Queer Theories Of Power

To “queer” power is to seek to expose the limitations, unstable foundations, and power-laden [Page 545]assumptions of the “straight” political, psychological, cultural, and economic discourses that govern us. Queer theories assume that truth, nature, and fact are not, contrary to conventional wisdom, pregiven and universally valid but are discursive constructions. Reclaiming a pejorative term (for nonheterosexuals and other “deviants”), queer theories provide far-reaching critiques of and challenges to the dualistic, essentialist, and heteronormative discourses that constitute our lives at all levels, from the intimate and everyday to the global. With similarities to, but going farther than, nongender postmodern theorizing, queer approaches to power seek to subvert the apparent naturalness of the “straight” authorities, hierarchies, and discourses residing in the socioeconomic systems that govern us.

Theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Gayle Rubin, David Halperin, and Judith Butler have linked the sexual and material in ways that challenge conventionally held gender stereotypes and norms. Examining the constitution and effects of social discourses of sex, many queer theorists echo Michel Foucault's concern for the ways in which the repressive moral discourses that emanate from Western political, economic, and judicial institutions of social authority constrain and control bodies (through, for example, modern science, medicine, and technology). Their critiques, part of a thriving corpus of contemporary critical theorizing, deconstruct the dualities of sex and gender, homosexuality and heterosexuality to reveal the high political stakes involved in projects that question the “natural” causal relationship among sex, gender, and sexuality.

A successor to, and to some extent a replacement of, lesbian and gay studies, queer theories emerged, initially (in the late 1980s) as a challenge, first, to the homogenizing discourse of (homo) sexual difference (which was criticized as a rather white, male, middle-class model of analysis), and, second, as part of a social movement to give voice to and represent marginalized sexualities. The very word queer itself reflects the potential instability of all forms of identity: queer is less an identity than a critique of the formation of (apparently stable and noncontradictory) categories of identity. As such, queer theories include a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, assertions, and claims. Deployed to designate the delimitation of identity (i.e., the potential for identity to be multiple and even infinite, as opposed to fixed and invariable), “queer theory” is a way of pointing ahead by rejecting restrictive contemporary arrangements, resisting homophobia and hetero-sexism, and reimagining future politics, but one that never knows in advance precisely at what or where to point.

The proliferation of queer theoretical research in recent years represents a shift in society's engagements with the world, particularly in our engagements with and experiences of power. For queer approaches, power is prolific but also both intensely intimate and impersonal. Each of us is surrounded by overt and tacit sexual norms, which impact on our lives in numerous and diverse ways. These norms are produced and reproduced through prevailingly heteronormative relations of power, hierarchy, and privilege embodied in mechanisms of governance (institutions such as the education system, modern medicine, mental health care, the military, the penal system, and corporate industry, which institutionalize, regulate, and reproduce heterosexuality as natural and unmarked). As physical and psychological standards against which the human body and its behaviors are measured, social norms constitute what is considered normal and natural about a person. Productive and reproductive (of themselves, social identities, regulatory apparatuses, mechanisms of control, and life opportunities) these norms are also repressive: the bounds of what may be considered normal, acceptable, and decent in Western liberal society are continually policed (such that we police ourselves) through a variety of mechanisms of regulation, control, and (if need be) exclusion. Paying specific attention to the sexual norms and codes that privilege certain types of behaviors, identities, representations, and bodies, queer theories challenge very basic, but intimately held, assumptions about who we are and what we do.

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