Queer Theory

Social Justice Usage

Source: Barnett, Joshua Trey, and Corey W. Johnson. “Queer.” Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice, Sherwood Thomson (ed.). Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 581–582.

Queer theory functions to complicate existing academic frameworks, and conceptions of social relations, by deconstructing the dominant, heteronormative structures undergirding extant scholarship (Marinucci, 2010). One theoretical strategy relies on an insistence on the social construction of gender and sexuality (see Butler, 1990). Theories of social construction claim that human identities are not inherent or essential (that is, having an essence), but rather emerge out of social relations and discourse. In Butler’s (1990) work, she understands gender as produced through repetitive practices of personal and social practices. In other words, one’s gender does not exist a priori discourse, but instead is constructed by characteristics and experiences. At the base of social constructionist theories is the assumption that, since identities are constructed, they can always be constructed otherwise.

Queer theory also offers the opportunity to rethink or reimagine normative or dominant dis- course “queerly.” Intellectual labor of this sort requires scholars to transpose queer ideas of identity formation and social relations to texts that might otherwise be taken for granted as part of the dominant sex-gender-sexuality matrix. For instance, one might imagine that two women in a mainstream magazine advertisement are lovers and then consider the social and political import of such a reading.

New Discourses Commentary

Queer Theory is one of the major branches of thought within the Theory of Critical Social Justice, one that is particularly interested in, though not limited to, issues of sex, gender, and sexuality. In that sense, it is one of the key contemporary critical theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, it is one of the handful of specific and activist-driven approaches to Theory collectively labeled “applied postmodernism.”

Queer Theory is, in many respects, the most purely postmodern derivative of Theory (as compared, say, to critical race Theory, which is much more significantly critical, i.e., Neo-Marxist, in orientation, relatively speaking). That is because queer Theory owes a great deal very specifically to the French postmodern (or, poststructuralist) philosophers Michel Foucault (see also, Foucauldian) and Jacques Derrida (see also, Derridean). Foucault’s relevance is of such central importance not least because of his attempts to address the power dynamics and social constructions around homosexuality throughout history and madness in his History of Sexuality and History of Madness (see also, discourses, power-knowledge, biopower, and episteme).

Queer Theory exists, in a nutshell, to antagonize norms, normativity, and the normal—that is, anything that can be considered normal by society (even in accurate, neutral description) and thus that carries or can be construed to imply a morally normative expectation about it, which it deems intrinsically oppressive. This attitude is probably most clearly understood in the binary dichotomy “normal” versus “abnormal,” noting that there is a relatively positive connotation to “normal” as compared to a relatively negative connotation to “abnormal.” Considering ways that society tends to expect one’s behavior to be within certain bounds of “normalcy,” and everything falling outside of that is “abnormal,” “perverted,” or “crazy,” may clarify this understanding. Queer Theory wouldn’t merely seek to expand the boundaries of “normal” to include circumstances like homosexuality or, stretching the idea further, intersex conditions but to abolish the idea that “normal” is anything but constraining and oppressive entirely (see also, violence of categorization).

Queer Theory seems to deliberately confuse anything that is descriptively normal, in the sense of being commonplace, e.g., heterosexuality or the sexual binary, with that automatically carrying an implication that any variation from that sense of falling within the general norm must be understood pejoratively and seen as somehow illegitimate. It views society has carrying strong expectations, if not requirements, for people to fall within the “normal” range and not to be “abnormal” in any way, and sees these expectations as a central application of dominance to create oppression. This intentional conflation of “normal” in a descriptive sense and “normal” in a moral (normative) sense is the centerpiece of queer Theory, and because there are both reasonable and unreasonable, fair and unfair applications of normativity as a result of descriptive normalness, it has been and remains relatively easy for queer Theory to keep muddying this water for its own activist purposes. (Indeed, this it often says it is doing intentionally as its own form of activism, sometimes called “queering.”)

Queer Theory has a number of central Theorists who produce this kind of work at a scholarly level. The three most influential early queer Theorists would have been Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, although Jack/Judith Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and David Halperin, among others, have been particularly influential.  The term “queer Theory” seems to date to a 1990, when the Italian feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis coined the term for a conference and the special issue of a feminist journal on its themes. As is usually the case with schools of thought, each of these foundational thinkers contributed to queer Theory in different but significant ways that are too complex to detail for an entry of this scope and size.

Among these queer luminaries, Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick stand out particularly in understanding the roots of queer Theory, which combine a number of other lines of earlier thought. Sedgwick, famous for her Epistemology of the Closet (1990), did a great deal to draw Derridean thought, deconstruction, and the concept of binaries (and their fundamental illegitimacy) into the foundations of queer Theory. She also was instrumental in ensuring that the presence of feminist giant and French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949) was still significant within foundational queer Theoretical thinking. This combination, seeing Derrida’s phallogocentrism in combination with de Beauvoir’s view of women as being the “second sex,” i.e. other to men, informed much of how queer Theory thinks and engages in activism—seeking to identify and deconstruct these unjust binaries is therefore central to queer Theoretical thinking.

Judith Butler’s influence on queer Theory literally cannot be overstated. In some sense, her influence very much is the heart of queer Theory. Butler is perhaps most famous and influential via her concept of gender performativity, which she adapted (badly) from J. L. Austin’s more general ideas of performativity in speech acts. This idea suggests that all of gender (and sexuality), and maybe all of (biological) sex, even, is attributable to a kind of learned and enforced performance of socially constructed roles that society inscribes via socialization so that these then re-inscribe themselves as people take them up and continue to perform them. These ideas, Butler put in a “poststructuralist” context that she seems to have derived from a relatively decent understanding of Foucauldian thoughts on discourses, knowledge, and power, particularly biopower and power-knowledge, together with what seems to be a clear misunderstanding of Derridean thought, especially on structuralism and deconstruction (thus rendering her own “poststructuralism” something of an activism-oriented invention).

Nevertheless, the Foucauldian and Derridean—i.e., postmodern and “poststructuralist”—influences upon queer Theory remain both centrally relevant and dominant in terms of how queer Theory is done. The simplest possible summary of these influences would be this.

Foucault’s influence is that power, as biopower and power-knowledge, unjustly labels that which it wishes to exclude, usually as some kind of abnormal or undesirable, by controlling the discourses around those potential ways of being and thinking (“potentialities”), and this creates and maintains oppression that can be resisted simply by thinking and being otherwise. This renders queer Theory extremely interested in expanding possibilities by being weird, violating taboos, and disrupting and subverting (not just challenging) norms, which is viewed as a way to achieve liberation for those outside of what the existing dominant power structure considers “normal” or acceptable.

Derrida’s influence is that binaries are inherently hierarchical and thus generate oppression within the discourses in which they exist (so the connection to Foucault becomes important here for getting these out into the world). Furthermore, binaries in the “discourses” need not only show up in how it is possible to read or express language, but also by considering anything as a possible “text.” Thus, queer Theory is positively phobic of binaries of any sort, particularly those having to do with sex, gender, and sexuality. Thus, being (gender) non-conforming, non-binary, or queer in some way intrinsically becomes a site of activism that deconstructs the binaries we expect and thus creates liberation and change. Because of the misunderstanding of Derrida’s deconstruction at the sources of queer Theory, and the pessimism of the Theorists involved in it, this often takes ironic and obnoxious forms and is altogether unserious—in practice a kind of strategic essentialism that’s intentionally a bit too aware of its own absurdity (see also, pastiche and politics of parody).

This means that for queer Theory, not only is activism achieved by thinking about different “potentialities” and attempting to perform them, i.e., queering something, it is also achieved simply by being queer. This shouldn’t be mistaken for being LGBT because being queer cannot accept normalcy or stability even within those categories. In fact, there should be no categories at all other than “queer” (which is to say woke or critically conscious under the doctrines of queer Theory) and “not-yet-queer” (thus, bad).

Thus, many people mistakenly understand queer Theory as somehow relevant to LGBT civil rights and acceptance—including most queer Theorists—but this is not at all the case. Queer Theory has nothing positive to say about lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender rights except to the degree that those can be made useful for breaking societal norms, and it has no interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender acceptance at all, as that would make them fall within the reach of acceptable societal norms (i.e., normal) and thus a necessary location for disruptive and subversive queer activism. That is, while it seems because of its name that queer Theory is activism on behalf of LGBT rights, it is actually not; it is actually about destroying normalcy in all its forms, including for LGBT people, most of whom don’t like or want this. Queer Theory elevates only one identity as authentic: the queer identity, which ceases to be queer the moment it is accepted or even able to be categorized.

This has the effect of making queer Theory self-defeating and simultaneously self-concentrating in a peculiar way. Because queer Theory nominally advances LGBTQ rights but actually only advances queerness, as queer Theory succeeds in its stated mission, it increases the need for itself, as normalized LGBT and Q issues become necessary sites for queering and other applications of queer Theory to subvert that normalization. This has the peculiar result of queer Theory’s success in its apparent mission—LGBT(Q) rights—further marginalizing its true charge—a disruptive queer identity. That queer Theory lies to itself in this way is likely to be considered a feature, and a useful one at that, because the less sense something makes and more paradoxical it is, the more properly queer it is (making sense is, after all, normative).

Queer Theory has had some influence on the other major branches of Critical Social Justice Theory, perhaps most significantly and obviously on gender studies. Less known, though almost as significantly, the influence of queer Theory on fat studies and disability studies is substantial, as both fat and disability can be Theorized as queer forms of being (violating thinnormativity and ablenormativity, respectively). Postcolonial Theory has also adopted themes from queer Theory for its decolonization projects, as the “colonizing” view can be understood as the norm while the excluded “indigenous” (or pre-colonial) view therefore violates the hegemonic influence of that norm. As curriculum is one of the key things sought to be decolonized (see also, hidden curriculum), this obviously has direct application in critical pedagogy as a result.

Finally, critical race Theory has been mostly resistant to mixing with queer Theory and is content to see race as something of one fundamental axis in intersectionality while the domain of queer Theory (mostly sex, gender, and sexuality) represents another. This is likely because race and sex-gender-sexual identity are Theorized in fundamentally incompatible ways, though they are directly comparable, have similar Neo-Marxist roots, are both heavily influenced by incorporating postmodernism, and thus have a profound parallelism between them. A main objective of critical race Theory is to make specific racial identities more salient and to put social significance into racial identity categories for the purposes of doing radical, liberatory racial identity politics. The key objective of queer Theory is to remove social significance from all specific sex-gender-sexual categories and pour it all into a single, undefinable “queer” identity for the purposes of doing radical, liberatory gender/sexual identity politics. This is part of why a “transracial identities” argument that parallels arguments for transgender identities is doomed to fail (another part is ultimately standpoint epistemology, which in critical race Theory indicates that the lived experience of oppression for being black confers special insight about a particularly acute and pernicious form of oppression, and that cannot be gained merely by choosing to live as black after a lifetime of having understood only white privilege—and there is no clear parallel to this, especially if gender and sexuality are understood as performative rather than fundamentally connected to one’s racial identity, racial culture, and racial knowledges).

Related Terms

Ablenormativity; Applied postmodernism; Authentic; Binary; Biopower; Change; Colonialism; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical pedagogy; Critical race Theory; Critical Theory; Decoloniality; Deconstruction; Derridean; Disability studies; Discourse; Dismantle; Disrupt; Dominance; Episteme; Exclusion; Fat studies; Feminism; Foucauldian; Gender; Gender non-conforming; Gender performativity; Gender studies; Hegemony; Hidden curriculum; Identity; Identity politics; Indigenous; Injustice; Intersectionality; Knowledge(s); Liberationism; Lived experience; Marginalization; Men; Neo-Marxism; Non-binary; Norm; Normal; Normativity; Oppression; Other; Pastiche; Performativity; Phallogocentrism; Politics of parody; Postcolonial Theory; Postmodern; Poststructuralism; Power-knowledge; Privilege; Queer; Queer (v.); Racial culture; Racial knowledge; Race; Radical; Revolutionary; Sex; Sexuality; Social construction; Social Justice; Socialization; Standpoint epistemology; Strategic essentialism; Subversion; Systemic power; Text; Theory; Thinnormativity; Transgender; Violence of categorization; Wokeness; Woman

Additional Examples

Source: Barnett, Joshua Trey, and Corey W. Johnson. “Queer.” Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice, Sherwood Thomson (ed.). Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 581–582.

As an academic endeavor, queer theory has its roots in feminist and poststructuralist frameworks. First coined by Teresa 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 silence” (1991, p. iv). In other words, queer theory’s goal is to challenge and subvert dominant, heteronorma- tive discourses and to consider the construction of non-normative subjectivities. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was one of the earliest academic texts to deconstruct the discursive underpinnings of sex and gender difference. Queer theory’s early attention to difference and discourse laid the groundwork for what has evolved into a substantial field of intellectual inquiry.

Queer theory functions to complicate existing academic frameworks, and conceptions of social relations, by deconstructing the dominant, heteronormative structures undergirding extant scholarship (Marinucci, 2010). One theoretical strategy relies on an insistence on the social construction of gender and sexuality (see Butler, 1990). Theories of social construction claim that human identities are not inherent or essential (that is, having an essence), but rather emerge out of social relations and discourse. In Butler’s (1990) work, she understands gender as produced through repetitive practices of personal and social practices. In other words, one’s gender does not exist a priori discourse, but instead is constructed by characteristics and experiences. At the base of social constructionist theories is the assumption that, since identities are constructed, they can always be constructed otherwise.

Queer theory also offers the opportunity to rethink or reimagine normative or dominant dis- course “queerly.” Intellectual labor of this sort requires scholars to transpose queer ideas of identity formation and social relations to texts that might otherwise be taken for granted as part of the dominant sex-gender-sexuality matrix. For instance, one might imagine that two women in a mainstream magazine advertisement are lovers and then consider the social and political import of such a reading. Or one might “read” texts through a queer lens, as illustrated by Alexander Doty in Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993), which allows scholars to offer a queer “corrective” to mainstream interpretations of media culture. One could also read historical discourse queerly, as Chuck Morris (2007) and others do in Queering Public Address, an intellectual strategy that allows us to imagine a queer past.

One of queer theory’s strengths is its explicitly political character. Drawing on its roots in feminist intellectual projects, queer theory attempts to bridge the gap between the academy and the populations being theorized (Beemyn & Eliason, 1996). Because queer theory functions to complicate and challenge heteronormativity, it is situated in opposition to many oppressive practices (sexism, homophobia, etc.). Queer theory thus has the potential to under- mine systematic domination by deconstructing the practices that lead to oppression. Scholars and activists (these identities frequently overlap within the realm of queer studies) often find that queer theory and the process of deconstruction is a productive way to rethink identity and to rework social relations. In its ideal manifestation, queer theory is also a form of queer practice.

Revision date: 4/7/20

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