Gay Studies

By the 1980s, gay studies came to a critical turning point. Its achievements were clear: A body of theory had emerged that legitimized nonreproductive sexualities, locating sexual desire in politically marginalized yet physically expressive bodies, and exploring how those bodies operated, or were operated upon, within repressive political climates. But if placing gay and lesbian bodies in opposition to marital and economic norms offered the pleasures of subversion and righteous indignation, it also doomed them to permanent pariah status. Moreover, there was a growing awareness that gay studies, like the earlier disciplines it critiques, risked producing its own essentialized core gender identities, based upon a naturalized gay identity that still perceived anatomy and biology as inescapable. Missing from these formulations were the often polymorphous forms of gender identity and polyamorous quality of desire. The AIDS crisis, which took its toll throughout the 1980s to Reaganite-Thatcherite indifference, also fueled calls for a new, more radical politics. Queer theory responded by abandoning the neo-Marxism and social activism of gay rights, and built upon Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978–1984) and literary poststructuralism to argue that both sexuality and gender are social constructions produced within specific historical contexts. Queer social constructionism decouples sexuality from gender, abandoning any notion of sexual orientation as biologically determined. Male and female are no longer biological polarities but malleable constructs, and thus gender and sexuality (straight or gay) no longer automatically follow from one another. Sexual desire is not perceived as fixed and inherent in the body, but as a culturally created response that may or may not be related to a fixed social identity. Incorporating all categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and even voluntary heterosexual desire, "queer," by having no definitive "Other" to mobilize against, represents everything and nothing, and posits a suprademocratic category through which identities—of class and race as well—can radically hybridize and transform.

The same intellectual ferment that began to define gay as retrogressive and queer as politically progressive inspired a new academic vocabulary. The word homophobia, for example, came under new scrutiny in the mid-1980s. Though it astutely characterized sexual bigotry as a passively received mass neurosis and not a moral choice, Weinberg's term was now seen as etymologically illogical, literally meaning a fear of sameness but figuratively suggesting a fear of otherness. Homophobia was replaced with heterosexism, emphasizing not a special "phobia" but a chauvinism as banally evil as sexism or racism. Heteronormative, popularized by queer theorist Michael Warner in the early 1990s, moves beyond heterosexism's critique of mere prejudice to challenge the ways patriarchy—especially the patriarchy implicit in late global capitalism—normalizes essential gender identity and punishes all nonheterosexual conduct. Perhaps most influential is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's neologism homosocial, introduced in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), which argues that heterosexual social institutions, particularly marriage, have historically used women to triangulate and transmit male bonds that, while not actually homosexual, transitively accrue ambiguous homoerotic meanings. After much overuse, however, the parameters of homosociality have become (perhaps deliberately) vague, and there is a tendency to overoptimistically describe all same-sex, homosocial institutions—schools, prisons, monasteries, and so on—as fertile breeding grounds for imagined or potential homosexualities, regardless of those environments' coercive or insular qualities.

More recently, theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have linked queer and postcolonial arguments to investigate how, even in the postmodern world of hybrids and multiple subjectivities, Asian and African nation-states continue to regulate sexual identity and suppress female agency in accordance with colonialist mentalities that they, in a postcolonial era, have failed to progress beyond, and often unwittingly internalize. Most radical has been Judith Butler, whose notion of "performativity," first introduced in Gender Trouble (1990) and later refined in Bodies That Matter (1993), maintains that gender is not simply a construct into which humans are historically delivered, but is a mask, a controllable, conscious act of mimicry, parody, and self-parody, as best represented in drag performance. After Butler, however, queer theory's drive to reimagine sexuality without boundaries or definitions seemed to reach an impasse. One emergent critique sees the elegant philosophical games and abstruse language of authors such as Butler and Spivak as elitist, and questioned whether such texts can be effective political tools for inspiring large-scale cultural change. Some authors even question the concept of Butlerian performativity, dismissing it as stylistic gamesmanship. While queer theorists might argue that questions of rhetoric and performance are key to sociopolitical norms and thus to their transformation, the critique of queer theory as elitist and jargon-filled has nonetheless been widely perceived as justified. Some gay scholars have, in response, recast queer theory in more populist terms, as does Warner in The Trouble with Normal (2000), in which he suggests that by seeking marriage rights, gays and lesbians misguidedly try to legitimatize their sexualities through an oppressively monogamous, proprietary, shame-based institution that forbids constructions of freer sexuality.

As national debates about gay marriage and civil rights continue, the gay identity politics queer postmodernism hoped to replace are making a resurgence. Recent years have seen a slightly less radical interpretation of queerness, which, lest it unintentionally reproduce an intolerant, authoritarian voice within queer communities, should also potentially include identity-based gay activism and oppositional lesbian feminism.

Indeed, as increased gay/queer visibility in film, television, and other popular media has only inflamed the fears of social conservatives, a diversified strategy of neopragmatic gay activism and utopian queer theory may be necessary to neutralize prejudices ingrained throughout the centuries.