Pedagogical Help in Queer Theory

A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Nikki Sullivan. New York: New York University Press, 2003. vii + 232 pp.

Perhaps, if you teach a queer literature and theory course, like me, you have had some trouble piecing together the queer theory part of the course because of the variety and dispersion of the materials. If we teach such a course and want to suggest to our students what queer theories are and do, albeit at a slant and with lots of disclaimers about their mobility, from whom among the myriad writers do we choose, especially if our time is restricted and we want to give our students a sense of the richness and depth of these subjects? In my ongoing hunt for fitting books, I happened on Nikki Sullivan's Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Though I am not overly fond of "critical introductions," I decided to look at this one closely, and I was pleasantly surprised.

I was attracted to the book from the beginning because Sullivan indicates in her preface that, instead of attempting to say what queer theories are, she intends to indicate what they do, how and why they have functioned as they have, and what culturally and historically specific effects they have had, especially as those theories critique normalizing ways of knowing and becoming. This beginning echoed Nietzsche's "no being but in doing" idea, an important poststructuralist and queer concept and one of which Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others, have made good use. It soon became clear, too, that Sullivan reads queer theories not just across Nietzschean screens but also across those of Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, Sedgwick, Grosz, and others.

In the opening chapter, "The Social Construction of Same-Sex Desire," Sullivan offers a contextualization of queer theories, an attractive feature for students born in the 1980s who do not really have a clue about queer histories and their effects. She reviews the nature-nurture debate over the causes of same-sex orientations as it started, with the work of the nineteenth-century sexologists, to shift away from Judeo-Christian imputations of sinfulness and toward medical models of causes. So we read, for instance, about theories ranging from Richard von Krafft-Ebing's degenerative model of congenital inverts, to Magnus Hirschfeld's more positive ideas about a third sex and the infinite variability of sexuality, to Freud's psychosexual model of development, which suggested that homosexuals were aberrantly arrested in development but were "curable."

In the second chapter, "Assimilation or Liberation, Sexuality or Gender?" Sullivan continues this contextual review, beginning with the stifling effects that the sexologists' reductive and binary debates had on "homosexuals": if you were born a congenitally defective person, nothing could make you normal; if your environment made you defective, the shrinks supposedly could cure you. In the twentieth century, after Freud had won the sexology debate, a new debate evolved among homosexuals themselves: the assimilationists of the 1950s championed a place in "normal" society, and the liberationists of the 1960s–1970s refused to conform to heteronormativity and prided themselves on their choice of homosexuality. With the second wave of the feminist movement, gender also came into play in important ways and increased the complexities of the debates among us, including those involving race and class. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, intensifying poststructuralist discussions and the AIDS epidemic forced a sobering dis-ease among us that finally opened into the richness we now call queerness.

Nine more chapters follow these two introductory chapters. Each one focuses on a specific set of questions dealing with queer notions and includes the complex social, political, and theoretical conditions from which queer theories grew and queer activist groups emerged. These chapters show (a) how the ripening of interest in differences and diversity led to the queering of sexualities and genders; (b) how one can queer race, what race is, how the term emerged, and how, in...