A Genealogy of Queer Theory (review)

Queer theory’s emergence has posed radical and, to many, unwelcome challenges to numerous academic orthodoxies. Even scholars sympathetic with queer theorists’ political aims have critiqued their methodologies and analyses for disregarding critical tradition and historical fact, and for privileging an ethos of “hip defeatism” (6) over political engagement. Against these charges, William Turner’s provocative and timely book frames queer theory as a specifically historicist and deeply political enterprise, and he claims for it such diverse influences as the Civil Rights and Women’s movements, Marxism, and deconstruction. In the process, A Genealogy of Queer Theory turns one of queer theory’s most distinctive heuristic devices—genealogy—against the field itself.

A genealogy is “a historicized reading of categories that begins with a refusal to accept the ‘naturalness’ or inevitability of those categories [and proceeds as an] effort to find the choices, accidents, and circumstance” underlying their creation (32). This characteristic methodology of queer theory marks the influence of the “archeological” studies of Michel Foucault, who is central to Turner’s study, on queer thought and politics. Whereas queer theory uses genealogy to critique categories of sexual identity, Turner elaborates this critique by subjecting the conceptual framework of queer theory to its own historicizing methodology. Thus, queer theory’s critique of the heterosexual-homosexual binary is shown to echo other poststructuralist oppositions to dualist thought structures; queer theory’s abiding interest in “gender,” in contrast to a more narrow focus on “sexuality” in gay and lesbian studies, reflects its formation within feminism; and the indeterminacy of queer as an identity term is consistent with postmodern philosophy’s ongoing critique of the liberal subject.

Unlike more traditional forms of historiography, genealogy foregrounds scholars’ immanence in relation to their subjects. Turner’s training as a historian contributes to the creation of a narrative for queer theory whose point of departure is Foucault’s first major publication. However, the dominant position accorded Foucault constrains Turner’s inquiry so that all subsequent thinkers—from historians of homosexuality to queer theorists—are read with or against the French philosopher, precluding, for example, a more nuanced consideration of how Judith Butler takes up and critiques Foucault’s analyses. In his discussion of queer politics, Turner makes clear how a “queer” identity claim escapes the implicit whiteness and normative gendering that queer theorists ascribe to “gay and lesbian” identity. But Turner is less attentive to how queer theory’s heuristic investments and critical approach to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality distinguish it from gay and lesbian studies. On this point, such emergent “subfields” as black queer studies and transgender studies would have made productive and helpful contributions to Turner’s history of the field and its discursive contexts.

Turner’s genealogy is nevertheless a valuable introduction to queer theory, providing readers new to the discipline with a lucid account of its central ideas and methods, as well as an illustration of the type of knowledge project that queer theory enables. Scholars more familiar with the field will appreciate Turner’s summary of the major arguments of queer theory’s founding texts and his efforts to track their elaborations across discourses and disciplines, as well as within single careers.