What School Culture Teaches Us about Queer Theory

George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority-sister.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

My forthcoming book, “Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar Culture” (2013), evolved out of two impulses, one methodological and one historical. The methodological impulse was to produce a criticism that looked to be unavailable within queer theory when I began the project. The historical impulse was to visit upon the 1950s and 1960s a perspective that highlights dimensions of postwar culture equally unavailable within the standard accounts of the period. I’ll elaborate briefly on the methodological concern before turning to the historical intervention “Camp Sites” makes.

It cannot escape our notice that much of what gets published under the banner of queer theory in literary studies is scholarship on the recovery model. However sophisticated, queer-identified critics by and large engage in rereading, revamping, or otherwise revisiting figures in the literary tradition whose work either overtly or obliquely, readily or with difficulty, yields to a reading practice in which the following assumptions are in force: such figures were erotically nonconformist; their nonconformity was subject to punitive social pressures; their creative output reveals an illuminating cultural strategy for coping with such pressures, including the denial, the dissemblance, or the defiant embrace of their erotic difference. To observe this repertoire of assumptions is not to deny the value of queer criticism, nor to deny that much of it is as sophisticated as it professes to be. It is only to point out that these governing assumptions are so fully in accord with the mainstream of literary criticism, which for decades has treated authors as opponents or proponents of broader cultural values, that the question must arise: what warrants the assertion of numerous queer theorists that their work is radical or new?

In “Camp Sites,” I approach this question by way of the institutional framework in which the rhetoric of radicalism prevails. I argue that such rhetoric is the native tongue of a school culture in which difference and antinormativity have long been routinized. Whereas one consequence of this institutional development has been the embrace across the disciplines of the value of difference, for the humanities in particular it has meant combining the school’s commitment to alterity with the critic’s traditional commitment to adversarial culture. Queer theorists cannot help being radical, we might say, less because their arguments are unconventional than because they conform to the conventions of an institution that places a recognition of the contingency of conventions at the center of its mission. The case “Camp Sites” makes is that this view of things, which scarcely incites debate in the twenty-first-century academy, has a longer history than we tend to realize. I argue further that the embrace of contingency among academics of an earlier moment did not ground a politics of resistance so much as confirm the rectitude of the political order at large. Constructionism’s shifting loyalties afford a vivid instance of the hazards attending what John Guillory calls “the dubious correlation of epistemology with politics in much current cultural theory” (494). As “Camp Sites” argues, the theorization of social construction is not only a less effective mode of activism than many academics want to admit, but a practice fully in tune with the hegemony that constructionism’s champions imagine themselves assailing.

This is where the methodological polemic that drives “Camp Sites”—an avoidance of both the recovery model and the rhetoric of newness to which it is often wed—converges with its historical argument. “Camp Sites” begins with the observation that postwar academic disciplines were in remarkable agreement about the heuristic virtues of make-believe. For mid-century academics, I argue, the formal contours of subjects as diverse as affects, war games, and social gatherings were more meaningful than their contents. Behaviorists and systems theorists read the surface world with the close attention their colleagues in English reserved for lyric syntax. And just as they put the study of effects rather than the justification of beliefs at the center of their disciplines, so...