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Article Excerpt
When Janet Halley delivered an early version of Queer Theory By Men at the Duke University Law School in fall 2002, (1) she let something slip that I recognize now was a subtle introduction to you. She said, in a side remark to her talk, as if she was thinking it in public for the first time, that she identified increasingly with and as a gay man. I wrote her comment down because I have come to understand that the offhand remark, the one produced not in the writing, but by the public performance--the "living comment," if you will--is seldom as insignificant as it first appears. Neither an elaboration nor explanation, not a summary or pointed distinction, it is symptomatic in the sense that it brings something already in operation into critical view. In this instance, it consolidated into a category of recognition a species of utterance I now name (half jokingly, and with the appropriate nod to Gayle Rubin) "the traffic in gay men," a term which denotes the proliferation by lesbian thinkers, activists, and culture makers of a grammar of sex drawn from, often in overt debt to, gay male sexual styles and their idealization. (2) Undoubtedly, this grammar is intended to reject lesbian feminism in its U.S. 1970s formulation by authorizing instead a public, antidomestic culture organized around sexual practices of all kinds and dedicated to making power powerfully at stake in pleasure. Undoubtedly as well, this grammar's detachment of identity and identification from the lesbian says something about the difficulty of producing a queer sexual imaginary in which the lesbian is not conflated with heterosexual woman and in which distinctions within her gender and sexual multiplicities fully appear.
The something of which I speak is complicated, and I apologize now for how many pages it will take me to reveal it to you. But, I need the explication not simply because it is the task I agreed to (no, not simply because like a good girl I said I would), but in order to offer some kind of meaningful perspective on the consequences of your authorial debut. My response to Queer Theory By Men begins by exploring the effect of your lust for taxonomy--specifically your determination to install a highly disciplined and disciplining feminism as the normative entity against which your essay quite powerfully resists. (3) I'll ask: what happens if we wrestle feminism from such definitional singularity, if we approach our description of it not simply as an explanation, but as an act of construction that simultaneously defines feminism and establishes the discipline it can then wield toward us? And further, what happens if we refuse the subordination your definition condemns us to, by refusing to read your response to that subordination as evidence of the power of feminism's overpowering demand? (4) These questions are especially important for considering your methodological commitment to divergence, which I want to reformulate in order to take feminism, as I'm compelled to put it, all the way down to its non-self-replicating, epistemically disjunctive, anti-foundationalist theoretic core. After all, why should queer theory get all the theoretic thrill?
In the second part of the paper, I turn to issues of identity and knowledge formation as a means to narratively reassemble, via questions of institutions, time, and scale, the troubled stars of our extravaganza, feminism and queer theory. My goal is not a reunion--we've got too many anuses, vaginas, and motifs of self-shattering to seek recourse in the sexless seduction of Hollywood closure. Instead, I'm interested in situating, without apology or remorse, feminism and queer theory in the context of their most important epistemic distinctions, which means paying special attention to what I think of as the discordant temporalities that might come to explain the history of their famously failed theoretical convergence. By discordant temporality, I mean something along the lines of what Hortense Spillers has described as the epistemic shift that identity undergoes as it is transformed into an academic object of study, specifically the way that institutionalization ushers identity through a "threshold moment" after which it is not legible solely within the framework of its origination in U.S. social movement. (5) By reading the divergent temporalities of feminism and queer theory, we can account for the fact that they are not analogous entities. (6) The more obvious analogs would be women's studies and gay and lesbian studies, which name the institutional sites inaugurated by women's liberation and the gay and lesbian movement. Or feminist studies and queer studies, which identify the not-quite-yet institutionalized, but nonetheless academic conglomeration of inquiries that form cross disciplinary fields. Or feminist theory and queer theory, which two twin terms resonant with political signification with theory as an intellectual and increasingly academic apparatus.
I'm less interested in changing the terms of the debates for the ease of comparing "like" entities than in explicating what discordant temporality teaches us about the epistemic transformation of identity as an academic object of knowledge in the U.S. university. (7) For scholars who have resisted any talk of a divergence between identity politics and identity's academic inquiry, this interest will be deeply frustrating, if not altogether politically nihilistic, but there is good reason, following Spillers, to deepen our exploration of the distinctions between identity's activist deployments and its post-institutionalized, at times deeply anti-identitarian, critical elaboration. This will necessitate, I'll warn you now, some attention to the way that Queer Theory by Men tries to have its cake and eat it too by on the one hand offering a compelling commitment to the most profound and to my mind productive anti-identitarian impulses of queer theory, while enacting, on the other hand, its rebellion against feminism in a performative grammar of identitarian attachment to the belligerent bodies (yes, I'll say it) of variously embodied men. But my arguments, in the end, will not be solely argumentative along these lines since what I want, finally, is to find a way to animate my own desire for the kind of political offerings your paper seeks: for a future of multiple sexual imaginaries, including at least one (I'm not greedy) that can resignify the lesbian. Forgive me at the outset for this highly personal tone, but given the places we're going, it seems silly, if not downright self-delusional, to produce a rhetorical project that refuses critical intimacy with you.
I. DESPERATELY SEEKING DIVERGENCE
To begin my somewhat elaborate elaborations, let me tell our readers (they're asking) what little I know about how Janet came to relinquish authority to you. The fall 2002 lecture was advertised this way: A Map of Feminist and Queer Theories of Sexuality and Sexual Regulation. It set forth a reading in which sexual regulation was to feminism precisely what sexuality was to queer theory: the product of key political commitments and theoretical articulations which, especially in the former case, had profound and disturbing implications for the workings of law. The first written version, A Map of American Feminist Legal Thought: Sexual-Subordination Feminism, Its Derivatives, and Its Contestants, (8) seemed more formally to foreground those implications by naming the form of feminist thought--"sexual subordination feminism"--that the paper sought to interrogate in order to seek its distance from. This was followed by an important reconfiguration in which the title emphasized the theoretical priority that sexual subordination feminism could not: The Politics of Theoretical Indeterminacy: Deciding in the Splits Between Feminism(s), Gay Identity Politics, and Queer Theory. (9) This version contained much of the argument that is printed in this volume, though its grappling with the identity of the theorists it held most analytically dear--Leo Bersani and Duncan Kennedy--had not coalesced in the provocative finale: Queer Theory By Men, signed by Ian Halley. I share with our readers an interest in the significance of Janet's signatory abandonment and what it means that the space opened up by taking a break from feminism is conceded by a lesbian to men. (10) Lest I seem too focused on finding a way to insert a category more resonant for my own needy self recognition, let me ask: can a pro-sex, shame affirmative, self-shattering, and anti-domestic sexual imaginary be pursued if lesbians remain in the room? Or does our break from feminism require an identificatory detachment from anything resembling woman, and hence from anything that feminism might claim as the territory of her own critical or political authority?
Please don't take these ruminations as a less-than-subtle means of instituting brand name feminism's disciplinary rule: "what about women?" I'm already on board with the idea that any left politics that begins precisely where it knows in advance it will end seeks a form of authority that can only deaden whatever commitment to the possible the political must hold. And further, I absolutely agree with your implicit understanding that political thought that is animated by a moral or normative truth has avoided at all costs its encounter with its limit, which means that it has refused at some profound level to think its relationship to, in, and as difference. In calling this a refusal of difference, I risk a certain misunderstanding since the term is typically deployed to collate variety within the entity called human, which means that it tends to transform social differences into a singularity more profound even than sameness. My use of difference draws a breath from the interplay of psychoanalysis and deconstruction in its attempt to gloss the hermeneutic consequences of your repeated and necessary appeal to incommensurability, abjection, and the plenitude of our own radically understated state of unknowing. In this context, difference is no family visit to the multicultural theme park, but the conceptual place of something far more alien--"Wow--the rectum--it's dark in there" (11)--and manifestly abstract--"uncertain[ty]." (12) I want difference to carry the weight of what we share: a critical resistance to the disciplinary mechanisms of organized political thought.
But just so we're clear: I have no intention of domesticating our agreement by finding a way to critically meld; my understanding of the ethical requires neither sisterhood, monogamy, nor that kind of oedipal cleansing that begets the unpayable perpetual debt. I'd rather insist--can we call it a commitment?--that what's interesting is how my resistance might take forms and require formulations that are quite distinct from yours. Readers who think this is fancy footwork for a simpler notion of agreeing to disagree need to be warned that there is much more at stake in all this than that, since that is precisely one of the most sacred canards of the disciplinary mechanisms against which we both speak, as it perpetuates the fear that the future is abandoned if we don't find a way to function effectively as one. (13)
I have a lot to say about questions of time and the future (patience please), and I'm interested in exploring the importance of scale not simply for understanding the relation between feminism and queer theory, but for any discussion whose political investment rests on social change as its leftist ideal. These issues get to the heart of what I think matters about divergence, which is less about holding things apart in order to defer, if not avoid, their convergence than about building a relationship with what can't be brought together or fully known or incorporated within either entity--queer theory or feminism--throughout. Specifically, this entails critiquing your need for taxonomy in order to take divergence, as I have already put it, all the way down to a conceptual place where feminism is irreducible to any present manifestation of it and its constitutive otherness can critically emerge.
If I wanted to assume my own taxonomic burden, I'd be tempted to say that you've only given us "weak divergence," because the feminism you offer to suspend is so impervious to what might challenge it, is so captured by normative time, and lives so profoundly in legal scale that the ways in which feminism has diverged repeatedly from itself, proliferated in contradiction across academic, social, institutional, national, and political domains and recognized, even when repeating its own complicities, have no analytic place. Even your move to recognize "'hybrid' feminisms" confirms the authority of the taxonomic rule you initially establish, reserving "feminism" for a monotheistic commitment to the mathematical formulation m > f. (14) Resolutely anti-divergentist (as I have redefined the term), your feminism is truly a mess: she is bent on exacting her share of monumental history, which keeps her enthralled to the state; she is driven by a masochism she can never avow and hence she incessantly claims injury in the narrative she repeatedly repeats (woman is always victim, sex is forever trauma); she believes there is no innocence in pleasure; she refutes the unconscious; she judges; she always calls the police.
Your queer theory, on the other hand, is massively, brilliantly divergentist. The first version I received of your paper cited its ability to live everywhere, to "inhabit the intersections of postmodernism, feminism, gay male politics, pro-sex leftism, and so on, while suspending feminism," (15) is by which you mean all kinds of things: it gets to think, first, without the demand of an instrumentalizing action, and hence in a mode divorced from an address to the state and to state ameliorations as the only legitimate horizon of the political; it can explore without shame the sexual importance of shaming affect and in this it not only gets to have theoretic purchase in domains quite distinct from the legal, but can imagine personhood as non-identical, self-contradictory, and only partially described, initiated, and lived in and by the visible workings of social power; it assumes, as an ethics, that its own desire for a new sexual imaginary and the grammar of the theoretic it explores will not constitute a new truth, but is instead a highly contingent and speculative critical practice of freedom; its speculative freedoms are not democratically insistent, by which I mean that you do not presume to represent everyone or anyone, and you do not assume that without such representation we have left left political thought altogether. The divergentism that animates your deployment of queer theory allows it to occupy differing and nonsyncretic times; roam across various epistemic, affective, and theoretical domains without ever being reduced to any single one of them; and remain in awe of (but unintimidated by) what it doesn't know--all while refusing to give in to insecurity or fear that it has opened itself up to too, too much.
No wonder you and Janet find queer theory irresistible. Me too. And who wouldn't? But what do you do when you read claims for the queer that posit it as possibility, self-knowability, or as a form of social attachment and relationality? (16) Can the heat of the culturalist bent in queer theory, where affirmation is the other side of subordination and "queer" functions as either methodology or signpost for all kinds of unambiguous knowing, really be laid so formally and so completely at feminism's feet? Are the theoretical...
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