CMST 1700 SMC Heteronormativity in Communication Studies Synthesis

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Yep, G. (2003). The violence of heteronormativity in communication studies: Notes on injury, healing, and queer world-making. Journal of Homosexuality, 45: 11-59.

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Journal of Homosexuality
ISSN: 0091-8369 (Print) 1540-3602 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjhm20
The Violence of Heteronormativity in
Communication Studies
Gust A. Yep PhD
To cite this article: Gust A. Yep PhD (2003) The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication
Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, 45:2-4, 11-59, DOI: 10.1300/J082v45n02_02
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J082v45n02_02
Published online: 12 Oct 2008.
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Date: 25 April 2017, At: 10:59
The Violence of Heteronormativity
in Communication Studies:
Notes on Injury, Healing,
and Queer World-Making
Gust A. Yep, PhD
San Francisco State University
SUMMARY. Heteronormativity is everywhere. It is always already
present in our individual and collective psyches, social institutions, cultural practices, and knowledge systems. In this essay, I provide some
sketches for a critical analysis of heteronormativity in the communication
discipline. More specifically, I examine the symbolic, discursive, psychological, and material violence of heteronormativity, and begin exploring
ways to heal, grow, transform, and contemplate new possibilities in our
social world. To accomplish this, this essay is divided into five sections.
First, I discuss the study of sexuality in Communication. Next, through the
notion of injury, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity. Third, using
the concept of healing, I discuss ways of unpacking heteronormativity
Correspondence may be addressed: Department of Speech and Communication
Studies and Human Sexuality Studies Program, San Francisco State University, 1600
Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132 (E-mail: gyep@sfsu.edu).
The author is grateful to the two reviewers who provided him with thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies: Notes
on Injury, Healing, and Queer World-Making.” Yep, Gust A. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Homosexuality (Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, 2003, pp. 11-59;
and: Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering the Discipline(s) (ed: Gust A.
Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia) Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2003,
pp. 11-59. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery
Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J082
 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
10.1300/J082v45n02_02
11
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QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
through a critique of hegemonic heterosexuality. Further, I offer potential
ways for queer world-making through the lens of queer theory. I conclude
by exploring the need for more sexuality research in the discipline by engaging the productive tensions between constructive and deconstructive impulses. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery
Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:
Website: © 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Communication, heteronormativity, heterosexuality,
identity, normalization, queer, sexual hierarchy, sexuality
How is it that in a society like ours, sexuality is not simply a means of reproducing the species, the family, and the individual? Not simply a
means to obtain pleasure and enjoyment? How has sexuality come to be
considered the privileged place where our deepest “truth” is read and expressed? For that is the essential fact: Since Christianity, the Western
world has never ceased saying: “To know who you are, know what your
sexuality is.” Sex has always been the forum where both the future of our
species and our “truth” as human subjects are decided.
–Michel Foucault (1988, pp. 110-111)
. . . an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture
must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to
the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern
homo/heterosexual definition.
–Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, p. 1)
Sexuality is a privileged site of social organization, knowledge, identity, experience, and individual and collective “truth” in Western societies (Foucault,
1978/1990; Weeks, 1985, 2000). The symbolic centrality of sexuality is partly
due to the way it connects the individual to the social: Sexuality has become a
point of entry to the psyches and lives of individuals and to the life and welfare
of the population as a whole (Weeks, 1989). In Western cultures, sexuality has
been organized around the homosexual/heterosexual binary, a symmetrical
and oppositional coupling of a marginal category (homosexuality) with a privileged class (heterosexuality) (Fuss, 1991; Sedgwick, 1990). A closer examination of such a binary, however, reveals that heterosexuality is, in reality,
painstakingly dependent on homosexuality to maintain and reproduce its master status (Katz, 1995). Sedgwick (1990) states,
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13
First, [homosexuality] is not symmetrical with but subordinated to [heterosexuality]; but, second, the ontologically valorized [heterosexuality]
actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and
exclusion of [homosexuality]; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each
dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that [homosexuality] is constituted as at once internal and external to [heterosexuality]. (p. 10)
In short, heterosexuality is not an independent and stable master category but
rather, a subservient and unstable construct in need of constant affirmation and
protection. Unlike popular conceptions of gender and racialized identities in
dominant culture that are based on the presumption that difference is “written
on the body” and, therefore, serve as biological “proof” of such categories,
there is neither definitive nor ultimate “proof” of heterosexuality (Thomas,
2000). We all have heard of individuals who are heterosexually married, with
children, and fully participating in heterosexual practices, institutions, and rituals, who confess that they have been “living a lie” all along and proclaim that
they have always “really” been lesbian or gay all their lives. Precisely because
it can be “faked,” heterosexuality must anxiously, repeatedly, and persistently
set about trying to affirm itself, assure itself, defend itself, and insist on itself
(Butler, 1993)–a point to which I return later. Fuss (1991) further elaborates:
For heterosexuality to achieve the status of “compulsory,” it must present itself as a practice governed by some internal necessity. The language and law that [regulate] the establishment of heterosexuality as
both an identity and an institution, both a practice and a system, is the
language and law of defense and protection: heterosexuality secures its
self-identity and shores up its ontological boundaries by protecting itself
from what it sees as the continual predatory encroachment of its contaminated other, homosexuality. (p. 2)
In spite of its dependence on homosexuality as a category, heterosexuality has
largely remained opaque, unquestioned, and unproblematized (Ingraham,
1996; Katz, 1995; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993a, 1994a; Richardson, 1996,
2000). Heterosexuality escapes critical analysis through its “now-you-see-it”
and “now-you-don’t” character: It is simultaneously marked as a natural and
given category and unmarked as a ubiquitous and invisible force permeating all
aspects of social life (Warner, 2002). When the view is that institutionalized heterosexuality constitutes the standard for legitimate, authentic, prescriptive, and
ruling social, cultural, and sexual arrangements, it becomes heteronormativity.
The purpose of this essay is to provide some sketches for a critical analysis
of heterosexuality by focusing on heteronormativity in the communication discipline. More specifically, I examine the symbolic, discursive, psychological,
14
QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
and material violence of heteronormativity, and begin exploring ways to heal,
grow, transform, and contemplate new possibilities in our social world. To accomplish this, this essay is divided into five sections. First, I discuss the study
of sexuality in the communication discipline. Second, through the notion of injury, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity. Third, using the concept of
healing, I discuss ways of unpacking heteronormativity through a critique of
heterosexuality. Fourth, I explore potential ways for queer world-making
through the lens of queer theory. I conclude by exploring the need for more
sexuality research in the discipline by engaging the productive tensions between constructive and deconstructive impulses.
THE STUDY OF SEXUALITY IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES
We talk about intersectionality and multiple dimensions of oppression. What
will a concrete . . . communication project look like if intersectionality is
deeply integrated rather than given lip service? What are the dimensions
usually left out? Silenced? I personally do not see a lot of issues regarding “sexuality” raised.
–Wenshu Lee (Collier, Hegde, Lee, Nakayama, & Yep, 2002,
p. 273, my emphasis)
In spite of its preeminent role in the formation and constitution of human
subjectivity and experience in modern Western cultures, sexuality has been,
until recently, largely a neglected area of inquiry in the communication discipline. To have a proper historical context, it is worth noting that the National
Communication Association (formerly the Speech Communication Association) and one of its leading journals, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, were
founded in 1915. However, it was not until 1976–after more than six decades
of scholarly silence–that an essay on homosexuality appeared in that journal
(Hayes, 1976). Since then, a number of important changes have taken place in
the discipline. However, Slagle noted, almost twenty years after Hayes’ article
was published: “Within the field of communication, scholars have been reluctant to address the issues that affect the lives of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual
community” (1995, p. 85). Slagle’s comment still resonates today.
In this section, I outline some of the areas of research that have focused on
sexuality in the field of communication and describe some of their fundamental features. This is not intended as a comprehensive review of the literature;
such reviews already exist in the field. See, for example, Chesebro (1981) for
pioneering work on gay male and lesbian communication; Ringer (1994) for
research on communication and the construction of homosexuality; Gross &
Woods (1999) for a compilation of research on lesbian and gay men in the media; Fejes & Petrich (1993) for a review of lesbians and gays in the media;
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Smith & Windes (2000) for an overview of the current rhetorical war over sexuality; and Henderson (2000) for a recent review of queer communication
studies.
In the “Bibliography of Articles and Books of Relevance to G/L/B/T Communication Studies” presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in 2001, Corey, Smith, and Nakayama, who compiled the
report, found 66 articles published in disciplinary journals between 1973 and
2001. Such journals included Central States Speech Journal (now Communication Studies), Communication Quarterly, Communication Research, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Human
Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Quarterly Journal of
Speech, Southern Communication Journal, Speech Monographs (now Communication Monographs), Text and Performance Quarterly, and Western
Journal of Communication. Although it was not intended to be an exhaustive
bibliography, the report, based on a number of search terms related to sexuality, provides a fairly good view of published research in sexuality and communication in the discipline. Based on this document, I identify five fairly
distinctive areas of scholarly writing. They are research on: (a) lesbian and gay
movement and activism rhetoric, (b) lesbians and gays in the media, (c) interpersonal communication and HIV/AIDS-related work, (d) performance of
sexual and gender identities, and (e) queer readings and analyses of media.
Some of the early research in the communication discipline focused on the
rhetoric of the lesbian and gay movement. The first published essay in the discipline investigated the functional and rhetorical characteristics of consciousness-raising groups (Chesebro, Cragan, & McCullough, 1973). Other studies
examined the language of the gay community (Hayes, 1976), views of homosexuality in the rhetoric of social science (Chesebro, 1980), analysis of ideologies in two gay rights controversies (Brummett, 1979), and successful
strategies for influencing content of television programming (Montgomery,
1981). More recent research examines the evolution of gay liberation rhetoric
(Darsey, 1991), AIDS activism (Dow, 1994), and progay/antigay rhetoric in
public discourse and policy debates (Smith & Windes, 1997). These studies
tend to focus on lesbians and gay men as a distinct minority group developing
resources, modes of communication, and community-building to fight for civil
rights and equal treatment in society in the earlier historical context of lesbian
and gay liberation and the more current environment of AIDS activism and
public policy debates in the United States.
A second body of research in communication focuses on lesbians and gays
in the media. Mainstream and alternative media are examined. Focusing on
mainstream media, Gross (1991) investigates the ethics and politics of “outing” closeted homosexuals, Kielwasser and Wolf (1992) examine the symbolic annihilation of lesbian and gay youth in mainstream television, Nelson
(1985) explores the paradoxes of homosexuality in Hollywood films, and
Sender (1999) investigates “gay window advertisements” (p. 172). Research
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QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
on alternative media ranged from gay media (Morton & Duck, 2000; Sender,
2001) to homophobia reduction programs on college campuses (Fuoss,
Kistenberg, & Rosenfeld, 1992) to the discursive tensions of graffiti texts (Rodriguez & Clair, 1999). This body of research also tends to conceptualize lesbians and gays as a distinct group in which their sexuality is their common
identity feature in mainstream and alternative media texts and representations.
A third body of communication research investigates sexuality in the context of HIV/AIDS and in the broader context of interpersonal communication.
Earlier work focused on acquiring information and learning about AIDS (Stiff,
McCormack, Zook, Stein, & Henry, 1990). More recent research investigates
communication of social support in an HIV/AIDS support group (Cawyer &
Smith-Dupre’, 1995), and attraction toward and nonverbal stigmatization of
gay men and people living with AIDS (Le Poire, 1994). Interpersonal communication research has examined reactions of verbal expression of affection in
same-sex interaction (Floyd & Morman, 2000) and the role of sexual orientation in predicting and anticipating communication behaviors (Mottet, 2000).
The studies in this group generally assume that gay and lesbian identities are
stable and contained categories of selfhood. As such, sexual identities are presented as fixed and unchanging features of individuals.
A fourth body of research in the discipline represents a significant departure
from previous work on sexuality and communication: These studies highlight
the fluidity of sexual identities in different ways. Focusing on the performative
aspects of gender and sexual identities, these studies examine the performance
of sexuality (Brouwer, 1998; Corey, 1996; Corey & Nakayama, 1997; Meyer,
1995), pleasure (Corey & Nakayama, 1997), gender and sexuality in performance (Bell, 1995; Dillard, 2000; Galloway, 1997; Gingrich-Philbrook, 1994;
Miller, 1995; Reinelt, 1994; Taylor, 1995), and performance of race, gender,
and sexuality in public culture (Brookey, 1998; Garrett, 1993; Johnson, 1995).
These projects, mainly published in Text and Performance Quarterly, tend to
present gender and sexuality as contingent, improvisational, unstable, political, and ideologically saturated representations, bodies, pleasures, and relationships.
A final and most recent body of work can perhaps be called “queer readings
of the media.” Unlike other research on lesbians and gays in the media, these
studies examine normativity in popular culture in their analysis of representation,
embodiment, and desire. Different forms of media are examined in this research.
They include photography (Asen, 1998), telephay (Cohen, 1991a, b), television
(Battles & Hilton-Morrow, 2002; Cooper & Pease, 2002; Dow, 2001; McLaughin,
1991; Shugart, 2001), mainstream and independent films (Brookey, 1996;
Brookey & Westerfelhaus, 2001, 2002; Cooper, 2002; Evans, 1998; Henderson,
1992; Nakayama, 1994), and print and mixed media (Erni, 1998; Sloop, 2000a, b;
Squires & Brouwer, 2002). By interrogating normativity, this body of work attempts to deconstruct and offer alternative readings of media productions of
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gender and sexuality. As such, gender and sexual identities are destabilized,
critically examined, and opened to contestation.
In this brief overview of research on sexuality and communication, based
on Corey, Smith, and Nakayama’s (2001) report, three points seem to bear further discussion. First, although the premier journal of the communication discipline was founded in 1915, there was almost complete scholarly silence on
issues of sexuality for the first 61 years of official disciplinary existence. An
examination of publications in the 1970s and 1980s shows that sexuality research was generally scant. Starting in the early 1990s and exploding in the
mid-1990s, sexuality began to be more widely addressed in communication.
However, most of that research is situated within performance studies and critical studies of media. Second, studies on lesbians and gays–particularly research in interpersonal communication, HIV/AIDS, and more traditional
research on media representation–tend to use, in Sedgwick’s (1990) terms, a
minoritizing view. Such a view suggests that the homo/heterosexual binary is
only an issue of enormous importance for a relatively small, discrete, and fairly
fixed homosexual minority. In addition, this body of research tends to treat gender and sexual identities as fixed, stable, and contained. Through such fixed conceptions of identities and a minoritizing view, these studies normalize and
perpetuate the current homo/heterosexual binary (Gamson, 1995/1998). In the
process, hegemonic heterosexuality remains opaque, reinforced, and unquestioned. Finally, the current explosion of sexuality research in the discipline is
starting to endorse, in Sedgwick’s (1990) terms, the universalizing view. Such a
view locates and exposes the incoherencies of categories such as “natural” or
“normal” sexuality, “woman” and “man,” that stabilize heterosexuality. In this
process, normativity and heteronormativity are just beginning to receive critical
attention. Although I believe this is a critical step in the discipline, communication scholars have not paid much attention to the violence of heteronormativity
in the psyches, souls, and bodies of individuals and communities. It is this violence that I wish to name and articulate in the next section.
INJURY: THE VIOLENCE OF HETERONORMATIVITY
I see hatred
I am bathed in it, drowning in it
since almost the beginning of my life
it has been the air I breathe
the food I eat, the content of my perceptions;
the single most constant fact of my existence
is their hatred . . .
–Judy Dothard Simmons (quoted in Lorde, 1984, p. 156)
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QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of
hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled,
and treated as an “Other.” This process of othering creates individuals, groups,
and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less
consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated
markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and
nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an “invisible center”
(Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a center are
attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a
taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness,
desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of
power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of
social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is “the site of violence” (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms
of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through
heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life
forms are created, examined, and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990). Heteronormativity, as the invisible center
and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others.
Heteronormativity is ubiquitous in all spheres of social life yet remains
largely invisible and elusive. According to Berlant and Warner (in Warner,
2002), heteronormativity refers to:
the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations
that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent–that is, organized as a
sexuality–but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its
privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked as
the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural
state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of
norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of
rightness produced in contradictory manifestations–often unconscious,
immanent to practice or to institutions. (p. 309, my emphasis)
Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality hegemonic through the process
of normalization. Although it is experienced consciously or unconsciously and
with different degrees of pain and suffering, this process of normalization is a
site of violence in the lives of women, men, and transgenders–across the spectrum of sexualities–in modern Western societies. Not unlike the experiences of
children who must learn to survive in an emotionally and physically abusive
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environment where violence is the recipe for daily existence (Miller, 1990,
1991, 1998, 2001), individuals living in the heteronormative regime need to
learn to conform, ignore, and banish their suffering to survive. The process of
coping by repressing the pain and identifying with the perpetrator is, in my view,
a powerful mechanism for heteronormativity to perpetuate itself in current
forms of social organization. Drawing from the work of feminists and
womanists, critical scholars, and mental health researchers, I identify and examine the injurious and violent nature of heteronormativity in this section. For purposes of discussion, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity enacted upon:
(a) women inside the heteronormative borders, (b) men inside the heteronormative borders, (c) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people,
and (d) individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Violence on Women Inside the Heteronormative Borders
One of the ways in which heteronormativity manifests itself is through
“obligatory heterosexuality” (Rubin, 1975, p. 179), “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich, 1980/1993, p. 227), or “compulsive heterosexuality” (Jackson, 1999,
p. 142). Compulsory heterosexuality creates the conditions by which “it never
occurs to many women to be anything else” but heterosexual (Kitzinger &
Wilkinson, 1993b, p. 31) and channels these women into marriage and motherhood in the service of men (Richardson, 2000). Feminist scholars (see, for example, Carabine, 1996; Delphy & Leonard, 1992; Holland, Ramazanoglu, &
Thomson, 1996; Jackson, 1996, 1999; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993a, 1994a, b;
Rich, 1980/1993; Richardson, 2000; VanEvery, 1996a, b; Walby, 1997) accurately maintain that heterosexuality is a key site of male power and dominance.
(I discuss this further when I examine the relationship between heterosexuality
and gender later in this essay.) Heterosexuality is a patriarchal institution that
subordinates, degrades, and oppresses women. As such, it is hardly surprising
that heterosexually-identified women can readily identify sites of emotional,
psychic, physical, and economic suffering in their relationships.
According to Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b), “the reasons for heterosexual women’s misery have been well documented” (p. 26) and they range from
physical and emotional exhaustion to violence and diminished mental health.
Because asymmetry of power and sexist norms are common in heterosexual
relationships, many heterosexual women live in inequitable and exhausting relationship arrangements: They carry the burden of housework, care-taking expectations, child-rearing obligations, and parenting responsibilities associated
with motherhood (Croghan, 1993; Jacklin, 1993). Further, research findings
(e.g., Gelles, 1987; Jones, 1998; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993b; Russell, 1990;
Wood, 2001) indicate that much of the physical violence against women–battering and physical abuse, rape, murder–occurs within the context of heterosexual relationships. Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b) point out, “Women
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who date men, or voluntarily have sex with or marry them, are disproportionately at risk for violence, rape and murder from those men” (p. 27). Because
such violence has been normalized in society, many women learn to overlook
their suffering (Wood, 2001) or may not even recognize their own torment and
pain. Finally, after reviewing previous research, Kitzinger and Wilkinson
(1993b) note that heterosexually married women report lesser psychological
health (i.e., more mental disorders) than heterosexually married men, and
lesser psychological adjustment (i.e., more anxiety, tension, and depression)
than lesbians. Based on their extensive work with heterosexual feminists
(Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993), Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993b) conclude:
The behaviors commonly known as “heterosexuality” are commonplace
among our feminist contributors: they are married, have sex with their
husbands and/or other men, and bring up children with the fathers of
those children. The identity of “heterosexual” (a sense that they are accurately described by that label) is much rarer. We refer to heterosexual
identity as “precarious” in part as a way of signifying the difficulty
women have in claiming the label “heterosexual” as their own–hard to
do when it stands, in so much feminist theory, as synonymous with oppression. . . . Heterosexual identities are precarious, despite the ubiquity
of heterosexual behavior, because who would be heterosexual, really, if
they had a choice? (p. 28, emphasis in the original)
Here they highlight the regulatory power of heteronormativity, as manifested
in compulsory heterosexuality, in the lives of women who are well aware of
the gender-based patterns of dominance and submission.
Violence on Men Inside the Heteronormative Borders
Although the manifestations and effects are different, compulsory heterosexuality is also imposed and enforced on men (Connell, 1995). As a patriarchal institution, heterosexuality privileges, elevates, and maintains the
dominant social and material status of men at the expense of women and sexual others. Indeed, men, endowed with their heterosexual privilege, have less
impetus and motivation to expose the violence of heteronormativity, as
Ramazanoglu (1993) reminds us, “men have much less reason to struggle and
go on struggling than women” (p. 60). However, heteronormativity and
heteropatriarchy are also harmful to men in perhaps less tangible ways
(Thomas & MacGillivray, 2000).
Heterosexuality constitutes men as “real” men (Wittig, 1992). To be a
“real” man is an exhausting and unending performance, or as Michael Kimmel
(2001) puts it, “that nightmare from which we never seem to awaken” (p. 277).
Homophobia and the fear of being perceived as gay become the central organizing principle and the cultural policing of manhood. The fear of humiliation
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and emasculation keeps “real” men afraid, ashamed to be afraid, and silent about
their own fears (Kimmel, 2001). Fear and shame are sites of psychic violence for
these men. In addition, on the level of sexual practice, MacGillivray notes, “there
is harm, since I for one would suggest that heterosexuality is based on a repression
of all unsanctioned sexual impulses, which most–if not all–of us feel” (Thomas &
MacGillivray, 2000, p. 257). In sum, heteronormativity impels heterosexual men
into a lifelong labor of “proving” their manhood and concealing, if not banishing, a range of sexual possibilities, gender performances, and pleasures.
Violence on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer People
While the harm of heteronormativity appears to be less evident for women
and men who are living within the boundaries of heterosexuality, the violence
against sexual others is unequivocal. In another article, I proposed a model for
understanding the violence of heteronormativity for individuals who are assumed or perceived to be living outside the patrolled borders of normative heterosexuality (Yep, 2002). This model focuses on both affective and cognitive
understanding of heteronormative injury, and explores both macroscopic (e.g.,
institutional heterosexism) and microscopic (e.g., individual acts of homophobia) levels of violence against individuals and groups deviating from the
heteronormative ideal.
Inspired by Wilber’s (1995, 1996, 2000) work, the model is comprised of
two interdependent dimensions: (1) interior-exterior, and (2) individual-collective (Yep, 2002). Interior-exterior, the first dimension, focuses on affect,
cognition, and bodily sensations that are potentially experienced by the individual (interior) and those practices, actions, and behaviors that are acted out
in the social domain (exterior). Individual-collective, the other dimension, emphasizes the subjectivity and experiences of the person (individual) and how
the individual relates to others in the social group (collective). These two dimensions, taken together, form four quadrants: (1) interior-individual, (2) exterior-individual, (3) interior-collective, and (4) exterior-collective.
Interior-Individual: Soul Murder and Internalized Homophobia
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves. Very
early in life children learn from interpersonal contacts and mediated messages
that deviations from the heteronormative standard, such as homosexuality, are
anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing, shame-invoking, hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of self-hatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral
patterns, becomes firmly implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in
heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many
people who do not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994)
tells us his personal story:
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I was born in 1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt
absolutely alone. I had no one to talk to, didn’t know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I
imagined gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would
always be despised for their “perversion.” Not once in high school did I
ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldn’t
imagine a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used
alcohol and drugs to try to dull the pain of my isolation. Eventually, at
age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay teens. I
saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting
that things would ever get any better. (pp. 13-14)
Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves through socially endorsed and culturally
accepted forms of soul murder.
Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep, 2002). Shengold
(1999) defines soul murder as the “apparently willful abuse and neglect of
children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic
. . . [so that] the children’s subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly negatively affected” (p. 1). Further explaining this
concept, Shengold (1989) writes, “soul murder is neither a diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime–the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another
person” (p. 2, my emphasis). Isn’t the incessant policing and enforcement, either deliberately or unconsciously, by self and others, of the heteronormative
mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
Exterior-Individual: Externalized Homophobia and Hate Crime
These are injuries inflicted on others. Fuelled by heteronormativity, externalized homophobia is commonplace. It can be directed to any person who
is perceived or assumed to be a sexual other and can be manifested in multiple ways: harassment, avoidance, verbal abuse, differential treatment and discriminatory behavior, and physical violence. The use of name-calling toward
individuals who are perceived to be outside the boundaries of heteronormativity (e.g., lesbian, gay, or transgender) is common in everyday interaction. In U.S. middle and high schools, for example, verbal harassment is a
pervasive problem:
One-third of eleventh grade students who responded to a 1999 CBS poll
said that they knew of incidents of harassment of gay and lesbian students. Twenty-eight percent admitted to making antigay remarks themselves. The average high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, public
I. Research and Interventions
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schools hears an antigay comment every seven minutes, according to
data gathered by students in a year-long study; teachers intervened only
3 percent of the time. (Human Rights Watch, 2001, p. 31)
When administrators and fellow students overlook and disregard these situations, they provide a clear message that it is permissible to hate those who are
perceived to be sexual others; thus, the cycle of homophobia gets perpetuated
in society. In addition, verbal harassment, if allowed to persist, can lead to an
overall hostile environment and other forms of violence, including physical violence and sexual assault.
Hate crimes are the most extreme expression of externalized homophobia.
Antigay violence is increasing (Berrill, 1992; Fone, 2000) and victims are still
being blamed for bringing it on to themselves (Herek & Berrill, 1992). Homophobic murder is, as Donna Minkowitz (2000) put it, “still open season on
gays” (p. 293). Reports on gay bashing appear regularly in the media and
Every such incident carries a message to the victim and the entire community of which he or she is part. Each anti-gay attack is, in effect, a punishment for stepping outside culturally accepted norms [of heteronormativity]
and a warning to all gay and lesbian people to stay in “their place,” the invisibility and self-hatred of the closet. (Herek & Berrill, 1992, p. 3)
Externalized homophobia, whether in the form of verbal or physical assault,
is a potent, and at times deadly, mode of enforcement of the heteronormative
order.
Interior-Collective: Discursive Violence
Discursive violence refers to words, gestures, tones, images, presentations,
and omissions used to differentially treat, degrade, pathologize, and represent
lesbian and gay subjectivity and experience (Yep, 2002). In everyday discourse, lesbian and gay people are not only treated differently, but also talked
about differently. From everyday conversation to media images, lesbian and
gay experiences are represented differently from the heteronormative standard.
In everyday conversations, for example, it is not considered socially peculiar for people to closely scrutinize and make the most intimate, intrusive, and
personal inquiries about the lives of people living outside of the boundaries of
compulsory heterosexuality. Comments and questions such as “what do lesbians do in bed anyway?” or “how does a male-to-female (MTF) transgender
(before her gender confirmation surgery) have sex?” directed at lesbians and
MTFs, respectively, are not unusual. While these invasive inquiries into the
lives of lesbian, gay, or transgendered people are deemed as demonstrations of
interest in “their lifestyle,” such scrutiny of sexually unmarked individuals is
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often considered inappropriate, offensive, and in bad taste. Similarly, references to a lesbian or gay partner as a “friend” when their heterosexual counterparts are routinely referred to as “spouses,” although not necessarily ill
intentioned, are symbolically violent acts that reaffirm and reproduce the
lower status of the lesbian and gay person in current social and sexual hierarchies.
In the media, individuals and groups living outside of the heteronormative
order are also represented differently. Such individuals have gone from complete invisibility to greater national visibility (Fejes & Petrich, 1993). At the
present time, Gross (2001) observes,
Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people have all become
reasonably familiar presences on the various stages of America’s media-dominated culture. News professionals–editors, reporters, talk show
hosts, columnists, and members of the punditocracy–now include
gay-related issues and events as a regular category of news, and we make
the front pages and the network evening news with regularity. (p. 252)
But such visibility is not necessarily unproblematic, as Gross is quick to add:
“yet those appearances are almost invariably in the context of some controversy centering on our right to pursue our lives in ways that heterosexuals take
for granted” (2001, p. 252). In a sense, individuals inside the heteronormative
borders “just are” while those outside of them are “social issues.” Or worse
yet, they become freaks, perverts, misfits, and public spectacles as they are
packaged to titillate, captivate, and revolt national talk show audiences as on
The Jerry Springer Show (Gamson, 1998).
Exterior-Collective: Institutional Violence
These are systematic and socially accepted injuries inflicted upon individuals outside of the heteronormative mandate. Institutional violence is widespread
for LGBTQ individuals and communities. Undergirding all social institutions is
heteronormative ideology (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Richardson, 1996). Hegemonic heterosexuality permeates the family (VanEvery, 1996a, b), domestic
and intimate life (Croghan, 1993; Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996;
VanEvery, 1996b), education (Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998; Talburt &
Steinberg, 2000), social policy (Carabine, 1996; Eskridge, 2002; Kaplan,
1997), the mass media and popular culture (Fejes & Petrich, 1993; Gross,
2001; Gross & Woods, 1999; Ingraham, 1999), among others. In short,
heteronormative thinking is deeply ingrained, and strategically invisible, in
our social institutions. The process of normalization of heterosexuality in our
social system actively and methodically subordinates, disempowers, denies,
and rejects individuals who do not conform to the heterosexual mandate by
criminalizing them, denying them protection against discrimination, refusing
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them basic rights and recognition, or all of the above (Kaplan, 1997; Rubin,
1984/1993). More simply stated, the regulatory power of heteronormativity
denies LGBTQ individuals and couples their citizenship.
There are numerous “positive rights” (Stein, 1999, p. 286) that heterosexual
individuals take for granted but LGBTQ persons are categorically denied.
They include being able to marry a person of the same sex, gain custody of
their children, become foster and adoptive parents, visit one’s same-sex partner in the hospital, being able to obtain bereavement leave when one’s partner
passes away, being able to file joint income tax returns with one’s partner,
among many others. Although the issue of same-sex marriage is highly contested on ideological grounds within LGBTQ communities in the U.S. (Yep,
Lovaas, & Elia, 2003), LGBTQ couples are deprived of the numerous rights
and privileges accorded to heterosexually married dyads (Kaplan, 1997; Stein,
1999).
In sum, heteronormativity is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and
continuous violence for LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in
the individual psyche and in collective consciousness, in the individual perceptions and experiences and in the social system and institutions.
Violence on Individuals at the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender,
and Sexuality
People inhabiting and navigating the intersections of race, class, gender,
and sexuality experience violence and oppression simultaneously based on
such systems of social ordering (Kumashiro, 2001; Yep, Lovaas, & Ho, 2001).
These systems are neither independent nor additive (Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; hooks, 1990; Kumashiro, 2001; Lorde, 1984; Smith, 1998;
Takagi, 1996; Yep et al., 2001). It is not theoretically useful or pragmatically
helpful to compare and rank different forms of oppression. For example, a
claim that Asian Americans are more homophobic is futile without specification of the interplay between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the purpose
and basis for such a comparison. Neither is asking an individual to specify a
rank order for their oppression (e.g., do you feel that oppression based on your
race is more intense than your sexuality or your gender?).
According to Weber (2001), race, class, gender, and sexuality are systems
of oppression. As such, they are complex (i.e., intricate and interconnected),
pervasive (i.e., widespread throughout all social domains), variable (i.e., ever
changing and always transforming), persistent (i.e., prevailing across time and
space), severe (i.e., serious consequences for social life), and hierarchical (i.e.,
creation of social stratifications that benefit and provide options and resources
for some and harm and restrict options and resources for others). For individuals located at these intersections, the process of “performing the hybrid self”
(Muñoz, 1999, p. 138) means negotiating different histories, economic dispar-
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ities, and sex/gender systems, and experiencing the violence of racism, sexism,
classism, and heteronormativity.
HEALING:
UNPACKING HETERONORMATIVITY,
CRITIQUING HETEROPATRIARCHY
In French they have the word recueillement to describe the attitude of
someone trying to be himself or herself, not to be dispersed, one member
of the body here, another there. One tries to recover, to be once more in
good shape, to become whole again.
–Thich Nhat Hanh (quoted in hooks, 1989, p. 29)
To heal is to recover from injury, fragmentation, and disintegration; to nurture one’s body, psyche, and soul, and to re-integrate, connect, and become
whole again. To heal from the ongoing violence of heteronormativity is to understand, unpack, and demystify its invisible power. Jackson (1999) suggests
that an effective critique of hegemonic heterosexuality, as an institution, identity, practice, and experience, needs to (a) unpack heteronormativity and
(b) critique heteropatriarchy. However, Jackson cautions us that “it cannot,
however, be assumed that heteronormativity and male domination always articulate with each other in predictable ways at all four levels, that it is possible
to ‘read off’ identity, practice and experience from what is institutionalized”
(1999, p. 164). With this in mind, I now turn to explore ways to analyze
heteronormativity and scrutinize the complex dynamics of heteropatriarchy.
Unpacking Heteronormativity
To reveal the hidden mechanisms through which heteronormativity maintains its disciplinary power in society, there is a need to debunk some of the
popular assumptions about heterosexuality in both theory and practice: Heterosexuality is not natural, universal, transhistorical, fixed, stable, or monolithic (Butler, 1993; Jackson, 1999; Katz, 1995; Richardson, 2000). In this
section, I discuss the historical, unstable, and multidimensional nature of heterosexuality as an institution, identity, practice, and experience.
Heterosexuality Is a Historical Invention. Contrary to popular belief, heterosexuality is neither universal nor transhistorical (D’Emilio & Freedman,
1988; Katz, 1995; Seidman, 1991). In fact, heterosexuality is a fairly recent
cultural invention in Western cultures, or to put it another way, heterosexuality
has a history (for a detailed history of heterosexuality, see Katz, 1995). I am
not arguing that sexual desires, impulses, emotions, and behaviors toward in-
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27
dividuals of a different sex are recent phenomena. They are not, indeed. However, I am suggesting that the social meanings attached to those desires,
impulses, emotions, and behaviors are derived from a modern system of ordering and organizing of sexualities, genders, and their pleasures–a historically
specific cultural invention called heterosexuality.
According to Katz (1995), “the experience of a proper, middle-class, different-sex lust began to be publicly named and documented” (p. 51) in the 1860s
in Europe and, in 1892, heterosexuality made its U.S. debut as a system for
talking, articulating, thinking about, and socially organizing sex differences,
eroticism, and reproduction. In its early versions, the new term heterosexual
was not equated with “normal” or “good” sex. Indeed, in 1892, Dr. Kiernan referred to heterosexuals as a perverse class exhibiting “abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite” (cited in Katz, 1995, p. 20). Influenced by medical
and psychiatric institutions, the new term continued its circulation and mutation in the twentieth century, with meanings fluctuating from nonprocreative
“perversion” to procreative, “normal,” different-sex eroticism. It was not until
Sigmund Freud that the new heterosexual ethic, proclaimed as “normal” and
“healthy,” was born, stabilized, fixed, and accepted as the ruling sexual orthodoxy. Katz (1995) concludes, “as the term heterosexual moved out of the small
world of medical discourse into the big world of the American mass media, the
heterosexual idea moved from abnormal to normal, and from normal to normative” (p. 82, my emphasis).
Although the current theoretical, institutional, psychic, and cultural hegemony of heterosexuality appears constant and irrevocable in modern Western
sexual systems, its history reveals that there are other ways of conceiving, ordering, and organizing sexuality, eroticism, and pleasure that are different
from the homo/heterosexual binary framework. Foucault (1985/1990), for example, notes that in Ancient Greece, men had intimate inclinations for women
and for boys:
. . . a Greek could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored of a boy or a
girl. . . . it was common for a male to change to a preference for women
after “boy-loving” inclinations in his youth. . . . To their way of thinking,
what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for “beautiful” human beings, whatever their sex might be. (p. 188)
Their sexual system was clearly not governed by our current dualistic conception of homo/heterosexual desires. Foucault (1985/1990) further points out
that “the Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as
opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior”
(p. 187). He cautions us against anachronistic projections in sex history analysis, that is, the tendency to apply our current sexual system to describe and
evaluate different ways of ordering eroticism and pleasure from other societies
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and historical periods. However, the urge for anachronistic projections remains strong, thus attesting to the power of the homo/heterosexual binary, the
fundamental feature of hegemonic Western sexual systems. But, as I stated before, such binary is “irresolvably unstable” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 10), and it is
this relation that I further explore next.
Heterosexuality Needs to Constantly Reproduce Itself. In spite of its immutable appearance, heterosexuality is neither fixed nor stable. Because of the relational nature of the homo/heterosexual binary, heterosexuality can never be
completely, positively, and ultimately “free” of its dependence on homosexuality. In a never-ending attempt to appear as “authentic,” “pure,” and “uncontaminated” from homosexual invasion and infringement, heterosexuality
erects heavily policed borders. Such borders are closely watched and carefully
defended because they are points of danger for one or the other or both identities involved (Johnson, 1997). Just imagine the anxiety, tension, and anger–even violence–which can be provoked by suggesting to a self-proclaimed
heterosexual man that he might be gay. But why such anxiety? I contend that
the source of anxiety and tension partly emanates from awareness that heterosexuality is fundamentally fragile.
“To overcome some constitutive sense of its own tenuousness,” argues Butler (1996), “heterosexuality has to re-elaborate itself, to ritualistically reproduce itself all over the place” (p. 114). Such incessant ritualistic reproduction
is an attempt to maintain the fiction of a stable heterosexuality. Calling it “the
heterosexual comedy,” Butler maintains that the heterosexual ideal, like other
sexual norms, is fragile and fundamentally comic. Elaborating on her notion of
comedy, she states,
If you say “I can only desire X,” what you’ve immediately done, in rendering desire exclusive, is created a whole set of positions which are unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I take it that one of
the essential aspects of comedy emerges when you end up actually occupying a position that you have just announced to be unthinkable. (Butler,
1996, p. 114)
In a sense, through the erection of boundaries, such as the articulation of one’s
exclusive desire for only members of a different sex and engagement in only
certain authorized erotic practices, a host of sexual possibilities are denied yet
immediately conjured up.
If heterosexuality is not independent and stable, then it must continuously re-affirm itself through repeated performance. Invoking her notion of performativity,
Butler (1993) points out that
. . . hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to
imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets
up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce
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and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that
heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully
overcome, that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain
of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender
to produce itself. (p. 125)
In short, heterosexuality, as an institution and identity, is caught up in an anxious and unending cycle of repetition compulsion.
Heterosexuality Is Not Monolithic. Although we are living in times of declaration and affirmation of diversity and difference, heterosexuality is still
generally treated as a monolithic and unitary concept (Crawford, 1993;
Eliason, 1995; Jackson, 1996, 1999; Smart, 1996a). As an institution, radical
lesbian feminists simply treat it as eroticized power (Jeffreys, 1990, 1994). Unlike marginalized sexual identities that are achieved after tremendous emotional
labor and immense personal struggle, heterosexuality is considered a “default
identity” achieved without much effort, thought, or struggle (Kitzinger &
Wilkinson, 1993b, p. 31). As such, heterosexual identities are unremarkable. As
a practice, heterosexuality, by locating itself inside Rubin’s (1984/1993, p. 13)
“charmed circle,” escapes analytical scrutiny. By ignoring that “heterosexuality may be many things” (Smart, 1996a, p. 170), the complexity of heterosexuality–as an institution, identity, practice, and experience–is disregarded.
There are reasons for overlooking the complexity of heterosexuality. Perhaps
the most important reason for such a move, Smart (1996a) argues, is that the
pluralisation [of heterosexuality] might appear as if it were trying to
evade the accusation of “holding” institutional power. It might seem
that, if we acknowledge heterosexualities, heterosexuals as a “class”
cannot be held responsible for heterosexism and homophobia and the
range of harms addressed to “other” sexualities. (p. 171)
This move is neither new nor unproblematic. For example, the classifications
of “white” and “people of color” are used to highlight material and structural
power differences in racialized and racist societies. Similarly, feminists used
to argue that gender division should be primary, while keeping other categories such as race and social class as secondary in an attempt to challenge sexism and patriarchal power. Such moves, however, tend to homogenize, ignore,
silence, and erase important differences from within and can lead to misleading hierarchies of oppression.
Heterosexuality, like other forms of human expression, is extremely complex. Heterosexuality is not merely sexual; it is social (VanEvery, 1996b). As
such, Jackson (1996, 1999) suggests that, to examine its complexities, four analytical domains should be considered: (1) Heterosexuality as an institution;
(2) heterosexuality as identity; (3) heterosexuality as practice; and (4) hetero-
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sexuality as experience. Although such domains obviously interconnect and
intersect, Jackson (1999) argues that they are useful analytical tools for debunking myths of monolithic heterosexuality.
As an institution, heterosexuality is rooted in gender hierarchy and manifested through its central mechanism, marriage (Jackson, 1996). Implicit in the
marriage contract is men’s appropriation and exploitation of women’s bodies
(e.g., sexual, reproductive) and labor (e.g., domestic, emotional) (Delphy &
Leonard, 1992). Through institutionalized heterosexuality, discourses and
representations of sex are articulated in phallocentric terms, that is, the positioning of women as sexual objects and men as sexual subjects (Jackson,
1996).
As an identity, heterosexuality tends to be unmarked and uncontested. It is a
“normal,” “taken-for-granted” and “default” identity and social location. Its
ordinariness represents a lack of reflection characteristic of the privilege of
power. However, many of the identities available to women (e.g., wife, girlfriend, mother, and daughter) come from heterosexual relations. Such identities shape, influence, and constrain how women and men operate and function
in the social world. For example, cultural conceptions of a “good wife” or
“good mother” create expectations and experiences and regulate women’s behavioral choices. Among feminists, heterosexual identities are more problematic. Exemplifying these struggles, Mary Gergen (1993), when asked to
contemplate her heterosexuality, wrote,
I . . . became aware that no one had ever actually called me a heterosexual
before. . . . Yet I don’t deny it; I do not murmur, “There must be some
mistake.” No, I do affirm some basic self-identification tag. . . . Then, my
reactions shifted to a mingled puzzlement, resentment, a slight annoyance. Why address me so categorically as a heterosexual? Why was anyone so sure? Because I am married? Or because my husband seems
“straight”? (p. 62)
While Gergen’s reaction is one of puzzlement, others are more defensive.
Take Sandra Bem’s, for example: “Although I have lived monogamously with
a man I love for over 26 years, I am not now and never have been a ‘heterosexual’ ” (1993, p. 50, my emphasis). Heterosexual identities, then, appear to be
highly contested among feminists (for a more detailed presentation of this debate, see Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993).
As a practice, heterosexuality involves behaviors and actions derived from
our current gender hierarchy. Such actions include domestic labor, emotional
work, and sexual behaviors. In her research on long-term domestic living arrangements, VanEvery (1996b) observes that men control and appropriate
women’s labor in most domestic situations. Male control is also found in committed antisexist living arrangements where a more egalitarian principle governed division of housework and child-rearing practices. Similarly, Holland
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and associates (1994) found that, in terms of sexual practice, sex is still defined
as “penetration for men’s pleasure in which women find fulfillment primarily
in the relationship, in giving pleasure” (p. 31).
As experience, heterosexuality is different for women and men. Jackson
(1996) points out that although practice and experience are closely interconnected, experience refers to the mental interpretations, emotional reactions,
and bodily sensations. However, physical experiences, such as sexual pleasure, are not simply “raw” bodily sensations; they are discursively mediated
through interpretive and sense making processes linking experience with practice. Holland et al. (1996), in their study of “first heterosex” (p. 145) experience for young women and men, found that discourses of first sexual
experiences are constructed in masculine terms. Unlike most young women
who enter their first experience of heterosexual intercourse already constituted
as “woman” (puberty marked by first menstruation), young men constitute
themselves as “man” through their first experience of heterosexual intercourse. In other words, a boy becomes a man through this event. While discourses of male sexual agency are defined through “doing,” discourses of
female sexual agency are notoriously absent. Holland and colleagues (1996)
elaborate,
“Proper sex” [is] widely defined as a specific version of heterosexual intercourse in which the man’s penis penetrates the woman’s vagina; it
starts with his arousal and finishes with his climax. “First sex” in this
embodied but fragmented guise is the young man’s moment. There is no
equivalent definition of the “sex act” in terms of female agency, action or
desire; her orgasm is his production. (p. 146, my emphasis)
In the limited, if not absent, discourses of female agency and desire, it is apparent that heterosexuality as experience is qualitatively–and dramatically–different for women and men.
In sum, heterosexuality is not monolithic. Because heterosexuality is
founded upon gender hierarchy, it systematically and structurally creates and
maintains the subordination of women. Therefore, it is critical to understand
the dynamics of heteropatriarchy.
Critiquing Heteropatriarchy
Heteropatriarchy is an overarching system of male dominance through the
institution of compulsory heterosexuality. In this section, I examine heteropatriarchy through its interlinkages and interconnections with gender, pleasure,
and whiteness.
Heterosexuality and Gender. Although there is disagreement about whether
sexuality or gender should be emphasized in the analysis of heterosexuality, researchers agree that heterosexuality and gender are inextricably linked (Ingraham,
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1996; Jackson, 1996, 1999; Jeffreys, 1996; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993b, 1994b;
Rubin, 1975; Wilton, 1996; Wittig, 1992). (For detailed analyses of the link between gender and sexuality, see Butler [1990, 1993], and the connection between heterosexuality and gender, see Ingraham [1996] and Jackson [1999].)
Heterosexuality, by its very definition, reinstalls and reaffirms gender division. Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1994b) point out that “ ‘hetero’ means other,
different; ‘heterosexuality’ means sexual involvement with one who is other,
one who is different–man with woman, woman with man. The otherness of the
‘other’ sex, the ‘differentness’ of man from woman, is thereby immediately reinforced” (p. 444). Through this relation of otherness, a naturalized polarity and
binarism–a “heteropolarity” (Wilton, 1996, p. 127)–is created. Heteropolarity is
a social construction founded upon a presumed complementarity between
women and men (the “natural fit” between penis and vagina). Heteropolarity
permeates scientific and popular discourse; people uncritically speak about the
“opposite sex” when “there is no biological or somatic sense in which the bodies
of women can be understood as opposite to the bodies of men” (Wilton, 1996,
p. 126). Yet this discourse is critical for the maintenance of heterosexuality and
heteropatriarchy. Wilton (1996) further explains: “This heteropolarity is necessary for patriarchy, for it must be possible to distinguish men from women in
order to institute and reproduce a power differential that is (precisely) predicated upon that difference” (p. 127). Thus, a social hierarchy, based on gender
to secure male domination and female submission, is maintained as a fundamental feature of social life.
Through the “heterosexual contract,” women are constituted as “real” women
and men as “real” men (Wittig, 1992, p. 44). In modern Western societies, being a
“real” woman means declaring oneself as heterosexual and engaging in heterosexual sexual activity (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1994b). Similarly, being a
“real” man means maintaining a reputation of an able performer in heterosexual sex (Holland et al., 1996). Through the policing and shaming of sexuality,
gender is regulated. From this perspective, lesbians are not proper women and
gay men are failed men (Wilton, 1996).
By reinscribing the male/female division as fundamental and producing a
gender hierarchy at the sexual and social levels, institutionalized heterosexuality arrogates women’s bodies and labors (Delphy & Leonard, 1992; Jackson,
1996, 1999). Grounded in a materialist-feminist perspective, Ingraham (1996)
calls for the exposure and debunking of the “heterosexual imaginary,” that is, a
way of thinking that masks and conceals how heterosexuality structures gender and forecloses critical analysis of itself as an institution. Ingraham uses the
notion of heterogender to reframe gender and to highlight its relationship to
heterosexuality. Heterogender challenges and de-naturalizes the “sexual” as
the beginning point for unpacking heterosexuality by linking heterosexuality,
as an institution, with the gender division of labor, distribution of resources,
and the patriarchal relations of production. By focusing on heterosexuality and
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heterogender, Ingraham (1996) argues, “we focus on one of the primary roots
of exploitation and oppression rather than on one of the symptoms” (p. 187).
Heterosexuality and Pleasure. As I noted earlier, sex is defined in terms of
the “penetrative norm” (Jackson, 1999, p. 145), a genitally focused activity in
which the man’s penis penetrates the woman’s vagina. This script for sex and
sexual pleasure is defined by and for men. Although penetration occupies a
privileged place in heterosexual sexual relations, it does not necessarily signify the invasion and subjugation of women’s bodies. Because “men penetrate
men, women penetrate women and women can penetrate men,” Smart (1996b,
p. 236) writes,
This diversity of practices allows penetration to have various meanings,
not the exclusive meaning of dominance and subordination which is endlessly mapped onto the binary of male and female. Wrenching penetration out of a heterosexual matrix of meanings deprives it of its symbolic
power.
Although the possibility of re-coding heterosexual sex as a broader scope of
desires, acts, and practices appears promising, the potential for re-signifying
penetrative sex, in our current cultural landscape, is limited. Jackson (1999)
observes,
Even in consensual sex, most straight men are decidedly queasy about
the very idea of being penetrated. The unease and revulsion this activity
provokes is precisely because it is generally still read within the “heterosexual matrix of meanings.” For most straight men being fucked means
being “unmanned.” Most are not particularly receptive, either, to the idea
of giving up the idea that sex with women equates with penetrating them.
(p. 172)
Even for “queer-identified” heterosexual men, penetration is not an option
(Thomas, 2000; Thomas & MacGillivray, 2000). A penetrable body is a vulnerable body; to be penetrated is to relinquish power (Bersani, 1988; Robinson, 2000).
The limited conceptions of heterosexual pleasure are connected to gender.
This is hardly surprising: Under heteropatriarchy, the language of eroticism is
man’s language (Frye, 1990). Although there is language for erotic pleasure in
literary contexts, everyday discourses of female sexual agency and female sexual pleasure are largely absent (Holland et al., 1994, 1996; Jackson, 1999). The
same is true for lesbian sex. Although Frye (1990) is optimistic that a vocabulary of pleasure and sex, a language for “doing it” (p. 314), will emerge among
lesbians, she points out that a lexicon for lesbian sex is “utterly inarticulate”
(p. 311). In contrast, a diverse language is available to gay men to express and
articulate their sexual desires, pleasures, acts, and practices. In short, women
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in general, and heterosexual ones in particular, do not have an adequate language to assert, articulate, and share their pleasures.
Heterosexuality and Whiteness. It is apparent that an examination of heterosexuality produces parallel and analogous findings to investigation of whiteness. I am using whiteness to refer to a “historical systemic structural race-based
superiority” (Wander, Martin, & Nakayama, 1999, p. 15) which produces a racial subject that is “privileged, normalized, deified, and raceless” (Johnson,
1999, p. 1). Both heterosexuality and whiteness are everywhere and strategically invisible, universalized, naturalized, and taken for granted, seemingly
formless, shapeless, and without content, and normalized to evade theoretical
scrutiny and critical analysis. Heterosexuality and whiteness appear as the
very air we breathe, “the stuff that creates us with no reminder that it is doing
so” (Stokes, 2001, p. 14, my emphasis), thus underscoring their normalizing
and self-generating power. Observing the similarities between heterosexuality
and whiteness, Smart (1996a) points out that heterosexual identity is “akin to a
white colonial identity. It entails an effortless superiority, a moral rectitude, a
defeat of the emotional and the neurotic by the power of unconscious struggle
and, of course, the certain knowledge of masculine superiority” (p. 173).
However, a closer examination of heterosexuality and whiteness reveals
that their relationship is deeply ambivalent and eminently troubled: Heterosexuality is simultaneously the means of ensuring and the site of endangering the
reproduction and perpetuation of whiteness (Dyer, 1997; Stokes, 2001). On
the one hand, heterosexuality is absolutely indispensable for the reproduction
of whiteness; on the other, it is also the mechanism through which whiteness
can annihilate itself (Dyer, 1997). In this sense, heterosexuality makes the reproduction of whiteness unstable. Such an unstable mixture of excitement and
horror results in a compulsive imagining of interracial sex (Ferber, 1998;
Stokes, 2001; Young, 1995). In the process, white women
become silent markers in the systems of exchange that make both whiteness and heterosexuality cultural givens. Simultaneously imagined as
the key to whiteness’s future and its weakest defense, white women enable whiteness at the same time that they are denied its fruits. They make
it possible, yet are kept from the fullness of its franchise, given their status as women in the always patriarchal shape that whiteness assumes.
(Stokes, 2001, p. 17)
Once again, gender becomes inextricably linked to sexuality in the ongoing
tension and struggle between heterosexuality and whiteness to reproduce and
sustain a white heteropatriarchy–a self-evident standard against which all differences are measured.
Using the concept of healing from the violence of heteronormativity, I presented two interrelated approaches to demystify its invisible power. First, in
the process of unpacking heteronormativity, I discussed the historical, unsta-
I. Research and Interventions
35
ble, and multidimensional character of the institution, identity, practice, and
experience of heterosexuality. Second, in the critique of heteropatriarchy, I explored the relationship between heterosexuality and gender, heterosexuality
and pleasure, and heterosexuality and whiteness. In the next section, I explore
potential ways to disentangle and liberate our bodies, psyches, and souls from
the tyranny of heteronormativity.
QUEER WORLD-MAKING:
THE PROMISES AND CHALLENGES OF QUEER THEORY
The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of
acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes,
blockages, incommensurate geographies. World making, as much in the
mode of dirty talk as of print-mediated representation, is dispersed
through incommensurate registers, by definition unrealizable as community or identity.
–Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (in Warner, 2002, p. 198)
Queer world-making is the opening and creation of spaces without a map, the
invention and proliferation of ideas without an unchanging and predetermined
goal, and the expansion of individual freedom and collective possibilities without the constraints of suffocating identities and restrictive membership. In this
section, I offer some inchoate ideas for such an exciting endeavor. More specifically, I (a) discuss the proliferation of queer, (b) sketch the evolving conceptual terrain of queer theory, and (c) identify some of the challenges for
queer theory in its second decade of existence.
The Proliferation of Queer
Originally used as slang for homosexual and a homophobic epithet, “queer,”
has, in recent years, been re-appropriated in popular culture and academic discourse. Queer can signify self-identified culturally marginal individuals of
various sexualities and/or describe an emerging and fluid theoretical model
that has evolved and developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies
(de Lauretis, 1991; Jagose, 1996).
Although seemingly simple, the term “queer” is actually astonishingly
complex and fairly perplexing (Anzaldúa, 2000; Clarke, 1994; Jakobsen, 1998).
It is a category in the process of forming and becoming without predetermined
or final borders; it is conceptually elastic, unrestrained, and open-ended
(Jagose, 1996). Given that the category of “queer” is never closed, how can it
be defined? In a true sense, it cannot. However, I identify some common con-
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ceptions that circulate around the term. In an interview, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contends that one of the interesting features of the word “queer”
is that it isn’t up to one person to define. Any word like that represents a
very contested site, and “queer” does so in some especially interesting
ways, partly because it started out as a pejorative term and has been consciously reclaimed as an honorific term; partly because it’s an experiment–not the first experiment–with finding a non-gender-specific name
for a variety of sexual experiences and practices. Part of what interests
me a lot about it is that in reclaiming the term, I don’t think that what’s
being done is to disavow a lot of the negative stereotypes associated with
it, but rather reinhabit them in different ways. (Chinn, DiGangi, &
Horrigan, 1992, pp. 80-81)
She further points out that “there are a lot of people that are gay that aren’t
queer . . . [and] there are probably a lot of people that are truly queer that aren’t
gay” (Chinn et al., 1992, p. 81).
Kumashiro (2002) identifies two ways in which he uses the term. In a narrow sense, “queer” is intended to mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited,
transgender, intersexed, questioning, or different because of one’s sexual orientation, presentation, or identity. Although intended to be fairly narrow, the
designation is, in reality, capacious and deliberately inclusive. In a broader
sense, “queer” signifies nonnormativity. Agreeing with Warner (1993, 1999),
Butler (1993), Seidman (1996, 1997), Kumashiro (2002), and Clarke (1994),
Parker (1994) contends that “queerness takes its bearings in defining itself
against normativity, not heterosexuality; given the fact that heterosexuality is
nothing if not normative” (p. 55). Halperin (1995) extends it beyond normative
heterosexuality:
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily
refers. . . . [It] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the
normative. . . . [It] does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility
whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. (p. 62, emphasis in the original)
Imagining the possibilities of queer-world making, Halperin (1995) further
explains,
It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it
may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering
the relations among sexual behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of
gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of represen-
I. Research and Interventions
37
tation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community–for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire. (p. 62)
Based upon these common conceptions, “queer” can and does coexist with
terms such as “lesbian” and “gay”; however, they are not interchangeable with
one another (Jagose, 1996; Parker, 1994). Next, I turn to discuss the emerging
and fluid theoretical model–queer theory–that I alluded to earlier.
Sketches of the Evolving Conceptual Terrain of Queer Theory
Initially coined by Teresa de Lauretis in 1990, queer theory is a relatively
recent academic and cultural phenomenon (Halperin, 1995; Turner, 2000).
Heavily influenced by poststructuralism, queer theory entered the academy, through a variety of disciplines in the humanities (such as English,
film studies, and cultural studies), education, and social sciences (such as
sociology), in the 1990s (Dilley, 1999; Hennessy, 2000; Namaste, 2000;
Seidman, 1996; Turner, 2000). According to de Lauretis, “‘queer theory’ conveys a double emphasis–on the conceptual and speculative work involved in
discourse production, and on the necessary critical work of deconstructing our
own discourses and their constructed silences” (1991, p. iv, my emphasis). To
put it another way, queer theory is guided by a significant deconstructive impulse.
Originating from, developed in, and distancing itself from conventional lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and its predecessor have overlapping but distinctively different theoretical and political goals, neither one of which is
necessarily superior to or more inclusive than the other (Berlant & Warner,
1995). Departing from the “gay ‘ethnic’ identity” model of homosexuality (Epstein, 1990, p. 285) and inspired by the radical, confrontational, “in-your-face”
queer politics of activist groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation, queer theory is characterized by a transgressive agenda and a rebellious spirit. As such,
queer theory challenges the assumption of the unified homosexual subject undergirding much of Western homophobic and gay-affirmative theory (for a detailed account of this assumption, see Epstein, 1990; Seidman, 1996, 1997). A
unified homosexual subject reproduces the homo/heterosexual binary, as
Seidman (1996) explains,
Modern Western affirmative homosexual theory may naturalize or normalize the gay subject or even register it as an agent of social liberation,
but it has the effect of consolidating heterosexuality and homosexuality
as master categories of sexual and social identity; it reinforces the modern regime of sexuality. (p. 12, my emphasis)
As I argue throughout the essay, this regime of sexuality based on the
homo/heterosexual binary becomes injurious and violent to individuals and
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QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
communities through the workings of heteronormativity. Recognizing normalization as a site of violence, Seidman (1996, pp. 12-13) points out that
Queer theory wishes to challenge the regime of sexuality itself, that is,
the knowledges that construct the self as sexual and that assume heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories marking the truth of sexual
selves. . . . Queer theorists view heterosexuality and homosexuality not
simply as identities or social statuses but as categories of knowledge, a
language that frames what we know as bodies, desires, sexualities, identities. This is a normative language as it shapes moral boundaries and political hierarchies.
In the process, queer theory calls for a dramatic shift from lesbian and gay
assimilationist politics to a politics of difference (Slagle, 1995). Seidman
(1996) further explains,
Queer theorists shift their focus from an exclusive preoccupation with
the oppression and liberation of the homosexual subject to an analysis of
the institutional practices and discourses producing sexual knowledges
and the ways they organize social life, attending in particular to the way
these knowledges and social practices repress differences. . . . [In short],
queer theory aspires to transform homosexual theory into a general social theory or one standpoint from which to analyze social dynamics.
(p. 13, my emphasis)
As such, queer theory does not aspire to attain theoretical hegemony or domination in cultural politics. Rather, queer theory provides another view, another
discursive horizon, and another perspective from which social relations can be
analyzed and examined.
Because it is an open system, queer theory is neither a singular nor a determinate body of ideas (Berlant & Warner, 1995; Halperin, 1995; Jagose, 1996).
As such, it is not a traditional theory that can be described and explicated in
propositional form. Queer theory, then, is more about an open system of discursive and conceptual possibilities than a rigid and fixed theoretical model.
If queer theory refuses to be normalized (Butler, 1994) or fixed (Jagose,
1996), how can I provide a descriptive overview that does not impinge on its
conceptual possibilities? In a literal sense, I cannot. At the expense of potentially domesticating and foreclosing queer theory, and for purposes of discussion, I chart its current conceptual landscape. To accomplish this, I attempt to
map its conceptual mobility and sketch some of its evolving conceptual
spaces: (1) Contesting categories; (2) contesting identity; and (3) contesting
liberalism.
Contesting Categories. Influenced by Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and
many others, queer theory is particularly suspicious of sexual categories. Ho-
I. Research and Interventions
39
mosexuality and heterosexuality are master sexual categories in the sexual regime of the modern West. But how does a sexual category come to be, what
does it entail, and how does it function in a social and cultural landscape?
In his pioneering work on homosexuality as a category, Plummer (1981/
1998) poses four critical questions. What is the nature of the homosexual category? When and how did those categories emerge? How do they come to be
bestowed upon certain practices, behaviors, and individuals? What kind of impact do these categories have on people once bestowed? When analyzing how
the homosexual category comes to being, Plummer, drawing from earlier research, wonders how engagement in same-sex sexual activity, suspicion of
one’s homosexuality, and labeling oneself as homosexual come together. For
example, does the act of engaging in same-sex activity lead to labeling oneself
as fitting the homosexual category? Or, does a suspicion of one’s homosexuality lead to a homosexual label, and does such a label necessarily include sexual
activity? To understand such complexities, Plummer (1981/1998) calls for historically situated, culture-specific, and localized analysis of the meanings and
politics underlying such category constructions and deployment.
Following a historical analysis, Halperin (1990) poses the question of
equivalence. Can the category of the modern homosexual be meaningfully applied to a Greek adult who is married and regularly enjoys sexually penetrating
male adolescents? Can the same modern category be applied to a Native
American berdache, an adult male who has adopted many female characteristics since childhood and is married to an adult male in a public and socially
sanctioned ceremony? It is evident from this discussion that the category of the
modern homosexual has limited conceptual space and cannot be meaningfully
used transhistorically or cross-culturally.
Underlying the suspicion about categories is power: Sexuality–and its accompanying discourses and knowledge systems–is the mechanism through
which power is exercised (Foucault, 1978/1990). In addition, categories are
rarely conceptually sealed. As such, categories leak, ooze, and bleed, and one
of the aims of queer theory is to articulate the problems and leakages of identity categories.
Contesting Identity. Since early liberation movements, particularly the civil
rights, women’s, and gay and lesbian liberation movements, members of excluded groups–ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians–have demanded
inclusion in U.S. society and politics by arguing that they possess “the characteristics that allowed white men to govern themselves–that they were fully persons” (Turner, 2000, p. 11). Such a move depends on claims about identity,
that is, a sense of recognition and solidarity based on shared characteristics
(Ryan, 2001). Although initially conceived in terms of a liberation politics
aimed at freeing people who are locked into homo/heterosexual and feminine/masculine roles, the lesbian and gay movement became increasingly interested in community building and gaining civil rights by adopting the ethnic
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model in the mid-1970s (Seidman, 1993). Thus, a unified homosexual subject–a stable gay identity–emerged.
A unitary gay identity created visible and commodified lesbian and gay urban communities. Gay culture became mainstreamed and through this process,
a new hierarchy emerged with white, middle-class, able-bodied gay men at the
top (Seidman, 1997). Women, people of color, transgenders, working-class individuals became increasingly alienated and started interrogating the viability of
a gay identity that marginalized, and, in some cases, erased their subjectivities
and excluded their participation (Anzaldúa, 2000; Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; Lorde, 1984; Seidman, 1997). In addition, individuals who
engaged in certain erotic practices, such as leather and sadomasochism, also
found themselves marginalized by the mainstream gay community (Seidman,
1997). The question “Is and should sexual object choice be the most significant
basis for community?” was debated among different individuals and groups
within ethnic, gender, and sexual minority communities (see, for example,
Anzaldúa, 2000; Brandt, 1999; Clausen, 1990; Lorde, 1984; Moraga &
Anzaldúa, 1983; Smith, 1998; Vance, 1984).
Queer theory attempts to destabilize identity categories, which, according
to Butler (1990), are instruments of regulatory systems, whether as the normalizing labels of oppressive regimes or as the connecting points to fight against
that very oppression. Identities can be used to affirm and pathologize. Even in
cases of affirmation and connection, identities, if allowed to stabilize, can constrain and limit the experiences and choices available to the individual
(Foucault, 1989). For example, in their study of “bareback sex,” or the deliberate practice of unprotected anal intercourse among gay men, Yep, Lovaas, and
Pagonis (2002) found that gay sexual identities are paradoxical as they simultaneously connect and constrain individual wishes, experiences, and desires.
Queer identity is an identity with an essence (Halperin, 1995). Sedgwick
suggests that it is an auto-descriptive term of self-identification that calls into
question conventional understandings of sexual identity, and its ambiguity
serves as a site of mobilization against regimes of the normal (Chinn, DiGangi,
& Horrigan, 1992). Responding to what it means to write or speak by invoking
a lesbian identity, Butler (1991) states,
. . . I am skeptical about how the “I” is determined as it operates under the
title of the lesbian sign, and I am no more comfortable with its homophobic determination than with those normative definitions offered by other
members of the “gay and lesbian community” . . . . This is not to say that I
will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I
would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies. (p. 14, my emphasis)
To leave the meanings of a sexual identity continuously open for re-signification and negotiation is to destabilize such identity permanently. Echoing the
I. Research and Interventions
41
sentiments of other queer theorists, Butler (1991, p. 14) writes, “I’m permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary
trouble.”
Contesting Liberalism. Queer theory, paradoxically, relies on and critiques
twentieth century U.S. liberalism (Turner, 2000). For example, on the one
hand, it depends on the commitment of liberalism to free inquiry and expression. On the other hand, the model of free, rational persons developing, forming, and participating in political institutions to guarantee liberty for all has not
been a very accurate picture for sexual minorities and other marginalized individuals as they have been mostly excluded from such processes and levers of
power. Queer theorists believe that the present system is not working and to insure equal rights and treatment for such groups, there is a need to rethink the
current system of social organization, identities, and power distribution
(Turner, 2000).
Living and Embodying Queer Theory: Some Challenges
Queer theory, Crimp (2002) writes, “cannot, however, be counted an unqualified success” (p. 289). As an evolving perspective and a vantage point
from which to examine social relations, queer theory is facing some imminent
challenges. These are both theoretical and pragmatic. In my view, there are
four theoretical challenges that queer theory needs to engage with as it grows,
evolves, and transforms; they are questions of race, gender, class, and
transnationalism. At the level of praxis, I contend that there are at least two potential areas of engagement: Queer theory as embodied practice and queer theory and social change.
Race Problems. Although the broad umbrella of “queer” may appear to include queers of all races and social classes, it is a misleading façade (Anzaldúa,
1991; Johnson, 2001). Calling it a “queer blind spot,” Muñoz (1999) observes,
Most of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed toward analyzing white lesbians and gay
men. The lack of inclusion is most certainly not the main problem with
the treatment of race. . . . When race is discussed by most white queer
theorists, it is usually a contained reading of an artist of color that does
not factor questions of race into the entirety of their project. (p. 10, my
emphasis)
In light of this situation, Muñoz offers the notion of disindentifications as a
lens to interpret minoritarian politics based on interlocking components of
race, class, gender, and sexuality and discusses how such components affect
the social.
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QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
Focusing on a critique of stable conceptions of identity and committed to
racialized and class knowledges, Johnson (2001) introduces quare theory. He
explains,
Quare studies . . . would not only critique the concept of “race” as historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed/performed, it
would also address the material effects of race in a white supremacist society. . . . As a “theory of the flesh” quare necessarily engenders a kind of
identity politics, one that acknowledges difference within and between
particular groups. Thus, identity politics does not necessarily mean the
reduction of multiple identities into a monolithic identity or narrow cultural nationalism. Rather, quare studies moves beyond simply theorizing
subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that
mediation may propel material bodies into action. (p. 9)
Both disindentifications and quare theory appear productive points of engagement with mainstream queer theory about racialized knowledges and experiences. (For a more detailed explanation of these approaches, see Johnson
[2001] and Muñoz [1999].)
Gender Trouble. As a non-gender-specific term, “queer” appears inclusive
of all genders. However, such terminological breaks can be read as reactionary
and potentially dangerous (Thomas, 2000). Under a non-gender specific umbrella, Jeffreys (1997) is concerned about the disappearance of the lesbian and
denial of lesbian oppression under patriarchy and heteronormativity. Similarly, Wolfe and Penelope (1993) contend that destabilization of identity categories, a typical move in queer analysis, leads to lesbian erasure. They write,
We [cannot] afford to allow privileged patriarchal discourse (of which
poststructuralism is but a new variant) to erase the collective identity
Lesbians have only recently begun to establish. . . . For what has in fact
resulted from the incorporation of deconstructive discourse, in academic
“feminist” discourse at least, is that the word Lesbian has been placed in
quotation marks, whether used or mentioned, and the existence of real
Lesbians has been denied, once again. (p. 3)
Given the history that “gay,” as a label, came to signify male homosexuality in
a number of contexts, the concern that “queer” might become a male generic is
certainly not unwarranted.
Queer theory is also guilty of transgender erasure. Namaste (2000), for example, argues that queer theory, with its focus on performativity, fails to take
into account the context in which gender performances occur. She points out
that Butler’s drag queens perform in gay male cultural spaces and reduces drag
to something a person does on stage rather than a person who is. In addition,
queer theory ignores the material realities, the lived experiences and the
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subjectivities of transgendered people. Elliot and Roen (1998) call for the development and articulation of transgender theories, that is, ideas and assertions
that inform and are informed by transgender political movements and articulated by transgenderists.
Queer theory is committed to the deconstruction of gender and sexual categories. Engagement with the social context and the material realities associated with gender performance under heteropatriarchy would diminish the
danger of excluding, erasing, and othering genders that are not male.
Class Dismissal. According to Anzaldúa (2000), “queer” was a working-class word that has been taken over by academics. In south Texas, the
word is used to signify “sexual difference,” someone who was sexually different. Although the seemingly unifying rubric of “queer” appears to include
queers of all social classes, the term itself tends to homogenize and erase differences (Anzaldúa, 1991). As such, middle-class values are promoted and
working-class subjectivities are stifled and suppressed. Johnson (2001) offers
quare theory, as a framework for understanding the racial and class diversity
within queer communities of color and an embodied practice of resistance, as a
potentially productive engagement with class subjectivities and material realities.
Transnational, Diasporic, and Hybrid Queer. As technology re-maps notions of distance and re-draws territories, globalization dramatically shifts the
sense of what is local (Altman, 2001). As a result, queerness is now global
(Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002; Grewal & Kaplan, 2002). From forced
prostitution to sex tourism to cybersex, sex is now commercialized in new
ways as politics, economy, migration, languages, bodies, pleasures, and power
come together in “real” and virtual spaces. Through this process of intermingling, new hybridities are created, new identities are negotiated, and new
meanings for sexual, diasporic, and transnational experiences emerge. In spite
of its tendency to reduce queer sexualities and cultures to a commodity exchangeable in the marketplace, globalization has created and expanded the terrain for intervention and negotiation over sexual meanings and the struggle for
queer rights (Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002). Although some work has already started to examine these complexities (see, for example, Altman, 2001;
Cantú, 2002; Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002; Giorgi, 2002; Hawley, 2001;
Kantsa, 2002; La Fountain-Stokes, 2002; Luongo, 2002; Markwell, 2002;
Patton, & Sánchez-Eppler, 2000; Puar, 2002; Quiroga, 2000; Rofel, 1999;
Rushbrook, 2002), this area of theoretical and pragmatic intervention appears,
in my view, extremely productive.
Queer Theory as Embodied Practice. By focusing on the unstable character
of sexual and gender identities, Butler (1990) suggests that certain embodied
practices, such as drag and cross-dressing, can be used to highlight the
performative aspects of gender and sexuality. Through such performances,
gender and sexuality are denaturalized and exposed: “In imitating gender, drag
implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself–as well as its contin-
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gency” (Butler, 1990, p. 137). Recognizing that parodies by themselves are not
necessarily subversive, Butler calls for ways to understand and enact certain
types of parodic repetitions that can effectively disrupt and destabilize naturalized categories of identity and desire.
But do such parodies and subversive performances transform and change
the heteronormative regime? There is considerable disagreement on this point.
Some scholars insist that we need to return to the material consequences of
gestures and practices that challenge heteronormativity. For example, Jackson
(1999) argues for the need to re-focus on structural inequalities based on gender. Hennessy (2000) calls for an analysis between late capitalism, labor, and
commodification of sexual identities.
Another area of embodiment is, of course, the domain of erotic practices.
Jackson (1999) argues that the idea of “queering sexual practices”–that is,
making them innovative and nonnormative–has little political effect. Foucault
(1989) might disagree. Using the example of sadomasochism (S/M) as the real
invention of new avenues and possibilities of erotic pleasure, Foucault debunks popular beliefs about the association of S/M with deep-seated psychological violence and aggression. He argues that individuals who engage in S/M
“are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their
body–through the eroticization of the body” (Foucault, 1989, p. 384). He elaborates,
. . . the S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, but
it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles but everybody knows very
well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with
the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. Or,
even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a
game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either
explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting. But I wouldn’t say that it is a reproduction, inside the erotic relationship, of the
structures of power. It is an acting out of power structures by a strategic
game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure. (Foucault,
1989, pp. 387-388)
Contrary to heterosexual relationships where strategic relations, such as pursuit, conquest, or flight, are played out before sex to obtain sex, S/M practices
are played out within sex (Foucault, 1989). In this sense, S/M practices are
transgressive. Proposing a “queer praxis” through “the transformative potential of queer sex” (Halperin, 1995, p. 86), Foucault suggests that S/M practices,
for example, radically re-map and re-orient sites of eroticism and pleasure in
the body. This re-mapping of the erogenous zones extends beyond priv…