what is "queer"? (part one)
What is queer?
Introduction
Good morning gamers!
Just a heads up: in this series of essays I will be discussing the queer experience, which means that there will be content in here that deals with homophobia, slurs, anti-queer violence, and other hate crimes, as well as racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and other forms of bigotry that impact members of the queer community. Queerness does not exist within a vacuum; intersectional thinking is essential for any discussion of identity.
I’ve been working with queer theory for a few years now, but I always find it a little bit difficult to figure out where to start when talking about queerness. It’s such a big topic with a myriad of interpretations and experiences; condensing it into a single paper, lecture, or book is an impossible task. Here, I’ve done my best to consolidate important contemporary discussions of queerness—and sexuality writ large—into a digestible piece of informational (read: educational) content.
My approach is built from my understanding of a concept called low theory, which I define as “a disruptive mode of theory that asks us to engage with it” (wright 10). Traditionally, academic texts are dense and indecipherable. It often feels like you need to take a course in reading these types of texts before you can begin to parse one—probably because that’s exactly what you need to do. Instead of making this traditionally academic, I’m going to aim for usefulness to a general audience. Fuck academia. This is queer theory and it’s meant for everyone.
Definitions
Queer, in this context can generally be understood as referring to an identity that fits under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. The word queer has a troubled history: it has been (and still is) used as a homophobic slur against members of the LGBTQ+ community, inspection of its etymology reveals an association with strangeness and otherness, and there is disagreement within the LGBTQ+ community about whether or not the word has been “reclaimed.” We will not be unpacking all of that today; that is a different job for a different essay. Instead, I want to focus on what systems and structures of power are hinted at using queer and an umbrella term for a set of identities.
In his 2017 MFA thesis paper, queer theorist and new media artist Matthew R.F. Balousek argues that queer is “most easily understood as the inverse of a set. Queers exists outside of heterosexuality and/or cisness as people of color exists outside of whiteness” (Balousek 2). This is an interesting place to start. It positions queer people as those excluded from the set of all people by the filter of having a cisgender and/or heterosexual identity. He also ties queerness to other systems of identity-formation—explicitly noting that people of color are non-white. Queerness cannot be separated from other identities because, in the words of Amanda Phillips, “[all] identities, after all, are fictions that organize us” (Phillips 8; Foucault). Calling identities fictions risks undermining the real and often harmful effects that they can have on us—especially when used as the justification for systems of classification that are then used to legitimize violence against members of a perceived identity group.
But queerness is more than an identity (or collection of non-normative identities regarding gender and orientation). Balousek defines queer as “the disruption, questioning, or opposition of normative structures, especially in regard to gender and orientation, and especially with the aid of
or an emphasis on relationality.” He argues that “[queer] as an ideology, then, is about the practice of this sense of the word in a broad sense” (Balousek 11). Queerness is a description of one’s identity and it is an active ideological position—a set of radical and disruptive politics and praxes. I understand that some people are uncomfortable with the violent history of the word queer, but language is malleable. Balousek wisely says that “in the mouth of a bigot, any word can become a slur” (8). It is more useful for this conversation to adopt Balousek’s proposed definition of queer instead of shying away from the term, sure, but it is also putting queer theory into practice to reclaim the word, to wrest it away from homophobic bigots who wield it against members of our communities.
“Straight,” “gay,” and “queer”
If queer means, among other things, the inverse of the set of heterosexuals and/or cisgender people, it creates an identity based on exclusion. To be queer is to be outside of what is considered “normal” with regards to gender and orientation. How can there be an understanding of what it means to be queer that is not based on such a binary logic? Do we have a name for identities that are “normative” other than the two obvious ones: normative gender and orientations and non- queer? One could argue that sure, there are terms for people who are not trans—we call them cis— and for people who are not gay—we call them straight. These are still constructed identities. To better understand how heterosexual and homosexual came to be, we must struggle to understand Foucault. I’m so sorry for this.
Foucault’s History of Sexuality
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction is the first part of Foucault’s study of the development of the technology of sexuality. Originally published in 1976 in French as La volonté de savoir, or The Will to Knowledge, this book outlined what Foucault terms the “repressive hypothesis,” rebuts it, and presents a new version of the history of sexuality from the seventeenth century to the modern day (really, the mid-twentieth century, it’s been almost half a century since he wrote the book).
Foucault summarizes what he calls “the story,” his understanding of contemporary conversations about sexuality. He suggests that since the seventeenth century, we have seen more and more conversations about sex and sexuality, which discredits the notion that sex is repressed in our society; if sex is repressed, then why do we talk about it so much? Foucault rejects the story and its repressive hypothesis—that our society has been censoring and repressing sex and sexuality since the Victorian era—in favor of a more nuanced understanding of how and why sexuality is controlled. He is explicitly not arguing that there has been no censorship of sex or sexuality, he just means that the regulation of language and policing of sexuality fall into a category other than repression because of the growth in ways that we talked about it. He concludes that sexuality is not repressed in our society—that narrative is based on faulty logic; instead, sexuality is the focus of many discourses and conversations, and there has been an unprecedented growth and spread of the powers policing sexuality. The rest of Volume 1 is an analysis of the mechanisms of these powers, as well as the intention behind their deployment.
Foucault presents a list of features of the way power is presented in the West. Firstly, there’s what Foucault calls the negative relation—a description of how power can only be exercised over sexuality by limiting what is considered acceptable or allowed. In other words, power doesn’t say “yes” to any forms of sexuality, it either says “no” or has no comment on the matter. By overlooking quote unquote “valid” forms of sexuality—the conjugal couple engaging in procreative sex with the goal of reproduction—there is a judgement made about what counts as invalid—or aberrant, degenerate—forms of sexuality. This leads right into the second feature: the insistence of the rule; Foucault says that “sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden” (Foucault 83). But beyond that, sex and sexuality must be understood in terms of the law (and discourse) and the language used to talk about legitimate and illegitimate forms of sex and sexuality is static; once a form of sex or sexuality is determined to be acceptable or unacceptable, that is the final say on the matter. This places the power in the hands of the group that defines valid sexuality. The third feature is the cycle of prohibition—the punishment of sex that is not suppressed. This feels like the idea behind the repressive hypothesis: Foucault says that power “constrains sex through a taboo that plays on the alternative between two nonexistences” (84). In other words, by prohibiting sex, either the non-normative forms of sexuality are suppressed or the people with non-normative sexualities are. Fourth in the list of features is the logic of censorship—Foucault identifies three forms of this feature: “affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists” (84). This pairs with the third feature and again feels like the basis for the repressive hypothesis; I will remind us that Foucault does not argue that sex is not repressed at all, but that repression is not the primary way in which power is exerted over sexuality. Certainly, sexuality is rendered a taboo, the existence of non- normative sexualities is treated like a shameful secret. The fifth and final feature of how power is exerted over sexuality is the uniformity of the apparatus—there is no room for variation in how this power is exerted. There is the normative and the non-normative, there is the acceptable and the punishable.
Sexuality is entirely constructed. People do not naturally identify themselves as straight or gay, they just are or aren’t horny for people that share or don’t share their gender identity. Similarly, gender is a fabrication—a performance if you will. Nobody naturally identifies themselves as male or female because those words mean nothing outside of the context of a gendered society. Foucault’s whole point is that sexuality is used to control what is deemed appropriate and to justify the violence required to enforce that norm. This has some upsetting implications: namely that at some point, someone had to invent what heterosexuality meant.
Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality
I won’t spend too much time on this next text (in part because it is, at least for me, more intelligible than Foucault’s books) but I do want to highlight a couple points and encourage you to read Jonathan Katz’s book for yourself. In The Invention of Heterosexuality, Katz argues that “heterosexuality is not identical to the reproductive intercourse of the sexes; heterosexuality is not the same as sex distinctions and gender differences; heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men. Heterosexuality [...] signifies one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and their pleasures” (14). Katz shows that the first definition of heterosexual referred to a perversion of sexual appetites. To make a long story short, an American understanding of sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century raised procreative desire as the norm. Erotic desire and pleasure were simply not a part of the formulation of “normative sexuality.” As the twentieth century started, there was a new cultural understanding of what constituted acceptable forms of sexuality. Katz notes that the “making of the middle class and the invention of heterosexuality went hand in hand” (41). Heterosexuality as a norm is, therefore, tied to the development and enforcement of sexuality, class, race, and gender divisions.
queer theory
How does queerness connect to theory? And what even is theory, anyways? Why does it matter? When I talk about theory, I’m really talking about a mode of critical theory, a branch of philosophy that is kind of obsessed with revealing and challenging systems and structures of power. Queer theory uses queerness as a lens through which an analysis is made; a theorist can attempt to understand a social system in relation to queerness and identity and propose ways to challenge the status quo with the goal of basically fixing a broken system (usually through some rejection of the status quo and a restructuring of things rather than the neoliberal ideal of working within a system to change it).
Queer theorists challenge the idea that cisgender and heterosexual are the normal, baseline identities. We analyze the power structures built to enforce norms and challenge them, offering new ways of understanding gender and sexuality outside the limited view of a hetero-/homo- binary. Here, I’ve done my best to explain what queerness is and how our understanding of sexuality has been constructed. In the future, I’ll look closely at the work of some important queer theorists and explain some big concepts in queer theory.
Good night, gamers.
Works Cited
Balousek, Matthew R.F. "Opening the Horse: An approach to queer game design." Santa Cruz, June 2017.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage, 1990.
Katz, Jonathan. The Invention of Heteropsexuality. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Phillips, Amanda. Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture. New York University Press, 2020.
wright, dani. "blood play: a queer gothic approach to game design." Santa Cruz, June 2022.