Queer at Last? Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression

The crucial, empowering incoherence at the core of heterosexuality and its definition never becomes visible because heterosexuality itself is never an object of knowledge, a target of scrutiny in its own right, so much as it is the condition for the supposedly objective, disinterested knowledge of other objects.

—David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography

Straightness and Its Discontents

Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Heterosexuality went from being the norm to being on the defensive."¹ This indignant statement opens one of the central chapters of Daphne Patai's book Heterophobia, an aggressive attack on "the feminist turn against men" in U.S. academia. According to the author's diagnosis, the current disease of women's studies departments—feminism's alleged "heterophobia"² —is caused by the critique of sexual dimorphism, which has contaminated academic feminism since the 1990s. Patai's rather vulgar critique is interesting only insofar as it is a symptom of the critical condition of heterosexuality, which the ideologue means to overcome. In other words, the straight lady protests too much.

The insistence on heterophobia in feminism is one example of the homosexual panic that manifests itself in the deliberate promotion of heterosexuality in the United States today. It is evident in the government's defensive political and ideological efforts to protect the heterosexual institution of marriage, as well as a variety of smaller sociocultural spaces, from the "invasion" of sexual minorities. In 1996 at Pennsylvania State University, for instance, a group of undergraduates founded Students Reinforcing Adherence in General Heterosexual Tradition (STRAIGHT) to "promote education and pride in the tradition and appropriateness of heterosexuality in society."³ Always a useful tool for diagnosing the state of culture and society, the Internet offers a number of Web pages that express regrets about the recent devaluation of heterosexuality through feminist and lesbian and gay critiques. While their authors, both female and male, emphasize their acceptance of various forms of sexuality, they nevertheless work toward the renaturalization of heteronormative gender difference.⁴

By interpreting these incidents as defensive responses to a crisis of heterosexuality, I also suggest that they speak of the growing authority of the critical tendencies that aim at unsettling the hegemony of heterosexuality. The notion of heterosexual normativity has become the object of a radical critique. Developed by feminist, lesbian, and gay activists and scholars since the late 1960s, this approach has been reconfigured by queer theory since the early 1990s.⁵ The queer critique articulates the critical condition of heterosexuality by insisting that it is neither a natural basis of social relations nor a stable identity but "a construction whose meaning is dependent on changing cultural modes."⁶ A variety of scholars have convincingly argued that the dominant system of institutionalized heterosexuality operates through the hetero/homo divide and that its universalization and naturalization have made heterosexuality invisible as a sexual practice or identity. By revealing the conditions and effects of the production of sexual norms and the processes of normalization, queer scholarship has introduced a powerful critical discourse for denaturalizing and destabilizing the dominant notion of heterosexuality. Moreover, the analysis of the ideological, material, and institutional aspects of the formation of normative and minoritized sexual subjects has provided the basis for a critique of the production of heteronormative privileges.

While the unwittingly homophobic defenses of sexual norms can be regarded as one form of response to such a critique, they are not the only possible reaction from the hegemonic camp. There is another, seemingly "queerer" attempt to come to terms with the critical condition of heterosexuality, namely, straight intellectuals' participation in the critique that dismantles their own normative status. Heterosexual scholars have begun to interrogate critically the heterosexual subject "after" queer theory. From their writings emerges the figure of the "queer heterosexual" or the "queer straight" as a somewhat elusive subject of current critical discourse. Queer straights are lovers both of "the opposite gender" and of queer discourse. What distinguishes them from the supportive "friends and relatives" of gay people is their self-representation as potentially transgressive, queer subjects. The...