Queer Studies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Formed out of scholarly conferences in the 1980s, queer studies started as an elite academic movement of primarily humanities scholars who had taken a lead in developing lesbian and gay social constructionist studies in the 1980s (Fuss 1991). Social science scholars were largely absent from its beginning intellectual formations (see, for example, Fuss 1991; Abelove et al. 1993; Warner 1993).

Correcting for this absence, two important edited readers stand out in foregrounding a queer perspective for the social sciences and, conversely, a more social standpoint for queer studies. The first is Queer Theory/Sociology (1996). In his introduction to the volume, Seidman argues that queer theory wants to shift the study of sexuality “from explaining the modern homosexual to questions of the operation of the hetero/homosexual binary, from an exclusive preoccupation with homosexuality to a focus on heterosexuality as a social and political organizing principle, and from a politics of minority interest to a politics of knowledge and difference” (1996, p. 9). While this volume importantly situates the development of sexuality studies within earlier British sociological work on homosexuality (e.g., McIntosh 1996; Plummer 1996; Weeks 1996), its intersectional queer/sociology focus provides empirical studies that illustrate the postmodern critique of identity as multiple, exclusionary, and performative.

As Steven Epstein (1996) and Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer (1996) noted, earlier sociological work on sexuality as socially constructed was problematically absent from the new onslaught of queer studies scholarship. Instead, queer studies theoretically centered Michel Foucault’s work (1978) and those of his followers, particularly Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Eve Sedgwick (1990, 1993), making them the triumvirate benchmarks in the field. Setting the bar for analytical virtuosity, Sedgwick’s statement in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) triumphs the need to make sexuality and the hetero/homo binary part of every analytical study of modern Western culture. Later historical studies, such as George Chauncey’s (1994), date the rise of the closet to the 1930s and its intensification during the cold war, when state-sanctioned homosexual discrimination became patterned and systematic. Similarly, Seidman’s (2002) sociological genealogy of the closet’s rise and fall over the last half century empirically concretizes the closet’s social shifts and changes. Interestingly, the theoretical acumen of Butler’s work, and its ironically enabling programmatic framework, on identities as performative, specifically in their striving to perform idealized versions of heteronormative and gender-normative forms, serves as a theoretical cradle for empirical studies on intersectional identities of sexuality, gender, race, and class (e.g., Stein 1997; Esterberg 1997; Bettie 2002; Salzinger 2003).

Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies (1998), edited by Peter Nardi and Beth Schneider, is the other key reader in sociology that highlights a queer perspective as the latest word in conceptualizing sexualities. However, in his afterword to the volume, Plummer (1998) notes the limitations of what he calls the “Foucauldian deluge” on sociology and is critical of its overemphasis on discourses and texts to the detriment of empirical social research more broadly (see Green [2002] for a similar critique of queer theory).

Contradictorily, since the mid-1990s, queer studies and the sociology of sexualities have converged in their analytical focuses while continuing to remain apart in their conversations and debates (see, for example, David Eng et al. [2005] on queer studies in a double issue of the journal Social Text and Joshua Gamson and Dawne Moon [2004] in their review of queer studies and its status in the sociology of sexualities). The fields converge, however, in their Foucauldian conceptualization of power as disciplinary, exclusionary, and normalizing, as well as in their studying of identities, institutions, and relations of state, nation, and globe. Still, queer studies’ latest voices remain scholars from primarily the humanities (see Eng et al. 2005). And the sociology of sexualities, although drawing strongly on queer studies, remains distant from its emphasis on discourse/text, its poststructural antinormative theoretical presuppositions that typically eschew identity altogether, and its use of antihumanist language to problematize identity categories and the written text itself (see Butler’s [1995] and Fraser’s [1995] exchange as exemplars of these issues).

These contradictions notwithstanding, queer studies and the sociology of sexualities come together in their analysis of identities, from their gender and sexual interaction to the problematizing of heterosexual identities to the analyzing of the multiple ways race, class, and gender, in addition to sexuality, interact, and finally to the very limit of identity itself. Additionally, the two fields have made the relationships between processes of sexualities and nationalism, colonialism, and globalization key trends as well. This entry will briefly review some of these convergences in detail.

In rethinking sexual and gender-identity formations, Judith Halberstam’s (1998) and R. W. Connell’s (1987, 1995) works on female masculinity and hegemonic masculinity, respectively, help queer studies scholars to rethink conceptions of dominance and resistance. Female masculinity, for Halberstam, extends the concept of masculinity beyond men to include women, and views masculinity as a general form of gender expression and practice that lesbians, butch lesbians, butch women, as well as nonlesbian females, draw on to project authority, strength, and aggression in social life. Conceptualizing the intersection of compulsory heterosexuality and male dominance, Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity links heterosexual male practices of homophobia and sexism to the subordination of femininities and dominated masculinities.

Building on the work of Monique Wittig (1992), Adrienne Rich (1980), and Connell, queer studies continues to make compulsory heterosexuality and heterosexual identities problematic and in need of social explanation. From Jonathan Katz’s (1996) historical overview of the development of heterosexuality as an ideology and an identity over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to Chyrs Ingraham’s (1996, 1999) concept of the heterosexual imaginary and its ideological role in white weddings or Elizabeth Freeman’s (2002) work on marriage, weddings, and heterosexualities, queer studies continues to attempt to undo compulsory heterosexuality’s hegemony.

As Gamson and Moon note, “Long before queer theory began speaking of ‘multiple identities,’ black feminists had articulated an intersectional analysis of oppression that recognized race, gender, class, and sexual oppression as interlocking systems” (2004, p. 52). Since the early 1980s, scholarship on intersectionality has proliferated in the field. Stein’s (1997) study of generational differences between two cohorts of lesbians makes age, history, and social conditions central aspects in explaining differences among lesbians who came out in the 1970s in comparison to the 1990s. Analyzing the racial, gender, class, and sexual intersections of mostly queer people of color on talk shows, Gamson’s (1998) study demonstrates struggles over queer visibility and media representation. Furthermore, from humanities scholars like Tavia Nyong’o (2005), whose work illustrates the exclusions but also social necessities of intersectional identities like the pejorative punk, and intersectional sociologists like Roderick Ferguson (2004), who approaches the social through combining social theory, sociology, and literature, to Chet Meeks (2001), who theorizes the limits of sexual identity and liberation and develops a politics of antinormalization to underscore sexual differences beyond identity, scholarship on intersectionality demonstrates the hybrid importance of this research in queer studies.

The last key trend in queer studies is scholarship on nationalism, colonialism, and globalization and its relation to sexual practices. Important work by Joyti Puri (1999) shows the continuities and discontinuities in transnational discourses of menstruation, marriage, pornography, and homosexuality for Indian women today. Focusing on the relationship between sexual and colonial practices, Ann Laura Stoler’s (2002) study of Dutch colonial rule in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indonesia demonstrates the way colonial practices organized sexuality, intimacy, and family in shaping the relationships between Dutch men and the native Indonesian women they had sex with and made “concubines.” Finally, Chandan Reddy (2005) details the uses and abuses of gay Pakistani asylum seekers in the U.S. policy of “family reunification,” which simultaneously makes asylees part of a class of low-wage workers in the United States.

In short, queer studies’ focus on identity and its multifarious constructions, as well as its engagement with scholarship on nationalism, colonialism, and globalization, illustrates the field’s intellectual efflorescence, contemporary relevance, and vanguardism.

SEE ALSO Foucault, Michel; Gender; Gender, Alternatives to Binary; Gender Studies; Heteronormativity; Identity; Other, The; Said, Edward; Sexual Orientation, Determinants of; Sexual Orientation, Social and Economic Consequences; Sexuality

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Puri, Joyti. 1999. Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge.

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James J. Dean