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Sharon Marcus
Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay
L
ibrary shelves
tell interesting stories. Thirty or forty years ago, it took
almost no time to get from feminism to homosexuality—in the stacks.
Neither category took up much space, and few books stood between
them, since the Library of Congress system classifies feminism and ho-
mosexuality together in Subclass HQ, “The Family. Marriage. Women.”
That subclass has filled out rapidly in the past forty years, and in the past
two decades much of the growth has been in HQ 74-77—“Bisexuality.
Homosexuality. Lesbianism. Transvestism. Transexualism.” Books that
once huddled together for warmth on a few shelves now proudly occupy
many linear feet in most major research collections. Paralleling the growth
of gay studies has been the even more substantial increase within HQ
1101-2030.7: “Women. Feminism.”
1
One ironic result of the surge in lesbian-gay studies and feminist studies
is that the distance between these sections in the library has grown even
as sexuality and gender have coalesced in feminist and queer scholarship.
The more books there are in HQ 74 and HQ 1101, the longer it takes
to get through each section, and the longer it takes to get from one to
the other. That homosexuality and feminism are neighbors at all is an
artifact of a classification system that absorbs both “sexual life” and
“women” into “family” and “marriage,” the first two words in the over-
arching HQ subclass heading. Although “family” and “marriage” unite
“homosexuality” and “women,” they also separate them. Between HQ74-
77 and HQ 1101-2030 we find HQ503-1064: “The family. Marriage.
Home.” Stuffed into those call numbers are “parents,” “single people,”
“man-woman relationships,” “adultery,” “divorce,” “widows,” “geron-
tology,” and—as if when marriage ends, so does life—“Thanatology.
Death. Dying.”
For their keen comments on this essay, I thank Ellis Avery, Diana Fuss, Anne Higonnet,
Vanessa Schwartz, Judith Walkowitz, Sandra Harding, Kathryn Norberg, and the
Signs
ed-
itorial staff.
1
For more information on the Library of Congress’s subclasses in the social sciences,
see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco_h.pdf (last accessed April 5, 2005).
[
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
2005, vol. 31, no. 1]
2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2005/3101-0002$10.00
 192
Marcus
It is not surprising that those who devised the Library of Congress
headings in the late nineteenth century defined homosexuality as a sexual
deviation to be sandwiched between bestiality and incest, on one side, and
prostitution, sadism, fetishism, masturbation, and emasculation, on the
other.
2
Nor is it astonishing that the system’s inventors asserted, well before
Monique Wittig, that lesbians (HQ 74.2) are not women (HQ1101; Wittig
1993, 108). Scholars may try to overturn these divisions, but classification
systems designed for bookshelves transform intersections into sequences
that then become hierarchies. The first term in any Library of Congress
data entry is the most visible because it governs where and therefore how
we see a book. A scholar may argue that at the turn of the century race,
gender, and homosexuality were all mutually constitutive categories, but
the book in which Siobhan B. Somerville (2000) makes this assertion is
classified as first and foremost about gender identity (HQ1075.5.U6S6S:
1. Gender identity—United States—History).
Like the sexological categories Somerville analyzes, Library of Congress
descriptions often reveal more about the values of the classifiers than about
the books they categorize. For example, Esther Newton’s
Margaret Mead
Made Me Gay
(HQ76.3.U5 N49) includes several essays on the relation-
ship between feminism and lesbianism, but the library’s third subject list-
ing for the book is “Lesbian feminism—United States.”
Lesbian feminism
is a term associated much more with separatism than with the sexually
mixed consciousness-raising groups Newton describes in her essays on
feminism. But either out of ignorance of such nuances or in accordance
with a one-drop rule of sexual deviance, the library rubric reduces New-
ton’s account of knotty encounters between women to a single political
movement and filters lesbians out of feminism: books on “lesbian femi-
nism” are shelved with “homosexuality,” not “feminism.”
Those who write, read, and teach books that strain the limits of clas-
sification systems can pride themselves on how poorly those schemes reflect
new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. The library is filled with
works that dissolve the dictates governing their placement. We now have
the tools to pry off the labels that segregate homosexuality from the family,
queer studies from feminism, and lesbians from women. This essay begins
with an overview of how we acquired those tools and then inventories
the equipment provided in some recent queer scholarship, most of it
focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, France, and the
United States, for understanding not only sexuality and gender but also
2
See Chan 1986 for the history and usage of the Library of Congress system.
S I G N S
Autumn 2005
193
modernity and its offshoots—science, liberalism, democracy, and con-
sumer culture.
Genealogies of sexuality and gender
Feminism in the United States has, since the 1960s, understood sexuality
as both an arena for women’s liberation and as a crucial vector of women’s
oppression. Manifestos such as Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal
Orgasm” ([1970] 1971) and encyclopedic works such as
Our Bodies,
Ourselves
(Boston Women’s Health Book Collective [1970] 2005) claimed
women’s rights to sexual pleasure, autonomy, and knowledge. The de-
mand for female sexual autonomy also required understanding the forces
arrayed against it: hence the focus on rape, sexual harassment, and male
domination in early writings by Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, and
Catharine MacKinnon. Lesbians played an important role in those early
feminist formulations, as we see in two recent collections whose essays
chart the intertwined history of lesbianism and feminism since the 1960s:
Newton’s
Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas
(2000) and Amber Hollibaugh’s
My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl
Dreaming Her Way Home
(2000). Both books express frustration with
1960s and 1970s feminist tenets—that heterosexuality embodies men’s
oppression of women, that male domination suppresses lesbian love and
bonds between women, and that lesbianism liberates women from male
oppression by refusing men and all things masculine. One classic for-
mulation of those tenets was Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosex-
uality and Lesbian Existence,” first published in
Signs
in 1980, which
summoned feminist theory to go beyond “token allusion to lesbians”
(Rich [1980] 1983, 140). To do so, Rich argued, would require under-
standing “the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male
dominance” (141) and lesbianism as women’s resistance to “male tyranny”
(160). But prescribing lesbianism as an antidote to everything toxic about
heterosexuality excessively sanitized lesbianism, purifying it of power, gen-
der, and desire.
3
Butch women were censured for being male-identified,
and femme women were criticized for cleaving to patriarchal codes of
femininity (Hollibaugh 2000, 63, 123; Newton 2000, 161, 172).
Feminist arguments about sexuality as the site of women’s oppression
depend on an interesting circularity: they define gender as the sexual
On lesbianism as a desexualized fantasy of feminism, see also de Lauretis 1994, 185,
and Dever 2004.
3
194
Marcus
conflict between men and women, and sexuality as the gender conflict
between men and women. As a result, early feminist manifestos for les-
bianism either had little to say about gay men or saw gay men as having
much more in common with male oppressors than with lesbians. Rich
cited “the prevalence of anonymous sex, . . . the justification of pederasty
among male homosexuals,” and the “pronounced ageism” of gay men’s
“standards of sexual attractiveness” as examples of the “differences” be-
tween lesbians and gay men, expressing the sense of strict sexual difference
now associated with radical feminism ([1980] 1983, 157). But Rich,
MacKinnon, and Brownmiller also articulated a fundamentally liberal pol-
itics, since they assumed that to deprive women of autonomy, equality,
individuality, and happiness is to commit unacceptable violence on rights-
bearing human beings. Feminists in the United States diagnosed sexual
difference as the cause of the heterosexual conflict they aimed to eradicate,
but even as they made sexual difference paramount, they also located its
disappearance as the horizon of equality.
The continental versions of feminism that circulated in the United
States in the 1980s through the work of H´l`ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray,
and Julia Kristeva also took up a sexualized opposition between femininity
and masculinity. Irigaray’s writings described male homosexuality in ways
uncannily similar to Rich’s work. But French feminist theory was inter-
ested in neither individual liberty nor the eventual eclipse of sexual dif-
ference. For thinkers influenced by Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjec-
tivity, freedom was a necessary casualty and sexual difference an inescapable
condition of being human. Feminists in the United States understood
lesbianism as the rejection of the masculinity embedded in heterosexuality.
French feminists theorized female homoeroticism as the embodiment of
the feminine difference on which true heterosexuality depended but which
phallocentrism suppressed. In the late 1990s, that embrace of heterosexual
difference led a different set of French feminists to denounce lesbians and
gay men who demanded political and social recognition. French oppo-
nents of gay marriage included conservative womanists, such as Fran¸oise
H´ritier and Sylviane Agacinski, who warned that sexual difference is the
universal basis of culture and that psychic health, sound parenting, and
mature sexuality flourish only when a couple unites the complementary
opposites Man and Woman (see Eribon 2000; Butler 2002).
The French model of sexual difference once exerted a strong influence
on U.S. feminist scholarship. In the past two decades, however, that in-
fluence has waned as psychoanalysis and deconstruction have become in-
creasingly specialized, as students have lost interest in France, and as the
fall of communism and increasing U.S. conservatism have combined to
S I G N S
Autumn 2005
195
make liberalism more appealing to progressives.
4
Liberalism has become
a prominent ingredient in arguments for the rights of women and sexual
minorities. In both instances the grounds are similar: respect for difference
and interest in promoting equality and autonomy. Newton, for example,
includes “the right to be different without being persecuted” and “the
right to a greater measure of sexual freedom and choice” among the causes
gays embody (2000, 237). Claims for equality, such as the demand to
legalize gay marriage, are not uncontroversial, and many queer theorists
warn that equality will be the death of difference because it will force
minorities to adapt themselves to a norm that was formulated to exclude
them (Warner 1999). But even warnings about its homogenizing con-
sequences affirm liberal values: nonconformity and individual dissent.
Where French feminists valorize gender difference as a universal difference
(Schor 1995), liberals in the tradition of John Stuart Mill value the idi-
osyncratic difference of the sexual minority.
The influence of liberalism provides one genealogy of how feminism,
instead of dividing homosexuality into a positive feminine version and a
negative masculine one, can make common cause with gay rights in the
name of freedom of sexual choice. Other important factors in the rap-
prochement of feminism and queer theory have been the increased visi-
bility of women in gay movements, increased contact between feminist
lesbians and gay men, and the academic dialogue between queer and
feminist theorists that became possible when queer scholars claimed an
academic presence. In the 1980s, scholars objected to the ways that fem-
inists like Rich and Irigaray characterized male homosexuality (Sedgwick
1985, 26; Owens 1987), and in recent years many men doing queer studies
give equal weight to feminist research agendas.
5
Parallel lines can some-
times converge. Feminist theory shifted from studying women to studying
gender as a set of relations, and lesbian and gay studies analogously moved
from tracing historically stable identities based on object choice to defining
queerness in relation to sexual norms. Those parallel shifts have created
intersections between queer and feminist scholars who now share gender
and sexuality as objects of analysis.
The queer turn began as a gambit to reclaim a slur whose lack of
Henry Abelove offers a more optimistic genealogy when he argues that authors who
laid the ground for gay liberation in the United States were influenced by a liberal ideology
whose strength derived not from U.S. global domination but from decolonization struggles
that challenged Western powers to live up to their liberal principles (2003, 70–88).
5
4
Examples include Bagemihl 1999; Goldberg 2001; Nealon 2001; and Lucey 2003.
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