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“Once upon a queer theory” is Brintnall’s contribution to the turbulent tradition of queer narration. In this essay, he highlights a pervasive fantasy underlying that tradition, the fantasy that queer narration is merely narration. Brintnall performs his argument both by 1) telling a story that centers the work of Teresa de Lauretis (she coined the term “queer theory” in the 1990s), and by 2) consistently and explicitly problematizing his narrative. In “Once upon a queer theory,” Brintnall, faithful to his subject, offers a queer narrative of queer theory.
In what follows, I summarize Brintnall’s queer narrative. I conclude by describing what I think is queer about it. Troubling the easy pathway leading from the beginning to the end of my reading of Brintnall’s essay is a question, What are we to make of the absence of any serious engagement with Halperin’s work on gay subjectivity in Brintall’s queer story? After outlining what I think is Brintnall’s reasoning for such an exclusion, I contend that Halperin’s approach to gay subjectivity, one that is manifestly linked to de Lauretis’ project, serves both 1) to clarify the main character of Brintnall’s queer narrative (what is, for Brintnall, the “somewhat” clear meaning of de Lauretis’ invention of/ intervention in queer lesbian and gay studies), and, relatedly; 2) to clarify what is queer about Brintnall’s queer narrative.
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Brintnall notes that, for de Lauretis, queer theory signifies the ways in which “gay and lesbian sexualities could be seen [now citing de Lauretis] ‘as social and cultural forms in their own right . . .interactive and yet resistant, both participatory and yet distinct’” (emphasis added). At this nascent stage of queer theorization the goal is, in de Lauretis’ words, to “articulate the terms in which lesbian and gay sexualities may be understood and imaged as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of the subject in culture” (emphasis added). In other words, the queer goal is the construction of, again, in the words of de Lauretis, “another discursive horizon, another way of thinking sexuality,” one that makes “other constructions of the subject in culture” possible.
Brintnall observes that de Lauretis’ understanding of queer theory anticipates what are by now well-known definitions of queer method/praxis. Take, for example, David M. Halperin’s contention that “queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (emphasis original). Yet, de Lauretis’ initial understanding of queer theory takes her some “critical distance” from normative gay and lesbian studies. Sexuality, even homosexuality, is not, not necessarily, the same thing as “at odds with the normal. . . the dominant.” As Brintnall points out, the work of scholars like Duggan and Puar demonstrate that lesbian and gay sexualities can “conform quite comfortably to dominant relational, kinship, economic, political, and citizenship norms, thus highlighting their participatory interaction with the reigning system of power rather than resistant queerness.” In that case, Brintnall asserts, “the heterosexual single black mother may have, in many contexts, a much stronger claim to queerness than does the white gay urban professional. . . .”
While de Lauretis takes “critical distance” from normative gay and lesbian studies, her “assumption that sexuality should be approached as a discursive construction” links her work to what are now the canonical sources of queer theory (even though, Brintnall observes, none of the authors of those sources thought they were doing “queer theory”). What follows is Brintnall’s remarkably concise and mercifully clear unfolding of the central terms/ideas in Foucault (power), Butler (performativity), and Sedgwick (unbearable secret/closet).
Significantly, in drawing close to the canonical sources of queer theory, de Lauretis ends up taking “distance” from her earlier commitment to “another discursive horizon, another way of thinking sexuality,” one that makes “other constructions of the subject in culture” possible. For de Lauretis, that commitment is explicitly related to a concern for “the ways gender and race are (not) incorporated” in the “discursive construction of lesbian and gay sexualities.” To draw out the distance between her early commitment and her actual work, Brintnall highlights ethnic studies professor Hames-Garcia’s critique of de Lauretis and of queer theory.
Hames-Garcia points out the “the whiteness of most narratives of queer theory’s development.” For example, Foucault, Butler, and Sedgwick “do not make race central to their analysis.” Summarizing Hames-Garcia, Brintnall writes, “If we consider instead, as the forebears of queer theory, lesbians and gay men of color, ‘we’ find sophisticated resources for thinking intersectionally.” And really considering people of color would mean doing more than scholars like de Lauretis, presenting scholars of color “later in the exposition, fold[ing] them in as additional and secondary, includ[ing] them as supplements to theory that does not foreground race or discuss it explicitly—as if silence about race does not broadcast an unnamed whiteness.”
Brintnall goes on to really consider scholars of color. Again, he offers a miraculously concise and clear summary of the central ideas of, citing Ferguson, “queer of color critique.” Brintnall’s overview includes Ferguson (critique of classical sociology); Muñoz (disidentification), and Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, in a special issue of Social Text, (subjectless critique). Both Ferguson and Muñoz, Brintnall observes, center women of color feminists in their respective texts.
We learned earlier that de Lauretis took “critical distance” from normative gay and lesbian studies, and now Brintnall reminds us that she also took some “distance” from emerging queer theory, and “just a few years after she coined the term.” “In The Practice of Love,” Brintnall writes, “de Lauretis dismissed what queer theory had become, characterizing it as [citing de Lauretis] ‘a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.’” Taking distance from emerging (i.e., subjectless) queer theory, de Lauretis aligns herself with Bersani’s project, especially Homos, a “psychoanalytically inspired” exploration “of the political potential of gay male desire in its specificity” (emphasis original).
In aligning herself with Bersani, particularly Homos, “de Lauretis clarified, somewhat, the nature of the (unfulfilled) promise of her initial in(ter)vention,” one that defined the exploration of lesbian and gay specificity as queer theory. Brintnall now introduces trans theory critique, focused on the work of Stone (posttranssexual movement) and Stryker (transgender rage), of efforts to articulate lesbian and gay specificity. Such efforts “can be seen,” according to Brintnall, “as containing an unexamined commitment to fairly stable conceptions of sex (male, female) and gender (masculine, feminine).”
The final development in de Lauretis’ thought that Brintnall explores is “a turning away . . . from commitments to [now citing de Lauretis] ‘feminist theory, gender theory, and queer theory.’” This turning away is related to her turning to “the importance of the drive [as understood by Laplanche] in queer theory.” This turn is also related to de Lauretis’ “skepticism about the compatibility of theory and politics.”
For de Lauretis, a “bearable life” is the goal of politics. Drawing close to Lee Edelman (“queerness [as] that which must be excluded, overcome, or annihilated so that the subject or the social order can experience peace, healing or completion”), she nonetheless argues that Edelman’s “demand is unbearable.” De Lauretis’ “rejection of Edelman’s queer critique of politics tout court” reveals the character of her suspicion of the compatibility of theory and politics. Theory cannot, perhaps, citing de Lauretis, “map out a program of political action,” but it must be translatable; it must be able to inform political action.
Brintnall now makes explicit connections between the various distances and turns manifested in de Lauretis’ work and the texts of queer scholars of religion. He introduces the reader to the texts of Melissa Wilcox, Linn Marie Tonstad, and Joseph A. Marchal. The reader may consult Brintnall’s essay for those connections. At this point, what I am most interested in is 1) the character of Brintnall’s narrative as queer narrative, and; 2) the exclusion of David M. Halperin’s work on gay specificity from Brintnall’s queer narrative (Halperin’s most recent work on gay specificity, How To Be Gay, is at least alluded to, in the final footnote, of Brintnall’s story).
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Brintnall anticipates objections to his queer story, and he address them by straightforwardly acknowledging the inherent limitations of (his) storytelling:
[E]mphases and exclusions are necessary to an essay like this one: they are what make a collection of details and an agglomeration of information a story. In the final analysis, queer theory is a long tutorial in learning to find traces of what has been hidden, marginalized, and distorted in service of fabricating a unified, seamless narrative of the normal, the natural, and the good, as well as assessing the damage wrought by telling certain stories rather than others (emphasis original).
More specifically, Brintnall anticipates objections/reservations like my own, questioning the lack of any serious engagement with Halperin’s work on gay specificity in his narrative. He explicitly states that he did not feel it “appropriate” to explore various strands within queer theory in this essay, an essay exploring the introductory features of the encounter between queer theory and religion. In addition, Brintnall may respond to my reservation by pointing out that it is de Lauretis who associates herself with the psychoanalytic strand of queer specificity. Thus, it makes perfect narrative sense to focus on that perspective—even at the expense of excluding the non-psychoanalytic strand of queer specificity represented by Halperin.
Yet, it is Brintnall who makes connections between scholars of queer theory, religion, and de Lauretis’ work that are extra-textual, that are not, in Brintnall’s telling of it, made by de Lauretis. Moreover, including the non-psychoanalytic strand of queer specificity represented by Halperin would allow Brintnall to highlight, as he has consistently done before, both a significant strand of queer theory that is directly related to various developments in de Lauretis project and queer voices of color that, in this case, take issue with “abstract notions of queerness” (and are otherwise given a relatively brief mention as critiques of Edelman, only to be dispatched as unwilling to “succumb to the intractable violence to which queer negativity points”). But the main reason to engage Halperin on gay difference is that doing so would only help Brintnall better define the main character of his queer story, namely de Lauretis’ “in(ter)vention” of /in queer lesbian and gay studies, and the queerness of his narrative. Or so I think.
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Halperin connects his work on gay male specificity to de Lauretis’ project in his essay, “Small Town Boy Neil Bartlett Learns How To Be Gay.” In this essay, Halperin explores what history has to do with gay subjectivity/difference. In the context of unfolding the potential new meaning(s) we may attach to the social practice of an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink, Halperin, in a footnote, tells us that a “similar argument” has been made “along feminist lines”—namely by de Lauretis in “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain.” The practice of an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink, specifically its potential to re-negotiate the terms of social inequality among gay men, is similar in kind to the social practice of “entrustment” (affidamento), a practice de Lauretis describes in her essay.
Entrustment, according to de Lauretis, is a way feminist women in Italy began to address “the power and disparity—the social and personal inequality—inherent in [female relationships], as well as . . . the erotic dimension of all relationships between women and its relation to power . . . ” (emphasis original). Entrustment, as de Lauretis understands it, is “a term proposed to designate a relationship between two women which . . . had not yet been named or formally addressed in feminist theory. [T]he relationship . . . is one in which one woman gives her trust or entrusts herself symbolically to another woman, who thus becomes her guide, mentor, or point of reference . . . both women engage in the relationship—and here is the novelty . . .—not in spite, but rather because and in full recognition of the disparity that may exist between them in class or social position, age, level of education, professional status, income, etc. . . . .”
In “Small Town Boy,” Halperin highlights similar power inequalities, but this time between men, specifically between gay men. As noted above, the social practice proposed as a means of negotiating power disparities between gay men is, now citing Bartlett, “that man buying his younger boyfriend (slightly embarrassed, but happily drunk) another drink.” Halperin observes that Bartlett cannot think this practice without remembering “that man,” Oscar Wilde: “I remember the bizarre twisting of mythologies Wilde used to justify his adoration of young men” Bartlett writes, “the mixing of a pastiche of Classical pederasty with a missionary zeal for the ‘criminal classes,’ the sense that they, not the boys he left sleeping in [his home in] Chelsea, were his true sons . . . .” What the social practice of an older man buying a younger man a drink figures is, perhaps, gay difference or gay history.
“Historically,” Halperin argues, “the problem of gay male self-constitution has been posed by history. We have looked to history to answer some of our most pressing questions about gay male identity.” Far from being static, history is, to cite Bartlett, a “source of doubt and hopes,” a source that allows us to determine who “we” were then and who “we” are now, to determine how we are both the same as and different from gay men/gay culture of the past. Significantly, “by looking to history for a definition of gay male existence, Bartlett was relying not on theoretical propositions but on social processes.” As Bartlett’s reflections on the significance of an older man buying a younger man a drink suggests, “it is possible to write a gay history [citing Bartlett] ‘in our own language,’ . . . ” History, “[o]ur history,” according to Bartlett, “now becomes a way of understanding and exploring the change in our culture [of writing a history of the present], not simply of reading it as an ‘end.’”
From this perspective, an older man buying a younger man a drink “is not necessarily a mere recapitulation of archaic and unchanging forms of social hierarchy, upper-class sexual privilege and working-class sexual prostitution.” It is, at least potentially, citing Bartlett, “a new kind of relationship, an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men[.]” As Halperin observes, “[d]ifferences in age and wealth may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who are asymmetrically situated according to conventional class hierarchies but are brought into approximate equality by the reciprocal exchanges of contemporary gay male life.”
Halperin’s emphasis on gay history and the ever changing meaning of social processes is consistent with de Lauretis’ method of challenging anti-essentialist tendencies (“theoretical propositions”) in feminist theory. Like Halperin, de Lauretis does not propose some kind of natural or “real essence” that, in her work, all women across every time and place share, but rather she tells a story, offers a history, of the Italian women’s feminist movement. It is in and through engaging the history of feminist social practices, like entrustment, that, now citing Locke’s definition of “nominal essence” deployed by de Lauretis, “the indispensable and necessary attributes of a thing,” in this case, women’s difference, is constructed or discerned or invented.
Entrustment, a social practice with an extensive history (e.g., the relationship between the biblical figures of Ruth and Namoi is cited as an example of “entrustment”), may also be read as a figure of women’s history or of women’s difference in “The Essence of the Triangle.” Its meaning is not fixed. It, too, is likely a “source of doubts and hopes.” Entrustment, that is, is not, not necessarily, mere recapitulation of patriarchal power. According to de Lauretis, entrustment “brings to light the hidden or unconscious conflicts and emotions of the ancient (patriarchal) relationship with the mother[;] it opens up the possibility and the critical elaboration of new symbolic forms of female authority that can effectively legitimate a woman’s subjecthood and thus render unto her not emancipation (under the law of the Father) but full social agency and responsibly as a woman.”
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In “The Essence of the Triangle,” an essence de Lauretis defines in terms of Locke’s “nominal essence” as, citing Locke, “three Lines meeting at Three Angles,” there is some awareness of the role race and racism play relative to discerning women’s difference in and through specific feminist social practices, but de Lauretis does not make race or racism central to her analysis. And when Halperin encourages us to “examine our actual practices” so that “we will see that we keep adapting our traditions so as to make them do a different kind of social and cultural work from the work they did in the past,” we are not wrong to wonder about who and what is included (and not) in the “we,” “our,” “our traditions” in Halperin’s writing. To whose history and traditions is Halperin referring? By taking race and racism seriously, “our” attention will likely shift to a broader array of (interrelated) power disparities and to a more extensive history of (perhaps subtle) queer lesbian and gay social practices that may be performing new social functions in the present.
Significantly, in turning now to that broader array of power disparities, I do not mean to segregate what are, in fact, queerly related issues. That is, by turning to C. Winter Han, his most recent book, Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire, in order focus on a gay male of color social practice that resists racialized power disparities, I do not mean to imply that class, race, and racism are not interrelated social logics, as if classism is a white issue, while race and racism are, for example, Black issues.
In Racial Erotics, Han defines sexual racism as the erotic “exclusion or fetishization” of gay men of color. Sexual racism, Han points out, is connected to (and, in fact, fuels) the broader racial hierarchy that values whiteness at the expense of everything else. Sexual racism de-forms gay male social life, and that is why Han argues that it requires a social response.
Han identifies the redeployment of racial stereotypes in the intimate lives of some gay males of color as one social response to sexual racism. This practice is meant to “de-center whiteness as the target of sexual desires while simultaneously marking the love of ‘sameness’ legitimate.” In and through the strategic use of racialized stereotypes, gay men of color invent “racialized ways of being [that] have value outside of . . . the service of whiteness.” Han explores this practice in the broader context of taking intraracial relationships seriously, but its history extends beyond intraracial contexts.
Han, Halperin, and de Lauretis, each in their own way, alert us to a collective social identity, one that is not found in “nature,” but rather in history, in the history of specific social practices, that, to re-turn to de Lauretis’ definition of queer theory, “articulate the terms in which lesbian and gay sexualities may be understood and imaged as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of the subject in culture” (emphasis added). And these various, to use Han’s term, “strategic essentialism[s]” are not just academic exercises. Han, Halperin and de Lauretis are all contesting a certain strand of queer theory, an “abstract queerness”—and for a good reason.
Han asserts that “queer theory has not only ignored race but has actively attempted to erase race analysis in an effort to present a universalized queer experience focused on the experiences of white, Western, upper-class gay men.” Halperin asserts that “[m]ost gay men nowadays, especially younger gay men, along with women and members of other minority groups, are forced to live in a state of denial about the social meaning of their difference . . . . When it comes to sexuality in particular, [anyone] can claim a queer identity, so long as such a claim does not challenge the protocols of American social life, disrupt heterosexual privilege, or lead to a rejection of the norms of mainstream culture (love, family, social belonging).” De Lauretis contends that feminist post-structuralism’s obsession with essentialism is not innocent. De Lauretis suggests “that what motivates the suspicion or the outright construction, on the part of Anglo-American feminists, of a fantom feminist essentialism, may be less the risk of essentialism itself than the further risk of which that entails: the risk of challenging directly the social-symbolic institution of heterosexuality.” In other words, what gets left out, hidden, etc. by this poststructuralist obsession with essentialism is the specific form of desire that challenges heterosexuality and that is made manifest in and through specific feminist practices—namely, a specific form of love, love between women, what we may call lesbianism. The erasure of specificity is also the erasure of certain (queer) desires.
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Brintnall’s contention that “emphases and exclusions are necessary to an essay like this one: they are what make a collection of details and an agglomeration of information a story” indicates that narration, any narration, requires making choices that make it a specific narration, a story. However, Brintnall’s second contention, that “queer theory is a long tutorial in learning to find traces of what has been hidden, marginalized, and distorted in service of fabricating a unified, seamless narrative of the normal, the natural, and the good, as well as assessing the damage wrought by telling certain stories rather than others,” indicates that it is precisely specificity that must be queered.
What is difficult to discern on the surface of Brintall’s narrative is the exact relationship he intends between specificity and queerness. As it is framed above, there is, on one the hand, specificity, and then, on the other hand, there is queerness. This way of framing the relationship between specificity and queerness is supported by other moments of his storytelling. For example, in his summary of the work of Duggan and Puar, Brintnall suggests that “participatory interaction with the reigning system of power” is at odds with “resistant queerness.”
Reading de Lauretis with Halperin on queer specificity clarifies, what is to Brintnall, the “somewhat” clear character of de Lauretis’ in(ter)vention.” It points to a form of queerness that is more subtle and supple and compromised than Brintnall may desire. In their textual relationship, in the relationship between unequals, de Lauretis (founder?) and Halperin (inheritor?) create/discern the possibility of a queerness that is at once participatory and resistant, a queerness made manifest in and through lesbian and gay social histories.
While the exact character of queerness in “Once upon a queer theory” is, at least to me, not entirely clear, it seems likely that Brintnall understands queerness as resistant queerness, queerness in opposition to “participatory interaction.” Even if Brintnall intends to define queerness in strictly oppositional terms, his narrative may be read otherwise, and in a way that makes more sense of his story’s main character:
As a story, Brintnall’s narrative is participatory—and no more than its “emphases and exclusions.” Yet, his story is also, and at the same time, resistant. Brintnall resists normalizing what is a queer story by consistently disrupting his narrative, by refusing to, and in the same moment he is also not refusing to, “[fabricate] a unified, seamless narrative of the normal, the natural, and the good.” In “Once upon a queer theory,” the practice of queer storytelling “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities” (emphasis added).
Gay Thoughts 