“Queer Theory” burst onto the scene about 15 years ago. The term received its first high-profile usage in a special issue of the journal differences (“Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities”) published in the summer of 1991; was mentioned also in the groundbreaking collection of essays Inside/Out, appearing the same year; and then gained wide notice with the publication in 1993 of Michael Warner’s influential collection Fear of a Queer Planet. By the fall of 1993, I was teaching a queer-studies course at California State University at Northridge, a class bursting at the seams with politically agitated students, many of whom were members of the campus activist group Squish — Strong Queers United in Suppressing Heterosexism.
Since then my classes have always remained well enrolled (today I still turn away students, even with an enrollment cap of 40), but gradually the political energy has died away almost completely. The students in California (before I left in 2004) and now in West Virginia have become remarkably blasé concerning (what they consider) the few lingering vestiges of homophobia and increasingly eager to claim that life is actually pretty good now, with our many queer television shows, product lines, and other lifestyle components. While vicious gay-marriage debates rage in the media, Brokeback Mountain stirs up heated local controversy, and Fred Phelps’s “God Hates Fags” picketers show up at local gay-pride events, even self-identifying queer students seem stunningly dismissive of politics generally, relying often on eye rolling as both critique and response.
As we read about the early energy of groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UP, I often ask students about their own lack of passion for social-justice issues and political activism. A few will roll their eyes, but others will admit that their passivity does, in fact, constitute a problem, though with a very unhelpful explanation for its root cause. “It’s our own fault,” said one very fashionable (and often fashionably late for class) A student. “We’re just shallow.”
While some might see that comment as actual evidence supporting the explanation he offered, I don’t buy the ease of that answer. Nor do I agree with another student from a few years ago at Humboldt State University, where I visited to give a talk on the state of queer studies, who tried to explain why all the queer students there seemed a bit depressed during the meeting I had with them: “Things are just too easy on this campus for people to get motivated; we need some real oppression around here to energize us.” More oppression is not the answer to anyone’s or any field’s problems.
Certainly there are some social contextual factors that offer help in understanding the waning of political energy in the classroom and in the field of queer studies generally. No student in my class last spring knew a single person who had died of AIDS. Since most of them were born in the mid-1980s and became sexually and socially self-aware in the last 10 years, they have never thought of AIDS as anything other than a pharmacologically manageable disease (even if that is a very dangerous and inaccurate perception, which I address in class). Ellen Degeneres’s character on her show Ellen came out on national television in 1997, and the series Will and Grace started in 1998, when most of them were in middle school. The lesbian and gay students in my classes today never knew a time when their identities did not receive at least a modicum of media validation through visibility.
Furthermore, the big issue of today — gay marriage — does not motivate them very much as a topic of personal and political urgency. Most of my gay and lesbian students are still sowing wild oats, so to speak; some speak about perhaps wanting to marry someday but express vague confidence that at some indeterminate point in the future, it will probably be allowed without any active work on their part. Others dismiss marriage as an outmoded concept and not worthy of a battle in any event (a perspective with which I have a lot of sympathy).
They do become interested when I talk about a few practicalities that marriage might bring with it and use, as an example, my own inability to get health insurance for my partner because of the lack of domestic-partnership benefits in West Virginia. But on the whole, they are not particularly energized by contemplating the impracticalities of being a middle-aged couple with no social safety net except what can be pieced together in spite of an unsympathetic state government.
Granted, when I was in my teens and 20s, health insurance wasn’t a burning issue for me either, at least until the AIDS crisis hit, and friends of mine without insurance (and many with insurance) faced terrible struggles in trying to get basic care for their illnesses. And given the fact that there is no similar or immediately galvanizing “life and death” issue today to enrage students, it is not surprising perhaps that they are rather blasé about politics. But just as the initial intensity of the feminist movement on college campuses waned long before sexism itself was seriously challenged, so too is queer intensity declining precipitously, even as heterosexism remains legally entrenched and homophobia remains a common political tool and general social undercurrent.
What does begin to rouse my students is the immediacy of violenceboth rhetorical and physical. Showing the film Boys Don’t Cry got many of them very agitated (even as a few also complained that I should only show them happy films rather than sad ones). Bringing in news stories of the harsh rhetoric used in legislatures across the nation as politicians debated anti-gay-marriage legislation and restrictions on rights for transgendered individuals led to even more-engaged classroom discussion.
And I always actively encourage my socially conservative and religious students to speak their minds — not to shoot down their ideas but certainly to generate genuine awareness that not everyone agrees with each other on topics that my queer students seem to take for granted as already resolved. I do not teach political activism — that is not my role as a cultural-studies professor — but I do teach about the dynamics of social movements and hope that my students develop a passionate attachment to the topic, whatever their political beliefs.
Once ignited, that intensity has to be nurtured carefully. Readings from the early work of Judith Butler still help in that regard. Her now largely abandoned implication of individual agency in changing sexual and gender norms through disruptive performances (which surfaces in both Gender Trouble from 1990 and the essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” from 1991) still makes students leave the classroom thinking that they can change the world if they first work creatively on themselves or their selves.
Indeed, much of the early energy in queer studies generally derived from the sense of being asked, and being willing, to commit one’s self to an important, realizable, and exhilarating cause. Unfortunately some recent theoretical work is not helpful. Especially deflating is Lee Edelman’s much-discussed antipolitical polemic from 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which is actually a symptom and reinforcement of the very problem of general political passivity that I’m discussing here. Edelman uses Lacanian theory to argue that queers should repudiate the “oppressively political” and abandon any claim to a “viable political future.”
But the question remains as to how best to rekindle not only intellectual intensity in the classroom, but also an excitement about a dramatically different future that might even motivate students to engage in the hard work of collective action and sustained response long after they leave the university. Fundamental not only to “identity politics,” but to all critical-thinking-based pedagogy is the belief that students, whatever their political orientation, should become engaged citizens in the world, not passive consumers who simply accept the status quo.
And what I have found works best in that regard is a return to an older model of consciousness-raising, based on dialogue and a sharing of lived experiences (there are always students in class who have endured terrible hardships about which they are willing to speak), followed by exercises that ask students to imagine certain futures — utopias, even — that they would find worthy of fighting for. The diversity of what they come up with (Is sex work legalized? Does marriage become a wholly passé concept? What role does spirituality or religion play?) can lead to very dynamic conversations.
Indeed, discussing their utopias allows them to begin to delineate the steps necessary to reach those states, looking backward in time to the successes of past social movements and forward to ones in which they might invest. It encourages students to think critically about how social change occurs, rather than to imagine vaguely that injustice somehow dissipates magically without the hard work of individuals and groups’ organizing. It urges them to juxtapose the present situation — and whatever fuzzy sense they have of its basic acceptability — with a concrete visualization of what they would prefer as a reigning paradigm (or variety of paradigms).
Some, such as Edelman, would argue that such exercises lock us into variations of the “norm” as it currently stands (whatever we project will simply be a version of what already is), but consensus about a single place-holding utopia is never the goal. The wide variety of possible utopias, as they sometimes clash with and sometimes complement each other, leads to intellectual excitement, critical attachment, and even productive anger. I will take that energy any day over the stasis produced by a cynical refusal even to imagine or invest in a future.
Queer studies will never be what it was in the early 1990s. Today’s context of ongoing oppression but token media and marketplace acceptance is very different. However, the doldrums of the queer-studies classroom and queer studies as a field can be challenged and the energy reignited. This means resisting the all-too-easy acceptance by students of the status quo; it means reminding them of the rhetorical and physical violence that continues to exist (but that is also uncomfortable to acknowledge and much easier simply to ignore or downplay); it means (for those of us working in queer studies) disrupting our own complacency that can result from being tenured, having successful writing and lecturing careers, and being able to afford a few comfortable lifestyle components. Queer studies will have a future only if it does the hard work of imagining possible futures and articulating ways to actually get us there.
Donald E. Hall is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he also serves as chairman of the department of foreign languages. His book Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Sexuality Studies is forthcoming from Routledge.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 4, Page B15
