One Step Global, Two Steps Back? Race, Gender, and Queer Studies

Since its rise around 1991, queer theory has offered both promise and problems. As an intellectual tool, it has provided new models for reconceptualizing identity, community, and activist politics. But theories often masquerade as universal explanatory systems or are mistaken for a politics. To assert that the tool of queer theory is adequate unto itself as a scholarly or political outlook seems to me absurd, tantamount to claiming that I can fix every leak and creak in my hundred-year-old house with a screwdriver or a power drill—both versatile tools, but inadequate on their own for complex tasks.

The problem of considering queer theory an intellectual panacea—a problem more prevalent a few years ago than today—was compounded in the mid-1990s by the coronation of a few texts as somehow representative of the entire, potentially diverse field. In a global context, the one in which we now inevitably speak, queer theory as a privileged approach to study poses some of the same problems that Dennis Altman discusses in his essay "Rupture or Continuity?" Altman explores the hegemonic movement of what he calls "the global gay" and various local resistances to it. "One might ask," with Altman, "whose scripts are being played out as more people in developing countries adopt the idea of forming homosexual couples."⁶

The world over, communities of women loving women and men loving men have resisted or worn uncomfortably the English terms gay, lesbian, homosexual, and queer . In China activists promote the use of the term tongzhi and speak of "coming home" rather than "coming out" as an appropriate rubric for understanding the dilemmas of tongzhi in a society profoundly structured by familial relations rather than individual identities. In Japan the term onabe competes with the transliteration rezubian (also rezu or bian) ; neither is used universally or completely comfortably among Japanese lesbians. Though we do not hear as much about it now as we did in the late 1990s, throughout the United States, even as queer became an acceptable term, it was questioned and resisted by communities of gays and lesbians of color and of white lesbians.

It must be clear by now that I am not a person who refers to herself as a "queer theorist," even as my doctoral education and my own scholarly writing have been informed by (and sometimes against) the poststructuralist tidal wave that had washed over academe by the mid-1980s. I am not averse to labels, as so many of my undergraduate students seem to be, nor am I dismissive of queer theory's insights. I resist, instead, the either-or reasoning with which queer theory established itself against feminist and lesbian and gay studies—and which, I believe, erases much of the vital work of working-class/lesbians of color that was actually a germinal precursor to the formation of queer theory itself in the United States. I believe I was invited to participate in this panel because I have written a book arguing as much, called Identity Poetics . In it, I examine the work of five activist-theorist-poets: Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa. I attempt to articulate the links between contemporary queer theory and an earlier—sometimes coexistent—identity politics frequently articulated by working-class/lesbians of color and by antiracist white lesbians that is neither wholly opposed to nor entirely divorced from the central insights of queer theory.⁷

Historians and other commentators on feminism and gay liberation widely acknowledge the influence of the civil rights movement on other liberation movements that followed in the United States. The standard chronology has it that the civil rights movement made possible the black power movement, the antiwar movement, women's liberation, and gay liberation. It is typical of the U.S. tendency to see things, as it were, in...