Superbad Sex Objects

I remember reading that when “feminism meets queer theory,” our encounter begets “more gender trouble.”¹ In “Against Proper Objects” (her introduction to that 1994 special issue of differences), Judith Butler runs interference in the custodial restriction of gender to women’s studies and sex to lesbian and gay studies, to clear the way for a profoundly troubled sense of gender that cannot be cordoned off from sex. A genealogy of queer theory might trace its inception to Teresa de Lauretis’s effort to activate feminist theory from within lesbian and gay studies and thereby insist that feminism is already a constitutive part of queer theory. However, the face-offs between women’s and lesbian and gay studies continue, particularly over our objects — whether proper or bad.² What will it take to get the encounters between feminism and queer theory we deserve?

One answer might be the critical embrace of superbad sex objects that informs Jennifer Doyle’s Sex Objects. Here contact with those messy, category-defying versions of sex and the ways in which sex “happens in art” is inextricable from our embodiment as feeling and thinking critics, the problematics of capital, and the constructions of race and sexual difference. While Doyle’s trafficking in the border zones of feminism and lesbian and gay studies is far from unprecedented, what distinguishes her contribution is in part her transgression of the disciplinary etiquette that would dictate that the proper object of women’s and lesbian and gay studies be identity and that we somehow be what we study.

Doyle’s critical positioning as a “fag hag” and her extension of her own cross-gender and cross-sexuality friendships to develop the “forms of intimacy that take shape between women (straight and gay) and gay men” (xxv) into not just the object of her work but also its method importantly and productively expand identity-based criticism. This version of the encounter between feminism and queer theory comes close to answering de Lauretis’s call that queer theorizing involve the “imaging and enacting of new forms of community by the other-wise desiring subjects of this queer theory.”³ Mobilizing a fag hag optic allows Doyle to bring other “other-wise desiring subjects” and objects into view. Doyle occupies a place within queer theory as one of those “other-wise desiring subjects” whose strong attachments to gay men and elective affinities for homoerotic representations far exceed our Noah’s ark taxonomies and transform how we read our desired objects.

In the central chapters of this wide-ranging work, Doyle imaginatively plays the favored hag to Andy Warhol’s fag (102). The payoff of this queer feminist perspective is most pronounced in the chapter on women in Warhol’s films of the late sixties. In one of the many transhistorical interpretive gestures that distinguish this study, Doyle looks again at these films and the role of women in them from the vantage of the female figure in “the twenty-ninth bather” section of Leaves of Grass, whose admiring gaze sets up one of the most explicitly homoerotic scenes in all of Whitman’s work (81).⁴ Framing our view in this way enables Doyle to argue that because these women are “framed by a gay male context, [they get] to be something other than the straight sex object” (72), and Warhol and Whitman can be seen as protoqueer feminist in their situation of women as those “other-wise desiring subjects.”

Like the women in Warhol and Whitman whom Doyle demonstrates to be both “irrelevant, and absolutely central” (71), Doyle activates the minor throughout her readings to demonstrate how the margin is centrally destabilizing to the “proper objects” of American literary and art historical study. The book’s provocative preface sets the stage, telling a personally implicating origin story for her formation as a queer feminist critic that links a pornographic photograph of a black man’s dick and an L. L. Bean sweater emblazoned with a whale to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick...