The Class Politics of Queer Theory

Donald Morton

Revision History
• Fall/Winter 1995-6	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 1 (pp. 51-55).
• September 1, 2003	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original.

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Post-al queer writings of the 1990's (a category in which most of the texts considered here belong) are marked by an eerie silence about the sharp historical shifts now under way, not just in the US but throughout the capitalist world. For the second time in the past decade or so, preparations are being made for a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class. The US Congress, for example, is not only sharply cutting back on programs for the poor and (in the name of “morality") initiating attacks on all kind of marginal groups but reducing spending generally for social programs in order to provide a tax cut for the wealthy. It is very telling to find that shifts of such historic magnitude are all but completely suppressed in the latest books not only from well-known writers on sexual politics such as Leo Bersani and David Halperin but also from such new ones as Mark Blasius and John Champagne. It is this “suppression” which produces the striking contrast between their books and that of Nicola Field, who argues that under present desperate historical circumstances, “It is crucial that the gay movement wakes up to the reality of class as a factor in gay oppression” (4). When read against Field's text, these queer theorists—shadow-boxing with a collapsing liberal state—seem not merely “out of touch," but blind to history, an impression which raises the urgent question of what interests they have been struggling to preserve all along.[1]

A similar questioning appears sporadically “from within” queer studies. In a recent essay on “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay History," queer studies insider Lisa Duggan describes an emerging “split” between an older generation of Stonewall era activists/scholars working without much material or institutional support and the “more privileged generation of [post-Stonewall] lesbian and gay academics” (182-83). Duggan's discussion is ultimately quite unhelpful because, while noting the economic dimension, she offers an eclectic explanation of the split as also a generational difference (which sets older and younger members of the gay community at odds), as also an educational difference (dividing younger academics trained to achieve privilege by absorbing sophisticated postmodern theory against other lesbigay scholars using traditional scholarly methods), as also a philosophical difference (between those committed to empirical research and those for whom empiricism is a problem). Duggan's eclecticism obscures the fact that—with increased economic pressure--we are witnessing basically the disruption of lesbigay “solidarity” along class lines. More symptoms of that disruption appeared on the Internet in early September, 1995, in the Queer Studies Mailing List, where Will Roscoe (an independent scholar well-known for his studies of the berdache) remarked, “Much of queer theory seems radical only as long as we ignore the class-base of its production and dissemination." Unlike Field, who urges that the only way to achieve an effective sexual politics is by emphasizing and rigorously explaining the effects of class difference on the sexual margins, Duggan's “solution” is to “smooth over" these class differences by urging traditional historians and social scientists to learn about postmodernism and postmodernist lesbigay critics/theorists to draw on the social sciences to “expand the research base for analyzing the changing discursive context” (181). In the end, rather than the kind of disciplined and rigorous analysis Field begins to offer that lays bare the bankruptcy of a merely “cultural” materialism, Duggan offers a hollow “exchange” formula which neatly side-steps economic issues: “We can all get along if you trade your theoretical knowledges for my empirical data base." Duggan's analysis trivializes the problem of the “material” by mystifying the “discipline problem," which is basically the failure of queer theory not only to provide a “disciplined” (theoretically rigorous) explanation of the relation of the cultural to the economic but also to stress the priority of the latter. This explanation is what Nicola Field's book helps to inaugurate.

Field directly addresses the class issue beginning from the observation that in the right-dominated 1990's, “success” for the lesbian and gay movement is being increasingly defined by gay entrepreneurs selling the “gay lifestyle” who measure progress as the growth of the “pink economy” (1). Such “success” assumes that all lesbians and gays “experience oppression in the same way” when in actuality “working-class and poor gays are less likely to be out, less able to find safety off the streets and more likely to be criminalised or sacked because of their sexuality” (4). Through advertising and public relations, gay commercialism is trying to sell a romaticized view of an oppressed minority that can spend its way out of subjection, as if the capacity to spend were evenly spread over the entire community. In actuality, the “gay lifestyle," which is “a specialised form of middle-class lifestyle," may in fact be “second nature to some” but is “completely unattainable and meaningless to many” (51). Just as the “pink economy” flatters the gay community with a “positive” notion of its “difference," on the political plane, identity politics serves the same purpose. It proposes a “solidarity” based on “a common sexual orientation which unites across differences of class” (37) when in actuality “class, wealth and private property lie at the root of gay oppression” (73). Slick lifestyle magazines only give coverage to the “preoccupations of working-class lesbians and gays—police harassment, job losses, wage cuts, benefit cuts, homelessness, domestic violence” to document “the activities of middle-class led reformist and campaigning organisations” (75). What is needed is not social and cultural reform but the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which uses “homophobia, like racism and sexism... to keep workers divided from one another through prejudice, mistrust and an artificial sense of competition” (109). Although Field overtly targets the “gay business class” (72), her book critiques the commodification of the subject and challenges queer theory's assumption that the homosexual subject is the quintessential “subject of desire” living for the pleasures of consumption (whether of products or of sex itself). The “queer" theorization of the subject not only obscures the vast class differences within the lesbian and gay community but with the “consumer-image” shifts the focus away from lesbians and gays as “producers” (exploited workers) (52). Rejecting postmodernism's playful uncertainties, Field is clear, straightforward and insistent: “gay oppression cannot be fought on a separate battleground from the central war against class oppression” (30).

The limitations of Field's book is that it largely addresses the level of the “everyday," when what is also needed is a sustained conceptual explanation at the theoretical level of exactly why and how her view of sexual politics in the 1990's is so completely at odds with the views in the four other texts under review here.[2] The five texts taken together are symptomatic of a decisive and determinate theoretical and political difference: four are instances of “desire-theory” and Field's, of “need-theory." Desire-theory, which is overwhelmingly dominant in the Euramerican academy and the culture industry today and has the most resources behind it (in the form of jobs for academics, research grants, opportunities to publish,...), is based on the premises of (post)structuralism and ludic (post)modernism, which—following the intellectual lead of Nietzsche/Saussure/Derrida/Lacan/Foucault,. . . —locate the motor of social change in the inescapable and purely aleatory and non-teleological effects of the ongoing “liberation” of (unconscious) desire and the “play of the signifier," understood not merely as the enabling conditions of meaning-making but also as the very arena of social justice. In these works, politics is grounded on the mode of signification and is a “matter” of discourses, textualities, representations, performances, simulacra, decentered subjects and structures.... Above all, since it is intensely hostile to all “totalities” and “causality"—in other words, to modes of knowing that make it possible to establish determinate connections between various social/political/economic/cultural/sexual... phenomena—desire-theory produces a politics of isolated localities in undecidable relation to each other, or, in Lyotard's terms, a politics of incommensurate language games (Lyotard and Thébaud, 45). Furthermore, desire-theory, which is based on what Lyotard has called the libidinal economy model of culture, has—according to queer and postmodern theorists generally—superseded need-theory, which is based on an “outmoded” Enlightement [sic.] conceptual economy model of culture. Need-theory, which is to say Marxist theory, stresses social change as historical rather than merely textual/representationa/semiotic... change and envisions history neither as an aleatory and playful Derridean text (without origin and without telos) nor as a Foucauldian series of disparate discourses/institutions, but as the history of changing modes of production and of modifications within the prevailing mode of production. Need-theory furthermore explains social change in relation to an objectively existing binary (base/superstructure) operating in the mode of determinate causality, such that changes in the (economic) base eventuate (although unevenly) in changes in the superstructure (politics, religion, culture, morals/ethics, sexual practices,..). Need-theory also makes possible (and requires for its very effectivity) a globalizing explanation of social injustice which allows one to connect not only geographic localities (South Africa, Bangladesh, the Bronx) but local social problems (AIDS, poverty, sexual harrassment) [sic.] in a pattern of determinate economic and class relations. Need-theory depends on “scientific” explanation (by which I mean a reliable and certain—though historically changing—"knowledge” of the social totality) and thus takes epistemological questions seriously. These theoretically different modes of understanding the social are not simply “available alternatives” one can freely “choose” because they are themselves by-products of—and symptoms of the theorist's relation to—an ongoing worldwide class struggle. If we take “desire” to correspond (following post-structuralist theory) the “unnameable yearnings” of the unconscious and “need” to correspond to food, clothing, shelter, health care, education,.., then the confrontational relation of these two modes of thought can be clarified by posing the question: What kind subject can afford to explain politics and the social world strictly in terms of "desire” except the subject whose “needs” are already met?

By this stringent division, I do not suggest that “class” is entirely absent from the vocabulary of queer critics/scholars/theorists. It would be “un-ethical” for any self-respecting academic to pretend that economic differences are entirely irrelevant to social justice. Foucault himself speaks about economic and class issues throughout History of Sexuality Volume I (the queer bible, according to Halperin). However, for queer theory generally, class conflict turns out to be just another set of problems, marginal at best, which have no determinate relation to sexual politics. Admittedly queer theory opposes some aspects of bourgeois life: what it opposes, however, is only the oppressiveness of homophobia as a set of attitudes and discourses. By neglecting to address and attack homophobia—as Field does—as a structure of oppression inextricably bound up with the class structure, queer theorists/critics become “sex rebels” rather than revolutionaries committed to radical social transformation. The problem with (post-modern) queer theory is that (contrary to its own self-understanding) it works basically not against but in the interest of the (economic) status quo, in the interest of purely cultural reform and not economic revolution. As Field aptly remarks (indirectly explaining queer theory's historical amnesia noted before): “According to postmodernism, we are now in a post-capitalist era where class struggle is non-existent” (127). Following the dictates of postmodern theory (which produces “materialism” exclusively as “cultural materialism"), queer theorists set up as the target of their opposition not capitalism but the liberal state. Halperin, for example, follows Foucault in arguing that “modern liberalism has eliminated certain modes of domination only to produce many others” (19). For his part, Bersani argues that if those in lesbigay studies do not focus on “the sexual specificity of being queer," they will come up “with a remarkably familiar, and merely liberal, version of it” (72-73). Champagne goes “to some lengths to demonstrate that a certain unwillingness to think through some of the limits of the liberal position” mars the work of some gay critics (xxx). In the last analysis, however, queer theorists mystify the liberal state as a set of cultural institutions supposedly guaranteeing a democratic inclusiveness which they wish either to see held to its “agreement” or replaced by a new queer democracy that will presumably be better. From Field's point of view, the problem with the liberal state lies not in its failure to live up to its democratic claims nor for her is the solution to displace liberal democracy with a queer libidinal democracy. Field's analysis of homophobia and class implicitly critiques the liberal state as merely a mask for the brutalities of capitalism, for covering over economic exploitation by trying to put a “human face” on capitalism by means of social security, welfare programs, . . . Today when US capitalists are under the most intense global competition since the end of the Second World War, multinational corporations and their political spokespersons in all mainstream parties have declared that we can no longer afford the “niceties” of that “humane facade” and have unceremiously [sic.] shoved the window-dressing of “liberalism” aside. Hence, the problem today is not liberalism, but an increasingly deregulated and rapacious capitalism.

While desire-theory has to be historicized as a product of the Sixties and Seventies whose limits the current irruption of the economic once more into cultural politics clearly demonstrates, these queer writers of two generations go right on promoting desire-theory as the last, best hope for the sexual (and all other social) margins. Their books divert the reader away from asking whether Foucauldianism helps with economic issues (it doesn't) and focus attention instead on an “insiders” debate over whether, in continuing with the Foucauldian program of (homo)sexual politics in the 1990's, the accent should be placed more on “specificity” (that is, on the particularity of queer desire) or more on the “strategies” and “tactics” of “discursive reversal” (which tends to produce an ever “broadening” but more “uncertain” understanding of exactly what the “queer” is by elevating it into semiotic and/or bodily “perversity-in-general").[3]

Although the lines of inquiry in any postmodern text are of course “mixed," the books of Bersani and Blasius accent the issue of “specificity," while those of Halperin and Champagne emphasize “reversals/strategies/tactics." Bersani's title (Homos) signals his resistance to what he regards as the misguided inflation of the meaning of “queer” to include not only all differences but the very difference of difference itself such that “queer” becomes equivalent to the Derridean “différance," “the supplement," “decentering," . . . Here Bersani is repudiating the kind of argument put forward, say, by Judith Butler, who insists that if “queer” is to be a useful term, it can never be “fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from prior usage” (Butler 228). Against this, Bersani asserts that “It is not possible to be gay-affirmative, or politically effective as gays, if gayness has no specificity” (61) and thus recirculates the category “homo." Furthermore, he critiques those queer theorists/critics whose work aids the erasure of gay specificity. Monique Wittig turns homosexuality into merely “a metaphysical category” and the homosexual into something “empirically unrecognizable” (44) and Judith Butler, in analyzing the queer, relies too much on the category “parody," which is not all that subversive since it depends on the very “norms” it is trying to undo (51). Eve Sedgwick and David Halperin are mistaken in their opposition to any effort to explain the “etiology of homosexuality” (56) because a knowledge of the “specificity” of the queer must include how it comes into being. Drawing on “recent psychoanalytically inspired studies” that “have emphasized the defensive and traumatic nature of the so-called normative development of desire” (58), Bersani explains “homosexual desire” as “desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself” (59). “Already identified” signals Bersani's insistence on the need for homosexual identity to be a “stable” (and not constantly shifting) category, not the name for any general and shifting “perversity” of signs or bodies (he thus prefers “gay” to the more current “queer," 71). Bersani is ultimately arguing that some uses of postmodern theory actually de-materialize the queer subject and is thus expressing a cautiousness about postmodern theory (and implicitly) about its notion that what counts as the “material” is basically the “signifier." By contrast, he insists that the “material” is an “empirical” category referring (as in moderism/humanism) [sic.] to what one can perceive through the senses. Thus, like Field Bersani rejects postmodern “materiality," but defines it empirically as what can be tasted, touched, smelled,..., whereas for Field “the material” is a structure of class conflicts.

In his specifying project, Blasius produces an “expository” text with little if any of the contestatory and polemical edge that marks intellectual/political struggle. He draws out the implications of “specificity” programmatically: the lesbian and gay communities are instances of the Foucauldian doctrine of “emergence," whereby different discursive communities (and their attendant institutions and ways of life or “ethos") emerge “island-like” on the surface of culture.[4] Thus: "Male homosexual sexual practices created a community; the existence of the community then transformed the identities of its members as gay. Those involved then reshaped their sexuality (ethical substance) through techniques (ethical practice) learned from one another in the context of gay community values and norms of sexual and social comportment (mode of subjection), resulting in... an ethos (the telos of ethical self-constitution)" (114). Blasius thus assumes the “self-evidentness” of “male homosexual sexual practices”: they need no explanation, not the kind of psychoanalytic explanation Bersani offers, and certainly not a materialist explanation connecting those practices to economic factors (as even John D'Emilio does in “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and Field more powerfully). Blasius speaks repeatedly of gay and lesbian “self-invention” (10, 45, 183, 192, 203); but since it offers an unself-reflexive and naive form of “analysis” which never asks its subject(s) to rethink themelves [sic.] in any fundamental way, his book seems calculated to produce in lesbigay readers not so much critical understanding as that flattering self-satisfaction about which Field warns her readers. Remarkable for its literalization of the Foucauldian idea of the “technology of the self," Blasius's book licenses the idea that a collectively invented (through the discursive community) “gay” or “lesbian” ethos already exists as the blueprint for “gay” or “lesbian” living (183). What does—predictably—rouse Blasius to react is work (like Catharine MacKinnon's) which stresses causal and determinate relations between larger social structures and sexual practices: “I do not think," he says, “one can analyze causal relations between a particular erotic practice (say, penetration and social inequality, or S/M and interpersonal violence in society)" (85-86). He will likely react even more strongly to Field. What is valuable about Blasius's book is the sheer symptomatic clarity with which it makes the connection—and marks Foucault's responsibility in making the connection—between abandonning [sic.] questions of the “state” and other macro-structures (politics) and turning instead to questions of the “self” (ethics). This stress on ethics is meant to divert attention away from the fact that at the bottom of social injustice is a quantitative logic (the logic of profit) which produces qualitative differences in the lives people lead under the capitalist mode of production. For Blasius and other postmodern “ethicists," injustice is a “matter” of ethical negotiation; such a move, however, begs the question of whether social injustice can be overcome through “ethical” means.

Whereas Bersani stresses specificity and cautions against generalizing, Halperin moves emphatically in the other direction, self-consciously inflating and exaggerating on principle. If in the seventies, Baudrillard enjoined us to “forget Foucault," today Halperin enjoins us to “fetishize” him. What we learn from Foucault, Halperin contends is that “homophobic discourses are not reducible to a set of statements with a specifiable truth-content that can be rationally tested” and “contain no fixed propositional content” (33), but instead “function as part of more generally systematic strategies of delegitimation” (32). Homophobia must therefore be resisted by “fighting strategy with strategy” (33). Halperin therefore lauds Foucault (as inspiration for the strategic politics of ACT UP) by claiming that Foucault was “the intellectual architect of what is arguably the most significant recent development in progressive politics in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere)" (26). And as his main strategy Halperin adopts the hagiographic mode of writing. At one level that mode is his clever “retort” to his (and Foucault's) opponents, those liberals who—unlike Foucault and Halperin--"naturalize” (essentialize) social truths (such as the truth of the superiority of heterosexuality). Yet the hagiographic mode is nothing more than Halperin's “naturalization” of Foucauldian “truth”: rather than historicizing, critiquing, and superseding Foucault's theories, Halperin canonizes them. He reifies Foucauldian ideas by reading them as bundles of “strategies” and “tactics” which can be detached from their historical context to become “timeless” tools in political struggle. Adopting the postmodern logic which prefers the indeterminacies of unknowing to the totalizing certainties of knowing, he turns Foucault and his ideas into fetishes (the very emblems of the irrational). Were Halperin to critique Foucault he would have to confont [sic.] the fact that Foucault's work has blocked the kind of rational, concept-based awareness of class in sexual politics that is so urgently required today and that Field (in touch with the present historical moment) demands. He would have to confront the fact that, while they may “theorize” differently, on the political plane, there is finally no significant difference between himself and Foucault, on the one hand, and the Camille Paglias, Bruce Bawers, Roger Kimballs, Richard Mohrs, and James Millers they “oppose," on the other. All of these writers are, in the end, pluralists: the liberals Halperin rails against are modernist (rational) pluralists (following Enlightenment principles) whereas Foucault, Halperin, and other queer theorists are (post-modern) irrational pluralists (who reject the principles of reason and conceptuality and adopt the libidinal “logic” of the fetish). The latter are opposed on principle to the idea of rational solutions to social problems because reason and concept-formation are themselves the problem. Where the former still promote the virtues of liberal democracy which conceptualizes equality in rational terms, the latter—who feel “betrayed” by liberalism—promote the new “queer democracy” which is basically a “democracy of the fetish," a space in which subject-citizens are defined as subjects of fetishes and where—since it is to be a “democratic” space—all fetishes are declared to be “equal." Of course, when faced, say, with the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world, even queer theorists have to set some limits (don't they?) and do so by appealing to “ethics," understood not in the classical sense as a code of conduct based on rational concepts but in (post)modern terms as a performance in which one “judges without criteria” (Lyotard and Thébaud 16). Thus, from his initial canonization of Foucault to his interpretation of various queer practices, Halperin follows the new logic and performative ethics of the fetish. Thus he defends queer body-building as utterly unlike old straight body-building: the former occupies a space beyond the mere functionality of the latter which was associated with the old world of productive labor (which evidently disappears in “queer democracy"). Halperin minimizes the connection between body-building (gay or straight) with cosmesis (the enhancement of the subject's exchange value on the sexual market). To his mind, queer body-building, which creates a post-al body of “pure desire-ability” and “consummability," is a new “queer” ritual (a postmodern performance) that is superior to traditional religious rituals of the Religious Right because unlike the “puritanical” latter group queers recognize the “inescapable” eroticism in all social practices. Because he takes the libidinal economy model of culture for granted, however, he never questions whether it is in fact politically productive to understand social practices in terms of fetishes, performances, and rituals in the first place. In other words, unlike Field, he never asks about “need," but of course this is because he and his audience are persons for whom need is no problem.

Halperin's book provides a strong reminder that the world-wide class struggle is the last thing “cosmopolitan” queer theorists have in mind. Against the evidence provided by the books reviewed here, he suggests that Foucault's reputation has suffered a severe blow from posthumous attacks (he cites James Miller's biography). He furthermore paints a picture (with himself as the leading figure) of lesbigay academics as in an “embattled” and “precarious” position in a society “where a claimed homosexual identity operates as an instant disqualification, exposes you to accusations of pathology and partisanship... and grants everyone else an absolute epistemological privilege over you (8)." As one motive for writing Saint Foucault, Halperin cites the damage done to his own reputation by the lawsuit against MIT launched by a colleague Professor Cynthia Wolff who charged him with some impropriety. Yet Halperin himself reports that he got as many lecture invitations as before, that in fact his “lecture fee went up," and that in a settlement of the scandal MIT gave him “two years of leave at a generous level of financial support, along with a research budget whose magnitude I shall probably not see the likes of again” (12). Have liberal institutions really failed David Halperin, or is he simply an assiduous practitioner of the Foucauldian “care of the self"? What Halperin is concerned with is basically preserving his status (and that of Foucault on whom his depends) as a queer celebrity in a constantly shifting (academic) market.

Champagne's “ethical” inquiries demonstrate that bourgeois theorists cannot afford to completely ignore class issues, but reveal even more emphatically that they cannot afford to press them seriously either. In order to avoid complete identification with “desire-theory," Champagne separates a bit from Foucault and, following Gayatri Spivak, critiques Foucault for seeming to merge the two categories, “interest” ("need") and “desire” (11). To get around this limitation, Champagne supplements Foucault with Batailles, who—so as to preserve the difference between interest and desire—postulates two economies existing side by side, a productive economy of “interest” (labor, work, stable meaning,...) and an anti-productive economy (of desire) in excess of the merely useful, functional, and productive and valorizes “non-productive expenditure” (Chapter 2). Champagne's main strategy then is to follow Baitailles's [sic.] valorization of the unproductive; thus he argues that “criticism must fluctuate according to the cultural moment, strategically critiquing the antiproductive most recently raised to the status of the useful, and valorizing tactically the currently nonproductive” (32). The theoretical effect of this strategy is to allow Champagne to talk rather extensively about economic issues (as in his discussion of Paris Is Burning) without privileging them. He can adopt no particular position because his “continued commitment to the poststructuralist critique of the intentional subject requires an insistence that [he] cannot know or manipulate adequately the multiple and conflicting interests that move through [him] as [he] produce[s] . . explanation[s]" (87). Indeed he adopts basically Spivak's model of eclectic and pluralist intellectual positioning (since it would be “unethical” to privilege any particular mode of critique): like her, then, he is alternately—as convenience dictates—a deconstructionist, a Foucauldian, a feminist, a Marxist, a psychoanalyst, a New Historicist, a gay theorist, a. . . . It is as disingenuous of Champagne to wish to be seen as allied to the “non-productive” as it is for Halperin to represent himself as a “victim” of liberal institutions: in fact being—like Spivak—"multilingual" in all the dominant theories is a sure way for Champagne to make himself “sell-able” in the US academic market. Bedevilled by what he may not know about himself (his unconscious), Champagne cannot then take and hold a determinate position because all positions deserve our “suspicion” ("I am suspicious” is his favorite critical locution—56, 89, 97, 98, 126 . . .). Here, then, is what he means by “the ethics of marginality”: the preservation of an “integrity” based on suspicion of one's own motives. It is the ethics of the committed skeptic. Of course, this argument—by no means limited to or original with Champagne, but pervasive in the bourgeois academy (it is what Mas'ud Zavarzadeh has critiqued as the bourgeois “me-in-crisis” argument)—is based on the presumption that political practices are to be assessed in terms of the intentions of the subjects carrying them out: since the unconscious guarantees that no intention is ever “pure," no particular practice deserves to be privileged. It is striking that this argument ensures that the “subject” (supposedly decentered by the poststructuralism Champagne champions) is preserved as the very center of political consideration. With this argument, Champagne and other bourgeois critics—showing the uses to which theoretical sophistication can be put—try to obscure and foreclose the most crucial alternative possibility: that political practices are not to be judged on the “purity” of the actors's intentions (their “ethics), but instead—as Field and need-theorists insist—on their historical and material effects in changing an oppressive and exploitative economic and social system.[5]