I first learned about queer theory in my second semester of an MA program. I took a class titled Queer Theory and Performance. The week before class started, my lung spontaneously collapsed, forcing me to miss the first day. Despite my initial absence, I dove into the material. It’s not easy learning the complexities of queer theory, let alone the intricacies of poststructuralism. But I was immediately attracted to queer performance theory and utterly invested in course readings and discussions. I quickly became “that guy,” the neophyte who asked too many questions, the one at whom everyone rolled their eyes and avoided at break.

           At midterm, we submitted our final project proposals. Many of the arguments in my paper challenged some of the foundational tenets of queer epistemology. I wanted to consider how an overarching label like “queer” might erase other salient and intersectional aspects of identity, like gender and race. This argument is now a common critique of queer theory. At the time, though, I was too ineloquent and inexperienced to frame and articulate my criticism. The instructor, Jill Dolan, failed me on the assignment and suggested that I talk to her during office hours.

            I will never forget sitting on the cold linoleum outside of her office door and waiting for her to finish a phone conversation. She finally waved at me, indicating I could enter the room. I dumped my nervous body into an uncomfortable chair and greeted her.

            “Ragan,” she said with little hint of emotion, “I think you should drop the class. Your contributions are a distraction, and I think you’re an essentialist.”

            I had never been asked to drop a class before, let alone a course to which I was so devoted. Heartbroken and embarrassed, I withdrew from the queer theory seminar the following day. Despite dropping, I read the entire course reader and fell in love with queer theory.

            Over a decade later, I am now a tenured professor and look back at the ordeal with a bit more perspective. I have taught college students for over a decade, learned to mentor overly eager and sometimes inarticulate graduate students (which is not to say that all or even most are “inarticulate”), and published several essays in which queer theory takes center stage. This experience doesn’t make me less upset with the aforementioned instructor, it makes me more upset and confused. Ten years later and I still feel the sting of the teacher’s judgment, queer moralism, and lack of care.

My love affair with queer theory grew throughout doctoral study. Queer perspectives seemed totally consistent with my anti-establishment, gender ambiguous, and pro-sex sentimentalities. Like a good little queer, I questioned heteronormativity, celebrated difference, and challenged taken-for-granted logics that sustain sex/gender systems. I also became friends with a number of queer-identified people. We all parroted the same or at least very similar lines about marriage, gender, race, and sexuality. 

I became disenchanted with queer theory in my last year of doctoral study. More and more, I saw queer friends policing other people’s normative desire. Two queer feminists, for instance, told a woman in our cohort that she wasn’t a “real” feminist because she was married to a man and her husband was in the military. Even the slightest divergence from queer theory’s script resulted in condemnation and sometimes alienation.  Queer moralizing—especially the sort I witnessed in graduate school—made me skeptical of queer theory.

I’ve been reading Lynne Huffer’s book Mad for Foucault, wherein Huffer more eloquently and in part addresses the paradoxical blow of queer moralism, an inverted list of behavioral expectations that shape queer identity politics, even as queer theorists claim to disavow and deconstruct identity. Huffer writes:

“I will not open a moral interrogation into those behavior rules—including the odd proposition that there will be no behavioral rules—that would generalize for everyone—or at least for all queers—whether or not we should be monogamous, multipartnered, celibate, single, soldered to another in a holy place, a sex club, cyberspace, or a brothel, for life or ten minutes, with one or with many, or none of the above.  If I’ve learned anything from Foucault, it’s that ‘anything goes’ forms of sexual freedom often put forward as queer eschatology are simply the inverted reflections of Enlightenment autonomy. So I’m not arguing, as some have in response to old-fashioned normalizing moralisms—be they of the family values, feminist, or gay sex panic variety—that barebacking or orgies or public sex or erotic vomiting or sex-positive feminisms or late-night schedules in and of themselves will subvert those moralisms: ‘every assassination of painting is still a painting.’”

           Queer moralism is a form of what my friend Dusty Goltz might describe as “critical tragedy,” or a “deployment of critical theory to enact a coherent and totalizing judgment of personal voice that forefronts one absence or axis of critique. Critical tragedy is the misuse of critical theories to wholly dismiss an account as wrong, privileged, or unreflexive, thus appropriating/erasing one story to forefront another—that of the critic.”

           I, for instance, don’t buy the queer assault on marriage. It’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate queer critiques of the institution, although it would certainly be convenient for some queer critics to moralize their own position by suggesting I just don’t “get it.” I have given careful consideration to arguments for and against marriage equality. Religious conservatives, queer radicals, and social progressives, among others, have constructed compelling claims about the issue and I have taken their words to heart.

           I am pro-marriage equality. I want to get married. I identify as queer and gay. I believe that everyone should have the right to marry, just as everyone should have the right to be single. I don’t believe people should be financially penalized or rewarded for either choice. I do not believe that marriage equality is exclusively or even primarily a gay white man’s issue. I believe that marriage equality is both a symbolic measure of acceptance and at the center of a human rights grid. None of the abovementioned positions are mutually exclusive but moralizing—whether conservative or queer—makes each claim appear to be oppositional.

           On a more concrete level, I teach and study human communication. I am an ethnographer. I study communication behaviors of discrete communities. Gays, lesbians, bisexual men and women, transgendered people, and queers have distinct communication practices. I believe that these behaviors are IN PART socially constructed. When I identify as “queer,” I engage in a critical tragedy, forsaking one culturally sedimented identity (i.e., gay) for a newer one (i.e., queer), trading one assimilation for another. I acknowledge the particularities of my penis and hormones and question the ways in which symbolization affords me certain privileges, just as it takes others away. But here’s where I REALLY think I’ll ruffle some feathers: I prefer the anti-marriage equality moralizing of the religious Right to the anti-marriage equality moralizing of many queers, because at least conservatives acknowledge that they are, in fact, moralizing. 

Foucault’s ideas anchor a bulk of my autoethnographic research. Some may find this union—between Foucault’s poststructuralism and personal narrative— contradictory. Scholars have noted the various ways in which Foucault resisted confession and shied away from autobiographical speech acts (see Butler’s Gender Trouble). Lynne Huffer grounds Foucault’s suspicion of autobiography in poststructural thought, arguing that, “Given Foucault’s lifelong effort to undo the moi—to interrogate the humanist illusion of an unsplit, self-identical, coherent ‘I’—his discomfort with [personal narrative] makes sense” (23).

While Foucault’s writing pre-dates contemporary understandings of personal narrative and autoethnography, he spends a lot of time interrogating judicial and religious acts of self-disclosure. He is careful to point out how, throughout the ages, confession has been used as an instrument of power. Foucault notes that confessions provide the proof of the truth of disciplinary mechanisms. Through acts of self-disclosure, a blasphemer subjects his or her own tongue to torture (e.g., piercing; see Discipline and Punish, 45). “Since the Middle Ages,” argues Foucault, “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (History 58). Truth’s fabrication is partially made possible by way of confession and is “thoroughly imbued with relations of power” (History 60), “for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (History 61-62). Foucault describes confession as a “ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation” (History 62). Confession’s promises of purification and redemption are precisely what legitimize discourses of objectification. Subjectivity, for Foucault, is nothing more than subjectivation (Huffer). 

Alternately, autoethnographic writing that specifically aims to reveal the productive and repressive functions of identity/subjectivity/subjectivation may, in fact, be commensurable with Foucault’s suspicion of the “personal.” Understanding this claim requires a more precise explanation of Foucault’s notion of personnage. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he describes how the nineteenth-century homosexual became un personage. Huffer explains that, when interpreting this oft-quoted passage, many US thinkers have wrongly equated French individualism and an American sense of community-based identity. In other words, un personage is more a character we play than a political or personal “reality,” or identity. Huffer contends that, “The personage is not so different from the social types one might find in a medieval morality play or a Renaissance allegory like Bosch’s painting or Brandt’s narrative verses about the Ship of Fools that Foucault invokes at the beginning of Madness” (71).

It is not that Foucault rallies against theorizing the personal as much as he questions how the personal has been used throughout the course of history to repress and produce particular subjects. If personal narrative is used to expose identity’s performativity, or  shed light on the discursive network that constrains and enables subjectivity, autobiographical theorizing is both consistent with Foucault’s use of tropes (e.g., the ship of fools) and anecdotes (e.g., daily rituals of people in mental hospitals) and commensurate with his research methods. This claim rings especially true in performance studies scholarship, where scholars tend to reveal the imitative, theatrical aspects of identity, and personal narrative regularly calls attention to specific cultural mechanisms that reproduce the “fictive or metaphorical product of a representational order, like a character in a play or the protagonist of a novel or even the ‘face’ acquired through a rhetorical troping” (Huffer 71).   

(Yes, this writing is part of a larger project. More to come.)  

In response to my last entry, somebody at the Born This Way blog wrote:

You just spent a lot of time saying “Cynthia Nixon is bisexual” - which is all she should have said in the first place. Just sayin’….”

First, I have no idea how this person left a comment. I didn’t even think you could leave comments on Tumblr. Second, the commenter’s well-intended response has incited me to share a lengthier conversation I had about the topic on my Facebook page.  I share more of my reaction to the controversy because, despite the commenter’s sentiments, Nixon ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT have just claimed she was bisexual.  Moreover, my initial post wasn’t simply a long-winded way of saying, “Cynthia Nixon is bisexual.” The response to my initial post engenders the criticism I originally articulated, namely that Nixon’s detractors have a very narrow understanding of LGBTQ identity politics and theory, which is only exemplified by a respondent who’s affiliated with a blog titled  Born This Way.  It’s hard to punctuate a response with a condescending “Just sayin’…” when, in fact, the person has a very limited understanding of WTF he or she is talking about.  At any rate, here’s the additional FB commentary.

Context: My good friend Wanda posted a comment criticizing Nixon for what he (Wanda is a drag queen) interpreted to be anti-bisexual speech.  Here’s my response.  You can judge for yourself:

Nixon’s statement “rings true” with the way many in our culture dismiss the possibility of bisexuality and affirm a sexual binary, where one can EITHER be straight OR gay. I don’t think she’s advocating disdain for bisexuals. I think she’s being ironic and responding to critiques of bisexuality. In other words, speaker location matters. Had Newt Gingrich said, “Nobody likes bisexuals,” I’d get your point. But we’re talking about a woman who admits that she’s attracted to both sexes and has, in fact, been in long-term relationships with men AND women. More to the point, Nixon’s had to absorb her fair share of, “Are you REALLY bisexual?” questions. In my eyes, her statement is a response to criticism of HER identity rather than a judgment of bisexual people. It might also be helpful to put the referenced sentence in its proper context. The full paragraph reads, ” I think for gay people who feel 100 percent gay, it doesn’t make any sense. And for straight people who feel 100 percent straight, it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t pull out the ‘bisexual’ word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals. We get no respect.” The longer quotation seems to support my argument, lest anyone think I’m grasping or simply a crazed “Sex and the City” fan.

My fabulous friend Wanda then replied, suggesting that 1) I’m giving Nixon too much credit, and 2) he worries that anti-gay bigots will use Nixon’s words against LGBTQ people.  My response:

I think your real beef is with what you describe in the latter half of your post and not the former. Your characterization of Nixon’s comment in the first half of your comment reads into her motivations, despite the fact that her sexual behaviors and life choices engender a direct response to what you assume about her statement. At the end of the day, I 100% give her the benefit of the doubt and see more logic in my interpretation of her words. Not surprising, given that I’m currently writing a defense of my own defense. LOL. That said, I sympathize with and understand the concern you vocalize in the second half of your comment. I’m CERTAIN that tons of bigots will twist her words and use them as a rallying call against LGBTQ people. My point is that it doesn’t do you or anyone else any good to ALSO misrepresent her claim; and, IMHO, that’s what you’re doing. I stand behind Nixon for the same reason I criticized GaGa’s overly simplistic and pandering “Born this Way.” From where I stand, Nixon hasn’t paid too little attention to her argument; quite the opposite, in fact. She’s thought SO much about identity politics and desire that she’s metaphorically lapped the people that find her statement so offensive.

When it comes to LGBTQ politics and theory, it sometimes takes “a lot of time” to explain an argument’s complexities.  I’d much rather be on the side of intricacy and nuance than an advocate of biological determinism and over-simplification.  Assuming that all Nixon should have said was, “I’m bisexual,” misses the entire point of conversation. Just sayin’.