Queer: Theorizing

Politics and History

Donna Perm

The arrival of a new moment in our political, social, sexual, theoreti-

cal, and cultural lives is announced in the proliferation of references
to "queer." "Queer Nation," Making Things PerfectZy Queer, "Making
it Perfectly Queer," "Queer Theory," "Queer Studies," "I Can See
Queerly NOW," "On a Queer Day You Can See Forever," Fear of a
Queer Planet.1 The use of the term "queer" in the names of an organi-
zation, recent books, articles, film series, and academic sub-disci-
plines represents more than a remedy for the increasingly cumber-
some designation "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered." More
than a term of convenience, "queer" and the interventions it seeks to
make into academic and political practices is intentional and
remains highly contested. AcadeIliics and activists continue to dis-
agree over its benefits and liabilities as an intellectual category of
analysis and as a strategy for political organizing.
This article is intended as a meditation on these queer matters.
My purpose is to consider both the promises and limitations of
queer to political and historical practices. In order to place this queer
moment in a larger historical context of theoretical visions and revi-
sions, I will first sketch out an example of the political application of
a once new and challenging theory from an earlier historical period
to demonstrate how inextricably theories and political investments
are bound. For example, early twentieth-century theories that
understood homosexuality as congenital sexual inversion posed a
political challenge to previous theories that treated homosexuality as
a criminally degenerate act? I will examine the political implications
of this theoretical move as evidenced in Radclyffe Hall's novel of
sexual inversion, The Well of Loneliness?
To firmly locate queer in historical, historiographical, political,
and intellectual contexts and to identify the problematic that queer,
at least in part, intends to remedy, I will consider the theoretical

RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 62:2442 1995

 Q U EER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY /25

debates in the history of sexuality that preceded its arrival. By trac-

ing the by-now-familiar political promises and liabilities of essential-
ism and constructionism, we can more readily appreciate how and
why queer theory arrived when it did and the intellectual knot it
may help unravel. By providing an admittedly cursory rendition of
a genealogy of the sexually deviant subject formations that prefig-
ured this queer moment, I will examine how the current political
and intellectual battlefield over identity politics and a politics of
fractured identities has taken shape.* Finally, my purpose is to con-
sider what queer analysis permits and inhibits, both in our scholar-
ship-specifically historical studies-and in our movement p ~ l i t i c s . ~
Determining the possibilities that the conceptual category “queer”
offers to our analysis of the present and to our interpretations of the
past necessarily brings us one step closer to a design for the future.

The Lure of Essentialism and the Challenge of Constructionism

Sixty-five years after its publication, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of
Loneliness remains one of the most important historical documents on
early twentieth-century constructions of homosexuality. Despite her
somewhat depressing portrait of homosexuality, Hall made two very
important political interventions. First, by insisting that sexual inver-
sion was a congenital defect rather than a character flaw, Hall argued
that homosexuality was a “who,” an identity, a noun. Rejecting theo-
ries that defined homosexuality as criminal or immoral behavior that
theoretically should be curbed by one’s free will, Hall instead sug-
gested that it described a type of person-in Foucauldian terms, the
homosexual was a “species of being.”6 Although Hall’s notion of
homosexuality never fully replaced older understandings of homo-
sexuality as sin, crime, or sickness, it was nonetheless politically
inspired, permitting Hall to assert that the homosexual ought to be
left in peace. In the context of a culture that viewed homosexuality as
either a crime, sin, or sickness, Hall defended homosexuality on the
grounds that it, like heterosexuality, was an immutable part of the
natural world, not subject to change or cure.
Furthermore, by insisting that homosexuality was a biological,
congenital fact of nature, Hall reframed the so-called problem of
homosexuality. For Hall, if homosexuality was ”natural,” the ”prob-
lem of the homosexual” resided with the society that deemed him or
her “unnatural” and persecuted him or her on that basis. Instead of
individual remedies f o r - o r social control of-this phenomenon of
nature, the logic of Hall’s argument dictated that the onus of respon-
sibility for the plight of sexual inverts belonged to the society that
26/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

condemned them. Hall’s homosexual sought either society’s com-

passion or its benign neglect. In posing this argument, Hall added a
new dimension to what had been perceived as a medical, criminal,
or psychological problern-she made it a sociological one. It is not
surprising that Havelock Ellis provided prefatory remarks that
accompanied the original and every subsequent publication of The
WeZZ of Loneliness. As one of the earliest sexologists and “defenders”
of homosexuality and sexual inversion as natural, Ellis appreciated
the political implications of recognizing society’s assault upon the
homosexual as a significant problem facing the hornosex~al.~
At least since Hall’s time, arguments on behalf of the ”essential
homosexual” have been politically attractive for many of the same
reasons that they were for Hall. Viewing homosexuality as a natural,
biologically determined phenomenon invites defenses of homosexu-
ality based on its inevitability and ”naturalness” for a class of indi-
viduals. Essentialist arguments posit homosexuality a s an
immutable fact of nature that, at the very least, ought to be tolerated.
This approach further implies that attempts to cure and/or discrimi-
nate against the homosexual are wholly inappropriate responses to
an immutable genetic phenomenon over which homosexuals have
no choice. Consequently, activists have often feared and resisted
arguments about homosexuality and social change rooted in con-
structionism. Construction theory posits sexuality as a product of
social relations and thereby suggests the history of sexuality to be
”the history of the subject whose meaning and content are in a con-
tinual process of change.” By attending to the shifting meanings
assigned to homosexuality, social constructionism challenges the
notion of the essential, natural, transhistorical, congenital, presocial
homosexual. Although the constructionists’ belief in social change is
implicit, and although the very theoretical basis of constructionism
requires, in Carole Vance’s words, ”imagining that things could be
different, other, better than they are,’’ constructionists have never-
theless been viewed as traitors whose arguments threaten the m o v e
ment? Lured by the seeming political expediency in arguments
grounded in biological determinism, many gay men and lesbians
have allied themselves with essentialist positions.
While essentialist notions concerning homosexuality have formed
the foundation of much political organizing, constructionism, alter-
nately, has guided our theory-making. In 1968, British sociologist
Mary McIntosh introduced an almost unprecedented way of think-
ing about the homosexual and homosexuality. Describing a number
of historically and culturally diverse anthropological accounts of
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/27

same-sex sexual behavior, Mcintosh declared ”[Iln all of these sod-

eties there may be much homosexual behavior, but there are no
’homosexuals.’”’O She argued that homosexuality, as well as the
homosexual, acquired meaning only in cultural, social, and histori-
cal context. Divorced from a particular cultural context that ascribes
meaning to same-sex acts, homosexuality merely describes a partic-
ular set or choreography of sexual acts, a gymnastics of orgasm.
Similarly, in 1974, Jonathan Ned Katz suggested that ”[bleyond the
most obvious fact that homosexual relations involve persons of the
same gender, and include feelings as well as acts, there is no such
thing as homosexuality in general, only particular historical forms of
homosexuality .”
Many scholars in gay and lesbian studies have been occupied for
the past two decades with documenting, describing, and analyzing
the ”particular historical forms of homosexuality” suggested by
Katz. The most obvious sign of this attention to specificity is the ten-
dency of historians to use terms appropriate to the period they are
discussing. For example, when John D’Emilio titled his book Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in
the United States, his use of the term Nhomosexual” was carefully
chosen. Gaining cultural currency during the period D’Emilio exam-
ines-1940 to 1970-”homosexuality” replaced ”invert” and preced-
ed “gay and lesbian.” Although D’Ernilio writes as a member of the
“gay and lesbian” generation, his study is of the “homosexual,” and
his use of the term underscores its historical speaficity. In this book,
he explored the actions and conditions that gave rise to a movement
based on a consciously shared, minority group view among homo-
sexuals; he credited the Mattachine Society of the early 1950s for
providing such a view of “the homosexual minority.”’* According to
IYEmilio, the logic that organized the strategy of the pre-gay libera-
tion, pre-queer, American homophile movement of the 1950s and
1960s was the logic of identity politics. Further, for D’Emilio, we
must understand this history to account for the launching and sus-
tained success of the gay liberation movement. Failing to recognize
the enormous political implications of this shift in consciousness and
discursive practices-from atomized individuals hoping for under-
standing and tolerance to a politics mobilized by virtue of a shared
identity as a minority-ignores the fundamental conceptual under-
pinning that permits and accounts for much of the past fifty years or
more of organizing.
Despite constructionists’ efforts to detail the changing meaning
and content of specific homosexualities, a central conceptual prob-
28lRADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

lem nonetheless remains. Simply put, agreeing that the object of our
study is, for example, ”the homosexual,” does not tell us what a
homosexual is, regardless of our attention to the constructed mean-
ings. Consequently, we are left with a basic question: on what basis
do we make our determination of the subject of our inquiry?

The Problem of Identity Politics for Historical Investigation

This question-Who is a homosexual?-has concerned historians of
lesbians for over a decade. From Blanche Cook‘s ”woman-loving-
woman” and Adrienne Rich’s ”lesbian continuum” to Joan Nestle’s
”sexual warriors” and Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis’s
“working-class butch-fem bar dykes,” scholars in lesbian history
have debated about the guidelines that determine who is a 1e~bian.l~
The lesbian scholars of the pre-sex war generation of the 1970s
and early 1980s employed definitions appropriate to the task of
retrieving historical foresisters. Seeking to recapture a lost ”hersto-
ry,” their guidelines for determining legitimate subjects of inquiry
were not unlike those recently suggested by Martha Vicinus as “les-
bian and le~bian-like.”’~ An unfortunate result of these efforts to
address and remedy the ”historical denial of lesbianism” by expand-
ing our understanding of who might constitute the historicized les-
bian is the essentialized and transhistoricized lesbian. By failing to
distinguish between the particular oppressions faced by, for exam-
ple, passing women and ”particular friends,” these definitions
obfuscated the distinctions between differently deviant subjects.
Further, according to these definitions, sex between women is no
longer necessary to the definition of lesbianism. Finally, these recu-
perative historical accounts identify as lesbian many women, both in
the past and present, who would not identify themselves as such.
Yet, more circumscribed definitions of lesbians pose their own
problems. An especially significant weakness that has resulted from
the application of more precise guidelines for identifying the histori-
cal lesbian is the obscuring of the lesbian femme. As the ”feminine”
partner of the butch lesbian, the femme confounded turn-of-thecen-
tury sexologists, whose focus on congenital and constitutional gen-
der and sexual defects, abnormalities, or confusion as the signposts
for lesbianism drew them to the butch or ”true” lesbian, but blinded
them to her ”wife.” If feminine women were recognized as lesbians
at all, it was as ”latent” homosexuals or as unfortunate victims of
predatory butches into whose clutches they fell. Although historians
have decried the sexologists’ erasure of femme, their efforts have
often been similarly thwarted. Despite the best efforts of recent his-
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/29

torians to make the femme visible in lesbian history, her recupera-

tion remains a formidable challenge. Elizabeth Kennedy and
Madeline Davis make a valiant effort to place the femme in the
post-World War I1 lesbian community of Buffalo, New York. Yet,
they explain that, of the forty-five narrators upon whose stories the
book is based, only eight were femmes. This imbalance is, in large
part, an unintended consequence of their decision to interview only
those women who, at the time of the interview, ”were still lesbians.”
They admit in their introduction that: ”[Ajt the time, we didn’t real-
ize how many fems we were e~cluding.”’~
These examples illustrate some of the problems that accompany
various answers to the question: how do historians of lesbians deter-
mine who is an appropriate historical subject? Do we require evi-
dence of genital contact for someone to fit into the parameters of the
research group under investigation?16 Or, depending on the histori-
cal moment, is an indication of primary emotional attachment to
another of the same sex enough? Furthermore, d o we examine a
type of behavior, the perpetration of certain acts, or a species of
being, a type of person possessing a particular sexual identity? Each
choice we make carries liabilities and benefits for the larger project.
For example, Tom& Almaguer has suggested that for Chicano men
a focus on inverted gender identity or specific sexual aims, rather
than sexual identity or object choice, more accurately reflects that
culture’s guidelines for determining homosexuali ty.17 Given this
example, we must consider whether, in privileging identity over
behavior, we inadvertently narrow our scope to a largely white, rel-
atively urban, North American homo-history. Applying homosexual
identity as the determining feature of homosexuality uncritically to
other peoples and cultural contexts may level differences in the
interest of deriving a theoretically coherent unifying principle.
What I am suggesting, then, is that basing the production of
knowledge on homosexuality on definitions that depend upon
homosexual identity will limit that knowledge. For example, I have
recently begun rethinking how the fixity of definitional categories
performs particular elisions in my own work. By relying on a strate
gy that presumes identity, however broadly or strictly defined, to
guide our determination of who is and who isn’t included in histori-
cal accounts, we fail to recognize the variety of challenges to the
sex/gender system posed by various subjects. By privileging identi-
ty over behavior, how will we account for suburban white women of
the postwar years who ”played” around with each other during the
day while their husbands toiled to provide for perfect suburban
30lRADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

lives? The question confronting historians remains how to retrieve

the histories of women who may or may not have identified as les-
bians, dykes, or daggers; who may or may not have lived exclusive-
ly homosexual lives; who may or may not have associated them-
selves with local or national lesbian subcultures, organizations, or
communities; but whose lives nonetheless help flesh out the idea,
experience, and consequences of homoerotic desire among women.
And, yet, how do we achieve this recuperation of variously sexually
deviant women without blurring or masking the distinctions
between them and the different prices paid by those in each catego-
ry? Was the woman who renounced married, heterosexual life to
take up with a factory-working urban butch any more transgressive
than the suburban housewife who, by remaining married while
indulging her homoerotic desires, fundamentally destabilized the
intended ideology of postwar American female domesticity and
family values?
The grip of the identity paradigm on our scholarly as well as
political imaginings has made it extremely difficult to address these
questions. As a theory and politics of multiple and deviant subjec-
tivities, it is possible that ”queer” provides new ways of thinking.
The challenge of “queer” to the hegemony of the ”normal” might
provide the space in which to begin retheorizing categories of inclu-
sion and exclusion that guide our historical work. By reframing the
project, queer may provide an interpretative strategy that can free
the historian from the bondage of rigid definitions that, necessarily
if unintentionally, limit the historical imagination.

We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It

In April 1990, four gay men from New York City called a general
meeting for those interested in ”doing direct action around lesbian
and gay issues.” Angered by recently released statistics announcing
a 122 percent increase over the previous year in reported hate crimes
against gay men and lesbians, these men wanted a forum in which
to discuss homophobia and related issues of invisibility.I8What they
got was a room full of sixty people excited and energized at the
prospect of boycotts, marches, wheat-pasting, and other guerilla tac-
tics to increase gay and lesbian visibility and expose what Michael
Warner describes as the ”deeply embedded” nature of heterosexism
in American culture.19At that meeting, Queer Nation was born.
As a political invention and intervention, ”queer” is offered,
according to Allan Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier, as ”confrontation-
al-opposed to gay assimilationists and straight oppressors while
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY /31

inclusive of people who have been marginalized by anyone in

power.”2o Constructing a politics of confrontation, anger, dissent,
and deviance, queer nationals are no longer interested in politics as
usual. Instead of organizing on behalf of a group defined variously
as homosexuals, gays and lesbians, or gays, lesbians, and bisexuals,
queers aim to destabilize the boundaries that divide the normal
from the deviant and to organize against heteronormativity. They
are, according to Berube and Escoffier, “undertaking an awesome
task. They are trying to combine contradictory impulses: to bring
together people who have been made to feel perverse, queer, odd,
outcast, different, and deviant, and to affirm sameness by defining a
common identity on the fringes.”**While challenging heterosexism
and homophobia, queers also assert an aesthetic and politics in defi-
ance of what they view as gay and lesbian assimilationism.
Not surprisingly, the emergence of queer has occasioned much
debate and disagreement within the ranks of the gay and lesbian
movement and gay and lesbian communities. For the most part,
queer coexists alongside other gay and lesbian formations. Some
”mainstream” gay and lesbian organizations like the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force work closely with “more firebrand” organi-
zations like Queer Nation.22 Others, like the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation, are less comfortable with queer. While
it has infused the movement with spirit, some find the move to
queer at the very least disquieting and quite possibly counterpro-
ductive. Writing in the Electronic Gay Community Magazine, Jeffrey
Nickel presents the problem this way:

What harm does “queer” do? A great deal. It tells both ourselves and
heterosexuals that we are so fundamentally different from them that
they couldn’t possibly understand who we are and what we’re about.
It reinforces the already all-pervasive notion that gay people lead lives
that are totally unlike those led by straight people. That can only
harm us.23

For Nickel, the Queer Nation slogan ”we’re here, we’re queer, get
used to it” provokes the response, “they never will.”
For queers, however, the insistence on difference that so troubles
Nickel is the very point. While some chose to stay home on the day
of the 1993 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day rather than march
under the banner “The Year of the Queer,” others contend that
“queer” defiantly captures their insistence on the right to be differ-
ent?4 As such, it positions itself as a challenge to what I will call “the
politics of lifestyle,” a politics that suggests ”we’re no different from
32/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

you except for who we sleep with.” Instead, queers define and pre-
sent themselves as deviants, dissenters, perverts, different, counter-
cultural. In 1982, Gayle Rubin argued that according to this culture’s
constructed sexual hierarchy,

...sexuality that is “good,” ”normal,“ and ”natural” should ideally be

heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commer-
cial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and
occur at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex
toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female. Any sex that vio-
lates these rules is ”bad,” ”abnormal,” or “unnatural.” Bad sex may be
homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, or commer-
cial. It may be masturbatory or take place at orgies, may be casual,
may cross generational lines, and may take place in “public” or at
least in the bushes or the baths. It may involve the use of pornogra-
phy, fetish objects, sex toys, or unusual roles.=

Queers have bad, abnormal, and/or unnatural sex and insist on the
right to do so.

Queer and the Historical Imagination

While queer nationals organized on the streets, gay and lesbian
intellectuals and academics began rethinking the project of gay and
lesbian studies. No longer satisfied with merely restorative solutions
such as adding gays to the curriculum, scholars working in this field
began reconsidering the very purpose of their work. Whereas previ-
ous scholarship in gay and lesbian studies tended to assume a het-
ero-homo dyad and to generate accounts of homosexual resistance
to dominant cultural oppression, “queer” approaches attempt to
reframe the subject. Like queer nationalists, scholars in gay and les-
bian studies are increasingly interested in investigating the opera-
tions of what Michael Warner has called “regimes of the normal.’’26
By shifting the scholarly lens off of homosexuality per -its inven-
tion, discovery, subcultural formations-as the object to be exam-
ined, queer scholars invert the equation, thereby scrutinizing the
production, construction, and investment in the so-called ”normal.”
Therefore, as a theoretical intervention, Teresa de Lauretis insists
that “the term ’queer,’ juxtaposed to ... lesbian and gay,’ ... is intend-
ed to mark a certain critical distance from the latter, by now estab-
lished and often convenient, formula. For the phrase lesbian and gay’
or ’gay and lesbian’ has become the standard way of referring to what
only a few yeas ago used to be simply ‘gay’ or, just a few years earli-
er still, ‘homosex~al.”’~~Yet, these are not a catalogue of terms from
which we choose randomly but, in fact, are frequently employed with
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICSAND HISTORY/%

specific historical and political intent. Furthermore, the notion that the
phrase ’lesbian and gay” is now considered an “established and often
convenient, formula,” sometimes arrogantly dismissed as ”retro” by
queer activists and theorists alike, diminishes the courage exhibited
by those who daily risk personal and professional relationships and
reputations by writing, teaching, taking courses in, and living gay and
lesbian lives. In the academy, where de Lauretis’ arguments are
directed, queer may be the latest in intellectual chic, but to indulge the
presumption that ”lesbian and gay” has somehow become main-
streamed and assimilated is, at best, wishful thinking. At worst, it is a
gross misrepresentation of the place occupied by most lesbians and
gay men in the academy and the larger culture.
De Lauretis explains how each of these discursive shifts rectifies
an elision produced by the previously used term. ”In a sense,” she
states, ”the term ‘Queer Theory’ was arrived at in the effort to avoid
all of these fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to
adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological
liabilities, but instead to both transgress and transcend them-r at
the very least problematize them.”28 She continues, “our ‘differ-
ences,’ such as they may be, are less represented by the discursive
coupling of those two terms in the politically correct phrase lesbian
and gay’ than they are elided by most of the contexts in which the
phrase is used; that is to say, differences are implied in it but then
simply taken for granted or even covered over by the word ’and.‘”29
However, the question remains, is ”queer” any less elisive?
However true de Lauretis’s observation concerning the elisive
nature of ”and” in ”lesbian and gay” may be, what remedy does
“queer” offer? Despite the barrier-crossing queer intends, can it do
so without also masking difference? My fear is that “queer” might
flatten the social, cultural, and material distinctions and liabilities
confronting each type of queer and the different stakes for each.
While, in theory, queer invites the possibility of building alliances
based on our common identity on the fringes, it is equally possible
that it performs the same elision it was intended to remedy.
To examine this question further, let’s, by way of analogy, return
briefly to my earlier discussion of the bases for determining lesbian-
ism employed by the first generation of lesbian scholars. Attempting
to remedy what Blanche Cook referred to as the ”historical denial of
lesbianism,” Adrienne Rich introduced the notion of the ”lesbian
continuum.” Rich intended the continuum to include

a range-through each woman’s life and throughout history-of

woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has
%/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another

woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary
intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich
inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving
of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associ-
ations as marriage resistance and the ”haggard” behavior identified by
Mary Daly ... we begin to grasp the breadths of female history and
psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited,
mostly clinical, definitions of ”lesbianism.”30

By defining lesbianism according to the degree to which women

organized their lives in defiance of dominant cultural prescriptions
of the sex/gender system, Rich‘s continuum permitted women who
did not conform to restrictive notions of what constituted a lesbian
to be claimed as part of lesbian history. The performance of homo-
sex, for example, was no longer required for admission to the annals
of lesbian history. Rich’s continuum has been criticized for failing to
distinguish between the different experiences of those situated vari-
ously along it, thus glossing over difference. My concern is whether
”queer,” like the continuum, could be charged with‘performing a
similar kind of erasure. Because many locations on the grid of sexual
deviancy are sufficient for inclusion as queer, for example, we have
the phenomenon of ”queer ~traights.’’~~ For queers, samesex sexual
activity is only one element among many that permits one access to
or the adoption of queer. This begsthe question: what does it mean
that claiming the label ”queer” no longer requires identification with
or engagement in homo-sex?
To avoid the various elisions produced by the use of ”queer,” one
must account for precisely that which is unique to each queer’s
transgression. We need to be able to analyze the varying geogra-
phies of deviance specific to each category of dissenter from the
dominant sex/ gender system. Only by recognizing, acknowledging,
and engaging these differences can coalitions be built that can with-
stand the strains of those differences.
Regardless of these shortcomings, queer should not be casually
dismissed. Just as queer promises to refocus the lens of politics, fore
grounding heteronormativity rather than homophobia, so too might
queer alter the way in which we conceptualize history and the sub-
ject(s) of inquiry. As such, it opens up new possibilities for thinking
through the projects before us. Instead of aiming to find homosexu-
ality in history, the notion of ”queer” asks that we examine the con-
struction of the normal and, in the process, map the deviant.
What benefits might accrue to lesbian history by queering histori-
cal research? Historians of lesbians have long bemoaned the scarcity
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/35

of sources due to the relative absence of lesbians from much of the

public discourse and the consequent invisibility of lesbians in much
of the historical record. A queer approach might permit reading les-
bianism where, initially, it doesn’t seem to be. An application of
queer theory to the historical investigation of lesbianism need not
require sources that are explicitly about lesbianism for them to shed
light on the operations of the normal.
For example, when I set out to conduct my first interview for a
project on lesbianism in postwar America, I found myself facing an
unanticipated problem for which, at the time, I had no contingency
plan. Although a woman who had agreed to meet with me knew in
advance the research topic, she announced before I even sat down,
”You know, I’m not sure I’m a very good subject for you. I mean,
I’m not a....” and she trailed off. Since she did not view herself as a
lesbian, she was not altogether sure she was an appropriate research
subject. Because she viewed “lesbians” as a “predatory lot” and
”incredibly fickle in their relationships,” she didn’t think of herself
as one, despite the fact that she has remained for forty years with a
woman whom she described as ”very male.” I proceeded with the
interview without any clear idea of how or whether to accommodate
this woman into my project.
While working on this project, I read one of the lesbian pulp clas-
sics of the early 1960s, Return to L e ~ b o sThe
. ~ ~main character, Frances
Ollenfield, is a white, young, suburban, middle-class housewife who
“has a past”-at least one sexual relationship with a woman-and,
during the course of the novel, considers and indulges a “future,”
involving herself in a romance with Erika. However, she is also
painfully aware that, although another woman’s clandestine lover,
she is also Mrs. William Ollenfield, ”that smug, little housewife.”33I
again faced the question of what this fictional representation con-
tributed to the construction of lesbian history.
Very shortly after, I read a letter written by Lorraine Hansberry in
1957, in which she pleaded the case for the heterosexually married
lesbian. She suggested that her particular situation resulted from
social and economic pressures that bound some women to a life that
is what ”...they have been taught all their lives to believe was their
‘natural’ destiny-AND-their only expectation for ... Security.”34
Hansberry’s defense of heterosexually married lesbians was a plea
for understanding for both herself and many others like her. As a
historical document, it reminds us that particular racial, social, eco-
nomic, and cultural factors permit, inhibit, and otherwise shape the
choices available for living socially and/or sexually deviant lives.
36/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

More implicitly, it warns us that if we d o not loosen the identity cat-

egories with which we examine history, we will overlook many
sources that can develop our understanding of the construction of
deviance, of homosexuality, and of queer.
The conceptual category of "queer" makes it possible to include
discussion of these three women because it reframes the very thing
we are examining. "QueeI" is an analytical tool that allows us to re-
read personal experiences and cultural prescriptions and proscrip
tions through a lens focused on how the normal gets constructed and
maintained.
While providing new recuperative possibilities for our scholar-
ship, queer also poses a political challenge to that very same scholar-
ship. Just as "queer" politics intends an oppositional relationship to
the normal, so too must queer history. Just as queer politics is
intended to counter assimilationist tendencies associated with gay
and lesbian politics, so too must the queer historian recognize those
same tendencies a s they have operated in different historical and
cultural contexts. Just as queer nationalists insist that "we are NOT
just like you except for who we sleep with," so too must the deviant
historiographer attend to the varieties of sexual subject formations
subsumed under the label queer and identify and account for each.35
In doing so: some questions remain: How does the politics of
queer shape the history of samesex eroticism? How might queering
history affect our readings and writings, interpretations and analy-
ses? To investigate the usefulness of queer to historical work, I will
illustrate by way of example. Women's prisons have been largely
overlooked as a valuable site for studying the historical construction
of lesbianism.36 Evidence from prisons, like that from the annals of
psychiatry, has been shunted aside with arguments that it does not
represent the lives of "normal," "well-adjusted," "average" lesbians.
Furthermore, homosexual activity among inmates, or between
inmates and prison personnel, can be easily dismissed as examples
of "situational" rather than "true" homosexuality, the "unnatural''
consequence of isolation in single-sex institutions. By approaching
the subject of lesbianism queerly, however, prison documents can
become a valuable source for the investigation of lesbianism. Insofar
as crime indicates the perpetration of some kind of rebellion from
the socially prescribed dictates of and standards for "proper" wom-
anhood, incarcerated women are absolutely appropriate queer sub-
jects. By failing to measure up to the dominant cultural norm for
women, investigations concerning incarcerated women shed signifi-
cant light on the construction and maintenance of the norm.
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/37

Second, dismissing women’s prison relationships as somehow

not representative of ”true” homosexuality is to believe implicitly in
the existence of the “true homosexual.N While the notion of the
“true” homosexual reflects the need for rigid regulation and strict
policing of the borders between true and false to even exist as a con-
ceptual category, queer captures and retrieves the stories from
across the border.
Finally, by defining itself in a direct and oppositional relationship
to the normal, a queer approach has no interest in sanitizing the
image of the lesbian. By investing deviance with pride instead of
shame, the notion of cleansing the lesbian for public consumption
runs counter to queer interests. Furthermore, sanitizing the histori-
cal homosexual also smacks of the kind of assimilationist tendencies
rejected by queers both politically and intellectually.
For these reasons, I remain thoroughly engaged by prison materi-
als. I will use a prison document as a final example to illustrate
thinking queerly. In 1959, the Massachusetts Correctional Institution
for Women in Framingham launched a series of ten discussion
groups on the subject of “From the Inside, Looking Out.” Dr.Anne
L. Clark conducted these g r o u p s for the younger women a t
Framingham under the auspices of the Massachusetts Correctional
Institute and the Massachusetts Society for Social Hygiene. She
began the second of these sessions by passing out slips of paper to
the twenty-five inmates present and asking them to write down any
question they had about sex. When Dr.Clark returned for the next
meeting of the group, she had prepared a brief paper to read to the
women that she hoped would answer their questions. She reported
that, of the twenty-five women present at the previous meeting, only
ten had submitted their slips of paper. But of those ten questions,
only seven were about lesbianism. As a result, Clark surmised that
issues surrounding lesbianism were of great concern to the women
there, and she prepared her remarks accordingly. Addressing the
inmates, she wrote:

When a man marries a woman, in the normal course of events they

have children so that their life expands. They now have their children
to love as well as each other. Love has to expand and include other
people besides the two lovers, otherwise a sort of hothouse atmos-
phere arises between them and their love gets suffocatedin other
words it gets choked. That is one reason why homosexuals are so
much more changeable than other people. Their love for their partner
soon wears out because it has no way of including other people. Then
the Lesbian tries another partner, and another and another each time
thinking this is it, but it never is. There are exceptional cases where
38/RADICAL HISTORY REV1Ew

partners remain faithful to each other for years on end, but this is the
exception rather than the rule. However, it has been said repeatedly
that partners who have genuine love and affection for each other are
more common among Lesbians than among male hornose~uals.~~

What would a queer reading of this document look like? First, it

would underscore the fact that Dr.Clark’s remarks are primarily
concerned with mapping the norm and juxtaposing lesbianism to it.
Second, it would note the suffocating, limited range of behaviors or
ways of organizing one’s personal life that are acceptable to the out-
side world, as opposed to inside prison. Finally, a queer analysis of
Dr. Clark‘s comments on this question of the homosexual relation-
ship’s failure to thrive would consider the ways in which the very
act of articulating the norm establishes more categories than success
and failure, maturity and immaturity. It also erects a boundary
between “more deviant” and ”less deviant.” It makes the production
of the ”respectable” gay a real possibility, if not a likelihood. If, for
example, the impermanence of relationships is a sign of failure, then
one might, by inference, conclude that permanence, the homosexual
facsimile for marriage, indicates less deviance. The mobilization of a
queer sensibility would quickly note and thereby interrupt the
temptation to appropriate attributes more consistent with the nor-
mal (read: emotionally healthy) and therefore less deviant. It would
identify how Clark‘s warnings about lesbianism provoke a counter-
argument defending oneself as almost normal or less deviant, based
on fidelity, stability, and other characteristics culturally associated
with normality. But more than that, a queer reading would note
how such counterarguments accept the terms of the dominant dis-
course unchallenged, are made in the interests of fitting in, and pos-
sess a logic just a shade away from the “we’re-just-like-you-except-
for-who-wesleepwith” politics. In so doing, a queer reading would
struggle with the deeply political question of how to resist the kind
of deviant-baiting in which Clark is engaged without submitting to
an assimilationist, normalizing argument on behalf of difference.

Drawing the Line

Gayle Rubin comments that:
Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular,
or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as
sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically correct. The
”line” distinguishes these from all other erotic behaviors, which are
understood to be the work of the devil, dangerous, psychopathologi-
cal, infantile, or politically reprehensible.... The line appears to stand
between sexual order and chaos. It expresses the fear that if anything
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/39

is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will
crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.3s

Determining, accounting for, and effecting change in how and

where the line between acceptable and unacceptable sexual practices
are drawn, when they are drawn, and by whom is the job of the crit-
ic, activist, and scholar. It is also a decidedly political task. The Line
itself may be inevitable, but where it is drawn is not.
As a politics of sexual deviance, queer must attend to the shifting
of the line, to the remapping of the borders. Whereas queer politics
tend to associate "gay and lesbian" politics with attempts to redraw
the line so that "normal" homosexuals are no longer on the "other"
side of the DMZ, queers tribadically choose to rub u p against the
boundary in the hopes of destabilizing, denaturalizing, and perhaps
dissolving it.
However, during this most recent period of contestation over the
placement of the line, a "queer and present dangei' has emerged.
While working to distinguish itself politically and intellectually
from earlier examples of oppositional sexual politics, particularly
gay and lesbian politics, the move to queer has engendered a prob-
lematic revisionist history. This revisionism is most clearly indicated
in the tendency among queers to strip the radical oppositional
nature of gay and lesbian political work of the 1970s and 1980s from
their accounts. "Gay and lesbian," whether describing politics, orga-
nizations, frames of reference, visions of the future, or scholarship,
have, for queers, come to be equated with assimilationist, accommo-
dationist, mainstream, conservative, and "retro." Similarly and not
unrelatedly, lesbian, like feminist, has been reduced to a description
for anti-porn, anti-sex, vanilla-licking "wimrnin." In effect, queer
politics, rather than dissolving the line, redraws it in a fashion that
hierarchizes deviance, thereby purging lesser deviants, whether lit-
erally or conceptually, from its ranks.
Rather than permitting these terms to continue serving as codes
for a kind of "straight queer" (read: more normal), the movement
might be better served by historicizing the politics of drawing the
line. In other words, by analyzing the ways in which deviance is
mapped, contested, and then remapped in historically specific ways,
we can identify the formations that challenge heteronormativity in
particular contexts and under specific condition^.^^ For example, the
homophile movement's theorizing of homosexuals as an "oppressed
minority, sharing an identity that subjected them to systematic injus-
tice," can be easily dismissed as bound by the limitations of identity
politics.4oInstead, I would suggest that we assess that movement's
4O/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

vision in the context of the time and under the circumstances in

which it was produced.
I am criticizing the failure to recognize the specific challenges
posed by differently constituted deviants in particular cultural and
historical contexts. To the extent that the practice of history inter-
prets and explains social, cultural, and political change, it must also
delineate how those changes are produced, when and by whom, if
they are to serve as “lessons of history.” Ultimately, effective and
progressive organizing, theorizing, and strategizing in the interests
of a queer future can only profit from understanding rather than dis-
missing radicals of the past, as well as writing itself as a history of
the present.
Notes
I would like to thank Ardis Cameron, Patricia Yaeger, Elspeth Brown, Nancy
MacKay, Rose Marasco, and Julian Murphy for the opportunity to present and dis-
cuss an earlier version of this article. Their comments, in addition to the generous edi-
torial assistance of Regina Kunzel, have been invaluable in the development of this
eSSay.
1. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Lisa Duggan, ”Making it
Perfectly Queer,” Socialist Review 22 (January-March, 1W): 1131; “On a Queer Day
You Can See Forever” refers to the Lesbian, Gay, Queer Film Series at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992-93;Michael Warner, ed., F a r 4 a Queer
Planet: Queer Politics and SociaI Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
2. For the seminal work that linked homosexuality to degeneracy, see Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopthia Sexualis, With a Special Reference to the Antipathic Sexual
Instinct, trans. S . J. Redman (Brooklyn: Physician’s and Surgeon’s Book Company,
1908).
3. RadclyffeHall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Avon Books, 1981).Originally
published in 1928.
4. Jennifer Terry, “Theorizing Deviant Historiography,” diflerences 3 (Summer
1992): 55-74.
5. For a useful discussion of the terms of the battle in which the tensions and chal-
lenges facing queer theorists and historians (as well as between queer theorists and
historians) are explained, see Lisa Duggan, “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory
Meets Lesbian and Gay History,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Historical Association in San Francisco, January 1994,forthcoming in GLQ.
Duggan explains that ”Queer theorists are engaged in at least three areas of critique:
(a) the critique of Humanist narratives which posit the progress of the self and of his-
tory, and thus tell the story of the heroic progress of gay liberationists against forces
of repression, (b) the critique of empiricist methods which claim directly to represent
the transparent ’reality’ of ‘experience,‘ and claim to relate, simply and objectively,
what happened, when and why, and (c) the critique of identity categories presented
as stable, unitary or ’authentic.’” ’’These critiques,” she continues, ”applied to lesbian
and gay history texts, might produce a fascinating discussion-but so far, they
haven’t. Queer theorists have generally either ignored lesbian/gay history texts, or
treated them with condescension. Lesbian and gay historians, in turn,have largely
ignored the criticalimplications of queer theory for their scholarly practice.”
6. Michel Foucault, History uf Sexuality, Volume I : An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York Random House, 1978),101.
 QUEER: THEORIZING POLITICS AND HISTORY/41

7. In his preface to The Well of Loneliness, Ellis writes, “...sofar as I know, it is the
first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising
form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exisk among us t o d a y . The relation of
certain p e o p l e w h o , while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes
of the highest character and the finest aptitudes-to the often hostile society in which
they move, presents difficult and still unsolved problems....” On Ellis’s place in early
sexological discussions on the etiology and prospects for sexual inverts, see George
Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical
Conceptualization of Female ’Deviance,”’ Salmagundi 58-59 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983):.
11446; Paul Robinson, The Modernimtion of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William
Master, and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Janice Irvine,
Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990); Jennifer Terry, “Lesbians Under the Medical Gaze: Scientists
Search for Remarkable Differences,” Journal of Sex Research 27 (August 1990): 317-39;
Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: New York University
Press, 1985).
8. Robert A. Padgug, ”Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,”
Radical History Review 20 (Spring/Summer, 1979): 11.
9. Carole S. Vance, ”Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of
Sexuality: Keynote Address,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?: International
Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies, ed. Dennis Altman e t al. (London: GMP
Publishers, 1989),30.
10. Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems 16 (Fall 1968): 187.
11. Jonathan Ned Kab, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976), 6.
12. John DEmilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 2940-70 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),4;
58.
13. Blanche Cook advises that “Women who love women, who choose women to
nurture and support and to form a living environment in which to work creatively
and independently are lesbians.” (Blanche Wiesen Cook, ”The Historical Denial of
Lesbianism,” Radical Histoy Rmiew 20 (1979):64.) See also, Cook, “Women Alone Stir
My Imagination,” Signs 4 (1979): 718-39; Frances Doughty, ”Lesbian Biography,
Biography of Lesbians,” Frontiers 4 (1979): 76-9; Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Powers of Desire, ed. Ann Snitow et al.,
(New York: Monthly Review, 1983), 177-205; Nancy Sahli, “Smashing: Women’s
Relationships Before the Fall,” Crysalis 8 (1979): 17-27; Bonnie Zimmerman, “On
Writing Biography of Lesbians,” Sinister Wisdom 9 (1979): 95-7; Judith Schwarz,
“Yellow Clover: Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman,” Frontiers 4 (1980):5947;
Leila Rupp, “Imagine My Surprise,“ Frontiels 5 (1981):61-70. For challenges to these
approaches, see Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the
Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Lknger: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19841,267-319; and Alice Echols, ”Taming of the
Id,” in Pleasure and Danger, 50-72; Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ithaca:Firebrand
Books, 1987); Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold:
The History of A Lesbian Community (New York Routledge, 1993).
14. Martha Vicinus, ”Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and
No Theory?”, Radical Histoy Review 60 (Fall 1994):57-75.
15. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Sl- of Gold.
16. See Cook, “Historical Denial of Lesbianism,” for a critique of requiring evi-
dence of genital contact as proof of lesbianism.
17. Tomis Almaguer, “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and
Behavior,” differences 3 (Summer 1991): 75-100.
18. Guy Trebay, ”In Your Face,” Village Voice (14 August 1990): 34. Figures based
on 1989 report released by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force on incidence of hate
crimes perpetrated against gay men and lesbians nationally.
19. Warner writes that, “Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embed-
42/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

ded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in

the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or
equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts. The dawning realiza-
tion that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any docu-
ment of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how wide-
spread those institutions and accounts are.. .. For both academics and activists, 'queer'
gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.
Warner, "Introduction," Fear uf a Queer Planet, xiii-xxvi.
20. Allan Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier, "Queer/Nation," OW/LOOK 11 (Winter
1991): 12.
21. Ibid., 12.
22. Alessandra Stanley, "Militants Back 'Queer,' Shoving 'Gay' the Way of the
'Negro,"' New York Times (6 April 1991),23.
23. Jeffrey Nickel, "Queer," Electronic Gay Community Magazine via New York
Transfer News Service (1 February 1992).
24. David Tuller, "Gays at Odds Over 'QWord:' Some Homosexuals Plan Protest
of 'Year of the Queer' Parade Theme," San Francisco Chronicle (7 June 1993).
25. Rubin, "Thinking Sex," 280-81.
26. Michael Warner, "Introduction," Fear @a Queer Planet, xxvi.
27. Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An
Introduction," differences 3 (Summer 1991):iv-v.
28. Ibid., iv-v.
29. Ibid., v-vi.
30.Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," 192.
31. Ann Powers, "Queer in the Streets, Straight in the Sheets: Notes on Passing,"
The Village Voice (29 June 1993), 24.
32. Valerie Taylor, Return to Lesbos (Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1982). Originally
published in 1963.
33. Ibid., 41.
34. Lorraine Hansbeny, "Letter to the Editor," The Ladder (August 1957), 28.
35. See Terry, "Theorizing Deviant Historiography."
36. For an exception, see Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison
Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), and
her continuing work on Superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for
Women during the mid-twentieth century, Miriam Van Waters.
37. Anne L. Clark, M.D., Comments to Inmates at the Massachusetts Reformatory
for Women at Framingham, informal discussion group on "From the Inside, Looking
Out," Miriam Van Waters papers, Schlesinger Library, MC 203, folder 69, 13 May
1959.
38. Rubin, "ThinkingSex," 282.
39. Comments by Melani McAlister on an earlier draft of this essay greatly helped
in my thinking on this matter.
40.W Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 4.