"But She Has Gay Friends": The Violence of Heteronormative Liberal Politics in the University

Heteronormativity is closely aligned with homonormativity in the university, because both are rooted in liberal politics of respectability. For heteronormativity, the naturalization of heterosexuality as a default relies on the defining of other sexualities as impossible, deviant, marginal, or abnormal.¹ In homonormativity, only specific ways of being gay are deemed legible and acceptable: it puts forth one way of being gay as respectable and normative. Homonormativity imagines a gay identity where sexuality carries with it little difference between the privileged heterosexual construction and the sexually marginalized LGBTQ categories. It does not contest heterosexual and heterosexist assumptions about gender, sexuality, and identity.² Roderick Ferguson further points out that this project "produce[s] the respectable gay as one of the ideals of neoliberal capital and urbanization, an ideal embodied in whiteness."³ Whiteness is not just a reference to a racial category, it is also a way of conceptualizing a particular (white) racial center and its pervasive power. Even without the presence of white people, whiteness is oft found at the center of discussions of race and racial difference. Even with the inclusion of sexuality studies and LGBT "safe zones" on many campuses, discussions of LGBTQ sex and non-normative relationships are still considered deviant.⁴

Queer studies and women's and gender studies remain vital as potential interventions in academia, even as they are often ghettoized and contested spaces in terms of procuring and promoting faculty lines.⁵ The university—with all its myriad rules, both spoken and unspoken—presents consistent challenges to openly queer and unruly identities. Shinsuke Eguchi articulates that their appearance in terms of age, race, and gender performance is often marked as "bitchy" and "unprofessional" as they are expected to be docile, quiet and subservient to (white) others at the university.⁶ I want to call attention to the mechanisms of discipline that permeate the university and how they are deployed to enforce a sense of precarity for queer people—and particularly queer people of color—in the academy. These disciplinary tools are deployed by an array of actors, including those who claim to be allies through their liberal viewpoints and/or pasts.

Even when diversity is purposefully included or even celebrated, it is often narrowly accepted by the administration and other academic colleagues. This acceptance could be as narrow as declaring February "Diversity Awareness Month" rather than "Black History Month" or having a class have a single reading from a person of color in a semester. In many universities, diversity initiatives are put forward for faculty, staff, and students, yet these often do not result in change in representation, curriculum, or staffing. These initiatives are not meant to succeed; rather, they are meant to consistently reinforce social norms and structures that continue to exclude people who perform in non-normative ways and/or ways that are purposefully disruptive/challenging.⁷ Bernadette Marie Calafell describes one instance where she asks another colleague to be mindful of time after several instances where the other instructor remained in the classroom after the class ended. After the exchange, the colleague—a white, cisgender, presumably heterosexual woman—weeps and claims that she fears Calafell, reinforcing dominant narratives about an assertive queer Chicana as monstrous.⁸ In this case, as the queer person of color engages in civility, the white woman colleague experiences this as an attack and utilizes her tears as a means of cultivating sympathy from other faculty. Although there is no explicit homophobia or heterosexism at play, the incident calls into question the queer faculty of color's place in the department, marking the queer person of color as hostile and uncivil.

Heteronormative narratives are distributed through a wide variety of actors. Michel Foucault describes changes in the "policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses."⁹ Throughout history, these discourses were managed through social taboos, most often through religion: what is named and what is not, what is possible and what is unthinkable. As contemporary society emerges, other institutions serve to...