Here at The Chronicle, Michael Warner published an essay on queer theory that is causing quite a stir. The essay, “Queer and Then,” begins with the end of Duke University’s famed Series Q, an ending that signals for Warner an “occasion for taking stock.” Which is exactly what Warner does. He discusses the beginnings of queer theory, its current permutations, and its continuing potential. Indeed, Warner is quite clear that he is not declaring an end to queer theory. He tells us that it is still necessary, that we are hardly postqueer, and that even in the writings of those who wish to distance themselves from queer theory, such as Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages, there is a queer theoretical perspective.
So why, then, is this particular essay being read as a sign that queer theory is dead and done? In my world, this is the conversation that is going on on email lists, Facebook pages, and even in face to face conversations. One person suggested it is because queer theory became “purist,” another suggested it is the inaccessibility of queer theory itself that was its undoing. Few are suggesting that queer theory remains a vibrant intellectual field.
Perhaps, as Warner suggests, people are trying to kill queer theory because people really don’t like sex very much and wish it would go away as a category of inquiry.
Sex, as Bersani astutely observed, distresses people, and they don’t like to be reminded of it. Perhaps (this is) the very reason why people seem to long for a present in which they can be postqueer.
But that seems like a terribly straight answer and I think a more queer one might be worth exploring.
By queer I mean we must, in Foucauldian fashion, ask whether what we imagine as the cause (people don’t want to think much about sex, let alone how sex is central to other projects of modernity like science and colonialism) is in fact the effect (of other forms of power, like Neoliberalism and the gay subject). I apologize if that was confusing, but that is the queer method of going through the back door that is central to queer theoretical interventions. Queer theory redirects us to look in the unexpected place. Queer theory surprises us with questions that other theoretical traditions don’t ask, even highly critical traditions. And, in the tradition of all good critical theory, queer theory forces us to shake ourselves out of our commonsensical understandings of the world and to enter the very shaky and liminal space of asking how this world came into existence and who benefits and who doesn’t. For instance, queer theory has never let us assume that there just are gays and straights, men and women, but rather forces us to ask what is the history of these subjects and how does their existence rely on repeated performances, performances that are always subject to failure?
Of course it is true that this is not 1992, but 2012, and the unlimited potential of queer theory, like the unlimited potential of the Frankfurt School, is now a known quantity. Back then, at queer theory’s birth, I was myself a young, queer theorist. My first book, Queer in Russia, was even published by Duke and asked the sort of queer-theory questions that I hoped would make Papa Foucault proud: how did the very different juridical and medical discursive regimes of the Soviet Union create different sorts of sexual subjects in Russia?
But like any middle-aged person, the limits of my own career are crystal clear to me. And like any middle-aged body of theory, the limits of queer theory are crystal clear as well. Queer theory has accomplished a lot, both in academe and on the streets where groups like Queer Nation or the Queer Liberation Army or even Heterosexuals for Mandatory Marriage were all inspired by the likes of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. But queer theory has, like me, reached the limits of its own body. Queer theory has kicked butt in areas like critical race studies, but it proved itself weak when it came to seeing the disaster that was the Neoliberal economy. Queer theory was able to spark debate within the university, but has had almost no effect in the political debates surrounding sexuality, which have been thoroughly dominated by gay identity politics.
In other words, queer theory is no longer a youth with boundless potential, but a middle-aged professor/activist who should be respected for what has been accomplished and from whom deeper and more insightful work will surely come. And, like many of us middle-aged queer theorists, queer theory ain’t dead yet.
