Page 192 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

Q

Queer theory Queer theory is a term that has been applied to a body of work that has
explored gay, lesbian and bisexual life experience. Crucial to queer theory is the
recovery of the concealed and repressed presence of gay and lesbian ‘actors’ and
activities within social and cultural life. More broadly, queer theory has explored the
processes through which sexual identities are constituted within contemporary
culture. Here queer theory has advanced anti-essentialist claims regarding the
cultural construction of sexual identities including their plurality and ambivalence.
The word ‘queer’ has been re-articulated and re-signified by ACT-UP, Queer
Nation and other communities of queer politics to deflect its injurious effects and
turn it into an expression of resistance. Thus the term ‘queer’ is a provocative re-
nomination that appropriates earlier offensive descriptions of gay and lesbian life
and turns them to its advantage. To ‘be queer’ is to adopt a non-straight lifestyle and
‘to queer’ is to estrange or de-familiarize identities, texts and attitudes that had
otherwise been taken for granted. According to Judith Butler, who is one of the
high-profile writers associated with queer theory, while the use of the term ‘queer’
as an affirmative has proved politically useful it continues to echo its past pejorative
usage. This suggests that identity categories cannot necessarily be redefined in any
way whatsoever.
Butler conceives of sex in terms of performativity produced as a reiteration of the
regulatory apparatus of heterosexual hegemonic norms. The identification involved
in the construction of sexual identity constitutes an exclusionary matrix by which
the processes of subject formation simultaneously produce a constitutive outside.
That is, identification with one set of norms, say heterosexuality, repudiates
another, say homosexuality. Indeed, the abjection or ‘throwing out’ of gay and
lesbian sexuality by the heterosexual ‘imperative’ is one of Butler’s particular
concerns. Nevertheless, she has suggested that through a miming of gender norms
drag can recast and destabilize them through a re-signification of the ideals of
gender. Drag suggests that all gender is performativity and as such destabilizes the
claims of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity as the origin that is imitated.
However, as she points out, drag is at best always ambivalent and can be itself a
reiteration and affirmation of the Law of the Father and heterosexuality.

Links Anti-essentialism, gender, identification, identity, performativity, sex

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