Psyche and Social Order

On Sexuality and Power; Alan Sinfield; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. viii + 218 pp.

When a theorist of the stature of Alan Sinfield takes up the portentous issues of sexuality and its intersections with power in contemporary gay culture, much is to be expected. For over three decades now, Sinfield has ranged across the early modern and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (from Shakespeare to Tennyson, Wilde to the Pet Shop Boys) and, in several classic books, offered us wonderfully destabilizing readings and provocative insights, all in a limpid prose, and with much humor and style. He is arguably the most influential and significant thinker in British cultural and queer studies, seen in the recent conference dedicated to his work at the University of Manchester.

These characteristics are on display in On Sexuality and Power, opening as it does with a chatty explication of Freud and a breezy overview of high theory in queer studies, both written with a lightness of touch and clarity that are his imprimatur. Sinfield's thesis in the book is that sexuality is imbricated in power. Not a particularly original thesis, you might aver, but that would depend on your theory of power. Sinfield is clearly responding to two hegemonic conceptions of power that he wishes to problematize: the Foucauldian model that dominates much queer theory, especially in the United States, and the liberal model that dominates much popular discourse in the United States and Western Europe (his two sites). The first Sinfield goes some way before he asserts that what it does is to celebrate fantasy and instability as though it was completely separate from social and political structures in the world (which, to him, is simply not the case), and the second, he argues, too readily builds perceptions of gayness and relationships as egalitarian, whole, and based on sameness when in fact they are riddled with inequalities and differences that we must recognize.

So far so good, but, again, this is only to be expected from a cultural materialist. Founded by Raymond Williams and taken forward by theorists like Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, cultural materialism called for scrupulously locating literary texts in the sociopolitical milieux from which they emerged and searching texts, with increasingly sophisticated sets of tools, for contradictions and instabilities that allowed for variant readings. These readings, cultural materialists firmly believe, do make a difference and can potentially contribute to social change, if not social transformation. Broadly Marxist, these scholars did not shy from subjecting Marxian verities to the electric shocks of French theory or feminism and gay and lesbian studies, but never forgot their own and their texts' ideological locations.

So what's special about this book, then? Well, it's Sinfield's first concerted attempt to bring psychoanalysis and materialist analysis together. Early on he wryly remarks, "Even a materialist needs a theory of psychic life" (3). The chapter "Taxonomies" lays out the framework within which our conceptions of sexual selfhood circulate; the next two chapters—"Fantasy" and "Power"—summarize and problematize the two schools of thought within gay culture cited above. The subsequent chapters have as titles the vectors along which Sinfield confounds our ignoring of hierarchies: "Gender," "Age," "Class," and "Race." To be sure, Sinfield is aware that none of these categories is discrete; there is definite overlap, so this is not an add-and-shake analysis.

Further, the materials he uses for each chapter are contemporary gay, lesbian, and transgendered fiction, poetry, and cinema, with some material from earlier moments (e.g., Whitman, Wilde, Genet). Once again, he's not positing "facts from fiction" (187); his purpose is to "investigate the kinds of representations that have been circulating" (187), and the point is to learn from these texts and enrich the gay subculture.

This is an admirable project but a delicate and difficult one, and this reader's disappointment with the book is that it is not undertaken with the necessary...