Queer and deconstruction

To present “queer” as a political concept in Sedgwick’s work poses a challenge because her work is complex, relating to various topics and oscillating between various methodologies. In this chapter I do not attempt to characterize the whole of Sedgwick’s oeuvre; instead, I focus entirely on her uses of the concept of “queer”. I suggest that there is a productive link between the term “queer” and deconstruction as a strategy that Sedgwick employs for her conceptual and cultural politics. Perhaps Sedgwick’s whole work should not be characterized as

deconstructive, but if “queer” is considered to be a deconstructive category, it is because Sedgwick uses it as a sign of something temporal, unstable or non-normative.³⁰ In fact, she has several ways in which she deploys “queer” politically. Often the term is part of her critical reading that she describes as “paranoid”. Sedgwick’s work as a whole is not deconstructive in the sense that it constantly alternates between what she calls “paranoid” and “reparative”

reading³¹. In reparative reading a positive, constructive element is strongly present. Moreover, her writing is political in the sense that she often seems to speak in the name of degraded people. Therefore, Sedgwick does not offer a typical deconstructive reading in the de Manian sense – as an internal analysis of the self-negating elements in a text. Nevertheless, she traces the logic of the heterosexual supplement, and “queer” functions as a figural refusal of this logic.³² Her project begins with deconstruction but exceeds it due to its political and ethical consequences. Negativity is neither the final aim of Sedgwick’s writing, nor is it the main analytical approach. Nevertheless, I find that negativity is important in her writing in order to understand the term “queer”, in that “queer” starts with shame, violence and exclusion. But the question still remains: Can Sedgwick’s work on “queer” be considered deconstructive, and if so, what would be the meaning of this deconstruction?

Unlike Judith Butler (1990), Sedgwick does not postulate subversion as an effect of the deconstructive reading of sexuality. Instead, Sedgwick’s work reveals contradictions in the concept of sexuality and its cultural deployment in law, literature, history, and broadly understood, the public arena. This type of reading reveals that the crisis within texts (for Sedgwick texts are not only written literary texts, but also e.g. cultural institutions) can be described as deconstructive. Yet the contradictions and discontinuities that can be revealed in the contemporary construction of sexuality are not in themselves subversive, indeed they are the opposite, in that these contradictions and discontinuities constitute the forms of sexuality that are currently present. For Sedgwick to reveal the construction of sexuality does not mean to subvert it. Penelope Deutscher puts it as follows:

Thus Sedgwick labels her own strategy ‘deconstructive’ but avoids two claims that are

30 Look, for instance, at Sedgwick’s formulation of “queer” in her essay: “Queer and Now” in Tendencies.

31 Sedgwick (2003) understands paranoid and reparative readings as modes of hermeneutic. Paranoid reading focuses on suspicion and aims at revealing negative affects, while reparative reading offers reconciliation with negative affects.

32In the essay “Around Performative” in Touching Feeling Sedgwick uses “queer” in the context of the Derridean concept of the logic of supplement. She writes: “Persons who self-identify as queer will be those whose subjectivity is lodged in refusal or deflection of (or by) the logic of heterosexual supplement.” (Sedgwick 2003, 71). Derrida developed the concept of supplement in Of Grammatology (1967, English translation 1976). The supplement stands for accretion and substitution (Of Grammatology 200). It functions to cover emptiness and it is a condition of representation (Of Grammatology 144). For Sedgwick the logic of heterosexual supplement aims at hiding always accidental and singular character of sexuality.

typically associated with deconstruction: first, that the internal instability of binarisms has a self-corrosive efficacy or internally subversive effect, and second, that the deconstructive critic’s exposure of that internal instability has a corrosive efficacy.

(Deutscher 1997, 18)

However, Tendencies seems to suggest that the concept of “queer” in some specific contexts acquires a disruptive power in relation to the construction of sexuality.

In some texts, such as in her main work, Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick uses Derridian deconstruction as a general construction for her own arguments. The paradigmatic opposition in this book is based on the relation of difference, which is negative.

Heterosexuality/homosexuality is a relational pair of concepts that codetermine each other and function as oppositions only in the determined structure. Here, in between the lines we can see the work of such Derridian terms as “trace” or “the law of genre”.³³ I do not offer any systematic analyses of Derrida’s influence on Sedgwick’s work, but I wish to point out that these deconstructive elements are an important part of the deployment of the concept of

“queer”.

It is noteworthy that Sedgwick was trained in literary theory at Cornell and Yale at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. During that time, particularly Yale, but also to some extent Cornell, were among the first universities in the States to introduce French post-structuralism and to apply it to literary and cultural criticism. Sedgwick is not a paradigmatic representative of the Yale School but her work clearly suggests the strong influence of this school.

At the beginning of Tendencies Sedgwick, as a literary scholar, offers us this working description of the term “queer”: ““queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993, 7). When we look at the rhetorical aspect of this description, it might remind us of some texts from the Yale School that refer to deconstructive concepts (e.g. Paul de Man’s “The Concept of Irony”). “Queer” appears to be an internal element of text or discourse that exceeds the semantic limitations of that text or discourse. Sedgwick does not advocate any semantic transgression, but advocates the act of rereading that extends semantic limits.

In the quoted description of “queer”, which is only one of several alternative

33 The Derridian inspirations of Sedgwick’s main work are traced by Ross Chambers in: “Strategic Constructivism? Sedgwick’s Ethics of Inversion”.

descriptions of the term in Tendencies, this concept does not refer to any particular object. The context of its application is gender and sexuality, but it is not a trope or a figure that can have limited signification. Instead, it “seems to be the trope of tropes, the one that names the term as the “turning away,” but that notion is so all-encompassing that it would include all tropes” (de Man 1996, 165). This is a part of the description of Paul de Man’s concept of irony and I believe it fits very well the context in which “queer” appears in Sedgwick’s work. De Man claims that irony has a performative function and it is not really a trope or a proper concept that could be defined. This can also be applied to the concept of “queer” as deployed by Sedgwick.

Sedgwick does not explicitly acknowledge de Man’s influence on her theorization of “queer”, but I think the Yale School provided Sedgwick with a very useful framework to challenge the existing theories of gender and sexuality and to politicize them in a different way.

In Sedgwick’s work “queer” is a very ambiguous concept. It seems to be a type of

“third term” which is without clear reference and oscillates between fiction and reality. In this sense it is a deeply deconstructive concept because it always appears as an act, or as Sedgwick calls it, a performative act. We have no power to interpret it because there is no interpretation ready at hand and no rules exist to guide our understanding of “queer” or to make a distinction between the imagined part of the concept and its reality connected to negativity. The positive element of “queer” is fictional, unstable, flexible and often utopian. The negative element is stable and is connected with shame and degradation.

The relationship between concepts of the “body” and the “text” is crucial in many of Sedgwick’s essays. Sometimes it is hard to understand what she means by these terms because they seem to have a broad connotation for her. For Sedgwick the body seems to resemble a text. It is close to the Foucaultian understanding of the body³⁴ that can be written by different discourses but also overwritten by others and again rewritten by multiple, often contradictory, power regimes. Sedgwick argues that the text and the body are limited and not totally open;

they are predetermined but at the same time they remain flexible. Sedgwick describes bodies in terms of literary criticism that are usually applied to texts. This is an interesting strategy and is theoretically challenging. I will focus on the consequences of this approach at the conceptual level.