The influence of new cultural studies

In the 1970s, what is referred to as French theory became popular in U.S. academia. Previously, there were not as many translations of French philosophical texts into English and the few Americans who were fluent in French took part in the discussions concerning poststructuralism, but these debates were limited to a narrow academic discipline. The situation changed during the 1970s when several translations into English were published in the U.S. One of the most important was Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1976. In addition, several other books and essays by Derrida were translated during the 1970s, namely Speech and Phenomena (trans. 1973) and Writing and Difference (trans. 1978).

Interestingly, several of Derrida’s translations were made by feminist scholars such as Spivak, Johnson and Ronell. At the end of the 1970s, a new wave of cultural critique that was influenced by Derrida became popular in English departments at many American universities.

Escoffier mentions that this new cultural critique formed a new generation of gay and lesbian scholars in the 1980s.

David Halperin (1995) states that beginning in the 1980s, the ideas of Michel Foucault became increasingly popular, not only among scholars, but also among activists. Foucault’s work was not directly related to the Yale School or to deconstruction but it definitely had some impact on them. Halperin claims that the publication of the translation of The History of Sexuality in 1978, and later, the publication of other books and essays by Foucault during the 1980s, made many gays and lesbians more critical towards identity categories, and subsequently this also influenced gay and lesbian activism and scholarship. Although sceptical

towards his theories, even Duggan in one of her essays (1995) mentions Foucault as a figure who began to popularize gay and lesbian topics in American academia in the 1980s.

Even more influential in the 1980s was the Yale School of criticism and more broadly, post-structuralism. For Jagose (1996), post-structuralism created the academic context in which the concept of queer appeared. Along with Derrida, the main representatives of this thought were Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Jonathan Culler and J. Hillis Miller. The Yale School was predominantly focused on literary criticism, but the next generation of scholars influenced by the Yale School applied these theories to create a broad cultural and political critique. In the 1980s among the young generation of scholars who combined an interest in sexual minorities with poststructural methodology were Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, Lee Edelman and D.A. Miller. Many of them later became strongly associated with queer theory. I discuss several of these authors in other chapters.

The Yale School scholars provided tools for a powerful critique of concepts such as natural, origin, norm and identity and they theorized these concepts in relation to literature, although the same concepts were at the heart of gay and lesbian studies and their political struggle. Jagose (1996) suggests that the rhetoric of difference embraced by radical activists at the end of the 1980s was influenced by post-structuralism:

Access to the post-structuralist theorisation of identity as provisional and contingent, coupled with a growing awareness of the limitations of identity categories in terms of political representation, enabled queer to emerge as a new form of personal identification and political organisation. (Jagose 1996, 77)

Jagose also highlights the importance of other French thinkers for gay and lesbian scholarship in the 1980s, and these included Althusser, Barthes, Freud, Lacan and Saussure.

Elizabeth Freedman⁸ (2010) claims that there was a difference between post-Stonewall activists and the new generation of activists that emerged at the end of the 1980s. The crucial aspect was that the appearance of this new wave of activists was not preceded by major mass protest movements and that the cultural context was different. New activists sought new ways to express their protest and disagreement with the political situation. Many of them found art an important means of protest, triggering the production of many new experimental films accompanied by similar trends in photography and theatre. Freeman gives Isaac Julien, Cecilia Dougherty and organizations such as Guerilla Girls and ACT UP as examples of these new activists.

8 Freedman argues for this particularly in her Introduction but this perspective is also found in other chapters.

It seems to be clear that in the 1980s, many debates on topics related to sexual minorities, which were previously almost exclusively found within the communities, were introduced into academia. At universities, gay and lesbian topics achieved theoretical sophistication that for some (Escoffier 1998) was a threat to the concrete political action that was required during the AIDS crisis. In other words, deconstruction was a controversial methodological ally for many gay and lesbian scholars, but it proved to be fruitful in producing a large number of studies that presented a new view on the oppression of sexual minorities and on many political issues concerning them. During the 1980s, academia offered a safe place for many gay and lesbian scholars to engage in political debates. In the U.S. minorities had limited access to public political debates during the time of the Reagan presidency, and Weeks (2007) suggests that this might be a reason why many debates within gay and lesbian communities moved to academia and there attained a high theoretical level.

It is difficult to summarize the few moments in the contemporary gay and lesbian movement that were essential to the development of the new political concept of “queer”. I have presented analyses of several historians of the homosexual movement and they seem to have a few points in common. First, the contemporary political movement of sexual minorities symbolically began with the Stonewall riots. This event occupies a special position in the gay political imaginary and therefore several authors, particularly those in favour of the concept of

“queer”, stress the connection between the emergence of “queer” as a critical political term and the rebirth of Stonewall energy. For those that are critical towards the use of “queer”, e.g.

Jeffreys (2002) and Weeks (2007), there is no such connection.

The change in vocabulary that happened around the time of the Stonewall riots had an immense impact on the movement of sexual minorities. The old term “homosexual” was considered to be too formal and too strongly connected to discourses that considered homosexuality to be a medical condition. The new term “gay” was a call to come out and be active politically. This change in terminology was also a sign of a deeper change in self-identification, in the role and perception of the community, and in political consciousness that was informed by knowledges available during this time.

The new term “queer” reflects mistrust towards the public institutions and political concepts that were dominant during the time. “Queer” never replaced “gay”, primarily because it was never fully accepted by the majority of sexual minority members. The term has been, and remains, controversial for many. The social, cultural and academic context at the end of the 1980s was different from 1969. “Queer” was influenced by the post-Stonewall movement, but people who used it from the end of the 1980s were also aware of the limitations that the utopian

revolutionary movement had in the early 1970s on the one hand, as well as the limitations of the ethnic model of identity and community building that became dominant after Stonewall on the other. Main gay and lesbian organizations conceived of homosexuals as a group that had a specific interest, similar to an ethnic group. This idea was developed during the 1970s but from the final years of the 1980s more and more activists found this model deeply insufficient and they searched for a different ground for their political expression on the level of theory and action.

In the face of the growing conservatism and religious movements in the United States many activists strove to build a broad political platform that could confront the new wave of oppression. As stated by several authors that I have quoted above, there were many heated debates between the different groups of sexual minorities during the 1980s. The LGBT movement and feminism, for example, were very divided and often unable to act together politically. The AIDS crisis required a powerful response from sexual minority communities.

AIDS was medically as well as culturally such a shock for the gay male communities that, as Piontek (2006) states, in gay narrations produced after he discovery of AIDS it was common to divide time into before and after the disease. AIDS reshaped the attitude towards sex and community, but it also changed the political attitudes of many gays and lesbians. It would seem that the established gay and lesbian movement with its assimilationist rhetoric of human rights was unable to meet these challenges. “Queer” was, as Duggan writes, “the promise of new meanings, new ways of thinking and acting politically – a promise sometimes realized, sometimes not” (Duggan 2006 [1991], 149). Contrary to Weeks (2007) who states that:

“despite an activist flirtation with queer, in Britain queer theory has largely remained confined to the academia (…)” (Weeks 2007, 151), Duggan emphasizes that in the U.S. “queer” was not primarily an academic term, but it emerged at the crossroads of gay and lesbian scholarship and activism. Historically, there was a requirement for new forms of action and thinking that could confront the new problems, but also deal with the existing problems within the gay and lesbian communities, which were strongly divided and barely able to agree on political claims. “Queer”

therefore emerged in the context of the internal clashes of sexual minority communities and the fear of AIDS. Adopting “queer” was not an attempt to reunite the different groups under a new umbrella identity, but rather to mobilize them to act together politically.

“Queer” as a political concept did not appear in a conceptual vacuum. The term started to be used as a form of opposition to the more established gay and lesbian movement of the time. Uses of “queer” as a political signifier have been influenced by various factors, among them the most crucial being the AIDS crisis, debates among sexual minorities concerning their

identity, feminist discussions of the time and new theoretical developments in social and cultural criticism in the U.S. academia.