Intelligible/Unintelligible: A Two-Pronged Proposition for Queer Studies

Although the 1911 publication The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions with Recommendations by the Vice Commission of Chicago almost exclusively focuses on women and their involvement in prostitution, literary critic and LGBT studies scholar Julie Abraham directs her reader’s attention to the “brief report on ‘sex perversion’” within its pages (86). According to Abraham, whose Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (2009) maps the myriad ways in which homosexuals have historically made cities, and vice versa, the vice commission remained perplexed when trying to ascertain the comprehensible traits of those “sex perverts” who wandered the streets of Chicago. Indeed, “They were particularly concerned about the absence of legibility among these groups of men, ‘who do not fall into the hands of the police on account of their practices, and who are not known in their true character to any extent by physicians because of the fact that their habits do not, as a rule, produce bodily disease’” (Abraham 86).

While legibility and intelligibility are not to be confused as one and the same, their linkage is nonetheless inextricable for the function of a signifying system Judith Butler has famously called “the heterosexual matrix,” that is, “a grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized” (151). For the vice commission, which sought to maintain the heterosexual matrix for early-twentieth-century Chicago in light of a growing, city-based homosexual population, the ability to read on the surface (legibility) presumably guaranteed knowledge of the subject’s inherent nature (intelligibility). In, therefore, noting the inevitable anxiety induced by an emergent pervert collective at once legible and yet unintelligible, Abraham argues that the “commission, in fact, foregrounded the possibility of community as if that were inseparable from (il)legibility, as if the difficulty of ‘know[ing]’ these men were intrinsic to their formation of groups and colonies, or at least intrinsic to the threat to the social order that such groups and colonies represented” (86). Through “literature, photographs, songs, and music-hall performances” (88), members of the commission were presumably adept at identifying these social pariahs (although such skills were always susceptible of failure just as they were not unilaterally accessible to the general public). Yet so-called cults of perverts would continually prove threatening to the so-called innocent if the means to really know them remained unobtainable and thus encrypted, like queers themselves, within the realm of the unintelligible.

I begin with Abraham’s insights (representative of the many others her illuminating study offers) because it enables me to reflect on the import of intelligibility and unintelligibility for queer studies. It is fitting that the three books engaged here—one by a historian and the other two by literary/cultural studies scholars—prove exemplary for pondering how these two terms provide a pertinent critical approach within the field. A caveat, however, seems inevitable since at first take, the insistence on a politics of unintelligibility for queers may seem counterproductive. A second take, though, reveals that unintelligibility—like work upholding an “antisocial thesis” or “gay shame” which gave way to an invaluable body of work in contemporary queer studies for complicating conventional assumptions regarding gay identity, community cohesion, and cultural affirmation—productively flies in the face of individuals and institutions such as the Chicago Vice Commission wishing to silence, regulate, or shine a revelatory light on nonheteronormative subjects and their sexual practices.¹ Alternatively, turning the tables on heternormative demands for intelligibility for queer projects prompts the two-pronged proposition I will soon make clear.

In the introduction to Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (2007), Scott Herring offers compelling reasons for why unintelligibility best suits his project and, as I wish to argue, queer studies in general. Taking...