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Not Yet Queer Enough: The Lessons of Queer Theory for the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
Stephen Valocchi
Gender Society 2005; 19; 750
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294

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GENDER/ NOT
10.1177/0891243205280294
Valocchi & SOCIETY
YET QUEER
/ December
ENOUGH
2005

NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH

The Lessons of Queer Theory for
the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality

STEPHEN VALOCCHI
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the
insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory
in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor (2003), Seidman (2002), Bettie (2003), and Schippers (2000).
The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even queerer theoretical
direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sex-
uality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or conflate it with the broad range of gender and sex-
ual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and
performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its
emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes.
Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological
analysis.

Keywords: queer theory; performativity; power; ethnography

In 1994, Steven Seidman edited a volume of Sociological Theory on queer theory

(Seidman 1994) that introduced a queer theoretical perspective to a sociological
audience and suggested how queer insights might be useful in rethinking gender
and sexuality. Two years later, he followed up his appeal to sociologists to take
queer theory seriously by editing a collection of essays in which the contributors
utilized queer theoretical insights in their empirical work (Seidman 1996). Despite
these promising beginnings a decade ago, sociologists of gender and sexuality are
only now beginning to see queer theory as a legitimate and useful contemporary
social theory. This article will reassert the original appeal by reviewing some of the
recent work in gender and sexuality to highlight the insights garnered using queer

AUTHORS NOTE: I would like to thank Mary Bernstein, Rob Corber, Stephanie Gilmore, Steve
Seidman, Arlene Stein, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this arti-
cle. In addition, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Gender & Society,
Christine Williams, for their thoughtful and thorough comments.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Stephen Valocchi, Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
06106.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 19 No. 6, December 2005 750-770

DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294
2005 Sociologists for Women in Society

750

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 751

theory. Four monographs are evaluated in light of the main tenets of queer theory as
they have developed during the past decade. Using these tenets, the article engages
in a critical evaluation of the texts and, in so doing, indicates how they can be
extended in an even queerer theoretical direction. Conversely, the analysis also
indicates how queer theory can be pushed in more sociological directions to deal
with the materiality of sex, gender, and sexuality and the role of institutional power
in the construction of identities.
The article proceeds in three parts. I first describe the central concepts and
claims of a queer analysis. These involve a different way of understanding the rela-
tionship between sex, gender, and sexuality; a focus on the performativity of gender
and sexuality in the formation of identities; and a refusal of the easy conflation of
sexual identity with the whole range of sexual desires, dispositions, and practices
that constitute sexuality. These concepts are also based on and operate within a dis-
cursive understanding of power where sexual and gender subjectivities are fash-
ioned from the signifying systems of the dominant sexual and gender taxonomies.
These taxonomies, in turn, regulate subjectivity and social life in general.
Sociologists have made several different kinds of critiques of queer theory
(Edwards 1998; Green 2002; Jagose 1996; Seidman 1997; Walters 1996). These
critiques have pointed to its predominant focus on literary texts (Gamson 1994), its
lack of attention to the institutional and material contexts of discursive power
(Seidman 1997), and the critical deconstruction of identity or group empowerment
categories (Collins 1998; Walters 1996). The analysis below shares some of these
critiques but at the same time insists that because the insights of queer theory are
significant, we must find ways to make these insights amenable to empirical
analysis.
After laying out the central elements of a queer analysis, the next, larger section
of the article uses these elements to evaluate and extend the arguments of four
recent studies: Leila Rupp and Verta Taylors (2003) Drag Queens at the 801 Caba-
ret, Steven Seidmans (2002) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and
Lesbian Life, Julie Betties (2003) Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity,
and Mimi Schipperss (2000) Rockinout of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alter-
native Hard Rock.
These monographs were chosen for several reasons. First, these texts stand as
excellent examples of utilizing key components of a queer perspective in empirical
research; in this way, they serve as templates for future queer work in the area of
gender and sexuality. But while these works use elements of a queer perspective,
they do not go far enough. Thus, these texts provide perfect springboards for
addressing the ongoing tensions between sociology and queer theory. By pushing
the work in this direction, my analysis opens up new questions and important
insights into the sociology of gender and sexuality. Second, this research is
ethnographic in nature, and as I argue in the conclusion, ethnography is especially
well suited to handle the methodological challenges associated with distinguishing
practices, identities, and hegemonic structures of gender and sexuality, an impor-
tant component of a queer perspective. Third, these monographs, taken collec-

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752 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

tively, point to some weaknesses of queer theory as a social science perspective and
suggest ways to address these weaknesses. The final section of the article builds on
the insights of these monographs and offers guidelines for doing queer work in gen-
der and sexuality.

THE COMPONENTS OF QUEER ANALYSIS

Rethinking Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Sociologists are used to thinking of sex, gender, and sexuality as separate vari-
ables with discrete attributes defined in binary terms: Bodies are either male or
female; our gender presentation, behavioral dispositions, and social roles are either
masculine or feminine; our sexuality is either heterosexual or homosexual (Lorber
1996). We see each of these variables as signaling important social dynamics that
affect attitudes, behavior, and life chances. We also tend to see them as identities, as
bundles of norms, roles, and interests that are important indicators of the social self.
Thus, we are men or women, masculine or feminine, gay or straight. Of course,
sociologists admit that these are social constructions, but they are social construc-
tions with consequences.
Sociologists further acknowledge the normative relationship across these vari-
ables. As Lorber (1996, 144) states, sociology assumes that each person has one
sex, one sexuality, and one gender, which are congruent and fixed for life. . . . A
woman is assumed to be a feminine female; a man a masculine male. Heterosexual-
ity is the uninterrogated norm. Although sociologists do recognize this alignment
as ideological and hence as a source of power, we conspire in reproducing this
alignment by treating the categories and the normative relationship among them as
the starting assumptions on which our research is based and the major lens through
which we interpret our data. The conflation of these variables with identities further
encourages this tendency. We look, for example, for sex differences in earnings or
in the time balance between work and home (Bittman et al. 2003); we examine
dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities among men and women
(Connell 1995); we narrate the changing nature of lesbian and gay communities
(Armstrong 2002; Stein 1997).
These projects are essential, but the danger lies in their implicit recognition that
the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual as well
as the normative alignment across them are more than ideological constructs but are
somehow naturally occurring phenomena. By taking these categories as givens or
as reified, we do not fully consider the ways that inequalities are constructed by the
categories in the first place. These categories exert power over individuals, espe-
cially for those who do not fit neatly within their normative alignments.
Queer theory turns this emphasis on its head by deconstructing these binaries,
foregrounding the constructed nature of the sex, gender, and sexuality classifica-
tion systems and resisting the tendency to congeal these categories into social

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 753

identities. Because the binaries are revealed to be cultural constructions or ideolog-

ical fictions, the reality of sexed bodies and gender and sexual identities are fraught
with incoherence and instability. In other words, these binaries incompletely or
imperfectly represent a broad range of complicated social processes surrounding
the meaning of bodies and the social cues, practices, and subjectivities associated
with gender and sexuality (Jagose 1996; Lorber 1996). This gulf between the ideo-
logical construct and the lived experience is one contribution of queer analysis.
Queer theory focuses on the deviant cases, or the anatomies, genders, sexual
practices, and identities that do not neatly fit into either category of the binaries or
that violate the normative alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality (Corber and
Valocchi 2003). It also pays attention to how the dominant taxonomies fail to cap-
ture the complexity of individual gender and sexual subjectivities and practices
even among those who may define themselves in terms of those dominant taxono-
mies (Delaney 1999; Halperin 2002). While the dominant classification scheme
encourages us, for example, to view gender and sexuality as separate and independ-
ent dimensions of social and psychic life, queer analysis explores their interrela-
tionships and their unanticipated manifestations: the ways, for example, gender is
sexed and sexuality is gendered in nonnormative ways (Gagne and Tewksbury
2002).
As we will see below, rethinking sex, gender, and sexuality queerly opens up
new questions for sociologists and new ways of thinking about old concepts. For
example, what happens to the study of gay men and lesbians when gender is made
central to the analysis? In other words, what happens when the relationship
between gender and sexuality becomes an empirical question and individual
subjectivities and practices are not assumed to be easily read off the dominant tax-
onomies or identity categories? Gay femininity and lesbian masculinity may be
more useful analytical categories than the ones suggested by our dominant taxono-
mies of male and female, lesbian and gay. Also, what happens to the study of het-
erosexuality when sexuality and gender are understood queerly and used to analyze
subjectivities, practices, and subcultural formations? Queer analysis reveals the
instabilities in this hegemonic sexual formation and is sensitive to the ways individ-
uals may subvert the normative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the
construction of heterosexuality.

Rethinking Gay Identity

While a queer analysis deals centrally with the gulf between the normative
alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the lived experience of individuals, it
also pays special attention to one particular binary that has served as the trope of
difference structuring social knowledge throughout the twentieth and into the
twenty-first centuries: the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Seidman 1997). As lit-
erary theorists, film scholars, and cultural and social historians (Corber 2005;
Duggan 2000; Halperin 2002; Sedgwick 1991) have shown, the emergence of the
category homosexual at the end of the nineteenth century became a way not only of

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754 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

ordering, classifying, and regulating bodies, personalities, and human types but
also of organizing knowledge, social life, and public discourse. Normal and abnor-
mal, secrecy and disclosure, public and privatethese became the derivative tropes
of the homosexual/heterosexual binary.
Many sociologists, however, do not readily acknowledge the centrality of this
binary to the study of social life but limit their attention to it as an identity formation
much like any other socially constructed identity formation such as race, ethnicity,
and gender (Adam 1985; Epstein 1987; Murray 1979; Stein 1997). These identities
are socially constructed in that the number of social categories; the meanings,
expectations, and behavioral norms associated with the classification systems; and
the hierarchy of prestige and power across the categories of these systems vary cul-
turally and historically and are constructed and altered in the process of social inter-
action (West and Fenstermaker 1995). This historically and culturally variable pro-
cess aside, many people experience these identities as fixed and stable with a fairly
predictable relationship between the subjective awareness of ones identity, the
behaviors that correspond to or enact the identity, and the social institutions that
enforce this identity. This experience, of course, does not invalidate the constructed
nature of these categories. It simply attests to the ideological power of categorical
thinking and the modernist assumption of coherent selves.
A queer analysis challenges this understanding of sexual identity by focusing
not only on the historically constructed and hence contingent nature of the homo-
sexual/heterosexual binary but also on the many ways in which individual desires,
practices, and affiliations cannot be accurately defined by the sex of object choice.
Sexual and gender practices and modes of embodiment such as sadomasochism,
leatherplay, intersexuality, and transsexuality, for example, cannot be reduced to
the categories of homosexuality or heterosexuality, and these practices and modes
of embodiment, rather than sex of object choice, may become the basis for identity
formation (Chase 1998; Hale 1997; Kessler 1998). Transnational research also
reminds us that these categories of sexual identity are Western categories. In many
Latin cultures, to take one example, sexual subjectivity is not based on sex of object
choice but on the scripted sexual role (i.e., active/passive, masculine/feminine) that
one plays in the sexual act, again, pointing to the need to interrogate the gendering
of sexuality (Almaguer 1993; Kulick 1998).
Another way in which a queer analysis calls into question the salience and
coherence of sexual identity categories is through its attention to intersectionality:
the crosscutting identifications of individuals along several axes of social differ-
ence. Building on feminist work that criticized the collective identity of woman for
minimizing the different interests and power among women with respect to class,
race, ethnicity, and nation, queer analysis adds sexuality to this set of differences
and by so doing points again to the limitations of identity-based analysis (Collins
1991; Crenshaw 1995). First, sex of object choice may be irrelevant to an individ-
uals identity formation: racial, ethnic, and class differences may be more impor-
tant. Second, the understanding of sexual identity may be inflected in unique ways
depending on racial, ethnic, or class affiliations; thus, the practices, expressions,

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 755

and interests emergent from this intersection of differences cannot be captured by

the dominant categories of homosexual or heterosexual or any other single identity
category.
As we will see below, rethinking gay identity in these ways poses several new
questions in the study of gender and sexuality: How does gay identity operate as a
form of regulation in both the development of social subjectivity and social life in
general? How are gender and sexual practices that are not subsumed by the hetero-
sexual/homosexual binary experienced and organized? How do crosscutting social
differences affect how individuals experience sexual identity and desire, and con-
versely, how are sex and gender organized and experienced in terms of these other
social differences?

Performing Identity, Rethinking Power

Most sociologists understand sexual and gender identities as products of the

interaction between structure and agency. One way that socially constructed identi-
ties become shaped and stabilized, according to many sociologists, is through their
institutionalization in social structure and culture. In this way, the learning and
enactment of these identities are partly constrained by the social scripts, social
labeling, and material resources associated with various identities and by the force
of externally imposed political naming (Giddens 1987). Racial and gender identi-
ties, for example, are not infinitely flexible but are imposed by the power of the state
and various other social institutions (Omi and Winant 1986). Within these broad
institutional parameters, however, individuals and groups can exercise agency and
enact their individual identities in different ways or mobilize their identities collec-
tively to change the institutional structure to gain material and cultural support for a
different understanding of the meaning of those identities. For example, civil
rights, antiracist, and feminist movements are precisely about challenging the
meaning of the categories of Black, Latino, woman, and so on.
This structure/agency paradigm of identity enactment encourages a view of the
social self as partly autonomous from the power structures that construct the self;
these constraining forces exist mainly external to the individual and thus these indi-
viduals are capable of rejecting these forces or altering the operation of these forces
in their lives (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Stein 1989). In other words, even
though the self is a social creation according to this paradigm, there is a core self
that has the capacity to reflect on and interact with the social environment in ways
that can either reproduce or change that environment.
A queer approach to the enactment of gender and sexual identities complicates
this understanding of the relationship between structure and agency. Rather than
situating identity as the term of agency in this structure/agency dualism, a queer
approach to the social self collapses this dualism (Stein 1989). It sees the self as
human subject, that is, as derived from the manifold social, cultural, and eco-
nomic forces that construct the false notion of the autonomous self, and provide the
discursive material for the conscious and unconscious enactment of that self. In this

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756 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

view, agency itself is a social creation, and the resistance registered by social actors,
if any, occurs within the manifold forces that both call the social actor into existence
and shape the resistance of that social actor against these same forces. For example,
the gay liberation movement did not eliminate the category homosexual or make
sex of object choice an irrelevant or unmarked social characteristic; it simply
reversed the discourse (Foucault 1980, 101) by changing the meaning of the cate-
gory from sick and deviant to healthy and normal. The category was still marked as
heterosexualitys opposite, and sex of object choice continued to hold sway as the
sole signifier of sexuality and as a core component of self.
This understanding is best captured by Judith Butlers work on the performa-
tivity of gender and sexual identity (Butler 1989). For Butler, rather than the expres-
sion of a core self or an essence that defines the individual, identities are the effect
of the repeated performance of certain cultural signs and conventions. There is no
original from which gender and sexual identities are derived. In this view, sexual
and gender identities are performatively constituted by the very expressions of
gender and sexuality thought to produce them (Corber and Valocchi 2003, 4). The
conscious and unconscious adherence to the norms and cultural signifiers of sexu-
ality and gender both bring the subject into being and constrain the identity
enactments of that subject (Butler 1993).
Butlers (1993) understanding of performativity, identity, and subjectivity derives
from a model of power different from that used by most sociologists of gender and
sexuality (Stein 1989). Sociologists tend to view power as an external force operat-
ing through social institutions to limit the life chances of some groups and expand
those of other groups. But for Butler, power is constitutive of the self: The subject is
constituted in and through the meaning systems, normative structures, and cultur-
ally prescribed taxonomies that circulate in society. Individuals internalize the
norms generated by the discourses of sexuality and gender as they are circulated by
social institutions such as schools, clinics, mass media, and even social movements.
In so doing, individuals become self-regulating subjects (Foucault 1977, 1980).
Institutional change and changes in political economy operating from above the
social actor are backgrounded in this approach; meaning systems and discourses
existing in the culture, internalized by individuals, but unanchored in social institu-
tions are foregrounded.
This understanding of power is captured by queer theorys concept of hetero-
normativity. For queer theorists, heteronormativity means the set of norms that
make heterosexuality seem natural or right and that organize homosexuality as its
binary opposite. This set of norms works to maintain the dominance of heterosexu-
ality by preventing homosexuality from being a form of sexuality that can be taken
for granted or go unmarked or seem right in the way heterosexuality can (Corber
and Valocchi 2003, 4). As a result, the dominance of heterosexuality often operates
unconsciously or in ways that make it particularly difficult to identify. It is this nor-
mative and discursive structure that is foregrounded, not the ensemble of social
institutions that organize and promote that structure.

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 757

As we will see below, thinking about power, structure, and agency in these ways
opens up new questions about the construction of gendered and sexual selves. Can
the concept of performativity be extended beyond the conscious transgressions of
sexual and gender norms to explain the adoption of our everyday gendered and sex-
ual selves? How can we incorporate an analysis of discursive power that operates
subtly but pervasively into a discussion of gender and sexual power inequality that
still recognizes the material and political impact of social institutions?
In the following section, I use the elements of a queer analysis and the sociologi-
cal questions posed by that analysis to evaluate and extend the arguments of four
important monographs. Each monograph focuses on a particular component of the
queer theory paradigm outlined above (and some focus on more than one compo-
nent). Rupp and Taylor (2003) and Seidman (2002) explore the nonnormative
alignments across the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality and how these align-
ments are experienced and enacted in everyday life. Bettie (2003) and Schippers
(2000) explore heterosexuality, the various discourses that construct it, and the
instabilities and incoherences associated with that identity formation. They apply
the concept of heteronormativity to the study of heterosexuality and, in so doing,
engage another important concern of queer analysis and an ongoing point of con-
tention between this analysis and sociology, namely, the nature of power. Finally,
these two monographs offer another opportunity to apply a queer analysis to the
sociology of gender and sexuality in their treatment of intersectionality. Collec-
tively, these four works engage every component of the queer theory paradigm
described above.
My purpose here is to build on the queer aspects of these monographs and to
show the additional sociological insights that can be gained by taking queer analy-
sis seriously. These works are the products of a serious engagement between queer
theory and sociology especially in their concerns with the performativity of identity
and the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality. The following sec-
tion will describe this engagement but also use the tenets of a queer analysis out-
lined above to push that engagement in queerer ways.

APPLYING A QUEER ANALYSIS

Gendering Sexuality: Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret

In Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, Rupp and Taylor (2003) use their extensive
participant observations to make several claims regarding the coherence of gender
and sexual categories and the relationship between anatomical sex, gender, and
sexuality. As they argue, drag performances quite explicitly and intentionally
reject or mock traditional femininity and heterosexuality (p. 117). The drag
queens use the fact that femininity and heterosexuality are being performed by gay
men to challenge audience members to rethink the naturalness of sexual and gender
boundaries. The drag queens combine maleness and femaleness in a way that is

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758 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

hard to describe using conventional categories (p. 126). They evoke erotic desire
that cannot be characterized as heterosexual or homosexual (p. 126). In sum, these
drag queens perform cultural critique by highlighting the performativity of sexual
and gender identities and the constructed nature of the normative alignments
between anatomical sex, gender role, and sexual identity.
This works interest in the performativity of gender and sexuality and how these
performances critique essentialist notions of identity clearly engage several of the
core components of a queer analysis: the performativity of gender and sexuality in
everyday life; the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality in the construc-
tion of identity; and the inability of the available taxonomies to capture these
identities.
Rupp and Taylors (2003) theoretical focus is on the collective identity of drag
queenness, a gender category outside femininity or masculinity (p. 5). If we
look closely at their ethnographic evidence, we find several additional observations
regarding gay gender in the construction of the drag queens sexual subjectivity.
Two men who describe themselves as gay experience their sexual subjectivity in
transgendered terms. Their desire does not seem to be homosexual in nature as
defined by the sex of object choice. As Rupp and Taylor (2003, 34-36) point out, for
Sushi and Gugi, being a drag queen has to do with being in some sense
transgendered (p. 36). Gugi makes this relationship explicit when she talks about
her sexual and gender subjectivity: I dont know if it is because I wanted to be a
woman or because I was attracted to men that I preferred to be a woman. . . . Out of
drag, I feel like Im acting. In drag, I feel like myself (p. 37). When discussing boy-
friends and the norms of sexual relationships, the drag queens state that they are not
attracted to one another, and the only time they had sex together was with a differ-
ently gendered man (i.e., in a threesome). In addition, the drag queens bemoan the
fact that gay guys arent attracted to drag queens, yet at the same time, they say
that they are attracted to normatively masculine men. The gendered nature of the
object is the primary feature of their sexual desire (p. 78).
Although Rupp and Taylor (2003) do not pursue this point, implicit in these
statements and observations is a critique of the dominant taxonomy of sexual iden-
tity categories that defines sexuality on the basis of object choice and drains those
categories of their gendered desire. Clearly, the category gay is inadequate to cap-
ture these mens sexual subjectivity, whether in terms of how it is experienced, who
they are attracted to, and who is attracted to them. In these ways, they seem more
heterosexual in their sexual desire than homosexual (i.e., desiring someone who is
differently gendered and not having sex with someone of the same gender). But
again, these categories seem inadequate to capture this complexity.
When compared to the life histories of the other drag queens, these statements
also suggest that there are differences in the extent to which the public performance
of their gendered sexuality is congruent with their off-stage identities. As Rupp and
Taylor (2003) note, some do not think of themselves as between genders or as
women (p. 38), but that does not mean that their sexuality has no gender. The per-
formance of it in their everyday lives presents an opportunity to extend Butlers

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 759

(1989) analysis of the performativity beyond the public performances of the drag
queens and into their everyday lives. This extension could provide much needed
empirical grounding to the concept of performativity, particularly about the power
of norms regarding gender and sexuality and how these norms are taken up, con-
sciously or unconsciously, by different groups of individuals. Since performativity
is a theory of gender and sexual identity formation, sociologists can utilize it more
fully to explore how gender and sexuality socialization occurs. Rupp and Taylors
drag queens suggest that this process of taking up norms is an unstable, fragile,
and variable process.
Rupp and Taylor (2003) illustrate how a queer analysis highlights the limitations
of the dominant identity categories for capturing the complexity of peoples lives,
yet at the same time, they demonstrate the continued power of these categories in
shaping peoples understandings of themselves. The drag queens say they are gay
men even as they tell the ethnographers stories that foreground gender and back-
ground sexuality. The drag queens consider themselves part of the gay community
even as they report varying degrees of marginality within that community. The drag
queens announce their gay identity on the stage even as they construct perfor-
mances that highlight the trials and tribulations of gender nonnormativity. By
separating conceptually sex, gender, and sexuality and then noticing the ways in
which they interrelate in concrete social situations, by recognizing the dominant as
well as alternative ways in which these axes of difference are combined in particu-
lar cultural and historical contexts, and by paying attention to the performative
nature of sexed and gendered subjectivities, a queer analysis pushes us toward a
deeper and more complicated understanding of the intersection of gender and
sexuality.

The Limits of Gay Identity: Beyond the Closet:

The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life

Steven Seidmans (2002) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and
Lesbian Life seeks to uncover the changing meaning of gay and lesbian identity by
interviewing men and women who came of age at different historical periods
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the concept of the closet to
refer to the structure of power affecting the changing shape of identity, Seidman
interviews men and women of different generations and finds that only the older
generation uses the language of the closet. For the most recent generation of gays
and lesbians he interviews, the closet is not the metaphor these individuals use to
narrate their sexual lives or their relationships with family, at work, or in their
neighborhoods or communities. To account for this shift, Seidman argues that the
culture has changed from one of homosexual pollution and state-driven social
repression (p. 24) of the 1950s and 1960s to a culture of normalization and sexual
liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite this change, however, Seidman
argues that a culture of heterosexual dominance is still firmly in place. Using an
analysis of Hollywood film from the 1960s through the 1990s, Seidman illustrates

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760 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

how the image of homosexuality has shifted from the polluting gay to the nor-
mal gay. In other words, gays and lesbians are made visible and included as citi-
zens as long as we are gender conventional, as long as we link sex to love and mar-
riage-like relationship, as long as we defend family values, personify economic
individualism, and display national pride (p. 189). Thus, notions of gay and
lesbian identity have changed as the material and discursive nature of power that
shapes them has changed.
It is this understanding of power that queers Seidmans (2002) analysis of the
closet. His coupling of a materialist analysis of state-sponsored homophobia with a
discursive analysis of dominant images of homosexuality in Hollywood film
reflects a view of power as circulating at many levels, both constraining and
enabling particular identity formations. Related to this insight is his rejection of a
unitary gay and lesbian identity and his demonstration that these identities are his-
torically constructedanother feature of a queer analysis.
I want to build on these queer features of the analysis to historicize more deeply
and thus deconstruct further the notion of gay identity that Seidmans (2002)
ethnographic participants use to describe themselves. This notion derives from a
gay liberation discourse of coming out and the closet of the 1970s and is itself a
formation of discursive power that shapes and limits self-understandings and sex-
ual politics. Without that deconstruction, the analysis of the closet and sexual iden-
tity risks reading a post-Stonewall definition of lesbian and gay identity back into
the 1950s and 1960s. The Stonewall Inn was a Greenwich Village bar where a rou-
tine bar raid by police in the early morning hours of 28 June 1969 touched off a
series of riots and spurred a new era of organizing by gays and lesbians premised on
the construction of a gay collective identity.
As sociologists writing about the fifties and sixties suggest, these decades
encouraged role segmentation and a public reticence about ones sexuality (Mills
1963; Reisman 1961). This applied to everyone. Many men and women who had
homosexual desire organized it in ways necessary for the times, as something
engaged in periodically alongside other engagements or as something important to
their lives but practiced carefully in a national climate of hostility and repression.
Men and women came out during this period, but that meant something different
from the post-Stonewall meaning and involved admitting to oneself and to ones
social circle that one was a homosexual (Lexnoff and Westley 1956).
The meaning of the closetof being in and outchanged dramatically with the
gay liberation movement. A key component of this change was the transformation
of the meaning of homosexuality from a role to a core component of the self
(Chauncey 2000). Greatly influenced by the countercultures assertions about
authenticity and finding yourself and by the social movements need to mobilize
a constituency, lesbian and gay became public identities cast increasingly in
minority terms (Valocchi 1999). Thus, by historicizing the notion of gay identity, a
queer analysis uncovers the incoherence in the nature of identity-based thinking in
general and demonstrates the limitations of reducing understandings of sexual

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 761

subjectivity or sexual self-awareness to the currently dominant taxonomies of gay

and straight.
That most of Seidmans (2002) interviewees used the language of the closet
and coming out to describe their lives speaks to the power of the metaphor and
the success of the movement in institutionalizing the language in our culture. Evi-
dence from diaries (Russell 1993; Vining 1979), memoirs (Duberman 1991; Fel-
lows 1994), novels (White 1982), and other historical texts (Chauncey 1994;
Howard 1999; Katz 1975) suggests that these stories are, like most life histories,
stories of the past told in the present. This language is now readily available in the
culture to narrate the self, of constructing a linear narrative, the goal of which is
self-knowledge. It was not the operative language of the pre-Stonewall era for
understanding sexuality. Approaching these interviews queerly would reveal sev-
eral departures from the identity-driven language of the closet and the associated
notion that sexual identity is the core component of the self.
Approaching these interviews queerly also requires listening closely once again
to the intersection of gender and sexuality. As a matter of fact, several stories of liv-
ing in the closet and coming to sexual self-awareness can be read as attempts to
manage gender nonconformity and gender queerness. As Seidman (2002, 49)
notes, managing gender has been and still is at the heart of managing sexual iden-
tity. Queer analysis can explore this insight for what it tells us about the utility of
our dominant classification system to describe sexual subjectivities and the ade-
quacy of the concept of homophobia to describe the forces that construct the closet.
Both this system and this concept are based on sexuality and are drained of
sexualitys relationship to gender.
Although there are no stories of men that foreground gender, the story of Renee,
who describes herself as a masculine woman, can easily be read in transgendered
terms where her differently gendered self was the key to her sexual subjectivity. As
Seidman (2002, 53) reports, gender nonconventionality was at the core of her
sense of self, and because of this, the closet proved a tough accommodation.
Here we see slippage between Renees gender and sexual subjectivity and the het-
erosexual/homosexual binary. It is a binary constructed in part by the gay and les-
bian movement that after Stonewall, marginalized gender queers (e.g., drag queens,
transsexuals, butch lesbians) from the organizations, social networks, and subcul-
ture of the community (Wilchins 2002, 55). We also see the important place of
gender conformity in policing that binary. Renees narrative, especially if it elicited
information about the nature of her sexual desire, has the potential to unsettle the
dominant sexual classification system by providing an empirical example of an
alternative sex/gender system much like a queer analysis of Rupp and Taylors
(2003) drag queens does for gay gender.
One of the ironies of Seidmans (2002) analysis is that the naming of and then
the fight against the closet, a process that is taken as a mark of progress for gays and
lesbians, has the consequence of inscribing the homosexual/heterosexual binary
deeper in public life and in the official commitments of the gay and lesbian move-

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762 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

ment. By critiquing this binary, a queer analysis deepens the analysis of power. Not
only do state-sponsored homophobia and cultural representations limit sexual
autonomy, but the language of the movementthe notion that sexual identity
defined by sex of object choice is a core component of selfalso limits sexual
autonomy and any sexual politics to realize that autonomy. A queer sociological
analysis calls attention to both these sources of power: the material power of the
state and the discursive power of the movement that responded to the state.

Performing Intersectionality:
Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity

As stated earlier, a queer analysis goes beyond the study of homosexuality to

bring its conceptual and theoretical apparatus to the study of heterosexuality and
heterosexualitys relationship to gender and other axes of social difference such as
class, ethnicity, and race. Queer theory asserts that the homosexual/heterosexual
binary is a regulatory regime that structures many aspects of social and political
life, but it has, for the most part, limited itself to addressing how that regime affects
homosexual identity, culture, and politics (Gagne and Tewkesbury 2002; Warner
1999). If it is to be useful to sociology in general, it must extend its concerns with
the instabilities and incoherences of gay identity to all identity-based thinking, to
demonstrating the discursive power of the specifically heterosexual component of
the hetero/homo binary, and the utility of performativity as a mode of acquiring
social subjectivity for the study of heterosexuality. The following two studies go a
great distance in accomplishing this: Women without Class takes up Butlers (1989)
notion of performativity and applies it to intersectional identities; Rockinout of the
Box takes up heteronormativity as a regime of power and demonstrates how
individuals can use the instabilities inherent in heterosexual identity to resist this
regime.
Julie Betties (2003) ethnography Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Iden-
tity examines the multiple racial, class, and gender subjectivities within ostensibly
heterosexual identities. Bettie analyzes the ways that different social and racial
groupings of high school girls make sense of themselves, their schooling and fam-
ily experience, and their life chances. Refusing to collapse one form of social differ-
ence into another, Bettie argues that these working-class and middle-class Mexican
American and white girls experience their social world complexly and inter-
sectionally: Their gender subjectivity is class and racially inflected, their ethnic
subjectivity is class inflected, and their class subjectivity is ethnically and racially
inflected.
Betties (2003) thinking about intersectionality is informed by queer theory, par-
ticularly Butlers (1989, 1993) notion of performativity. Recognizing class as the
less visible axis of social difference among these girls, Bettie nonetheless views
these girls as class subjects who are constructed by their class performances. These
girls do not preexist the performance; rather the subject is constructed by the per-
formance (Bettie 2003, 53), caught in unconscious displays of cultural capital

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 763

that are a consequence of class origin or habitus (p. 52). In this way, Bettie extends
Butlers analysis of the performativity of gender and sexuality to the arena of class
subjectivities and in so doing grounds those subjectivities in material conditions.
Class identities are the effect of the repeated performance of certain cultural signs
and conventions associated with class origins, yet unlike Butlers treatment of
performativity, Betties is rooted in but not dictated by material conditions. The cul-
tural capital unconsciously displayed by these girls derives in large part from their
location along various axes of resource allocation, those deriving from their ethnic-
ity, their immigrant status, their gender, and their familys economic situation. The
power of the ethnography lies in the variable interplay between the imitation of
norms and signifiers of class, on one hand, and the resource limitations rooted in
material conditions, on the other.
In several instances in the ethnography, for example, the girls consciously per-
formed class in ways not predicted by their material conditions. Some middle
class performers of working class origins, for example, learned the cultural con-
tent of middle-classness, began to acquire cultural capital by association, and
learned to perform a class identity they did not originally perceive as their own
(Bettie 2003, 192). In these ways, Bettie (2003) constructs class queerly by show-
ing its complexly performative nature and in so doing points to a way of rethinking
the axes of social difference that form the basis of intersectional analysis. These
axes are discursive, comprising the norms and signifying systems associated with
different class, racial, and ethnic statuses, but they are also material, rooted in the
inequalities of economic and political resources. She refers to behaviors that result
from the conscious manipulation of these norms and systems as performance and
those behaviors more firmly rooted in material resources, and thus less able to be
changed, as performative.
Additional theoretical possibilities open up when we apply Betties (2003)
insights to these girls performances of their sexual identities. By foregrounding
sexuality in the intersectional analysis and asking about the ways that gender and
class operate in the formation of these girls sexual subjectivities, the ethnography
could also explore the meanings, incoherences, and ambivalences surrounding
fledgling heterosexual identities. We hear working-class Mexican American girls
(the chicas) adopting the discourse of heterosexual romance as a way of resisting
the postfeminist discourse of the middle-class white girls (the preps) and the
middle-class staff of the school who excoriate these girls for being childlike and
nave. This gendered discourse of class resistance by these girls also extends to the
arena of sexuality and coupling. To the extent that we see the chicas exploring sex-
ual desire and sexual pleasure, they do so with an openness and autonomy that we
do not see within the prep girl subculture. We also see a rejection of the traditional
heterosexual couple among the chicas in that they seem to possess an inchoate
awareness that they can get affection, intimacy, and family without marriage or
without a relationship where they will be dependent. Although never explicitly
explored, these girls have an ambivalent relationship to normative heterosexuality,
which can be seen as a function of their class position.

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764 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

Another place where we observe the utility of shifting Betties (2003) inter-
sectional lens to foreground gender and sexuality rather than class is in her brief dis-
cussion of Kate, a lesbian student whom Bettie comes to know, and the smokers,
the group of white working-class girls with whom Kate associates (p. 132).
Although Kate comes from a middle-class background, she hangs out with the
smokers and enacts a smokers identity. Part of this downwardly mobile class per-
formance has to do with the meanings of gender and sexuality in this working-class
subculture. Bettie mentions that one way this group of high school students resists
the prep culture is through a blatant rejection of normative conventions of femi-
ninity and masculinity (p. 134). Since one way that sexuality is expressed is
through gender, this subculture then proves more comfortable and less homopho-
bic than prep culture and thus is more comfortable for Kate. Here again, we see the
utility of further queering Betties intersectional analysis.

Performing Gender and Sexuality:

Rockin out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock

A fourth recent book in the area of gender and sexuality that uses a queer analy-
sis is Mimi Schipperss (2000) ethnography, Rockin out of the Box: Gender
Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Schipperss analysis of the alternative rock
subculture of Chicago in the early nineties focuses on the ways that the participants
do gender and sexuality differently by using the practices, identities, and symbolic
systems associated with the hierarchical binaries of man/women and homosexual/
heterosexual and subverting their meaning. Schippers refers to this practice as gen-
der maneuvering: taking the existing gender order and twisting or changing it so as
to not reproduce the patterns of structuration that keep the hierarchical relationship
between masculinity and femininity in tact (p. 119).
Time and again, Schipperss (2000) ethnographic participants engage in gender
maneuvering whereby they rework the dominant meaning systems associated with
masculinity and femininity and straight and gay through interactional strategies
that create, reinforce, or alter the norms of the subculture. Girl bands rock: They
eschew the misogynist lyrics typically associated with rock music and pair their
hard-hitting guitars, drums, and vocals with feminist, antisexist, and nonhomo-
phobic lyrics. Girls kick ass: women in this subculture adopt many signifiers of
traditional femininity but deploy them in ways that assert these womens leadership
role in rock bands and the music scene in general or these womens privileged posi-
tion as groupies or audience members. Men do not hit on women: The norms and
rules of interaction subvert the typical male-focused sexual culture of rock music.
The culture is still highly sexualized, but that ethos is not rooted strictly in terms of
male and female or sex of object choice: Women make out with other women and
express sexual attraction for female band members, men get crushes on male band
members, and the music, instruments, and vocals make the participants in the sub-
culture hot. Here is a good example of using the queer insights about the

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 765

performativity of gender and sexuality to illustrate resistance to the binaries and the
inequalities built into those binaries. Here we have ostensibly heterosexual rockers
acting in nonheteronormative ways.
Similar to the approach taken by Bettie (2003), Schippers (2000) is careful to
couple her mainly discursive analysis of gender with a structural analysis of gender
and sexual inequality, even as some of these inequalities are contested in the social
interactions within the subculture. Their gender resistance still exists within a
larger structure of inequality, and the impact of their transgressions is indeed lim-
ited by that larger structure. The women of the subculture, for example, fashion
their bodies, their subjectivities, and their interactions to transform traditional sig-
nifiers of femininity into signifiers of power, but the structure of male violence
toward women goes unchecked. The women and men of the subculture may
unhinge erotic desire from heterosexual identity, but the heterosexual/homosexual
binary still retains its force in fashioning their identities, and the subcultural space
is still unambiguously heterosexual. In these ways, the analysis is explicitly guided
by the queer insights regarding the discursive power of the binary and the ways in
which gender and sexuality can be deployed in nonidentitarian ways. It also is
guided by the sociological insights about the rootedness of these binaries in
systems of material and political power.
These insights about power can also be used to foreground issues of class and
race when analyzing the discursive (and nonnormative) use of gender and sexuality
in this subculture. A queer analysis that takes intersectionality seriously would
push the ethnography further to investigate the ways in which these participants
class and racial identities are performed in this subculture and how gender and sex-
uality are used to articulate those identities. For example, many young women in
the subculture revalorize the slut and bitch labels to claim power; this ability is
of course race and class inflected since it is precisely the distance of these middle-
class white women from the class and racially coded stereotypes of slut and bitch
that make possible their claim to those labels with no negative consequences. In
addition, some of the gender and sexual maneuvering they perform is accom-
plished discursively through naming sexist and homophobic behavior and attitudes
as lower class or red-neck, thus using class stereotypes to construct their middle-
class gender subjectivities as enlightened and progressive. In addition, the fact that
this subculture existed in the midst of neighborhood gentrification and a suburban
invasion, a frequent topic of conversation among the participants in the subcul-
ture, presents the additional possibility that the alternative gender and sexual
subjectivities of the young middle-class participants of this subculture are ways
they symbolically distance themselves from their new neighbors with whom they
have much in common, at least in material if not in aesthetic terms.
In these suggestive ways, a sociologically informed queer analysis can explore
the discursive and material nature of power embedded in the homosexual/hetero-
sexual binary, the possibilities that exist for dismantling that binary, and the rela-
tionship of that binary to other axes of inequality.

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766 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

THE FUTURE OF QUEER SOCIOLOGY

In examining these four monographs, I have wanted to highlight the advantages

of using a queer approach to study gender and sexuality and also to identify a num-
ber of ways in which queer approaches in sociology can be extended to better cap-
ture the complicated reality of gender and sexual subjectivities, identities, and prac-
tices. Unlike other queer sociological analyses, this article presents a set of
concepts and analytical lenses that sociologists can use when doing empirical work
in the area of gender and sexuality. These are (1) queering the relationship between
sex, gender, and sexuality; (2) taking seriously the nonnormative alignments across
these variables; (3) resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or to conflate it
with the broad range of gender and sexual practices; (4) broadening an understand-
ing of power to include identity formations as well as other discursive formations;
and (5) treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed
and performative. Using these conceptual guidelines derived from queer theory, we
can rethink the nature of power and resistance and interrogate the gendered nature
of sexuality, the sexualized nature of gender, and the complex but patterned nature
of human subjectivity across various axes of social difference.
As is also suggested by this examination, a queer analysis can benefit from soci-
ologys insistence on the material grounding of the discursive constructions of
sexed bodies, masculinity and femininity, and sexual identities. As Bettie (2003)
and Schippers (2000) quite rightly point out, the enactment of identities is an
accomplishment or performance, but these identities are also constrained by an
array of institutional forces that contribute to the power of heteronormativity. In
this way, a sociological queer analysis embellishes Butlers (1993) notion of
performativity by rooting the repeated enactment of norms in the rules, resources,
and regulations of social institutions. It also theoretically enriches queer theorys
understanding of intersectionality by rooting the discursive possibilities of identity
construction in the social hierarchies of power resulting from class, race, ethnicity,
and gender. In other words, these works combine a queer sensibility about the
performative nature of identity with a sociological sensibility about how these
performances are constrained, hierarchical, and rooted in social inequality.
The analysis of these texts also suggests one mechanism through which the
performativity of gender and sexuality is accomplished. Although Butler (1993)
and other queer theorists would emphasize the unconscious repetition of the cul-
tural signs and normative conventions of gender and sexuality (and that is undoubt-
edly part of this dynamic), the work of Bettie (2003) and Schippers (2000) shows
that class, racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities are also interactional accom-
plishments. As these two texts illustrate, this symbolic interactionist understanding
of identity can be combined with a queer analysis to illustrate the ways in which
subjectivities are deeply constrained, the ways in which they can be reconstructed,
and the ways in which power pervades each of these dimensions. It also dovetails
nicely with queer theorys anti-identitarian posture in that symbolic interactions

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 Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 767

focus on practices can point to the inconsistencies and incoherences of individuals

identity enactments in relation to the dominant taxonomies.
Finally, and related to this emphasis on practices rather than identities, it is not
surprising that each of the monographs used here to illustrate the utility of queering
the sociology of gender and sexuality employs ethnographic methods. As these
texts amply demonstrate, the application of the concepts mentioned above to
achieve this queering of gender and sexuality requires a sensitivity to the compli-
cated and multilayered lived experiences and subjectivities of individuals, to the
social settings within which these experiences and subjectivities take shape, and to
the larger cultural, discursive, and institutional contexts of these lives where
resources are allocated, images created, and taxonomies are given power. Ethno-
graphic methods, with their emphasis on how individuals create meaning, seem
best suited to this enterprise. For example, many times throughout these ethno-
graphies, individuals claim certain identities even as they undercut these claims
through their practices and their (sometimes unstable) desires and subjectivities.
This affinity between queer theory and ethnographic methods derives from
some common epistemological assumptions not necessarily shared by other vari-
able-based, quantitative methodologies used in sociology. First, both queer theory
and ethnography are ambivalent or agnostic about their capacity for discerning
objective truth. Both emphasize social reality as representation: queer theory in
its reliance on discourse and ethnography in its culturally mediated relationship
between observer and observed. Quantitative, variable-based methodologies, by
contrast, assume that the indicators used to measure social processes do indeed cap-
ture something real and objective. Second, both queer theory and ethnography do
not always assume that the classification systems named in the culture or used by
social scientists accurately correspond to or help elucidate practices, motivations,
or interests of those who may be subsumed within those systems. Ethnographic
methods rely on a more processual model of concept development done in interac-
tion between the initial concepts or classification schemes and the observations and
participation conducted in the field; queer theory focuses on the gap between the
categories used and peoples lived experiences. Quantitative approaches that rely
on surveys, interviews, or secondary numerical data, by contrast, have classifica-
tion systems already laid out or developed prior to research. Using these methodol-
ogies, it is hard to observe the incongruities between classification systems and
individuals actual behaviors and even harder to develop alternative classification
schemes in the process of the research. Ethnography gives researchers the tools to
identify, describe, and understand these incongruities provided that this method is
coupled with a theoretical framework that can call attention to these different levels
of interpretation.
The concepts used in this article can serve as a queer theoretical framework that
ethnographers can use going into the field: paying attention to the practices individ-
uals engage in and how these practices construct their sexual and gender subjec-
tivities, the degree to which these practices are organized into coherent identities,

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768 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005

and the correspondence between these identities and the dominant sexual and gen-
der taxonomies. Combining the sensitivities of ethnography with the sociologically
informed queer concepts elaborated in this article can result in gender and sexuality
research that represents individuals lived experience in ways that honor the com-
plexity of human agency, the instability of identity, and the importance of institu-
tional and discursive power.

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Stephen Valocchi is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Sociology at Trinity Col-
lege, Hartford, Connecticut. He is the coeditor, along with Robert J. Corber, of Queer Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Reader. He has published several articles on the gay and lesbian movement in
the United States and is currently working on an oral history of progressive activism in Hartford.

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2005 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.