Activism enters academia

Around 1990 “queer” began to be used as a strategic means of identification. The ground for it was shared oppression but this identification with “queer” created a political community that consisted not only of shared oppression but of shared political goals and joint political actions.

In this form, “queer” enters academia and becomes one of the most prolific academic terms of recent decades.

1993 marked the publication of several works that constituted a new field of research called “queer theory”. Among them were A Fear of Queer Planet edited by Michael Warner, Tendencies by Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler. All these authors drew on the tradition of activism in their use of “queer” and for all of them “queer” was

not simply a theoretical concept but also a political term. Moreover, they challenged the division between academia and politics. However, at the same time “queer” disappeared from use on the streets. During 1993, in almost all cities in the U.S., Queer Nation and ACT UP disappeared.

In 1993, “queer” began to appear as an adjective in more and more diverse contexts.

There was, for example, not only queer theory, but queer movies, queer life styles, queer shopping centres, queer travel agencies, and so on. In a way, “queer” slowly lost its direct political radicalism as it was no longer so often used by activists, but it acquired the possibility of functioning temporarily in different contexts, even in commercial contexts.

For many academics who adopted “queer”, the term was a means of blurring the distinction between activism and academia. A good example of this is the work of Douglas Crimp, particularly his essays dating from the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s subsequently published as Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002). Crimp in these essays continuously oscillates between political activism and academic discourse. He challenges not only the distinction between these fields but also the discourses through which politics and academia operate.

2.4.1 Queer politics as a form of academic critique

In her essay “Making It Perfectly Queer” (1991), Lisa Duggan advocates that theory be kept as close to activism as possible. For Duggan, it is crucial that “queer” incorporates, in both theory and activism, a utopian dimension. The oppositional and confrontational character of “queer”

on a theoretical level can be transformed into a radical critique of gay politics. Duggan writes:

“I want to take up the position of “queer” largely in order to criticize (but not completely displace) the liberal and nationalist strategies in gay politics and to advocate the constructionist turn in lesbian and gay theories and practices” (Duggan 2006 [1991], 149). In Duggan’s opinion “queer” can be used in politically engaged theories in order to criticize presumptions about the self, political agency and the public/private division.

Duggan regards Queer Nation as a good example of the practice of that type of critique.

She characterizes the political agenda of activists in the following way:

Many of these new gay militants reject the liberal value of privacy and the appeal to tolerance which dominate the agendas of more mainstream gay organizations. Instead, they emphasize publicity and self-assertion; confrontation and direct action top their list of tactical options; the rhetoric of difference replaces the more assimilationist liberal emphasis on similarity to other groups. (Duggan 2006 [1991], 153)

Duggan emphasizes that the rhetoric of difference may be used to problematize the very notion of unitary identity. “Queer” was used to demonstrate that identities are constructed

socially and that people are marked with multiple identities that define them. Interestingly, in the 1990s academia also developed a new way of analysing identities called intersectionality (see e.g. Crenshaw 1991).

Duggan claims that not only the notion of gay and lesbian identity but also the very notion of a gay and lesbian community is problematic, and the term “queer” can help in rethinking this notion.

The notion of a “queer community” can work somewhat differently. It is often used to construct a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members’ sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender. (Duggan 2006, 157)

She also mentions that for many activists, “queer” simply meant “gay”. Nevertheless for many others, this term was a new cultural and political opening.

For Duggan, on many levels “queer” is a contradictory term but it does not mean that it should be dismissed in academia; on the contrary, in these contradictions Duggan recognizes a political potential that might also be transformational for academic theories. Duggan in fact attempts to set an agenda for future queer theory:

The continuing work of queer politics and theory is to open up possibilities of coalition across barriers of class, race, and gender, and to somehow satisfy the paradoxical necessity of recognizing differences, while producing (provisional) unity. (Duggan 2006 [1991], 162)

This might be regarded as a rather ambitious aim.

Duggan’s 1991 essay is important because it is one of the first texts to theorize “queer”

and search for a proper academic language and discourse to express it and to make it political.

Duggan aims to be very close to the original uses of “queer” by Queer Nation, but at the same time she aims at establishing a theoretical field that would be able to maintain the political potency which “queer” has in activism and to express a more general social and political criticism in academic terms.

2.4.2 Queer academic utopia

Lauren Berlant also based her use of “queer” on Queer Nation’s notion of the term. In her essay

“Sex in Public” (1999, written with Michael Warner), she uses “queer” to discuss the concept of the public sphere. The point of using “queer” in this essay is to sexualize and deconstruct the traditional concept of the public sphere. In this context, “queer” contains a notion of an

alternative to the established meaning of the public sphere and the values that are connected to it.

For Berlant, “queer” can function as the basis for a utopian project. She writes:

By queer culture we mean a world-making project, where “world” like “public,” differs from community or group because it necessarily includes more people that can be identified, more spaces that can be mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a birthright. The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate registers, by definition unrealizable as community or identity.

(Berlant and Warner, 2000, 322)

Here “queer” is connected with certain forms of utopian revolutionary politics that are prompted by particular acts and lifestyles. In this context, “queer” refers to a way of living that is alternative and non-normative. Through “queer”, Berlant attempts to challenge the notion of intimacy. The concept of “queer” would accommodate forms of intimacy without a necessary connection to concepts of “privacy”, “kinship”, “property” or “nation”. In this idea, one can detect some echoes of Queer Nation, but Berlant seems to go even further with the concept of

“queer”. It is clearly a positively valorized term that in some way is able to inspire us to make the world a better place. It would seem that for Berlant, “queer” is a type of messianic promise for the future; it can inspire or encourage us to be politically active and also to live alternative lifestyles. However, contrary to Queer Nation, Berlant’s text does not clearly explain how to act politically in the name of “queer” or what would it mean to be “queer”. “Queer” here is instead an idealized concept of difference.

Berlant also discusses “queer” in “Queer Nationality”, one of her early essays co-authored with Elizabeth Freeman Here she is much closer to the explicit uses of “queer” by Queer Nation. Berlant states that “queer” as it is deployed by Queer Nation has multiple political references. According to Berlant, many of Queer Nation’s actions and ideologies aim to point out: “how thoroughly the local experience of the body is framed by laws, policies, and social customs regulating sexuality” (Berlant and Freeman 1997, 148). Berlant seems to be placing Queer Nation into a Foucaultian framework, especially since later on in the same text she sees Queer Nation as representing resistance to these regulatory regimes.

Berlant emphasizes two aspects in the uses of “queer” by Queer Nation: counterpolitics and an alternative vision of public space. Berlant claims that public space is unitary, hegemonic and normative. From this perspective, Queer Nation opens up public space to new meanings.

“Queer Nation understands the property of queerness to be a function of the diverse spaces in

which it aims to become explicit. It names multiple local and national publics” (Berlant and Freeman 1997, 151).

In “Queer Nationality”, “queer” is powerful, political, transformative and radical.

Enthusiasm about “queer” and Queer Nation is very strong in this essay, the author seeming to believe that this term can produce theoretical miracles through its powerful radical critique. It can, for example, challenge our presumptions about identity, community, nation, norms and popular culture.

Berlant states that the use of “queer” among activists established the concept as an ideal limit. It is a “utopian promise” of a new identity and a new community. It also marks the beginning of a new symbolic order. By this “Queer Symbolic” Berlant refers to a possibility of imagining new forms of cultural participation and nationalism; in other words, new forms of being together in different shared spaces.

2.4.3 Queer against norms

For Michael Warner “queer” stands for the contestation of the institutions of state, family, nation, and of politics itself. He states:

The preference of “queer” represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.

(Warner 1993, XXVI)

Warner considers the political value of “queer” to lie in its oppositional role in reference to established social norms. This idea is very close to the politics of contestation proposed by Queer Nation, but Warner goes on to attribute more theoretical qualities to the concept of

“queer”. To Warner, “queer” is able to express the permanent insufficiency of traditional identity categories.

A similar way of theorizing “queer” is represented by Simon Watney. Watney was one of the first scholars in the Anglo-Saxon academic circles to conduct a cultural analysis of AIDS. Watney observes: “‘queer’ identity recognizes that no single term, including ‘queer’, can ever resolve all the epistemological and political problems that are inscribed within the current dominant rationality of sexuality and sexual identity” (Watney 2000, 61). Watney argues that “queer” signifies counter-identity, and it is politically very potent in the form in which it was deployed by activists. However, Watney considers this potency to be temporal.

“Queer” as the name of a radically oppositional concept and movement began to appear historically during the time of AIDS and it can be seen as a cultural answer to this disease.

Watney distinguishes two main aspects in “queer”: its oppositional side towards mainstream

society and its deconstructive side towards LGBT communities. For Watney, the second aspect of “queer” seems to be more important. He writes: “ ‘Queer’ thus articulates contradictions and tensions within the older lesbian and gay politics, and permits us to think of ‘gay’ politics in a wider historical perspective” (Watney 2000, 59).

Like Gould, I find the role of emotions to be crucial in establishing “queer” as a political term. The relationship between emotions and politics in the case of the term “queer” is very contingent and can be discerned on several levels. For me it is crucial that “queer” has introduced a new approach to political debates and theories. Queer Nation showed that agents do not have to take part in political debates on pre-established terms, which might often be oppressive, limiting and normative. Indeed, agents can contest and challenge the very terms in which political debates take place.

The term “queer” as a political concept in the field of AIDS and LGBT activism appeared around 1990 and disappeared around 1993. There were still some smaller organizations that used the term, such as Queers United in Support of Political Prisoners or Qthink, but after 1993 none of them were able to capture political imagination of sexual minorities on such scale as Queer Nation did. Even though after 1993, “queer” was no longer as radical politically in the field of activism, a new chapter of “queer” as a political concept began with its use by scholars in U.S. academia.

When activists of Queer Nation used the term “queer”, they were able to galvanise public opinion with it, including many gays and lesbians. Many public actions were very provocative and outrageous. This was a political practice, understood as a public transformative action. But when academics try to place “queer” into theoretical discourses, it often sounds too idealistic, utopian or at points, exaggerated. Nevertheless, I find it fascinating that this concept is so flexible and that it is able to work on so many levels and can provoke such an immense number of interpretations and uses.