A Genealogy of Queer Theory (review)

A Genealogy of Queer Theory by William B. Turner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, 248 pp., $69.50 hardcover, $22.95 paper.

When I teach courses introducing students to the field that has come to be called queer theory, I title my first-day handout (which examines, in non-chronological order, some of the key moments in the emergence of queer thought over the past three decades) "The Proliferating Origins of Queer Theory." The problem, I explain to students, is that any myth of origin suggests a linear (or we might say "straight") path of development and implies a pure and singular starting point. Queer theory, by contrast, proffers the impure and perverse, and multiplicity rather than singularity. Origin myths, moreover, tend to privilege a naturalized, reproductive model of development, whereas queer theory deploys—or recruits—alternative, denaturalized models. Finally, origin myths are generally neat, categorized, disciplined, and disciplinary, whereas queer theory, like the best work in both feminism and cultural studies more generally, tends to be actively interdisciplinary or anti-disciplinary.

It is for these reasons that William B. Turner's A Genealogy of Queer Theory is such an important and useful book. A clear introduction to what Turner calls "the proliferation of queers," A Genealogy of Queer Theory is attentive to the multiple locations where queer theory has germinated over the past few decades (1). Feminism, in particular, plays a central role in the story Turner tells: although the work of feminist historians, literary critics, and theorists appears in several chapters, two of Turner's five chapters focus exclusively on feminist work, the first on scholars and activists who historicized gender and sexuality beginning in the 1970s and the second, more specifically, on Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Turner also takes readers through the work of Michel Foucault, gay male historians and sociologists who developed social constructionist models of sexuality, as well as literary critics who interrogated the convoluted meanings of sodomy in both the Renaissance and the present day. Most important, the book consistently weaves in concerns that are far from academic; opening and closing with a consideration of hate crimes—that is, of the literal and endemic violence to which all those who are perceived as queer are potentially subject.

Over the course of A Genealogy of Queer Theory, and perhaps despite Turner's best intentions, Foucault emerges as the central figure. Even though the book, as a good Foucauldian genealogy, "abandons telos" (44), each chapter ultimately spins back to Foucault in some way, even those chapters which wouldn't necessarily have to. The first chapter on feminism, for instance, begins with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and other feminist historians, but quickly becomes an overview of the individual essays in the volume Feminism and Foucault. Undeniably, Foucault is centrally important to queer theorists, but here he begins to play an author function that Foucault himself would have undoubtedly resisted.

However, queers of color do not play a particularly important role in this genealogy. Almost ten years ago, Sedgwick wrote that "a lot of the most exciting recent work around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example" (1993, 8-9). In my mind, Sedgwick's observation remains true; Siobhan Somerville's Queering the Color Line (2000), Cathy J. Cohen's The Boundaries of Blackness (1999), and José Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications (1999) all attest to the ways in which sexuality and race are always intertwined. The major absence in Turner's book is a sustained consideration of work, reaching back to 1981, in which feminists of color imagined and invented queer identities and communities. As Gloria An-zal-dúa wrote at the time, "We are the queer groups, the people that don't belong anywhere . . . and because we do not fit we are a threat...