First, Offence

So what’s hot on Facebook here in the last week of July 2015? Well, we have the closure of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival because ciswomen (that is, “womyn-born-womyn” [Ballou])) are offended by the threat of trans women attending the event. We have the barring of drag queens from performing at the Glasgow Pride parade because their playfulness offends trans people, for whom gender identity is no joke. Under “Related Posts,” we have the protest that lgbt people of colour were making about the screening of Paris is Burning in Brooklyn last month, a protest mounted against the offensiveness of a white filmmaker “exploiting queers of color.” And everywhere these posts appear, there is an avalanche of approving Likes or vehement condemnations of political correctness. Facebook certainly has not invented this culture of offence-taking—let’s call it offendedness—but it has surely exacerbated it. With its short, rapid-fire entries and nonce-polemics-cum-debates, Facebook demands fast and fatal action on matters of offence. Overall, the effect may be polyphonic, but each entry conveys with brutal and exigent force the offendedness of its author, who knows exactly how the issue du jour is to be read. The Sex Wars have returned but for the texting generation.

What underlies this declarative obsession is the fantasy of a world without offendedness, a world, that is, without offence; this is a world where (exclusionary) identities can be celebrated against other identities without appearing to be contrary to them; it is a world of politics without politics. But at least where matters of queer thinking were concerned, it wasn’t always thus. One remembers (nostalgically, alas) Judith Butler’s suggestion that the potentially offensive sign on the gay male restaurateur’s door, “She’s overworked and needs a rest” (167), was an occasion to think about how no constituency owns the feminine (not the female, the feminine); or how the offence taken by the theologian who hated jello-esque religious kitsch became for Eve Sedgwick an analysis of the queerly reparative vestiges of sentimentality (Epistemology 142–43); or, more recently, Lee Edelman’s suggestion that we respond to Christians’ jeremiad that queers are destroying the world not with “self-righteous bromides of liberal pluralism” (16) but with an analysis of how such jeremiads might, or even should, be true. Yet, current offendedness rarely demands complex arguments: all of us are now poised to offend, or to be offended, and often in the fastest and most ad hominem of ways.

Consider the circuit of offendedness that vivified Judith Halberstam’s relation to the Gay Shame Conference in 2003. She had hesitated going, she says, because she was “convinced that gay shame, if used in an uncritical way, was for, by, and about … white men” (219). Presupposing the offensiveness of the speakers’ un-self-critical whiteness, she was not disappointed: whiteness’s purported privilege escalated to the moment when Ellis Hanson illustrated his talk with an image of a Puerto Rican porn star, and Hiram Perez, a queer person of colour, addressed him with “an angry and impassioned critique” (230). “Hansen [sic] responded defensively,” she recalls, until Michael Warner closed things down with a parodic quotation from another “white” paper (Douglas Crimp’s) on racialized drag. For Halberstam, “The punctuation of the conference by the apparently humorous but actually deeply offensive image of a white gay man (Warner) mimicking a drag queen of color (Montez) who is lip-synching to the voice of another white gay man (Tavel) captures perfectly the racial dynamics of the conference as a whole” (231), that is, the abjection of persons of colour and the massaging of gay white men’s privilege. Perez’s offendedness is “angry, impassioned critique” whereas Hanson’s offendedness is merely defensive privilege under attack. But paradoxically (or not), Halberstam’s reading of the scene invokes the “political certitude” that she would decry elsewhere in gay male critique, a certitude she, David Eng, and José Muñoz would have us “relinquish” (Eng 15). Much more dismissive than a Judith Butler might be about the layers of mimicry and...