Queer Misgivings

David Savran's new collection of essays, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2003), tries to revive the once trendy discipline of queer theory through—of all unfashionable things!—an unapologetically Marxist perspective. The result is an often thrilling diagnosis of the indissoluble economic-aesthetic quagmire of the American theater. Whether it infuses new life into the queer construct is a dodgier matter. Savran's book, however, remunerates its reader even if it can't on its own rehabilitate a utopian epithet fallen into theoretical doubt.

When I wrote "The Queer As Drama Critic" for the Queer Theater issue of Theater that I guest-edited in 1993, the term queer had been newly radicalized. From its long-held derisive meaning—a variant of queen and fag—the word had been reclaimed by gay and lesbian theorists and activists as a defiant call for building a broader coalition in the fight against AIDS. Rallying together those minority groups most vulnerable to the epidemic's color-blind assault, queer became a banner under which more than just white, middle-class gays and lesbians could march. Implicit was the recognition that our identities were plural, not singular—that we belonged to concentric communities even as we are made to feel like we're living in the cracks of no community whatsoever. The new queer vision offered a revision of those identity politics movements, steeped in too fixed and narrow a sense of group belonging, which at best amounted to a temporary corrective or reverse discourse, at worst a form of mini-nationalism blind to all but its own parochial struggle. As the opening of "Queer As Drama Critic" reveals, I couldn't resist adopting the new rainbow rhetoric, an academic form of hippiedom that was infinitely seductive to my graduate student ears: "The term Queer is manifold; it seeks to encompass that which has been excluded, ridiculed, oppressed. Life caught in the margins. Sex yes, and sexuality, but also gender, race and class, and that which refuses easy taxonomy and suffers the fate of difference. A philosophy never fixed nor realized, but a politics of shared struggle, and a striving for community."

Queers pursued this quixotic agenda raucously in the streets with ACT UP and Queer Nation, to name two of the more prominent avatars of the new militancy, which derived much of its rage from the mourning and melancholia of stigma. Meanwhile, queer academics opted for a more abstract form of revolution, with a new generation of lesbian and gay scholars arming themselves with post-structuralist weapons to dismantle the calcified assumptions of identity. At question were the very tenets that had formed the basis of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements—that homosexuality was the basis of a valid minority identity. Though no queer theorists wanted to roll back the modest protections accrued since the Stonewall rebellion, there began a vigorous interrogation of the politics of identity categories, in particular the way binaries such as male/female, white/black, and straight/gay had shaped our social geography and thus distorted the internal landscape on which we patch together a sense of self.

Admittedly, there was from the beginning a disconnection between the guerrilla-style protests taking place in New York, Washington, and San Francisco and the often recondite scholarly indirection of the theory. Worse, the academic face of the movement didn't adequately reflect the new diversity that queer was meant to denote. Its look, in fact, was every bit as ivory tower as its formidable jargon. After the first flush of intellectual passion, a kind of hypocrisy dogged queers in the university. Ironically, the real nail in the coffin came as a consequence of the miraculous changes wrought by medical breakthroughs in the fight against AIDS. The relative success of protease cocktails—the wonder drug every HIV+ person can't help wondering about—sapped the queer movement's sense of urgency. Though access to health care and the spread of new infection among the world's poor only went...