Gender and Queer Theory PDF

10 GENDER AND QUEER THEORY DONALD E. HALL Though commonly used, the term ‘gender theory’ is something of a misnomer or, at best, a euphemism. In reality, gender theory could more accurately be termed ‘sexu- ality theory’, because it explores the var...

10 GENDER AND QUEER THEORY DONALD E. HALL Though commonly used, the term ‘gender theory’ is something of a misnomer or, at best, a euphemism. In reality, gender theory could more accurately be termed ‘sexu- ality theory’, because it explores the variety of ways that ‘gender’, our assignment to social roles in ways related to our biological sex, is connected intimately and vari- ously to our experience of sexuality, and how that experience bears on our own and others’ identity. While gender theory is deeply indebted to feminist theory (see Chapter 9), it takes students and critics in very different directions. Building on its origins in the analysis of the differential valuations of women’s and men’s social roles, its specic interests are the ways that sexuality, in its myriad forms, has been variously dened, valued, prescribed and proscribed across time periods, social groups and world cultures. In short, gender theory examines critically the identity politics of sexuality. As all entries in this Companion discuss, or certainly imply, critical theory argues generally that there is always a theory underlying cultural expression and interpre- tation, even if, and perhaps especially when, such expression and interpretation deny adamantly or ignore wholly its theoretical positioning. Thus gender theory is not a twentieth- and twenty-rst-century phenomenon alone, even if the term would hardly have been used or recognized in previous centuries. There always already was a gender theory in use, even millennia before the rise of identity politics as we know it today. Thus gender theory is a body of work as applicable to the study of classical literature as it is to the study of aesthetic expression and popular culture in the twenty-rst century. Indeed, the rst explicit expressions of a gender theory occurred during the clas- sical era. In early Greek poetry, for example, one nds an idealization of the beauty of youth, with an implicit theory of intergenerational desire embedded therein that allows for erotic attachment between adult men and boys or adolescents; often this is placed in a context of tutelage in which the younger individual receives education from the mature man and in return offers some form of emotional attachment and physical affection (precisely what form is vague and open to much dispute). Even more explicitly, in Plato’s Symposium (c.380–367 BC), a collection of differing perspectives on love offered by a group of men at a banquet, we nd one of the most inuential theorizations of desire between men and women, men and men, and women and women, ever written. Aristophanes, a character in the Symposium, attempts to account for the diversity of sexual desires manifested in his society. In his theorization of the origins of what we would today call homosexuality and 107  DONAL D E. HAL L heterosexuality (though such terms were unknown then), he claims that human beings descended from primordially conjoined beings, some comprised of male and male halves, others female and female, and still others half male and half female. After Zeus divided them, to diminish their strength and humble them, they forever after sought their missing half. Longing for completion through erotic attachment to an individual of the same or other sex is thus theorized as wholly natural by Aristophanes; no one at the banquet disagrees with his perspective, though each has his own theory of ideal love and ideal lovers. As I have suggested elsewhere (Hall 2003), we nd therein the origins of the still persistent myth of the ‘soulmate’, in which a dyadic partnering is the primary means through which personal fullment is achieved. As I mention below, queer theory today questions all such assumptions, even those such as Aristophanes’ that do not validate male/female couplings alone. Yet any such tolerance of diversity in sexual desire expressed in Plato and in the erotic poetry that Sappho wrote to other women during the Greek era gave way to ever-tightening regulations of proper and improper desire during the Christian era. Numerous social forces and factors contributed to this change. One of the ways that Judaism, and then Christianity, differentiated itself from paganism and Greco-Roman culture generally was in the strictness of its moral teachings and increasing speci- cation of rules governing domestic relationships. The hedonism and social chaos of the late Roman empire was what Christianity used to dene itself against, empha- sizing, in contradistinction, temperance, stable domestic arrangements based on well-dened marital rules, and strict obedience to church doctrine and political/reli- gious hierarchy. And it is important to emphasize here that the era’s ‘gender theory’ was one of an ever-tightening regulation of male/female relationships and couplings, as well as a proscription of male/male and female/female sexual relationships. Indeed, students of ‘gender theory’ today should never assume that it is relevant only to the lives of lesbians, transgendered people, gays and other oppressed sexual minorities. The prevailing gender and sexual paradigms of an era regulate everyone’s lives, working to curtail possibilities and relentlessly push sexual/erotic relationships into socially acceptable channels. Of course, this affected individuals in highly differential ways. John Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) has demonstrated how the late Middle Ages in particular saw an increasing and harsh stigmatization of same-sex activity as a threat to social and religious order. One might connect this desire to track down and clearly delineate all forms of potential impropriety to any number of social changes occurring: a shift from agrarian to increasingly urban social organi- zation that brought with it new potentials for social chaos; an increasing emphasis on individualist interpretations of biblical truth (resulting nally in the Protestant revo- lution of the early sixteenth century), with its concomitant anxiety over regulating strictly just how far that individualism could extend; and new socio-economic demands for population growth and stability that meant domestic, reproduction- based, and rigidly patriarchal male/female relationships became ever more highly valued. Thus all manifestations of sexual nonconformity posed complex multidimen- sional threats to vested social and religious authority. Gender theory urges us to 108  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY recognize that erotic relations were and always have been heavily imbricated within diverse and far-reaching networks of power. For an example we need look no farther than the case of Henry VIII, whose domestic, though certainly politically involved, sexual needs and demands during the early sixteenth century led to massive social upheavals and renegotiations of power that stretched over centuries. While marital and other intimate relationships are usually termed ‘private’, they often have far- reaching public implications and consequences. In acknowledging that complexity, gender theory today (especially as inuenced by Michel Foucault, whom I discuss below) urges us always to multidimensionalize such power relationships, to resist reducing them to a simple top-down model of socio-sexual regulation. Thus in the Renaissance, even as sexual relationships between men became newly regulated as a capital crime, subcultures (specically houses of male prostitution) began to ourish, demonstrating how indications of increasingly intense attempts at social control often signal the emergence of vibrant and threatening new manifestations of social nonconformity. Again, urbanization is one key to understanding this phenomenon. Only when populations reached a critical density did individuals establish communicative and erotic relationships that led to the emergence of new forms of group self-identication (see John D’Emilio’s essay in Abelove et al. (1993) for a related argument). While undoubtedly same-sex desiring individuals throughout history (even those in rural and sparsely populated areas) had always had erotic contact with each other, only in the ‘modern’, or post- medieval, era could those individuals encounter sufcient numbers of other, simi- larly desiring people to self-identify as a group, as something other than an aberration or individual sinner. New technologies today further complicate this dynamic as individuals no longer even need to be in physical proximity to nd each other, discover common ground, and privately or publicly proclaim a shared identity. Yet certainly paradigm shifts occur very slowly. Even with gradual processes of urbanization, for the many centuries leading up to the dramatic changes of the Victorian era religious denitions held sway. In particular, ‘sodomy’, a vague term that often refers to anal sex between men and sometimes to any sexually deviant activity at all, was the prevailing mode of dening non-normative sexuality. This cast same-sex desiring men as one subset of that broader category of ‘sinner’, not unlike thieves, adulterers or blasphemers. It also meant that social discourse largely ignored same-sex desiring women, a fact which reminds us that ‘gender theory’ demands a recognition of the gender differentials always circulating in society. Yet all of this changed in the nineteenth century with the ourishing of the natural and social sciences, with new emphases on philosophical reasoning, and with the rise of identity politics (the women’s movement and the anti-slavery movement in particular). Traditional forms of social hierarchy were newly abraded by the rise of a market economy (which emphasized social change and renegotiation of social roles and rights) and by increasing literacy and new communication technologies (the rise of journalism and the popular press, the circulation of erotic ction and poetry, the rise of a postal system that allowed inter-regional and international sharing of infor- mation, etc.). Changes in prevailing sexuality theories thus cannot be separated from 109  DONAL D E. HAL L the socio-cultural changes that led to the rise of the workers’ rights movements, the abolitionist movement and the feminist movement. All were reective of and partici- pating in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment emphasis on human (rather than divine) agency in determining social roles and denitions of the normal and abnormal, and group demands for social justice and recognition of equal status. Michel Foucault writes famously in his History of Sexuality, vol. 1 that ‘The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood’, continuing: ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homo- sexual was now a species’ (Foucault 1984: 43). Foucault’s observation has been inuential and deserves some close analysis here for what it tells us about how and why gender theories changed and what ‘gender theory’ means today. His emphasis on the nineteenth century bears explanation rst. The Victorian era (1837–1901) saw an explosion in new scientic knowledge and quasi-scientic movements. In particular, the rise of the so-called social ‘sciences’ meant that individual human beings, discrete social groups and entire populations were scrutinized intensely in efforts to describe them accurately and, more importantly, prescribe their proper functioning. Psychology, anthropology, sociology and analytical history all provided perspectives, and implicit judgements, on social subsets such as non- whites, women, the working classes, religious minorities and criminals. All were examined and valued against an idealized ‘norm’ of white, bourgeois, Christian, law-abiding men. The social sciences were determined to track down all of the causes and qualities of deviance. This was extended by the end of the century to the category of the ‘homosexual’, as a subset of other sexual deviants, by the new discipline of sexology. In a sense, Foucault oversimplies when implying that it was only the ‘homosexual’ that became a separate, highly individuated ‘species’ or quasi-biological category. The ‘heterosexual’ also became a category, as did other groupings of like-acting sexual beings: prostitutes, ag- ellants, fetishists, etc. As Sigmund Freud explored in historically unparalleled fashion around the turn of the twentieth century, all human beings became ‘case histories’, with adult personalities and sexual proclivities that could be traced back to childhood experi- ences, developmental processes and peculiarities, and variously channelled drives and desires. What is clear also about Freud, as well as other psychologists and sexologists of the era, however, is that underlying their desire to ‘understand’ is also the drive to classify, contain and perhaps cure abnormality. While sodomy had been a sin that any individual might nd tempting, sexual deviance originated in social, familial and biological processes that could be understood and potentially regulated or remedied. Therefore, key to understanding the legacy of nineteenth-century social science and the importance of Foucault’s analysis of it is the recognition that classication systems are always hierarchical. Heterosexual/homosexual, white/non-white, male/ female exist as binary pairings in which the rst term of the binary is the norm and value-generating term against which the second is judged and found to be inferior and lacking. Claims of objectivity, both scientic and social scientic, always mask a thorough, even if unwitting, imbrication of the sciences within the value systems of a given time and place. Key, then, to gender theory of the late twentieth and early 110  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY twenty-rst century is a meta-commentary on such contextual embeddedness and, one could say, arbitrariness, which allows the gender theorist and political activist to challenge discriminatory laws, popular perceptions and offensive discursive commonplaces. All such theoretical categorizations and their at once enabling and resulting (or, in other words, self-reinforcing) lived, interpersonal systems of behaviour became newly perceived as socially constructed and therefore potentially deconstructable through concerted analytical work and political action. Gender theory as a subset of identity political theory is thus heavily indebted to and intertwined with feminist theory. Early twentieth-century feminist writers such as Virginia Woolf, and later Simone de Beauvoir, questioned the differential nature of socially prescribed gender roles, probing the narrow rules that limited the ways women could express themselves and live their lives. Beauvoir’s famous observation in The Second Sex is that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (Beauvoir 1988: 301). This sums up the social constructionist perspective: that one’s biology, body and bodily functionings are not inherently meaningful; they are interpreted and inscribed upon by society and social value systems. For most feminist theorists, this means a complete repudiation of any reference to ‘natural’ or essential qualities of womanhood or femininity, with an emphasis instead on an iconoclastic questioning of the extent to which everything having to do with gender difference is a human construct, created to reect and reinforce a set of power dynamics privileging men. The same thorough iconoclasm animates the work of most recent theorists exam- ining the identity politics of desire, sexuality and sexual expression. Wherever and however desire originates (see Bristow 1997, which examines the perspectives of Freud, Jacques Lacan and others in some detail), gender theorists of the twentieth and twenty-rst century redirect our critical attention to the question of how and why certain forms of desire and sexual expression have become privileged and others denigrated as deviant, unhealthy and/or criminal. In this way gender theory is political theory, and is certainly bound up with the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender social rights movements of the last century. Just as feminist theorists renegotiated the valuations of the binary male/female, and theorists of race renegotiated the social values ascribed to white/black/brown, so too have gender theorists attempted to undermine the judgements and seeming timelessness of the concepts heterosexual/ homosexual. Applied gender theory then examines how such social constructions and normalized valuations are represented in diverse modes of cultural expression: the law, media, literature, art, interpersonal interaction and individual self-representation and social presentation (i.e. fashion, physical mannerisms, verbal inections, etc.). Indeed, among the rst impulses in twentieth-century gender theory, as in feminist theory, was to argue for equal treatment and equal rights for lesbian and gay individuals. This often involved the recovery of historical information concerning the important work of sexual nonconformists in the past and an attendant argument for a liberalization of laws today. Thus important foundational works of gay analysis such as Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, from 1980, argued that gay men have always existed, have always contributed importantly to culture, and have been treated with varying degrees of tolerance over time. Similarly, two important early 111  DONAL D E. HAL L works of lesbian analysis, Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue (1984) and The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), argued for the transhistorical and transnational importance of lesbian and gay cultural expression. In doing so, these works tended to use twentieth-century terms and uniquely Western constructs in ways that sometimes sacriced historical and cultural nuance for the sake of political impact. An attention to nuance and a deep commitment to the specicity of social categories and identity constructs are key characteristics of the critical movement known today as ‘queer theory’, even as the umbrella term ‘queer’ also seeks self-consciously to bridge categories and identity groups for the sake of political coalition-building. ‘Queer’, long a term of opprobrium and even hatred, was reclaimed in the late 1980s as a political term of radical coalition-building by AIDS activists. As the ‘norm’ of conservative politics, bourgeois decorum and popular media banality became perceived as contrib- uting signicantly to the climate of fear and hatred of AIDS sufferers, queer activists proclaimed the end to their complicity with deadly silence and status-quo conrming niceties. ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ became the rallying cry of a social movement loudly demanding an end to the smug self-congratulation of a heterosexual population itself fractured by divorce, economic turmoil and various other crises and hypocrisies. ‘Queer theory’, beginning in the 1990s, has taken such radical political energy and translated it into philosophical/academic language and applied it to the interpretation of a variety of cultural forms. It is radically anti-essentialist theory, arguing that everything – desire, sexual norms and gender, certainly – is interpretable as social construction and open to challenge and change. The anthropologist Gayle Rubin was one of the rst to signal the need for such iconoclasm in sexuality studies in her 1984 essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ (reprinted in Abelove et al. 1993). In it she argues that ‘it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reect more accu- rately their separate social existence’ (Rubin 1993: 33), and goes on to catalogue the hypocrisies and horrors of the persecution of sexual nonconformists during the 1980s; she ends with the injunction ‘It is up to all of us to try to prevent more barbarism and to encourage erotic creativity…. It is time to recognise the political dimensions of erotic life’ (Rubin 1993: 35). Throughout her inuential essay, she urges a de-sensationalization of sexuality and a commitment to challenging all forms of hierarchy in sexual valuation and variation. Rubin’s work was foundational to that of Judith Butler, who has been one of the leading voices in queer theory and who provides yet another bridge between gender theory and feminist theory. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990, 1999) and the essay ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991; also reprinted in Abelove et al. 1993), Butler emphasizes ‘performance’ as an analytical category that also allows for radical political and critical intervention. Speaking out of and also participating in an era of spectacular protests by AIDS activist groups (such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation), Butler suggests that all identities – gendered and sexual, in particular – are forms of scripted performance that are always available for subversive reinterpretation. She implies, thereby, an exciting potential for individual or group agency in the possible rewriting of such performances: 112  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY if heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat, or if the very exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative purpose? If there is, as it were, always a compulsion to repeat, repetition never fully accomplishes identity. (Butler 1993b: 315) This implication of fragility, however overstated it may be, certainly helped energize political activism and queer critical/intellectual activity. It also implies that mundane subversions of received gender and sexual norms, such as queering one’s clothing or hair colour, or one’s appearance through piercings or tattooing, could at the very least contribute to a destabilization of traditional hierarchies. While Butler has long argued that readers might grossly oversimplify the idea of performativity by overempha- sizing one’s ability to choose a new sexuality or gender at will, her emphasis on identity roles open to subversion has had the positive consequence of allowing for connections among high theory, political activism and quotidian choices. It is rare that a theorist can cross those divides. Similarly revolutionary in theoretical implication was the work of Eve Sedgwick in the 1980s and 1990s. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Sedgwick rst explored how patriarchal structures of male bonding – the homosocial order – have in modern Western culture increasingly depended upon the virulent, violent suppression and exclusion of homosexuality. Her intriguing analysis of the oppression encountered similarly by gay men and all women in a regime of sexist and heterosexist men has remained highly inuential and laid the foundation for queer theory’s argument that tactical linkages among the oppressed could be achieved while not erasing differences and divergences in political interest. She embraces that inclusivity in Tendencies (1993), arguing for a denition of ‘queer’ that brings under its umbrella ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, disso- nances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (Sedgwick 1993: 8). At the same time, of course, gender theory as a body of work could be seen as subsuming and potentially diluting the political and critical interests of a host of identity-related causes. This bears some discussion. To the extent that gender theory (especially in its manifestation as queer theory) emphasizes useful, if limited, linkages among various identity bases and interest groups, it has also struggled with the possibility that it might become a rigidly and narrowly regulatory regime of its own. At its best, gender theory offers opportunities for collective action among heter- osexual feminists, lesbians, gay men, transgendered people, bisexuals, and a host of others dened as ‘other’ by the forces of tradition and conservatism. Michael Warner argues in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) that ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in 113  DONAL D E. HAL L favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal…. For both academics and activists, ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by dening itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. (Warner 1993: xxvi) This cuts a very wide swathe, of course, though it also suggests a potentially huge coalition of those opposed to ‘normal’ values, practices and ways of thinking. Yet certainly scepticism by those traditionally disenfranchised within the larger social collective remains warranted. At what point does coalition-building and common- ground nding begin to do violence to the specicity of individual struggles and the nuances of the experience of oppression? Gender theory retains a useful but also dangerous murkiness in its assumed relationship between the exterior performance of and social mandates concerning binarily dened ‘gender’ (masculinity and femininity, even as those hardly capture the full range of human lives and potentials), binarily dened biological sex (XX and XY chromosomal differences, the physiological mani- festations of those differences and the ways inter-sexed individuals challenge such distinctions), binarily dened sexual ‘orientation’ (heterosexual and homosexual, as well as the criss-crossings and complexities undercutting such a binary), and nally the ways all of the above get differently interpreted and performed across and within races, classes, regions, cultures, linguistic groups and a host of micro-social spaces. So much specicity gets lost in this process of aggrandizement and subsumption that vigilance and incessant self-interrogation are not only necessary, but also inevitably insufcient. Indeed, something is lost and something gained in each instance of coalition- building. In linking theories of oppression on the basis of sexuality to those of oppression on the basis of sex (and, especially, the gender roles associated with one’s biological sex) the critic/theorist certainly risks losing an awareness of how sexually nonconforming men are treated very differently from women (whether heterosexual or lesbian). Thus when Michael Warner, in a foundational statement concerning queer theory, writes, ‘For academics, being interested in queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualised spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the publics from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform’ (1993: xxvi), one is not only struck with the uninterrogated masculinism of the language (‘exude some rut’), but also the lack of nuanced awareness of how one’s experience of writing, dressing and otherwise performing differently on a university campus can be signicantly different if one is a physically large, perhaps muscular, man or a physically smaller woman. Rape, assault and other forms of violence are often threatened and carried out against women who refuse to gender-conform in dress or appearance; that fact gets wholly lost in Warner’s bravado. Gender theory and queer theory more specically are not necessarily inattentive to the dramatically different experiences of oppression on the basis of sexuality confronted by women and by men, but the fear remains palpable (and understandable) that ‘a generic masculinity may be reinstalled at the heart of the ostensibly gender-neutral queer’ (Jagose 1996: 3). Repeatedly calling attention to this possibility at least mitigates the likelihood that it will happen automatically or uniformly. 114  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY Similarly, gender theory in its titular nod towards naturalized roles of femininity and masculinity, but underlying focus on sexuality, has a complicated but potentially syner- gistic relationship to theories of transgenderism, transsexuality and inter-sexuality. Judith Halberstam is a leading advocate of drawing fully on that dynamism. Near the beginning of her inuential study Female Masculinity, she writes: I am using the topic of female masculinity to explore a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity. Female masculinity is a particularly fruitful site of investigation because it has been vilied by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike…I want to carefully produce a model of female masculinity that remarks on its multiple forms but also calls for new and self-conscious afrmations of different gender taxonomies. (Halberstam 1998: 9) Thus, for Halberstam, transgender theory can enrich and be enriched by a queer political and theoretical movement that, à la Butler, nds in performative noncon- formity the possibility for radical social change. But for activists and social workers speaking out of their own experiences of oppression and rst-hand knowledge of the horric experiences of clients and friends, such linkages and potentially subsumptive moves are highly problematic. Viviane Namaste articulates the concerns of many when writing that in Anglo- American gender theory ‘transgendered individuals are conceived as a function of a lesbian/gay identity politics’ (Namaste 2000: 64). She takes particular issue with Halberstam’s Butler-inspired queer theory model: This framework does not respect the diverse ways transsexual and transgendered people make sense of themselves…[It] does not respect the identities and lives of heterosexual FTMs [female to male], assuming that one cannot be politically progressive and hetero- sexual, and that transsexuals need lesbian and gay communities to advance their collective situation. (Namaste 2000: 64) One of Namaste’s specic concerns as a sociologist is that folding all gender noncon- forming individuals into a single eld of study – ‘queer theory’ or ‘gender studies’ – means losing the specicity of individual experiences of oppression: Critics in queer theory write page after page on the inherent liberation of transgressing normative sex/gender codes, but they have nothing to say about the precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered and who is unable to access a woman’s shelter because she was not born a biological woman. (Namaste 2000: 9–10) Such a reminder about the hard daily struggles of those actively challenging or otherwise abrading the predominant ‘gender theory’ should complicate thoroughly, 115  DONAL D E. HAL L challenge fundamentally, the tendency among theorists and students alike to textu- alize and thereby objectify (and grossly oversimplify) the lives of differentially oppressed individuals. Gender theory as practised by academics is articulated within and out of specic institutional positions, ones that often ignore or actively hide their own ideological inections and identity political exclusions. Indeed, gender theory’s relationship to class identity, struggles and inherent complications has often gone under-theorized. As Linda Garber explores in Identity Poetics, ‘Early on, the women’s movement and lesbian feminism were informed by the class consciousness and materialist analysis inherited from prevailing leftist movements of the 1960s’ (Garber 2001: 33). Similarly, the very early gay rights movement had important ties to the American Communist Party in Harry Hay’s Los Angeles-based Mattachine Society during the 1950s. Yet such attempts to link oppression on the basis of sexuality with an awareness of class dynamics was always problematic given the ways that social recognition and validation in American society have long been linked with the acquisition of material goods and the pursuit of wealth. Just as other oppressed peoples (African Americans, new immigrants, etc.) have often sought social standing and a sense of having ‘made it’ through growing economic security and a movement into the middle and upper classes, so too at times have lesbians, gays and other sexual nonconformists found a source of validation in class advancement and the trappings of class status. Both Alexandra Chasin, in Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (2000), and Donald Morton, in The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader (1996), contribute to the slowly growing body of work that now attempts to theorize the class blindness, and sometimes even overtly repugnant class politics, of a queer consum- erism (marketed openly today through glossy magazines and advertising campaigns) that has often been overlooked in the broad strokes of gender theorization. The African-American lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde rst pointed out the dangers of overgeneralization in the early 1980s. In ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex’, she wrote from the position of ‘a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an inter-racial couple’ (Lorde 1984: 114), to call attention to the fact that ‘[u]nacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight’ (Lorde 1984: 116); she added that ‘white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and dene woman in terms of their own experience alone’ (Lorde 1984: 117). Race, in particular, continues (and should always continue) to undermine the ction of a single gender theory that describes a uniform experience of sexuality and oppression on the basis of sexuality. Twenty years after Lorde wrote the above words, José Esteban Muñoz reiterates them for a queer generation in Disidentications, saying that ‘Most of the corner- stones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed towards analysing white lesbians and gay men’ (Muñoz 1999: 10). Responses to the omissions that Lorde and Muñoz pointed out have taken several dynamic forms. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa spoke eloquently out of the position of one who crosses numerous boundaries of difference: sexual, racial, 116  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY linguistic and geographical. She explores how some individuals inhabit and nego- tiate a multifaceted cultural and sexual identity: For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behaviour. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer…It’s an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head. It makes for loqueria, the crazies. (Anzaldúa 1987: 41) In Black Gay Man Robert Reid-Pharr also emphasizes such multiplicity and its dynamism: I attempt to bring together various elements of my political, cultural, and social iden- tities – Perverse, Modern, American, Negro, Queer, Progressive – not as problems to be solved but as potentially fruitful ground for the articulation of American left identity. I do not wish to evoke anxiety or to demonstrate the difculty of living with multiplicity, but rather to present its pleasure. (Reid-Pharr 2001: 9) Of course, gender theory often, necessarily, isolates a single aspect of what is inevi- tably a multifaceted social identity. However, Anzaldúa and Reid-Pharr remind us that such academically useful partitionings have little to do with the way many people, perhaps all people, must live their lives. Indeed, if there are some discernible emerging challenges in the eld of gender theory, they reect that multiplicity and the need for critical reection on the continuing, naturalized assumptions that we bring to sexuality and identity. One obvious blind spot that many working in the eld of gender theory today evince is that of their own positioning vis-à-vis the variety of world cultures, even as those cultures also continue to metamorphose. Anglo-American and Western European paradigms of gay and lesbian identity and queer resistance do not translate easily or even relate necessarily to the experiences of individuals living in India, Africa and many parts of Asia. And while I acknowledge below the complications that new technology brings to sexuality today, these also do not pertain to the lives of the vast majority of peoples across the globe who do not have access to computers or the internet. Yet, at the same time, the forces of globalization and continuing cultural imperialism mean that Western paradigms are working relentlessly to reshape local structures of meaning, through movies, television, advertising and ever-increasing tourism. This hybridity, to borrow a term from postcolonial theory (see Chapter 12), will continue to complicate gender theory and sexuality itself in important ways. If I travel to a ‘foreign’ place and nd a startling easiness and openness about certain forms of sexual behaviour that are anxiety-producing in my home country, I may be changed. However, when I bring with me not only my own vocal judgements 117  DONAL D E. HAL L concerning that behaviour, but also lms and television shows mocking it or rendering it shameful, I also change the place I visit. Thus ‘theory’ itself can provide only a snapshot of a moment in time; it will always lag behind the dynamism attributable partially to those interminglings and other diachronic changes. And of course these exchanges are made far more rapid and unpredictable because of the explosion of new technologies and media. Web-based support groups, information-sharing, erotica and even sexual encounters mean that potentially anyone anywhere can experiment with or at least nd out about practically any form of sexuality or gender possibility imaginable. Since we are very much in the early days of this particular technological paradigm shift, it is impossible to say how this will alter our experience of sexuality or necessitate changes in current gender theory. However, that unpredictability does mean that there are enormous opportunities for inventive work in gender theory in the coming years. That dynamism is infectious and hopefully will energize the readers of this book. Even if we are never able to exercise the type of agency rst implied by Judith Butler over our genders and sexualities, we do possess a certain type of analytical agency. We choose whether or not to engage critically with the world around us and with our own identities, we choose to ally ourselves dogmatically or more supplely with certain theories or methods, and we choose nally to experiment or not experiment with new ideas and different eroticisms. Furthermore, we choose the care with which we interact with others and with their identities and positions in the world. Gender theory, at its best, urges us to see these choices as not always ‘free’ or easy, but certainly as worthy of ample discussion and careful, non-sensational consideration. FURTHER READING Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michèle Aina and Halperin, David (eds) (1993) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, London: Routledge. This is still the best collection of essays covering the theorization of sexuality and its rela- tionship to theories of gender. See especially essays by Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler and John D’Emilio. Bristow, Joseph (1997) Sexuality, London: Routledge. This book’s attention to the origins of desire as theorized by Freud and Lacan will provide useful information for students new to the discussion of sexuality and psychoanalytic theory. Bristow also provides an important historical overview of the origins of the eld of sexology during the nineteenth century. Garber, Linda (2001) Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. This book does a superb job of looking at the origins of queer theory and its relationship to the work of feminists from the 1970s and 1980s. Garber usefully complicates any notion of a uniform body of work termed ‘gender theory’ with an examination of the class and racial politics underlying broad strokes of theorization. Glover, David and Kaplan, Cora (2000) Genders, London: Routledge. This book examines rst the broad body of work in feminist and masculinity studies. It then usefully examines recent work in queer theory as it relates to earlier theoretical 118  GE NDE R AND QUE E R T H EO RY interests. This accessible book complements Bristow’s above. The two will be helpful to all beginning students of theory. Hall, Donald E. (2003) Queer Theories, Basingstoke: Palgrave. For students eager to explore the emergence of queer theory and its usefulness in applied literary and cultural criticism, this book may provide helpful information and examples. In particular, its last section of readings of literary texts including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Giovanni’s Room and The Color Purple offers some useful models of how queer theory can be applied by students and scholars. 119