an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, November-December 2007,
ISSN 1552-5112
Queering Space for New Subjects
Cyberqueer spaces are constantly
reconstituted as points of resistance against the dominant assumption of the
normality of heterosexuality in ways which are familiar to activists engaged in
other struggles against heterosexism. (Wakeford 2000: 408)
This paper takes the notion of “cyberqueer spaces” as
an invitation to revisit issues of subject formation, identity and politics. It
aims to connect feminist thought, science and technology studies, and queer
theory. The objective is to begin to piece together a vision of politics after
identity.
That identity can no longer serve as the foundation
for the political subject became increasingly obvious in the last decades of the
20th century. This period saw numerous debates about how to re-think
political subjects in ways that avoided ascribing essence to identity, while
still promoting struggle for social diversity. This paper connects related, but
distinct, academic deliberations on identity which all take critical stances
towards modernity. It explores critical approaches to “the subject” which do
not abandon political struggles for the rights of marginalized identities.
The first sections of the paper introduce ideas on identity
and subjects elaborated in feminist theory and history of sexuality. This is
followed by a presentation of some of the insights gained from internet
research and science studies, which account for the materiality of, and context
for, subject formation. Finally, the paper turns to queer theory as a source of
inspiration for finding ways to critique dominant ideas about identity and
subjects without constructing new binaries.
Feminism’s subjects
In the late 20th century poststructuralist
critiques of identity posed a serious challenge to feminism.[1] One important issue causing debate was
the perception that feminism risked losing its political foundation in the
subject position “women”, predicated on a shared gender identity. With the
benefit of hindsight it is possible to appreciate the generation of ideas this
confrontation resulted in. Of particular interest for the present paper are
recent feminist works which re-think approaches to identity and the subject.
In an analysis attempting to put to rest feminist
fears about the loss of “women”, Moya Lloyd (2005) argues that the
poststructuralist challenge provided an opportunity to “problematize[s]
feminism’s assumption that it requires a stable subject in order to justify and
ground its politics” (Lloyd 2005: 2). She undertakes a conceptual analysis that
clarifies the radical reconfiguration of politics brought about by viewing the
subject as “being in-process”, rather than a fixed entity. Her summary of
feminist re-conceptualisations of the subject in the late 20th
century is illuminating.
Lloyd constructs a typology that distinguishes
between five different feminist approaches which view the subject as “mobile”,
“lack”, “deferred”, “constituted” and “performative” respectively. The “mobile”
subject is a figure exemplified with the “cyborg” and the “nomad”, metaphors
that capture “the complex interleaving of the multiple dimensions of identity”
(Lloyd 2005: 17). In comparison, the subject as “lack” revolves around a dyad
of self versus other, an idea that explains the intrinsic instability of
subjects and “how subjects endeavour to overcome that instability, through
identification” (Lloyd 2005: 20). The idea of the subject as “deferred” focuses
on representation, claiming that “subject productions are always susceptible to
dissolution” (Lloyd 2005:20). This subject is an uncertain accomplishment,
inherently unfixed. These three perspectives address the character of the
subject while the remaining two focus on its production. The approach Lloyd
calls “constituted” views the subject as emerging from ideologies, social
practices and technologies of the self, combined in the “interplay of competing
discourse and practices” (Lloyd 2005:23). Not all subjects are constituted as
equal, they “may be differentially positioned, such that some are authorized to
speak while others are deemed incompetent, and where the knowledge of some is
deemed superior to the knowledge of others, thereby creating matrices of
inequality and patterns of pathology and normality that encode populations”
(Lloyd 2005:23). Those who view the subject as “performative” put the emphasis
on everyday speech and conduct. In this perspective subjects are produced in
acts of reiteration that produce selves that are mutually comprehensible.
Despite its own activity being the force, the performative subject has no
essence it “is an entity produced in the complex interplay of discourse, norms,
power relations, institutions and practices” (Lloyd 2005: 27).
The importance of Lloyd’s analysis for the present
paper lies in bringing out the similarities of different feminist
conceptualisations of the subject. She connects approaches that have often been
understood as conflicting, even as mutually exclusive. In seeing them as
variations on a theme, produced in the confrontation with poststructuralism,
Lloyd is able to retain the different insights they bring, which enables
further reflections drawing on all of them.
Lloyd is joined by Elizabeth Grosz (2005) in viewing
the poststructuralist critique of the subject as an opportunity for further
conceptual development, rather than a threat. Grosz’s focus is on the
relationship between identity and temporality, which she regards as especially troubling
in feminist politics. Her discussion also links the issue of subject formation
to sexuality; her argument refers to lesbian and gay politics which have drawn
on feminism, as well as influenced it.
Grosz argues that all identity politics have in common
a “received view” of identity as a process of stabilisation over time that
determines the subject. Identity is believed to have different dimensions, eg
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, which stabilise the subject and determines future
choices. Grosz considers this belief as a constraint because it generates a
tendency “to understand identity as the synthesis of one’s past (one is where
one was born, what class, race, and sex one was born into, the events or
history that constitute one’s life) rather than a synthesis oriented to an open
or indeterminable goal, a trajectory or direction” (Grosz 2005:213). In
contrast to this she argues that identity also ought to be understood as being
shaped by an orientation towards the future, “[O]ne’s sexuality is contained in
the next sexual encounter, rather
than in the synthesis of all one’s past sexual activities” (Grosz 2005:213).
This does not mean that the past is irrelevant, but that it is not the
singular, causal, determinant “[O]ne is what one has done, but also what one
can do, what is actualised but also what is virtual” (Grosz 2005:213). That the
future is not within individual control does not make it irrelevant to the
processes taking place in the present.
Brought in contact, Lloyd’s and Grosz’s analyses
demonstrate some of the productive effects poststructuralism has had on
feminist thought. Their discussions bring to the fore the need to rethink the
political struggle for equality, hitherto based in a notion of a causal
relationship between individual identity and the political subject. Both focus
on the issue of how identity and political subjects can be conceptualised in
new ways, which will contribute to, not disable, feminist politics. Both
analysts are also influenced by discussions in the history of sexuality of the
1980s, another field of interest to the present paper.
The epistemology of the
modern subject
Two of the most influential authors in the cultural
history of sexuality, Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, have had
significant impacts on the understanding of the subject.[2] In the following I will briefly touch on
their respective works in relation to the issues under consideration.
Foucault’s work on sexuality has been a key to
thinking of the subject as constituted, it also provides a possibility to argue
that the modern construction of the subject through individual biography is a
consequence of governance. Foucault (1981) analysed “the homosexual” as a
subject constituted in the medical and legal discourses emerging in the 19th
century. Both these discourses account for the subject in terms of past
actions, read as signs caused by an internal core, a true self. This
epistemology of the self constructs a subject that can be managed by law and
medicine.
Informed by Foucault’s (1989) understanding of
discourses as not only linguistic, but also material practices we can postulate
that the technologies available at the time played a role. Involved in this
particular construction of the subject were, for example, medical instruments
believed to tell about an individual’s sexual desires. However, much more
important were existing and new, technologies for communication - print, radio
and cinema - that made the discursive knowledge defining the homosexual widely
available in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This
is not to imply that technology was determined by homophobic ideologies, on the
contrary, it also served the social movements of the 20th century
which reformulated the homosexual subject into a positive position. The bar,
the newspaper advertisement, the telephone and the car[3] were crucial for the creation of social
community and political activists who struggled for the re-evaluation of the
sexual identities defined as deviant by the powers that be. Regardless of its
valuation the subject made possible in these constellations of institutions,
technologies and ideas took on features that appeared intrinsic to humans,
until poststructuralism provided new ways to question the “natural”.
Foucault focussed on the relationships between
knowledge and power in science and law, but his analyses had wider
implications. Literary scholar Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, inspired by his work, has
brought attention to literary fiction as a cultural technology for subject
production. In Sedgwick’s view an adequate understanding of any aspect of
Western culture requires critical analysis of the binary definition of humans
as necessarily embodying one of two possible directions of desire, aimed at
either the same or the other sex. Her book The
Epistemology of the Closet, elaborates Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge,
arguing that knowledge also produces ignorance, and that ignorance generates
power. Sedgwick employs “the closet” as an analytical term that signals the
dynamics of “privileged ignorance” in a society that subordinates and oppresses
the homosexual side in the structuring binary of heterosexual-homosexual. The
oppression of homosexuals is reproduced through the propagation of a privileged
ignorance that structures a cultural “not-knowing”, denying knowledge of, by,
and to non-heterosexual subjects. This “epistemology of the closet” is a
discursive formation that shapes Western thinking and defines subject
positions. The presumption of universal heterosexuality, allowing for a few
exceptions, is made possible by the active production of ignorance about
non-heterosexual people and life.
The notion of an epistemology of the closet ties in
with the two approaches to the subject that Lloyd called the “constituted” and
the “performative”, and it implies the importance of “coming out” as lesbian or
gay. In Sedgwick’s understanding of knowledge and ignorance, “the homosexual”
is a discursively produced subject position that gets occupied by a
performative act. In the later decades of the 20th century declaring
oneself homosexual became a speech act that laid claim to a subject position,
an act necessary for being seen as lesbian or gay, because heterosexuality is
assumed to be the default human position. The speech act of “coming out” defies
the powerful ignorance, the resulting knowledge about homosexual desire assigns
a specified subject position.
Declaring oneself lesbian or gay in public has also been
a way to get access to the social networks of homosexual life. This “coming in”
counteracts the continuing de-stabilisation of the homosexual subject by the
epistemology of the closet that reproduces an assumption of heterosexuality,
until explicitly rejected. However, just when heterosexual and homosexual
subjects appeared to become equally stable things began to change again, with
new technologies playing a crucial role:
…since the mid-1990s the meaning of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender or queer identity has been challenged by the ways in
which new technologies have become part of many people’s experiences of being a
member of a sexual minority. (Wakeford 2002:123)
New spaces for modern
subjects?
Researchers have documented how lesbians and gay men
did rapidly seize the possibility to communicate and represent themselves when
the internet presented the opportunity. Already in 1995 Randal Woodland
noticed:
Computer-mediated communication has had a
particularly dramatic impact on the lesbian and gay community, whose members
may live in geographic or psychological isolation. Through email lists, USENET
groups, and private BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), communication across the
Internet and on other computer networks has been a source of information,
friendship, and support for many lesbian and gay people. (Woodland 2000:416)
The development of on-line social spaces, a process
fuelled by a desire for belonging, demonstrates the importance of technology
for the constitution of lesbian and gay subjects. Until the late 20th
century literature, political and educational groups and bars were the crucial
non-heterosexual spaces. Lesbian and gay history abounds with biographies of
young women and men trying to find representations of, and social communities
constructed by others who, like them, felt attracted to people of the same sex.
Today young lesbians and gay men often have their first contact with others
like them on-line. In front of the home computer, in school, at internet cafés,
or libraries, wherever you can access the internet you can find representations
of homosexual life, you can interact with other gays and lesbians online, and
you can arrange to meet for social and/or sexual reasons.
In many respects constructing on-line community was
similar to claiming space for lesbian and gay subjects off-line. Nina Wakeford
(2000) describes the political struggles necessary to create safe online
spaces. Lesbians and gay men experienced difficulties with being allowed to
name newsgroups and email lists in ways that addressed the intended audience
explicitly. There were also continuing battles to keep prejudiced intruders out
of chat rooms. The concerted efforts by lesbians and gay men resulted in
cyberspaces in which non-heterosexual identities could be performed.
Wakeford discusses a tendency of many internet
researchers to analyse the new, on-line space in terms of the modern subject.
She notes that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender cyber studies have
“assumed that issues of identity can for the most part be reduced to issues of
self-presentation” (Wakeford 2002:123). This assumption takes the stability of
identity as a given in a way that produces a linear understanding of on-line
subjects. Off-line identity is simply relocated, becoming the definitive
determinant for on-line subjects, and the analysis revolves around whether
on-line subjects are truly liberated from all bodily constraints or
fraudulently concealing their real identity. In contrast Wakeford, and many
other internet researchers, argue that lesbian and gay subjects are produced in
new ways on-line.
The non-heterosexual spaces brought about by lesbian
and gay internet activity make visible the limits of coming out as a
performative act that produces an epistemic break. When performed in a
non-physical context the declaration of homosexuality does not break with a
prior identity ascribed by a surrounding heteronormative community. Among the
participants in an on-line lesbian and/or gay community there is no powerful
ignorance to challenge. To become a subject in this context pivots on
establishing sameness, not difference.
Sameness is much harder to validate than difference,
something documented by Jamie M. Poster (2002) in a study of a lesbian internet
chatroom. The creators of LesChat
wanted it to be a space for online interaction between lesbian feminists over
the age of 30. This requires that the identity traits of gender, sexuality,
political affiliation and age can be kept stable across different contexts.
This turned out not to be the case and LesChat
experienced difficulties with determining who is a lesbian on-line. The members
of the virtual community came to spend much effort attempting to authenticate
identity, to make sure that all participants were really lesbians. Poster’s
study documents the development of strategies to ascertain lesbian feminist
identity in the chatroom, referencing distinctly female physiology, as well as
lesbian politics.
Taking the conditions for on-line interaction into
consideration the difficulties with authenticating identity become obvious. The
identity “lesbian” is produced in particular bodily practices and
relationships. Lesbians are created, and stabilized in local practices which
are not the same on-line and off-line. The ways in which this identity has been
produced off-line does not seamlessly translate to on-line reality.
Because the chatroom was successful the case study
shows the negotiated character of identity. In LesChat “lesbian” came to be a speaking position that could answer
particular questions in ways that the other participants deemed to be correct.
Poster’s account points to the fact that authentication of subjects on-line is
an issue of negotiation of what constitutes the sameness on which the
interaction is premised.
Recalling Grosz’s discussion of temporality we may
argue that successful on-line interaction shows that knowledge of the past of
the subject is not a condition for social community. Validating the
authenticity of the on-line subject does not refer to temporal continuity, but
to the quality of its speech acts. The study of LesChat shows that performative language use can work as the only
tool to establish an identity acceptable to others. Virtual community is done
in language. Poster points out that the “community of a given chat room is
composed entirely of its participants. Without users’ words there would simply
be an empty screen” (Poster 2002: 237). The view of identity as performative
references speech act theory as a metaphor for social action, but in internet
studies this becomes literal. As a space in which subjects act, an internet
chatroom is constituted by digital technologies and language, and without
performative acts nothing will happen.
In cyberspace interaction words override the visible,
even if we see a person through a web camera we will not see them in a social
context that could contradict their “speech”. The written, or spoken, word
becomes the utterance that produces a subject with an identity that is socially
comprehensible. In this instance, identity does not function as a cause for
subject formation, but as an effect of language performances in a common space.
Internet theorist Mark Poster has also elaborated on
language and subjects in case studies. A central feature of his analysis is a
broad conception of language as “all mediated symbolic structures, comprising
in addition to language, images (both still and moving), animations, and
sounds” (Poster 2001: 153). Drawing on speech act theory he argues that the
subject emerges in “repeated enunciations” in which “individuals become
interpellated and recognized as coherent selves who function in a social world”
(Poster 2001:9). This theoretical platform enables him to ask about how the
“form in which language is exchanged between individuals and groups affects the
cultural construction of the world and subject positions within it?” (Poster
2001:153).
In the presentation of a case study Poster describes
himself as a non-practising Jew, living an ethnic identity produced in the
intimate practices of his family. His objective is to explore the listserver CyberJew to understand if “the fixity of
ethnicity as an attribute of the self would appear to be the opposite of the
identities constructed in the virtual space” (Poster 2001: 166). On the mailing
list he finds a sophisticated meta-discourse on what Jewishness is, with
participants discussing the transposition of ethnicity from physical space to
cyberspace. Countering academic arguments that the internet leads to further
individualisation of ethnicity, away from collective experience Poster cites a
discussion on the list in which one participant argues that the internet “is
not a dissolvent of ethnicity but represents a new stage in the history of the
Jews” (Poster 2001: 167), another thinks that the Internet “enables all Jews,
wherever they are on the planet to connect with each other” (Poster 2001: 167).
Poster observes that the list members regard the
internet as “a neutral instrument of community, connecting pre-established
ethnic identities” (Poster 2001: 167) which he is not prepared to accept. In
contrast he sees two disjunctions that the move to cyberspace produces in the
production of ethnic subject production. The first concerns identity: if
membership in an ethnic category in physical space is constituted by being born
into it, on-line communities based on identity must have their own dynamics.
Poster suggests that it is the participation in the virtual community that
produces on-line ethnicity. The second question is about space and time,
important in a religion that proscribes prayer at specific hours and defines
some locations as diasporic: can “traditional practices of Judaism subsist in
cyberspace?” (Poster 2001: 168). The list members present many different
solutions to this, none of which is final, but all workable.
In conclusion Poster argues that the internet offers
new forms of collectivity rather than individualization. Jewishness in internet
communities is not the same thing as Jewishness in
These two case studies of very different minority
subjects are interesting because they display so many similarities and lead the
researchers to the same conclusions regarding language and subject production.
The studies show how identity aspects believed to be “natural” and constitutive
for political subject positions are open to re-formulation relative to changing
sociotechnical circumstances. The internet case studies tell about social
interaction in ways that make obvious the importance of technology for the
production of reality. Cyberspace is a social reality generated by digital
computer technologies. Today few would claim that it is not real, but nobody
would claim that it is real in the same way as, for example, a hospital. The
physical and virtual realms are not opposed, neither separate, but cyberspace
has meant that “[I]ncreasingly the process of interpellation occurs through
mediations of information machines in addition to face-to-face interactions”
(Poster 2001:9). The “cybersubject” has not, and will not, replace the physical
subject, but entails a multiplication of the sites of interpellation and
enunciation, acts constitutive of and propelling subject production. Cyberspace
is a sociotechnical construction that extends human reality. Like other
environments it comes before, and exists independently of, each user. Unlike
many other environments the beginning of cyberspace is in the memory of now
living humans, something that cannot be said about many other sociotechnical
environments, such as a city.
Reality multiple
The implications of computer technologies for
identity and subject formation have also been discussed by feminists.
Cybertheorist Dianne Currier (2003) mobilises the notion “assemblage” to think
about the on-line subject. Her discussion theoretically aligns observations of
subject production on-line with the thinking of poststructuralist theorists
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), who emphasise change and emergence as
ontological conditions.
Currier, like other poststructuralist internet
theorists, rejects the idea that the subject, the entity that acts in an
on-line environment, is determined by the computer user’s identity. Instead she
argues that the subject on-line is the effect of many heterogenous elements and
that the resulting entity cannot be explained by, or predicted from, any
singular part, but that “the question of the form and function, status and
substance, of a component of the assemblage must be addressed through an
examination of the linkages and connections between it and other elements”
(Currier 2003:333). There is no essence “to be found in the interior depths of
the component itself” (Currier 2003:333). Currier does not reject identity as
such, but thinks that “it does become peripheral: it is a by-product, which may
appear within the operations of assembling” (Currier 2003:333). In assemblages
“identity may be produced and take on a particular formulation /…/ but equally
it may not” (Currier 2003:333). In her view this approach “indicates a shift of
epistemological framework, where identity no longer functions as the ordering
framework, but rather is itself a product of historical circumstance” (Currier
2003:333). The assembled on-line subject cannot be understood as being caused
by its previous experiences, it changes with context, it is produced in the
here and now. This subject is constituted in the material structure of
computer-mediated-communication, combined with the specific patterns of
interaction of the virtual community, and it is also a result of performative
acts.
The fusion of poststructuralist perspectives on the
subject as an effect with arguments based on cybertheory has been challenged by
feminists who perceive it as disregarding real women’s sexed bodies in
asymmetrical power relations (eg Braidotti 1994). To address this argument,
without simply restating the poststructuralist ideas philosopher of science
Annemarie Mol’s recent work on the “body multiple” is useful.
In an ethnographic study Mol (2004) discovers that a patient
is many bodies. The enactment of body parts, symptoms, and disease differs
between clinical, laboratory, and specialist settings within the same hospital,
treating the same patient. She describes how bodies undergoing medical
treatment are produced in different ways in specific practices. Mol insists
that the differences are not perspectives on the same body, but multiplicity of
the real. Each enactment of body and specialism is as real as the other. She is
adamant that the varying ways in which the body is produced in different
practices are not reducible to one, even in principle: “no object, no body, no
disease is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it,
reality is multiple” (Mol 2004:6). The singular body is a result of abstraction,
not reality. The belief in singularity and unity is imaginary, according to Mol
bolstered by a modern desire for stability and causal linearity.
Mol takes the physical body very seriously, that is
why she follows the work of medical practitioners and their patients in a study
that spans over several years. In the present context it is important to note
that the body multiple emerging in her material does not correspond with the
sexed body of feminism. Instead her study displays the latter as being as much
of an abstraction as any other singularity produced in particular practices,
and no more a final truth about human corporeality than other enactments of the
body. With Mol’s understanding of multiplicity there is no one sexed body that
can be disregarded by cybertheorists. Instead her ideas compel us to look
closely at the ways in which all academics, and the people they study, enact
bodies in their practices.
If the physical body is not the stable singular unit
assumed in the received modern view but produced differently in specific local
practices, it cannot serve as evidence against a poststructuralist view of
identity. The body multiple cannot be the material cause of identity, it has to
be viewed as co-produced with it.
Further extended to the discussion of subject
formation, Mol’s idea of ontological multiplicity brings locations, practices
and relationships into the picture. In relation to the irreducibility of the
“body multiple” the internet subject can be understood as analogous, the
subject on-line is not reducible to the subject off-line. On-line and off-line
practices are linked, but neither in a linear fashion, nor reducible to one.
This resonates with Currier’s analysis of the human individual who connects
with technology, as one element of an assemblage that does a subject. Identity
is produced when acting in a context, it is not the cause of the action. The
participants in the lesbian or Jewish cybercommunities, became lesbians or Jews
in this practice, by participating in ways judged authentic by the other
members, regardless of whether they were considered as such off-line.
In relation to physical reality cyberspace sociality
demonstrates the multiplicity of the subject. It shows ways in which different
subjects can be generated from the same, yet multiple, physical body, when the
relationships in which it involves differ. This subject derives from the
contexts in which it emerges, it does not effortlessly travel with the body,
but has to be produced anew in each encounter.
The view of identity as a by-product annihilates
identity politics and it can appear to leave the political agenda wide open to
fascist arguments for “re-education”, of what the majority deems as deviant
minorities. It is easy to see why feminists, lesbian, gay, ethnic and
transgender social movements fear this apparent consequence of
poststructuralism. However, instead of losing the political subject to a
hostile environment, it is possible to continue the re-thinking of identity in
ways that challenge the context.
Queer against identity
Lesbian and gay studies parallel feminism in their
responses to the poststructuralist challenge to identity as the guarantor for
the political subject. However, in this context a new strand of theorizing
emerged in the late 1980s. Teresa de Lauretis, who is attributed with
introducing the notion of queer theory, identified a need to break away from an
identity politics that was perceived to have had become too narrowly defining
of “appropriate” political subjects. According to her, the “term ‘queer’,
juxtaposed to the ‘lesbian and gay’/…/is intended to mark a certain critical
distance from the latter, by now established and often convenient formula” (de
Lauretis 1991:iv). Annamarie Jagose (1996) argues that this theoretical
perspective marks a distinctive poststructuralist turn in lesbian and gay
liberation discourses, which questions the belief sexual in identity as a
stable trait, causally related to politics.
Queer theory was not an attempt to produce new
identities but an attack on the idea of identity as determining for action.
Recently queer has been used as another identity label, something that was
explicitly rejected in the early formulation:
Queer cannot confront the logic of heterosexuality by
being another kind of identity. Queer should disturb all sexual boundaries, and
create sexual mayhem, so that any individual may occupy or perform any sexual
or gender identity, rather than have a true identity; in this way, queer
undermines the very notion of a truth of sexuality. (Kennedy 1994:140)
For the present discussion an important idea brought
out by queer theory is the rejection of the idea of sexuality as interior
truth. This contrasts sharply with the identity categories of homosexual,
heterosexual, lesbian and gay, which are all products of the modern discourses
that ascribe to sexuality the power to determine the self and its relationships
with others. In this context queer signifies the end of the modern discourses
of sexuality by emphasising the indeterminacy of desire. The destabilising
indeterminism of queer disqualifies it as an identity category, one cannot be
queer, it is a performative act of defiance.
Wherever queer is performed the modern sexual subject
is brought into question and new configurations of gender and sexual desire.
That gender is mentioned together with sexuality points to the possibility of
linking queer and feminist critiques of the subject. However, the above quote
expresses a preference for performativity as the key notion, which repels many
feminists since they perceive it as indicating that identity is voluntarily
chosen.[4] Arguments for the indeterminacy and
performativity of sexual identity have also been criticised for leading to a
political nihilism that renders impossible any effective struggle for the
rights of oppressed minorities. However, indeterminacy and performativity can
lead thought in a different direction, indicating a politics not premised on
the stability of the subject, but on opening up possible subject positions.
Alexander Doty (1995) suggests that queer could be used as a marker for “a
flexible space for the expression of all aspect of non- (anti-, contra)
straight cultural production and reception” (Doty 1995:73). In his view
“various and fluctuating queer positions might be occupied whenever anyone
produces or responds to culture” (Doty 1995:73). Doty’s cultural focus can be
articulated with the understanding of located practices as producing the
reality as multiple, as one way to approach multiplicity as an effect of
context.
Queer politics for
multiplicity
To reject the causal chain from identity, constructed
by the past, to the political subject that will voice political interests predicated
on the former, does not imply that subjects will disappear or become
irrelevant, on the contrary, it means that new subjects can emerge. In the view
of literary theorist Danielle Clarke this way of thinking makes it possible to
“discover subjects and subjectivity” that have been “created by radically
different discourses from those of modernity” (Clarke 2005:82) Clarke talks of
queer as a methodology for reading pre-modern texts, but with the decline of
modern discourses the pre-modern is not a defined past, it is always present
but marginalized in modernity.[5]
To emphasise the spaces in which subjects become
possible facilitates a re-thinking of politics, away from identity. From this
position it is possible to return to the issue of the assembled
non-heterosexual subject in cyberspace. Lesbians and gay men created new spaces
on-line, in which identity proved not to be determined by the past of an
individual, but by its future. The performative acts undertaken in on-line
interaction drives the situated production of new subjects in a sociotechnical
context that generates new norms, as well as novel opportunities. It is not a
benevolent all-accepting utopia, some subjects are impossible in the new
spaces, but these are not necessarily the same as in other contexts.
Being produced as subjects in different ways on-line
and off-line is a type of multiplicity that many people manage to live in the
everyday even though it is irreducible. Although modern discourse has so far
been able to explain this away, as being only play or, more negatively,
delusion, it is an experience that erodes the causal link between individual
biography and political subject. In this context sexual identity and political
subject positions do not connect in the linear fashion assumed for the modern
subject.
Grounding political struggle in a desire to open up
new possibilities for subject production (rather than re-enacting what is
already established) clears space for thinking differently about identity and
the human. In contrast to identity politics, that argue for equal rights for
subjects that are already stabilised, politics for the subject multiple would
aim to create spaces where subjects never seen before could be produced, in
ways that do not repeat previous mistakes of defining, excluding and policing
subject positions believed to derive from singular identities. This would be a
minoritarian politics, desiring not to change the world in ways allowing
marginalized subjects to be included in the relationships of power already
existing, but to change these relationships in ways that make it impossible to
establish identities that can be abstracted from sociopolitical context and
made to police conduct and agency in the ways “woman”, “lesbian” or “gay” have
done. Instead of clearing space for minority identities, such a politics would
queer space for multiple ways of becoming subject.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, November-December 2007,
ISSN 1552-5112
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Notes