We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Fabulous, Get Used To It!
(Radical) Queer Politics and Culture in the 1990s
Bob Nowlan
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 45-53) | ||
| • October 9, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
1
In the 1990s "queer" has become an increasingly widely preferred term of gay and lesbian self-identification, especially among "the young" (including the "young in spirit") and "the radical" (whether self-proclaimed or other-identified as such), not only in the United States, but also to a lesser and yet still important degree in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and various other advanced capitalist nations of Western Europe as well (although my focus in this essay is principally the United States and secondarily the United Kingdom because these are the two nations in which this new mode of "queerity" has to date been the most prominent). From Queer Nation to Queer Theory to Queercore and beyond, an emergent new queer movement is already exercising an increasingly powerful impact upon, and in some locations an increasingly predominant influence over contemporary gay and lesbian politics and culture.
What does it mean to be "queer" in the U.S. and the U.K. today? The most prevalent definitions are also the most conventional. First, "queer" is often used as simply the equivalent of "gay and lesbian" (and/or "homosexual"), referring thereby merely to all human beings who manifest a proclivity for same-sex sexual interaction. At other times, queer is understood, even more broadly and only slightly less vaguely, to refer to bisexual and transgender as well as gay and lesbian people. In fact, the more popular use of "queer" as self-identification has become, the more these two, general and inclusive definitions have taken precedence over other, particular and exclusive definitions. For instance, at the April 25, 1993 March on Washington for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights, "queer" was used most often to refer to all present (even at times including "straight but not narrow" supporters also in attendance). These two definitions, and especially the first, are not, of course, new; what is new is the extent to which "queers" choose to call themselves queer and the extent to which self-identifying as queer is understood as positive, and indeed something of which to be proud, even defiantly so.
It might seem therefore that the contemporary popularity of "queer" is relatively inconsequential, as it does not in and of itself signify a new direction within gay and lesbian politics and culture. And yet, even if "queer" were to refer to nothing more than "non-straight" people, it would still be necessary to inquire into why queer has become so popular—and pervasive—at this historical moment. After all, "queer" was widely rejected in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall as derogatory and demeaning, as suggesting that homosexuality is "strange" in the sense not only of unfamiliar, but also of perverse. A principal aim of most currents within the movement(s) for gay and lesbian liberation throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s was to contest this representation of homosexuality as queer.
Why then do so many gays and lesbians today choose to call themselves queer? There are five principal reasons:
First, queer does provide a single term for the difference that unites all "non-straights," and allows for differences among queers to be reunderstood in terms of differences within a common "queerity"—in other words as representative of different modes of queerity as these take shape along and across multiple axes of queerity. "Queer" therefore does the work that "gay" was originally intended to do, before gay became increasingly exclusively identified with male homosexuality (that is to refer to a social, and especially public identity, community, and [sub]culture rooted in but extending and developing beyond a common homosexual "orientation"). Queerity, moreover, can refer simultaneously both to the experience of alienation from, and the action of rebellion against dominant "regimes of the (hetero)normal," where these regimes are understood as responsible for defining and delimiting conceivable, desirable and possible forms of sexual relations and practices.
Second, this kind of commonality is most frequently understood not so much as a substitute for other means of self-identification (such as gay, lesbian, homosexual, etc.) but rather as a complement to and an extension of these: queers, therefore, include gay queers, lesbian queers, bisexual queers, transvestite and transsexual queers, and even, according to some definitions, queer-friendly and/or queer-identifying heterosexuals.
Third, queer identity is most often understood as not so importantly an inherent— ascribed or prescribed—identity, but rather, more importantly, as an identity which is created, and, especially, performed by queers. This kind of queer identity is actually therefore an "identity-effect," an emanation outward from within the immanent conduct of queer praxis. In other words, queers both define and continually redefine what it "is" for themselves to "be" queer in the very process of "being" queer. The fluidity of this queer (post-)identity is further understood as allowing for both the greatest possible tactical flexibility in coping with and fighting back against straight repression/ oppression, and the most extensive freedom in possible avenues for self-definition/self-expression. At least potentially, therefore, it opens up the possibility of queers widely accepting a "constructionist" rather than an "essentialist" conception of what is responsible for the formation and constitution of "sexual orientation": in other words, acceptance of the position that "sexual orientation" is not reducible either to a merely physiological predisposition or to the result of the pressures of environment and experience in merely an initial moment of psychosexual development. This can lead in turn towards a wide acceptance among queers that queerity can and should enact an assault upon—as a subversive wedge within—straight norms for and constraints upon sexual relations and practices.
Fourth, use of queer as means of (positive) (self-) identification means that queers are less likely to see themselves as simply like everyone else, and their difference as therefore relatively inconsequential and insignificant, a merely ignorant and bigoted misunderstanding of their real normality. It can thus mean that queers will refuse to pretend that the extent of their marginalization within/from straight society and culture is any less substantial than it has been, and will also refuse to pretend that they do not have ample reason for outrage against this society and culture.
Fifth, and finally, appropriation of queer from homophobic discourse so as to redefine queer within anti-homophobic discourse attempts to disable homophobia by extending the counter-attack upon homophobia to include an attack upon the power to determine what kinds of sexual relations and practices are to be understood and treated as normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, familiar/strange, proper/shameful, healthy/sick, moral/sinful, etc.
"Queer," therefore, is not simply the latest, most fashionable way to describe gay and lesbian people. It is, moreover, historically inaccurate to suggest that the contemporary "queer use of queer" refers merely to all gay and lesbian (and bisexual and transgender) people, as "queer" was (re)appropriated in the initial moment—roughly 1987 through 1992—of this new queer emergence to refer most precisely to a more exclusive and particular mode of radical (social-)sexual and (cultural-)political subjectivity. What at least initially united, and largely still unites most modes of contemporary queer subjectivity is a shared "queer spirit" of impatient anger. Queers are outraged gays and lesbians who have moved beyond mere expression of rage to demand satisfaction for what has outraged them and to take whatever they can whenever this is not given them in response to their demands. This "queer spirit" is the product of the evolution and intensification of struggle from the middle through the end of the 1980s to fight back against both 1. the decimation of the gay community by AIDS and by the stigmatization of gays and lesbians as responsible for AIDS, and 2. a rising tide of violence directed against gays and lesbians which far exceeds scapegoating gays and lesbians as responsible for AIDS. What distinguishes the definitively "queer" moment in this ongoing struggle to fight back against homophobia and AIDS is that "queerity" represents an aggressively offensive form of defense on the part of "victims" who not only refuse the status of "victim" but also demand that the conditions which render them victims be changed—and changed immediately. This stage of contemporary queer radicalism can, in fact, be distinguished by a series of five interconnected refusals and demands:
Queers have refused to plead politely with powerful straights for these straights to throw them a few crumbs of support for only slightly greater tolerance, but instead have demanded that these straights support complete tolerance, and acceptance, of queers right now.
Queers have refused to wait patiently for straight society gradually to open itself up to allow for greater acceptance of the queerly different, but instead have demanded that queers be accepted right now and everywhere within straight society as equal—as enjoying equal right of access and equal opportunity to exercise the resources, powers, and capacities of straight society.
Queers have refused to remain closeted or to downplay their queerity as they work and play within straight society, but instead have demanded that straight society accept queers "as they are."
Queers have refused to tolerate, and instead have demanded an end to government and medical industry inaction and delay in deploying the resources sufficient to end the AIDS epidemic.
Queers have refused to tolerate, and instead have demanded an end to homophobic violence, whether this violence takes the form of a. overtly physical attacks upon queers, or the forms of b. discriminatory and prejudicial laws and government regulations against queers, c. news and entertainment media mis/under/non-representations of queer life/queer lives, or d. condemnations and demonizations of queers disseminated by fundamentalist religious organizations and by institutionalized representatives of general cultural and/or local community mores.
In fighting back against homophobia by defiantly asserting queer
visibility, contemporary queer activism has emerged as a logical
extension of AIDS activism (and, of course, as is well-known, the ties
between queer activism and AIDS activism are even more direct than this
as the first Queer Nation chapter was initially an affinity group of ACT
UP New York). This relationship is neatly summarized by Allan Berube and
Jeffrey Escoffier in their introduction of Queer Nation to Out/look
readers:
A new generation of activists is here. They have come out into
communities devastated by the HIV epidemic and into political
consciousness through the struggle against AIDS ("Queer/Nation" 14).
Significantly, however, Berube and Escoffier immediately add "but AIDS
is not their [i.e. queer activists’] main focus" (14). The main
focus of queer praxis (whether in the form of academic queer theory,
extra-academic queer activism, or anti-academic and anti-activist queer
punk nihilism) is
"queerity"—or, more precisely, intervention at
the level of and directed against "(hetero)normal" regimes for defining
conceivable, desirable, and possible kinds and forms of (social-)sexual
identity (and activity). This shift of focus has led to significant
tensions between queer activism and AIDS activism; as Douglas Crimp
indicates, "the interrelation between the
two—queer activism and
AIDS
activism—is complex, shifting, sometimes divisive ("Right On
Girlfriend!" 6)."
Many commentators upon "queer nationalism" have stressed the degree to
which Queer Nation has attempted to move, as Guy Trebay puts it, both
"beyond AIDS" and "beyond ACT UP" ("In Your Face" 34), by deliberately
breaking every familiar rule of radical activist organization and
agitation, including those followed by ACT UP. For instance, Berube and
Escoffier describe queer nationalism as rejecting "a strategic
politics that confronts powerful institutions directly or uses lobbying
and electoral campaigns to bring about change" in favor of a "politics
of cultural subversion" that focuses on "theatrical demonstrations,
infiltrations of shopping malls, [sic] straight bars, kiss-ins and
be-ins" (14). To this Alexander S. Chee adds that "queer nationalists,"
while most often not only familiar with but also experienced within
ACT-UP, are "tired of groups with egos, processes, personality cults,
and politicking" ("A Queer Nationalism"
15)—groups that include
ACT UP. As Berube and Escoffier contend, queer politics only begins with
"fighting to keep queer turf safe from bashings," moving beyond this to
attempt the "construction of a new culture," and, in fact, to do so, "by
combining elements that usually don’t go together":
They may be the first wave of activists to embrace the
retrofuture/classic contemporary styles of postmodernism. They are
building their own identity from old and new
elements—borrowing styles and tactics from popular culture,
communities of color, hippies, AIDS activists, the antinuclear
movement, MTV, feminists, and early gay liberationists. Their new
culture is slick, quick, anarchic, transgressive, and fun. They are
dead serious, but they also just wanna have fun (14).
Of course, many queers would not conceive of "building their own identity" as the aim of queer praxis; instead much of queer praxis aims to establish a "post-identity" culture and politics of desire. Alisa Solomon even suggests that, contrary to initial (mis)impressions, queers are actually those gays and lesbians who are secure enough about their ineradicable place in (straight) society that they no longer need to focus principally either upon struggle for survival against homophobic oppression by "bashing back," or upon affirmation of pride in their existence as gay and lesbian "in the face" of external or internal homophobia; instead, because queers "feel freer to be ourselves, the useful organizing fiction of the past—that a person’s politics could be determined by his or her sexual orientation (or some other salient feature of identity)—no longer serves" ("Breaking Out" 27). Queer praxis focuses, therefore, upon rethinking—and redefining—(sexual) identity, contra Berube and Escoffier, not by seeking to create and conform to a new (sexual) identity but rather by refusing to accept and conform to any stable (sexual) identity: by embracing the opportunity for what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as "organizing around a fracturing of identity" ("Identity Crisis: Queer Politics in the Age of Possibilities" 27). This trajectory for queer politics is also endorsed by Lee Edelman who proposes further that queer nationalism should "reinvent the politics of sexuality by insisting on the fluidity of differences without the need to affirm the difference of a cordoned-off ‘politics’ or ‘activism’," ("The Mirror and the Tank" 31) and therefore not only reject the "liberal humanism" of ACT UP, but also refuse to work within the bounds dictated by conventional categories which define what "political activism" is (and is not) to mean—and against which it is to be opposed. Instead, Edelman argues that queer nationalism should embrace a "passive agency, an agency that acknowledges its inescapable participation in the production of social effects while acknowledging its inability to control the effects in whose production it thereby figures"—an agency whose foremost commitment is towards steadily striving to keep open space for "the unexpected," for "a zone of possibilities in which the embodiment of the subject might be experienced otherwise" (30-31).
From the vantage point of AIDS activism, these directions of queer politics are often greeted with suspicion, if not with disapproval. Robert Massa, for instance, has recently decried abandonment of AIDS as the necessary first priority for contemporary gay and lesbian politics at a time in which "the reality is that the AIDS caseload has not even begun to peak in the gay community (let alone other communities), that a new generation of gay men is becoming infected, that discrimination has hardly abated, that a cure is hardly is sight" ("All That We Cannot Be" 18). Massa perceives "normalization" of AIDS to be "not a sign of our success but of our failure," warning that "the shift away from AIDS to gay rights bodes ominously for both causes": for AIDS activism this shift means a loss of resources necessary to prevent stagnation and even reversal in the ongoing struggle to attend adequately to the needs of those living with and dying from AIDS, to combat mis-education about the causes and effects of AIDS, and to pressure work towards the development of a cure that can lead to the end of the epidemic; for "gay rights activism," this shift signals a failure to ground struggle for gay and lesbian "rights" in an affirmation of gay life, a failure in other words to prioritize struggle for "life" over struggle for "liberty" and struggle for life and liberty over "pursuit of happiness" (18).
Although more optimistic than Massa about a reconvergence between AIDS and queer activisms, Crimp is likewise worried that separations will lead to new kinds of separatisms which will weaken the effectivity of those thereby forced to struggle separately and apart. As Crimp sees it, "political identifications remaking identities are, of course, productive of collective political struggle, but only if they result in a broadening of alliances rather than an exacerbation of antagonisms" ("Right On, Girlfriend!" 16), a broadening, moreover, that will enable a "collective political struggle" (13), a struggle together by all united under the sign "queer" towards the accomplishment of "the extent of social change that will be required to improve all these different people’s chances of survival" (14). Crimp maintains the position that he and Adam Rolston proposed in AIDS Demo Graphics that it is AIDS activism and especially ACT UP which provides not only the best model but also the potential vanguard of a "second wave" of 1990s "gay radicalism," and is thus the rightful heir of the "first wave" led by the Gay Liberation Front movement in the early 1970s: "we see ourselves both as direct heirs to the early radical tradition of gay liberation and as rejuvenators of the gay movement, which has in the intervening decades become an assimilationist civil rights lobby" (98).
Yet now, less than five years later, we see the reemergence of a reinvigorated liberal gay and lesbian civil rights movement but little sign of any substantial gay and lesbian movement for radical social change, with little likelihood, moreover, that any such radical movement will emerge in the immediately foreseeable future.[1] In addition, the size and force of both ACT UP and Queer Nation has considerably diminished—to the point where both movements are now confronted not only with extensive demoralization but also with the threat of disintegration. At such a critical moment it is important to inquire into why both ACT UP and Queer Nation radicalisms have failed to provide the basis for a new radical gay and lesbian political movement that can sustain its strength over the long-term and, more concretely, through the course of the 1990s and into the 21st century.
What is most important to recognize, in retrospect, despite the tensions and divergences already described, are the pervasive commonalities between ACT UP and Queer Nation forms of political activism. Both ACT UP and Queer Nation represent movements comprised "of diverse, non-partisan groups of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action," whether in fighting back against AIDS and the neo-conservative AIDS backlash or fighting against homophobic violence and exclusion and fighting for queer visibility and inclusion. Moreover, ACT UP has provided not only critical inspiration but also an initial model for the queer cultural politics which conceives of pleasure, performance, and (dis)play as preeminent sites of resistance, disruption, and subversion.[2]
The strengths and weaknesses of both ACT UP and Queer Nation are the strengths and weaknesses of a shared ludic anarchism of theory and practice. In sum, the predominant forms to date of both radical AIDS activism and radical queer activism share (although, admittedly, in differing degrees) the following nine characteristically—and problematically—ludic anarchist tendencies:[3]
A tendency towards fetishization—and especially in a highly abstract and formal way— of "power," in and of itself, as the principal site of oppression. Because of this understanding, contemporary American and British societies are understood as dominated over by a nexus of interlocking circles of power, presided over in turn by an interlocking power elite that is concentrated at the top of all "established" institutions and enterprises—in government, in the military, in the news and entertainment media, in the church, in the higher educational academy, and in business and industry.
A tendency towards romanticization and idealization of "freedom" as a kind of utopian space of ecstatic transcendence from the exercise of power, and, because of this understanding, a tendency to accept the corollary position that freedom must inevitably always also be transient and tenuous, fragile and elusive.
As a result of 1. and 2., a tendency to subscribe to a conception of "power over"—and by this is meant virtually all forms of domination, hierarchy, and authority—as needing to be entirely opposed (or at least minimized as far as possible) because all forms of "power over" are equated with "oppressive exercise of power," even if, at the same time, as in 2., a corollary result of maintaining such an extreme position is to accept the ultimate telos of opposition to power as utopian fantasy. Because of the impossibility thereby of any meaningful transformation ever succeeding, it is thus often seen as "the human condition" to be forever doomed to suffer and struggle without ever overcoming or even approaching the overcoming of the inevitable gap between desire and fulfillment.
A tendency towards voluntaristically subjectivist and especially individualist conceptions and practices of "rebellion," often as much if not more about witness and testimony, self-expression and self-actualization than about enacting lasting social change.
A tendency towards impatience with and even dismissal of the necessity for painstakingly meticulous work concerned with the development of the objective preconditions necessary for subjective action, and an attraction instead towards striking out "right away," "immediately," with all immediately available force at the most immediately available and especially immediately appealing and exciting targets. This shows up most often of course, in AIDS and queer activisms, in a tendency towards fetishization of "spontaneity" and "direct action."
A tendency to valorize and even exaggerate individual differences over collective samenesses within groups and "groupings," and, as a result, a corollary tendency towards valorization of loose, ad hoc, and extrinsically linked coalitions and alliances over well-planned, intrinsically structured, and carefully organized collectives.
A tendency towards focus upon and concern with change in the immediate and the short terms at the expense of change in the medium and the long terms, and concomitantly, a corollary tendency towards greater interest in tactics than in strategy and towards impatience with theoretical work that does not rapidly lead to practical action, preferably action which is as "loud" and as "visible" as possible. This results in turn in a further corollary tendency to deemphasize planning and building for the long term—as well as the theoretical and critical work this planning and building requires—in favor of immediate and spontaneous mobilization to produce noisy and colorful spectacles in the here and now.
As a result, in particular, of 5-7, the tendency to favor—in actual practice—what are, in effect, highly eclectic and pragmatic kinds of programs and strategies, programs and strategies which are not based upon theorized understandings of who and what the enemy is/involves/includes, and what thereby must be done to defeat this enemy over the long haul. This tendency often takes the form of misunderstanding the complexity of the enemy, ignoring or downplaying its contradictions, and underestimating its capacity for absorbing attacks by granting concessions which can seem far more progressive than they in actuality turn out to be.
A tendency towards celebration of "looking" and "feeling" "different" as virtually equivalent with "making different"/"making a difference," and a corollary tendency towards support of aestheticized forms of "resistance" and "rebellion" and "disruption" and "subversion" over more directly political forms of organization geared not only towards support for gradualist reform but also towards enabling revolutionary transformation. This leads in turn to a further tendency to focus attacks against the social status quo not so much at the level of ownership and control of the means, processes, and ends of the production and reproduction of social wealth, but instead against its "drabness," "dullness," and "stupidity," against its imposition of "homogeneity" and "conformity," and even against the fact that it is a status quo of any kind— i.e. that it entails norms of any kind and the institutionalization of any kinds of (at least any kinds of "normalized") hierarchies, rules, laws, prescriptions, and proscriptions.
In fact, this kind of "radical" politics quickly collapses into a "liberal" politics because it is still ultimately focused at the level of "reformist" concerns: it is concerned to protect and secure the "rights" of a "minority population" within the existing system of social relations, and this remains true regardless of whether the "identity" of that "minority population" has been reunderstood as fluid rather than fixed, and regardless of whether these "rights" have been reunderstood to include the "rights" to remain rebelliously defiant of and marginally opposed to the cultural "mainstream." This kind of "radical" politics is not in effect actually directed at radical social change: it is not directed at change of what is fundamental about the organization of the totality of social relations; it does not seek to accomplish fundamental transformation of dominant social institutions and enterprises or of dominant structures of social relations and dominant forms of cultural practices. It does not therefore in fact work towards the creation of a new society—nor, for that matter, does it in fact work towards the creation of a new culture.
Both "liberal" and "radical" "queers" tend today to agree that queer visibility is the key: the more visible queers are, the more quickly and completely queers will realize their demands and enjoy their rights.[4] The same is understood to be true of PWAs and their supporters as well as all those stigmatized as "queer" because of their association with AIDS. The only thing that distinguishes so-called "radicals" like Larry Kramer and Michelangelo Signorile in this regard is largely a question of "style" and in particular of "tone," as these radicals prefer a more belligerently confrontational approach whereas liberals prefer a more peacefully accommodative approach.[5] Despite its understandable usefulness in providing a "militant" antidote to "mourning," anger alone, like any emotion, can only fuel a short-term movement—a movement that lasts only as long as anger remains shared and as long as this anger is not troubled by daunting challenges that require not only other kinds of emotions but also, and much more significantly, privileging intellectual over emotional responses as the basis for determining what is and is not to be done, by means of what, and for what. What’s more, for both the belligerently confrontational "radical" queer activist and the peacefully accommodative "liberal" gay and lesbian activist, the basic problem that requires their activism is still understood as exclusion and invisibility, and the solution thereby as inclusion and visibility. In both cases, heterosexism and homophobia are in effect treated as atavistic aberrations, rooted in ignorance, that run counter to the basic values of American and British democracy, and which are thereby doomed to pass into oblivion as more and more straight Americans and Britishers are re-educated and thereby enlightened. In both cases, queer struggle is in effect reduced to struggle for assimilation and integration: 1. assimilation of "queerity" into the straight mainstream of American and British society and culture so that "queer difference" can be tolerated and accepted within this mainstream, and 2. integration of queers into the U.S. and U.K. military and into positions of power within business and industry, government, and the news and entertainment media without simultaneously challenging the kinds of ends these institutions are designed to advance or the kinds of interests they are designed to serve, and without foregrounding any kind of vision of how to work "queerly" from within these institutions so as to fundamentally transform what they are about by "queering" them. This means struggling for an illusory equality of representation across all levels of a fundamentally unequal society: as long as queers are proportionately equal to straights as exploiters of labor and as managers and facilitators, regulators and legitimators of this exploitation, then seemingly all is well. Even if this absurd dream were to be realized, it would leave the largest mass of queers at the bottom of society together with the largest mass of straights, and therefore queers would be by and large still subject to capitalist exploitation—and still remain subject to all the dehumanizing costs of such an alienated existence.
| ★ |
