Introduction

“Queer” has long been used as a term of insult for lesbians and gay men, but by the late 1980s, it was undergoing a re-appropriation within “queer cultures.” Re-appropriation is a political strategy that entails reclaiming and transforming the meanings associated with injurious terms. In the context of queer theory, “to queer” means to disrupt or make something “strange,” twisting or unsettling meanings, pushing the invisible into the spotlight. These techniques are seen to have the potential to transform normative (taken-for-granted) assumptions, and have been widely used to challenge assumptions about sexuality and gender.

Within queer theory, an original focus was on unsettling the taken-for-granted assumption about the relationship between gender and sexuality. An everyday example of this is when lesbians are asked “which one of you is the man?” Here, the entrenched belief is that sexual relationships require a binary division in gender (masculine/feminine – male/female). Queer theorists demonstrated this normative belief only makes sense because of the dominance of heterosexuality and is a result of widespread heteronormative assumptions. If we step outside of heterosexuality, it is possible to imagine other configurations between male and female bodies and their gender performances, and it is not necessary to only think of sexual relationships in terms of gender binaries. Queer theory sets out to demonstrate how heteronormativity is endemic in all forms of knowledge and how, through the act of close, critical reading, we can make visible alternative interpretations that do not marginalize queer lives (the lives of those who do not line up with normative understandings of gender or sexuality).

The intention of “queer” was not to represent another identity category in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) spectrum, even though some people have used it as a naming device. Instead, queer theory is anti-identity and seeks to demonstrate the instability of categories, and the richness and fluidity of sexual desire that cuts across sexual and gender identities. It has evolved by arguing for the legitimacy of a range of marginalized subjects and practices (e.g., transgender, intersex, queer muslims, sadomasochism, barebacking) paying increasing attention to the way other categories of difference (e.g., class, race, ethnicity, disability, religion) intersect with gender and sexuality.

Definition

“To queer” is to make something strange, to unsettle, to disrupt. As queer theory seeks to demonstrate and celebrate the instability of categories and taken-for-granted assumptions, there is something counterintuitive in seeking to define or fix the meaning associated with the term. This is because once a meaning is defined, it becomes static and normative – the opposite of the radical instability queer theory implies. For this reason, it is helpful to think of queer theory in terms of what it does rather than what it is. In order to maintain its potential to disrupt, queer theorists draw on multiple theoretical tools (e.g., poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology) to undo normative assumptions. However, there is no definitive “queer theory,” rather “queer theories” or “queer commentaries” that are necessarily invigorated by the introduction of new ways of reading and seeing, vital to maintain its ongoing disruptive potential. Queer theory has roots in philosophy and literary and cultural theory, but is now most commonly associated with the academic fields of gender and sexuality. Key concepts include “performativity”, “heteronormativity,” and “assimilation.” Although often understood as densely theoretical and more engaged with the re-reading of literary texts than the everyday experiences of LGBT people, queer theory is underpinned by an understanding of language and knowledge as productive of meaning and reality and has a strong anti-homophobic, anti-normative, and anti-identity stance that is beneficial for understanding queer subjectivities.

Keywords

Gender; sexuality; heteronormativity; anti-homophobic; desire; lesbian & gay studies; performativity; minoritizing/universalizing; anti-assimilation

History

The early 1990s are often seen as the heyday of queer theory. Reportedly, the term was first used by Teresa de Lauretis (1990) in a conference call for papers on lesbian and gay sexualities at the University of California, Santa Cruz – although she distanced herself from the term shortly afterward. Within feminist accounts, the emergence of queer theory is traced back further to Gayle Rubin’s (1984) argument that the category sexuality should be politically and analytically detangled from gender. Writing against the background of the “feminist sex wars” that had divided many feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rubin argued that feminism is the theory of gender oppression and should not be privileged as the theory of sexual oppression as it “fails to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other” (p. 304).

Awareness of the sociohistorical and political context of the late 1980s is crucial to understanding the force with which queer theory ideas were taken up. The HIV/AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s decimated queer communities while triggering a wider societal sex panic that allowed the re-entrenchment of conservative values, and created a veil of silence over non-normative sexual practices.

The early days of “queer theory” are associated with star contributors such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick-Kosofsky, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner. Embedded within their work was a commitment to rethinking non-normative gender and sexualities without comparison to heterosexuality, while demonstrating the endemic heteronormativity within social theory. Critical analyses focused on forms of supposed deviant eroticism, the limits of sexual identity categories, and the fluidity of sexual desire. An anti-homophobic stance, developed through concepts such as “heteronormativity,” was used to challenge the prevalence of homophobic and heterosexist assumptions in taken-for-granted interpretations of queer lives. Another contentious issue that created discord among queer people was that equality for lesbians and gays could only be achieved by assimilating with heterosexual values and lifestyles. For those lesbians or gay men who did not challenge normative presentations of femininity or masculinity, there was the possibility of passing unnoticed as “straight.” For those deemed less “acceptable,” queer theory and activism provided a point of mobilization. Anyone engaged in non-normative gender or sexual practices (e.g., transgendered, drag kings and queens, leather dykes, and daddies), and those who resisted notions of fixed sexual identities, sought to push their “perversion” back in the public’s face through an open celebration of crossing gender and sexuality lines.

Although queer is most often associated with lesbian and gay lives, early accounts were clear that you did not have to be lesbian or gay to do queer. In fact, many lesbians and gay men are seen to behave in ways queer theorists interpret as “normative” by reinforcing traditional conventions such as getting married or having children. Similarly, some people who might be conceived of as “straight” because of an opposite-sex partner can do queer through disrupting heteronormative gender and sexual practices, often through sexual play, or through relationship practices such as polyamory that involves multiple partners, often both male and female.

Traditional Debates

Queer theory challenges psychological understandings of sexuality. Although some queer theorists draw on psychoanalytic perspectives, most reject any engagement with mainstream psychology. Psychology is seen as a discipline that constructs acceptable social norms and marks out variation from this “norm” as abnormal and pathological. In a “foundational” text in queer theory, the History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1979), Michel Foucault argued that it was the scientific turn, with its methodological drive to document and measure sexual behavior, that brought the notion of a “homosexual subject” – that is, a gay person – into existence. We can find examples of same-sex sexual behavior throughout history, but it was the “medicalization of the sexually peculiar” in the late 1880s that saw a shift from sexual “acts” to identifying the different types of sexual persons (or identities) that we find in contemporary thinking about sexuality.

As critiques of the way sexuality had been studied emerged among sociologist and social historians during the 1970s, psychology was seen as the main culprit. Homophobic viewpoints were widespread in psychology until the mid-late twentieth century, epitomized by the inclusion until 1973 of homosexuality as a mental disorder in DSM. In an effort to redeem the discipline, areas of psychology have since been involved in trying to understand the development of non-normative sexual identities seemingly outside of pathological interpretations. For example, studies on the role of hormones and genetics in the development of sexual orientation provided evidence of homosexuality as a variation of nature. Developmental models accounted for how lesbians, gay men, and bisexual men and women could develop a secure self-identity in a negative social context. Despite a “pro-gay” stance, endeavors such as these are problematic for queer theorists as they continue to work within heteronormative understandings of sexuality and identity. They are either concerned with questions about “what causes homosexuality” and therefore maintain a normal/abnormal binary, or they seek to establish certainty in identity categories rather than align with queer theory’s understanding of sexuality, desire, and attraction as fluid.

Critical Debates

Within lesbian and gay studies, the 1980s was dominated by debates about the merits of essentialist versus constructionist accounts of sexuality. The social constructionist position represented a dramatic epistemological shift, based on the rejection of biological, psychological, and psychoanalytic accounts for their essentialist assumptions that sexuality can be explained through innate biology. One of Eve Sedgwick’s (1990) most important contributions was to attempt to strike out the pervasiveness of the essentialist/constructionist debate by calling into question the idea that contemporary modes of homosexuality had actually replaced those identified in historical analyses of the nineteenth century. Although queer commentaries can be associated with poststructuralist analyses, and therefore social constructionism, Sedgwick objected to the sharpness of the contrast drawn between different historical modes of homosexuality (such as “sexual acts” vs. “gay people”), suggesting this led to the assumption that homosexuality today was a clearly defined entity.

Instead Sedgwick proposed that the modern definition of a homo/heterosexual distinction had become entrenched as a result of a lack of consistency in whether it should be thought of as a minority issue, only of interest to lesbians and gays, or as an issue relevant to every level of culture. Sedgwick proposed a shift from either/or arguments to avoid the entrenched polarity between questions such as “what causes homosexuality in the individual” that we find in essentialist psychology, and questions such as “what are the social and historical contingencies for the emergence of this” associated with social constructionist perspectives. Instead, Sedgwick argued that queer commentaries should interrogate the homophobic and heterosexist assumptions found in all knowledge, in order to challenge “the universalising, minoritising, pathologising and normalising tendencies of interpretations” (Edwards, 2009 p. 52). Queer commentaries should focus on what these interpretations do.

In contrast, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), also cited as a “foundational” text in the field of queer studies, drew significant attention to the way that gendered bodies lined up with sexuality within the social order. Central to Butler’s thesis were the concepts of the heterosexual matrix and gender performativity. The “heterosexual matrix” was used to demonstrate the way that a specific relationship between bodies (male/female), genders (masculine/feminine), and sexual desires had been normalized in order to reinforce the dominance of reproductive heterosexuality. Butler argued, in contrast to common-sense ideas, that there was no realness to gender or gendered bodies, instead the appearance of a stable core gender identity was the effect of repeating acts, gestures, and spoken desires to the extent that they became normalized, and producing the illusion of an internal essence, or “realness.” Thus, within queer theory, gender is seen as “performative” and takes on meaning through the repetition of discourses that have the capacity to produce that which they appear just to name.

While the work of Butler and Sedgwick were heavily indebted to poststructuralist theory and, for Sedgwick in particular, deconstruction, there were differences in how their works contributed to debates in feminism and sexuality studies. Butler’s work was widely cited in feminist debates, particularly regarding whether her account of gender performativity could sufficiently theorize embodiment, or whether it was too culturally reductionist. Sedgwick’s feminist credentials were less acknowledged. This maybe because Sedgwick occupied her own queer position, as a heterosexually married woman, who identified with gay men and was driven by the political injustices of the 1980s and the deaths of many friends and students from AIDs. Sedgwick’s attention to universalizing/minoritizing accounts become canonical in queer studies, but less so in feminism. Butler’s concept of “gender performativity,” demonstrated through the example of drag, had an enormous impact on the burgeoning field of transgender studies, and transgender became for some the ultimate “queer trope” (Prosser, 1998). Although queer theory might have emerged as a theory of sexual oppression, some of its greatest contributions are from the deconstruction of normative accounts of gender and gender development as well as the production of anti-homophobic interpretations of queer lives. For this reason, queer theory has not resulted in a radical separation of gender and sexuality; rather, it indicates the ongoing intricacies of an analytic relationship between the two.

Queer theory and its associated political framework also raised a number of challenges for lesbian and gay politics. Queer theory and politics emerged simultaneously, providing representation to those who felt marginalized by the politics of lesbian and gay liberation. This included those who could not pass as “straight” and those who wished to actively resist conforming with heteronormative values in order to be accepted. The tension between assimilation and anti-assimilation has increased within queer theory as the equality agenda has seen numerous successes internationally through increased access to civil rights via marriage, legally recognized partnerships, adoption, and access to reproductive technologies. All of these gains are seen by queer critics as concessions made to control and regulate sexuality. Lesbians and gays are accepted if they conform to heteronormative notions of monogamy and the family. To contradict this trend, queer theorists have sought to highlight the more messy and disruptive elements of queer lives that have become hidden by a “sanitized” Gay Pride movement. The Gay Shame counter-movement, aligned with what has become known as an antisocial turn in queer studies, returns attention to queer erotic practices such as “barebacking” and sadomasochism, gender variance, anti-capitalism, political anarchy, and a host of other conditions that spotlight the conditions of queer subjectivity that do not sit easily with normative expectations of gender and sexuality.

International Relevance

A frequent criticism charged at queer theory is that it is elitist and primarily the domain of white gay men from Anglo-American backgrounds. This overlooks the many productive and important contributions made by those working at the interface with feminism, but also in postcolonial and critical race studies. In order for a project “to queer,” the model of white, western privilege cannot function as the naturalized center for queer experience. Since 2001, within the Anglo-American context, there has been increasing hostility toward Islam and other forms of ethnic, racial, and religious differences. Here, queer commentaries have turned their attention to questions about “homonationalisms” within LGBT organizations – where white homosexuals align with nationalistic and racist assumptions about people from different cultures. Similarly, authors such as Jasbir Puar (2007) point to the way that concerns for the plight of lesbians and gays in “middle-east” countries have become part of a US state discourse that rationalizes the act of invading places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Questions arise here about how to conceptualize queer subjectivities in these countries without reimposing colonial and racist assumptions, and how queer muslims living in any part of the world resist violence from the state or society. Furthermore, despite the international backdrop of globalization, trying to account for a global notion of gay citizenship carries with it the risk of neo-colonialism if it universalizes and homogenizes queer experiences (from an Anglo-western center), overlooking the specificity of the local (Binnie, 2004). Thus, within queer studies, the intersection of sexuality with questions of race, gender, religion, social class, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship is increasingly important.

Practice Relevance

Psychology is a frequently site for queer critique, and some queer theorists insist there should be no engagement with psychology or psychoanalysis when theorizing queer subjectivity (e.g., Halperin, 2007). The problem for queer theorists is that knowledge production that uses universalizing strategies serves to normalize some experiences while marginalizing and pathologizing others. This approach is associated with mainstream psychology, which uses positivistic methods to generate laws of universal behavior to answer questions of causality. Using established and limited categories, such as homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or drawing on notions popularized through pseudo-scientific discourse, such as being stuck in a particular “developmental stage,” or “repressed” to explain individuals who are different from us, always carries the risk of “scapegoating, marginalising, shaming and minoritising others” (Edwards, 2009, p. 54). Nevertheless, Sedgwick’s approach to queer theory offers a useful tool for (critical) psychologists looking to engage with critiques of knowledge production beyond questions of essentialism versus constructionism. It does this by sidestepping questions about the origin of individuals’ sexual identity or why it is possible to ask these questions at this point in time, and instead focuses on what particular interpretations do in terms of marginalizing or pathologizing some people. Incorporating this type of thinking into psychological practice can be of real relevance to transforming the way psychologists work in a range of settings. In recent years, it has been noted that queer theories can inform our understanding of topics such counseling, health, intersexuality, and transgender. For example, challenging the normal/abnormal binary has major benefits when working in a therapeutic setting around issues such as sexuality and sexual behavior, or in health psychology on questions of what constitutes health or pathology.

Critical social psychology shares concepts and values with the post structuralist tenets of queer theory by highlighting issues of performativity and anti-normativity. Similarly, discourse analysis with its focus on the action orientation of knowledge utilises methodological techniques of close textual reading that are central to queer commentaries. Despite this, and with some notable exceptions (e.g., Minton, 1997), critical psychologists have been slow to champion queer theory and its potential for application across the discipline. The work of Peter Hegarty (2011) provides an excellent demonstration of how queer theory can be used to challenge core psychological concepts like “intelligence,” and for providing an excellent example of how to unpick heteronormativity in the history of psychology.

Nevertheless, elements of queer approaches continue to raise challenges for critical psychologists. One is the seeming necessity to radically reject notions of interiority. Thus, the anti-homophobic and depathologizing stance is perhaps easier to incorporate than that of the anti-identity, anti-relational, self-shattering calls of Leo Bersani (1996), where a vision of psychic erasure does not always sit well with concerns for the psychological subject, clinical practice, or psychological well-being. Critical psychologists might find more promise in commentaries that seek to theorize queer orientations (e.g., Ahmed, 2008) or deconstruct normative notions of chronology (e.g., Freeman, 2010), approaches that invoke the affirmative potential of queer studies and engage with questions of embodiment and time.

Future Directions

There have been numerous claims that queer theory “is over” – that it has lost its cutting edge, become mainstream, and therefore lost its power to disrupt. The question of futurity is further problematized by the “antisocial turn” within queer theory. In the contentious text No Future, Lee Edelman (2004) called for queers to resist the western (normative) preoccupation with reproduction, and the figure of the child as representative of hopeful projects. Other authors urge us to look backward, rather than forward, and to note that the political drive for recognition entails forgetting a history of persecution and giving up those who do not embody normativity, those that do not fit in (Love, 2007). Michael O’Rourke offers a more optimistic proposition for the future of queer theory: “Queer Theory is the future, a theory of the future, one which still has much to teach us about the urgent cultural and political questions of today.” And, as Downing and Gillett (2011) have mooted, there are still plenty of ways in which its application in psychology could help critical psychologists produce a more ethical psychology to counter the binaries of normal and abnormal, health and pathology.