Queer at last?: Straight intellectuals and the desire for transgression

GLQ

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 543-564

  Schlichter, Annette ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 12344289805     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-10-4-543     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 130.
2. Carol Siegel provides an alternative use of the term heterophobia. In a powerful, anti- intuitive reading of the movie Basic Instinct, she uses the concept to argue that heterosexual culture both disavows homosexuality and makes impossible the conditions for heterosexual love through a normative gender politics ("Compulsory Heterophobia: The Aesthetics of Seriousness and the Production of Homophobia," in Forming and Reforming Identity, ed. Carol Siegel and Ann Kibbey [New York: New York University Press, 1995], 319-38).
3. Molly K. Fellin, "New Organization to Affirm Heterosexuality," Digital Collegian, November 6, 1996, www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1996-jan-dec/ 1996-nov/1996-11-06-the-daily-collegian/1996-11-06d01-002.htm.
4. See, e.g., "Heterosexuality," www.blater.newdream.net/h/ heterosexuality.htm (accessed December 10, 1999).
5. For an elegant and complex elaboration of the contests between studies of "gender" and of "sexuality" see Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1-30.
6. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 17.
7. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, Ibid., 31.
8. I borrow this very apposite phrase from the title of the collection Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, ed. Calvin Thomas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Rout- ledge, 1990), 151n6.
10. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 312n2.
11. Diana Fuss, "Inside/Out," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.
12. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Subordination," in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 308.
13. Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi.
14. In a later essay Berlant and Warner include examples of straight individuals ("Sex in Public," 311-31).
15. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Rout- ledge, 1993), 230.
16. For a different reading of Butler's essay that emphasizes the problems of the discussion of straight drag performers see Sarah Cooper, Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, and Cixous (Bern: Lang, 2000), 48-49.
17. Suzanna Danuta Walters, "From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (or, Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Fag?)," Signs 21 (1996): 342.
18. Teresa de Lauretis, "Fem/Les Scramble," in Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, ed. Dana Heller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 47.
19. Michel Foucault, "Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 382-83.
20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 9. I return to a discussion of Sedgwick's special status below.
21. Ann Powers, "Queer in the Streets, Straight in the Sheets: Notes on Passing," Utne Reader, November-December 1993, 5.
22. Clyde Smith, "How I Became a Queer Heterosexual," in Thomas, Straight with a Twist, 60-67.
23. Elizabeth Grosz makes a sophisticated effort to undermine the binary of queer and straight but ends up underwriting the bifurcation of nonnormative queers versus hypernormative straights by representing heterosexual subjects solely through "the suburban couple whose rate of copulation is at least once a month" ("Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity," in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec [London: Verso, 1994], 142).
24. Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23.
25. Powers, "Queer in the Streets," 80.
26. Smith, "How I Became a Queer Heterosexual," 65, 66, 67.
27. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 319.
28. Janet Halley, "The Construction of Heterosexuality," in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, 83.
29. Calvin Thomas, "Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexu- ality," in Thomas, Straight with a Twist, 11-44;
30. Jacqueline Foertsch, "In Theory If Not in Practice: Straight Feminism's Lesbian Experience," in Thomas, Straight with a Twist, 45 -59.
31. Smith's essay appears in the same collection, also under the heading "Theory," but it is identified by the editor as a nonscholarly text with a "refreshingly experiential perspective" (Calvin Thomas, "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation," in Thomas, Straight with a Twist, 5).29. Thomas, "Introduction," 3.
32. Thomas, "Straight with a Twist," 11.
33. Foertsch, "In Theory If Not in Practice," 51.
34. Reviews of Straight with a Twist have emphasized the authors' self-absorption as a flaw, but I regard it as more than a "personal issue" and want to read its rhetorical function and effects. For a review see Marilee Lindemann, "Straight with a Twist," College Literature 29 (2002): 164-66.
35. Thomas presents these episodes within a complex theory of interpellation, but they nevertheless function as an authorization of his queer self.
36. Jagose, Queer Theory, 2.
37. Cooper, Relating to Queer Theory, 27, 108.
38. Carole-Anne Tyler, "Desiring Machines? Queer Re-visions of Feminist Film Theory," in Coming out of Feminism? ed. Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal, and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 171.
39. Robyn Wiegman, "Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity," boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 138-39.
40. By proposing a comparison between the discourses on antiracist whiteness and on queer heterosexuality, I intend neither to erase their differences nor to preclude much- needed further analysis of the interrelation of discourses of heteronormativity and whiteness in the formation and regulation of social subjects. On the contrary, the turn toward the critique of whiteness might also make us aware of queer straights' disregard of questions of racialization, which not only unwittingly reproduces the heterosexual as a monolithic white subject but also is a symptom of queer straights' problematic indi- vidualization of the question of heterosexuality.
41. For an interesting attempt to think the interrelation of whiteness and heterosexuality through the role of feminine "respectability" see Hilary Harris, "Failing 'White Woman': Interrogating the Performance of Respectability," Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 183-209.
42. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15.
43. Thomas, "Straight with a Twist," 14.
44. See, e.g., Sedgwick, Tendencies, 252-66.
45. For references to her straight sexual acts see Sedgwick, "A Dialogue on Love," in Berlant, Intimacy, 331-51.
46. For an assessment of Sedgwick that is more critical of her role as a straight queer see John Champagne and Elayne Tobin, "'She's Right behind You': Gossip, Innuendo, and Rumor in the (De)formation of Gay and Lesbian Studies," in The Gay '90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 51-82.
47. Champagne and Tobin regard Sedgwick's position in literary studies as an institutionally hegemonic space that has reduced the personal risk of her self-queering. Moreover, they insist that those who perform as queer should qualify as such through same- sex practice. Sex acts are understood as queer doings rather than queer "beings." Such a notion of queer still raises several questions: Does a specific sex act queer politically? Are same-sex acts per se queerer than hetero acts? Would, then, my eating pussy make me into an acceptable queer, but fucking a husband in the ass would not? Wouldn't the identities of the partners, in that case, still dominate the idea of the act as queer?
48. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 231.
49. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995).
50. For a programmatic proposal of how to understand such a field see Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, "Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality," GLQ 7 (2001): 663-79.
51. Diane Richardson, ed., Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 2.
52. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 319.
53. Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xxvii.
54. See also Paul Morrison, "End Pleasure," GLQ 1 (1993): 53-78.
55. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 319.
56. Cathy J. Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ 3 (1997): 452.
57. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
58. Subjection can of course also function as a "becoming gay" or a "becoming lesbian" under heteronormativity.
59. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 2.
60. See, e.g., Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1993), 135-53. The conflicts in the relationship between the transgender butch Jess and her lover Theresa arise over Jess's crossing into masculinity by taking hormones. A femme, Theresa resists "being turned into" a straight woman through Jess's transformation.
61. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980), 101.