First, the resistance to a methodology of queer studeis which incorporates Judith Butler's analysis of the performativity of gender, as evinced recently by both James Kirchick (whose hypocritical inveigling against personal attacks in YDN Guest Columns would be comical were his vicious attacks against Thomas Frampton less baseless and revolting) and by a far more measured and reasonable Jessamyn Blau, strikes me as being rooted in a fundamental misreading (or lack of reading at all, particularly in Kirchick's case,) of the theorization of the performative which Butler puts forward in the groundbreaking 1990 text Gender Trouble. To equate performativity with fluidity, with abstraction, as Blau does, ignores the extent to which Butler herself situates the performance and construction of gender within an ontological framework defined in relation to the ideological power of state formation, Foucauldian regulation and discipline, and the very real policing of what kinds of selfhood become permissible and articulable. To dismiss Gender Trouble and the work it has inspired as faddish poststructuralism ignores Butler's concern for the biopolitics of control and the violence with which power writes itself upon, and indeed, itself writes, the body. As she articulates powerfully in Precarious Life, among other places, Butler, like many other figures whose work engages with queer theory, is directly concerned with deeply resonant and important questions of social justice.
There are other problems with the (very different) critiques that Kirchick, Blau, and Larry Kramer himself are leveling. Jessamyn Blau writes
When I see a history class titled simply, for instance, "History of
Gay America," I will feel more comfortable with queer studies, and I will know
that it is finally an accepted academic field.
For such a social and cultural history of one queer community I would point Blau to former Yale graduate student George Chauncey's much-celebrated Gay New York, which i read in a Yale classroom in a class which had virtually no relationship to the LKI, which may itself indicate just how "accepted" queer studies is as an academic field. But what i really want to focus on here is the assumption behind Blau's call for the "simplicity" of a national framework which employs uncritically the term "gay" as a totalizing and exclusive site of interrogation. Butler, like many other queer theorists, has argued against totalizing universalizations of gender and "feminism" as reactionary and imperial. While the nation assumes a key role in the construction of discourses and lived experiences of sexuality, imagining sexual identity solely within the scope of a singular nation state or imagining sexuality solely as it informs a national mythos of plurality and multiculturalized difference both seem reductive of histories which have always been transnational (at least insofar as the nation has existed.) Secondly Gay America seems to me to exclude those on the margins of belonging - whether of citizenship and nationality - the immigrants, the refugees, the enslaved and the invisible, or of "Gayness" - those who inhabit the transgendered interstices of binary constructions of male and female.
***
Mos Def's The New Danger is occasionally brilliant, at times infuriating ("The Rape Over",) but mostly just frustrating. But when Mos proclaims "It's good to be back" on the album's final track, "Champion Requiem," we agree wholeheartdly: it's good to have you back, Mos. Meanwhile, Camper van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, which i only discovered last night, is brilliant from start to finish. I need to go and resume the hiatus, particularly given the fact that ineed to be on a bus to atlantic city at four thirty in the morning tomorrow. Oy gevalt.
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