, Lovaas,&Ho,
2001). These systems are neither independent nor additive (Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; hooks,
1990; Kumashiro, 2001; Lorde, 1984; Smith, 1998; Takagi, 1996; Yep et al., 2001). It is not theoretically useful or
pragmatically helpful to compare and rank different forms of oppression. For example, a claim that Asian
Americans are more homophobic is futile without specification of the interplay between race, class, gender, and
sexuality, and the purpose and basis for such a comparison. Neither is asking an individual to specify a rank
order for their oppression (e.g., do you feel that oppression based on your race is more intense than your
sexuality or your gender?). According to Weber (2001), race, class, gender, and sexuality are systems of
oppression. As such, they are complex (i.e., intricate and interconnected), pervasive (i.e., widespread throughout
all social domains), variable (i.e., ever changing and always transforming), persistent (i.e., prevailing across time
and space), severe (i.e., serious consequences for social life), and hierarchical (i.e., creation of social stratifications
that benefit and provide options and resources for some and harm and restrict options and resources for others). For
individuals located at these intersections, the process of performing the hybrid self (Muoz, 1999, p. 138)
means negotiating different histories, economic disparities, and sex/gender systems, and experiencing the
violence of racism, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity.
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there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power
relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited
groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come
into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage
that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them
together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the
force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations. -Power relations are both
intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation:
there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or
decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs,
nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of
power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit
at the. restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another,
attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive
systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which
coordinate the loquacious tactics whose ':inventors" or decision makers are often Without hypocrisy. -Where there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there
is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason,
power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power
relationships, Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle
in power relations. These points of resistance represent everywhere in the power network. Hence there IS
no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that
are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant,
or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can
only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction
or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always
passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but
neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the
latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or
focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or
individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are
there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one
is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing
unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible
regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web
that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the
swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless
the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat
similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.
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Social movements and politics are necessary to prevent exploitation we can reject static
identities without rejecting all identity.
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES
I have argued here that this turn towards the individual, acknowledged or disputed, has led to a
disengagement of coalition building and social movements, and the mirroring of the current social
conditions of late capitalism, including the renouncing of identity. Indeed, As Butler (1993) has stated,
the prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for to be
gay, to be lesbian seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am.
She is therefore
. . . not at ease with lesbian theories, gay theories, for as Ive argued elsewhere, identity categories tend
to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as normalizing categories or oppressive structures or
as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. (1993, pp. 307-308)
In contrast to the currents in the development of gay and lesbian studies, the anxiety with categorical
identification has been a main current in queer theory, from its beginnings in sex and gender studies to
its expansion into the wider cultural realm. The concern is not unfounded. Labeling can become a
constricting structure that limits the possibilities of being or becoming, as many queer writers have shown.
But one has to wonder, if we do not have rallying points, from where do we fight prejudice and
exploitation? Foucault has argued that participating in a homosexual perspective admits a
homophobic discourse; yet how do we deny homophobia? Social movements and politics are necessary
to counter dominant ideologies and power structures. A perception that we can reject static systems of
identity without rejecting all bases for identity, however temporary they may be, is necessary for true
resistance and social change. Thus, we can identify with social movements rather than simply
identifying as a particular category.
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ecofeminists have argued for a "third way," one that rejects the structure of dualism and
acknowledges both women and men as equal parts of culture and nature ( Warren 1987; King 1989;
Plumwood 1993; Gruen 1993; Gaard 1994 b). As a logical development of ecofeminism, a queer
ecofeminist theory would build on these analyses, using both queer theory and feminist theories about
the oppression of the erotic. Though the reason/erotic dualism seems to be an aspect of the original
culture/nature dualism, the heterosexual/queer dualism is a fairly recent development, as it is only in
the past century that the concept of homosexual and heterosexual identities has developed ( Smith
1989; Katz 1990). A queer ecofeminist per spective would argue that the reason/erotic and
heterosexual/queer dualisms have now become part of the master identity, and that dismantling these
dualisms is integral to the project of ecofeminism. Bringing these dualisms into the list of self/other and
culture/nature dualisms offered by Plumwood is one step toward queering ecofeminism. With this added
perspective, ecofeminists would find it very productive to explore "vertical" associations on either side
of the dualisms: associations between reason and heterosexuality, for example, or between reason and
whiteness as defined in opposition to emotions and nonwhite persons; or associations between women,
nonwhite persons, animals, and the erotic. From a queer ecofeminist perspective, then, we can examine the
ways queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women,
animals, nature, and sexuality. We can also examine how persons of color are feminized, animalized,
eroticized, and naturalized. Finally, we can explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, even queered. The
critical point to remember is that each of the oppressed identity groups, each characteristic of the other, is
seen as "closer to nature" in the dualisms and ideology of Western culture. Yet queer sexualities are
frequently devalued for being "against nature." Contradictions such as this are of no interest to the
master, though such contradictions have been of great interest to feminists and queer theorists alike,
who have argued that it is precisely such contradictions that characterize oppressive structures ( Frye
1983; Mohr 1988; Sedgwick 1990).