People with a History/CLGH Book Review:
Scott Bravmann:
Review of Morton, ed., The Material Queer and Beemyn and Eliason, eds. Queer
Studies
Scott Bravmann
Review of Donald Morton, ed., The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), xviii + 395 pp, $75.00 c/$25.00 ppb
Review of Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, eds., Queer Studies: A Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 1996),
vii + 318 pp, $24.95 ppb
from CLGH Newsletter 11:2-3 (1997)
The publication of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993) promised a future
publishing phenomenon that belied the very premise of its title: rather than a settled
singular The to define the discipline, there could only be an unsettled
"A" to mark the anticipated proliferation of anthologies, edited volumes,
readers, and reprints of earlier texts that would both enlarge and contest this process of
critical canon-formation. While at once confirming and enabling the possibility of
critical writing on queer subjects, these collections have not always done as much queer
critique as they might, but instead reiterate some of the most compelling, if often
obscured, problems of contemporary culture. In this sense, both The Material Queer and Queer Studies set out to do something new in the "field," but each in
ways that address rather different problems. These alternative, but not incompatible
trajectories propose interesting, needed reconsiderations of prior institutionalizing
practices in relation to the problematic subject(s) of queer studies.
In assembling The Material Queer (TMQ), Donald Morton has attempted
"to rearticulate a field of understanding" and insists that his volume "is
in fact urgently needed because the existing [queer studies] anthologies can in no way be
affirmed" (p. xii). As Rosemary Hennesey has argued, the majority of participants in
the race for queer theory have consistently neglected the place of material practices,
relations of production, and global economic inequality in those much celebrated recent
articulations of the queer ("Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture," Cultural
Critique 29 [winter 1994-1995], pp. 31-76). The self-described transgressive space
occupied by TMQ is intended to allow us to undertake such investigations. In
contrast to the collective premise of earlier queer theory volumes, which focus on the
autonomy -- even primacy -- of "(virtual) desire," TMQ aims to change the
terms of the question and address "(actual) reality" (p. 1). The decisive break
with these past projects that Morton wants to introduce is one that enables a move from
textual to cultural studies. Whereas the former "is concerned with the mechanics of
signification" (p. xv), a disruption of literal meaning, and ultimately renders
knowledge unreliable, the latter "depends on the continuing possibilities of speaking
`effectively' and `knowledgeably' about entities called `culture' and `society'" (p.
xv). Rather than (thick) descriptions of cultures of difference in which the bourgeois
subject encounters exotic others, which for him characterize the weak commitments of
idealism, Morton advances the notion of a fundamental imperative realized by materialist
analyses which offer (clear) explanations of the social structures that produce and
maintain inequality.
Against the idealist tradition, which argues for the autonomy of desire and extends as
far back as Plato, Morton situates his reader in a counter-tradition that "relat[es]
desire to the [materiality of the] historical world" (p. 2) and has its own ancient
roots, represented in TMQ by the fragments of Heraclitus. Though setting up a
critical opposition between these two theoretical strands, Morton's strategy admits some
areas of partial coincidence. Like the "ludic (post)modern" textualism he
decries, historical materialism also recognizes that language distorts the reality it
ostensibly represents, but it does so through the workings of ideology rather than the
slippage of the signifier -- so that the problem lies in relations of power rather than in
the structure of language itself. Furthermore, materialism understands the social
construction of historical subjects through analysis of the mode of production rather than
the mode of representation as it is understood in ludic postmodernism.
After a preface, two clarifying notes, and finally a lengthy introduction, the
anthology sets out in earnest to highlight the idealist-materialist contestations over the
queer in a way that is decidedly opposed to "let[ting] capitalism off the hook"
as "today's reigning ludic queer theory" has done (p. 37). Arguing against the
"voluntarist" notion of change effected by a new consciousness in such essays as
Michael Warner's "Tongues Untied," Morton (re)iterates the need for the kinds of
structural change sketched in Lance Selfa's "What's Wrong with `Identity
Politics.'" In part, this resistance to identity politics has to do with a rejection
of the ghettoization of queer knowledge and the insistence on the interconnectedness of
historical phenomena. The work of this volume insists that "the contestation over
sexualities [is] not so much a struggle between queer (desire) and straight (desire) as
[it is] one between desire and need, socialism and capitalism, the individual and the
collective, and so on" (p. 37). Throughout, Morton seeks to make global connections
-- such as why queer theory arose at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall -- and also
to recenter politics -- in part by returning to the political visions of (gay) liberation.
By bringing together and resituating such diverse theorists as Herbert Marcuse, Jacques
Derrida, Monique Wittig, David Horowitz, and Teresa L. Ebert, among many others, this
anthology makes an important contribution to rethinking the material queer. Its
intervention is timely and necessary, but there are also some problems in it that are more
than minor quirks. Worried that "all `queer' politics could ever be is the subversion
of the social order and not commitment to any particular program of social change"
(p. 203), Morton wants to hold onto certainty, even a privileged form of knowing, in order
"to set (however provisionally) a knowledge that could serve as the basis for
political praxis" (p. 122). In so doing, however, he never entertains doubts about
materialism's ability to know and, in simply saying it must be wrong, never seriously
considers the epistemological challenge: what if ludic (post)modern textualism is right?
If the structure of language does subvert the possibility of certainty, how then must we
set about working for social justice and changing ownership of the means of production?
Nor is Morton's own account of marxism as honest as it might be. In the volume's final
contribution, "Capitalism and Homophobia: Marxism and the Struggle for Gay/Lesbian
Rights," the 1917 Collective states, "Marxists oppose all sorts of capitalist
oppression ... [including] the persecution of both male and female homosexuals and others
who are oppressed on the basis of sexually related behavior" (p. 369). Without
comment, Morton lets stand as if it were true this idealist conception of marxism
whose definition falls outside the material practices of historical reality and never
accounts for the often blistering homophobia among marxist scholars, organizers, and
cultural workers. Reminding us of the skirmishes among partisans with various left
convictions, Morton mocks the (unorthodox) socialist vision of Socialist Review, a
left journal with one of the longest non-parasitic commitments to queer scholarship and
activism.
In addition to the necessary recentering of the material world and class relations, we
learn some curious (homophobic?) things from materialist analysis as well. On the one
hand, V. N. Vološinov tells us in an ahistorical statement that "[a]ll periods
of social decline and disintegration are characterized by overestimation of the sexual in life and in ideology" (p. 98), with the current implication that we should help
reduce that overestimation by knowing when to stay (with the full impact of bourgeois
propriety) in the material closet. On the other hand, we learn from the 1917 Collective,
writing in 1995 (!), that "[t]he question of the oppression of homosexual men and
women is a vital one for Marxists to take up, but it is not a strategic one for socialist
revolution -- unlike, for example, the woman question (p. 379). Even if we were firmly
convinced that sexism, women's movements, feminist theories, and gender-based analyses
were no longer dismissively called "the woman question," we find out that social
gender and its (material) consequences are fully distinct from compulsory heterosexuality,
homophobia, and other forms of sexual regulation.
Ultimately, despite its stated view to the future, TMQ does a much better -- and
necessary -- job of looking backward to excavate the tradition of materialist theorizing
of desire and challenging the idealist tradition than it does of looking forward to enable
critical reconsiderations of the very structures (complex, overlapping, contradictory)
that necessitated the new left break from universal, class-based marxist analysis in the
first place. In his rush to condemn ludic postmodernism, Morton overlooks the (attendant?)
postmodern cultural politics that have begun to reframe the terms of struggle,
highlighting specific differences, fractured subjectivities, and the local, largely, but
not only, as a way of resisting the imperialist impulses of uniform materialist analysis.
Also recognizing the shortcomings of a much wider range of prior publications, the
editors of Queer Studies (QS) "have sought to fill some of [the various
distinct] gaps within existing queer texts" (p. 2): their (near) inaccessibility to
undergraduate and non-academic readers, their focus on heterosexual audiences or people
who are just coming out, their narrow disciplinary allegiances, and their inattention to
the differently queer subjectivities of bisexuals and transsexuals. Organized into two
(overlapping) sections on identity and queer theory, this volume presents sixteen papers
from the 1994 InQuery/InTheory/InDeed Conference, which were selected because they
"dealt with areas that have often been excluded, marginalized, or ignored by queer
studies in the past: race, gender, transgender, bisexuality, and s/m" (pp. 2-3).
Unlike TMQ, which sets out to resituate a large number of key texts in an entire
field of understanding and therefore requires substantial (re)contextualizing work, QS's
essays themselves carry much more of the anthology's burden of (re)making the field. The
new research showcased in QS not only provokes reevaluation of existing queer
scholarly practices but it also complicates the rigid, even narrow, notions of materialism
and desire that inform TMQ's critique.
Motivated by "the very real persecution" that "[t]he butch who refuses
to pass as non-butch" faces (p. 27), Sherrie Inness and Michelle E. Lloyd ask,
"What does masculinity mean on a female body?" (p. 14). Arguing that the butch
is inexplicable within dominant versions of reality, they seek to explicate deeply
important questions about materiality as it is inscribed in complex, variegated, specific,
but not autonomous cultural practices of signification, and insist that the body is not
just a material presence in the world but also, quoting Jacqueline N. Zita, "a thing
that carries its own historical gravity" (p. 19). Recognizing that desire is not a
privilege as stated (repeatedly) in TMQ, Patricia L. Duncan's essay proposes a
productive understanding of s/m "as a site of conflict," "a political
act" whose practice "provides a space for resolving conflict and for
reconceptualizing notions of social difference" (pp. 87-88). This position is
differently inflected in Warren J. Blumenfeld's discussion of historical parallels in the
scapegoating of Jews and queers, including attempts by the Right to exploit
post-Reaganomics uncertainties by targeting gays and lesbians as a privileged elite.
Queer questions of history run throughout QS. Vernon Rosario's "Trans
(Homo) Sexuality?" is centrally concerned with how transsexual identities complicate
gender and sexuality and asks whether the early twentieth-century "invert"
should be understood as transsexual rather than as "the genealogical ancestor of the
modern homosexual" (p. 40). Amanda Udis-Kessler maps the queer historical shift in
how bisexuality is conceived: "from an implicit universal bisexual potential to an
explicit bisexual minority group" (p. 52). Race matters are provocatively explored in
several essays that address the subjectivities of people of color (JeeYeun Lee, Gregory
Conerly), name whiteness as a visible difference linked to social power (Tracy D. Morgan),
and identify the structural interdependence and mutual productivity of discourses on
racial and sexual pathology (Siobhan Somerville). Using a rational choice model, M. V. Lee
Badgett assesses the material impact of coming out at work. Essays by Ki Namaste, Amber
Ault, and Christopher James critique queer practices that have rejected bisexuals and
transsexuals, pointing out contradictions, misreadings, and appropriations in queer
theory.
Ruth Goldman's essay looks at how particular norms operate in "queer theory,"
including the privileges (for some) attached to the term and the tendency to separate
activism from academics. Yet in criticizing this latter practice among (certain) queer
theorists, she reiterates the impossible chronology Teresa de Lauretis used to distinguish
the "queer" of her theory from that of queer activists: in a footnote to the
introduction to the "queer theory" issue of differences (1991), which
Goldman quotes, de Lauretis writes, "My `queer' had no relation to the Queer Nation
group of whose existence I was ignorant at the time" (p. 171). The formation of Queer
Nation, however, post-dated the "Queer Theory" conference (1990) from which that
volume derived by approximately two months, thus explaining why de Lauretis was unaware of
the group's existence during the planning stages of her conference. Whatever else it might
bring to light, a careful critique would recognize that queer theory's genealogy does not
admit an activist-academic distinction simply because a foundational text got it wrong.
While the differences between these two volumes' projects are substantial, they also
share in a larger critique of queer scholarly practice. The anxious discontent with the
current institutionally privileged incarnations of queer studies that they speak against
gives them significance beyond their specific contents. Helping to open debate on the
possibilities of radically queer studies, their meta projects on how queer scholars
discipline and publish require their own sorts of (related) critical attention. Neither
books' (implied) optimism, however, poses the question of queer studies' future in the
increasingly long-term no-growth approach to the social sciences and humanities in the
academy. Nonetheless, that is a question we should be asking.
Source.
© The Committee for Lesbian and Gay History [CLGH] is an affiliated organization of the American Historical Association devoted to
promoting the study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* history, and the interaction of
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This text is part of People
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