Queer theory

Overview

Queer theory is derived largely from post-structuralist theory, and deconstruction in particular. Starting in the 1970s, a range of authors brought deconstructionist critical approaches to bear on issues of sexual identity, and especially on the construction of a normative "straight" ideology. Queer theorists challenged the validity and consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices.

Queer theory is a multilayered, and rather complex, field of study. To assign a single-sentence definition to this theory would be incomplete as it would fail to touch on the various ways it is interpreted, applicable and used. In particular, Queer Theory’s overreaching goal is to be sought out as a lens or tool to deconstruct the existing monolithic ideals of social norms and taxonomies; as well as, how these norms came into being and why. In addition, it analyzes the correlation between power distribution and identification while understanding the multifarious facets of oppression and privilege. It is vital to understand queer and Queer Theory as an applicable concept providing a framework to explore these issues rather than an identity. Queer is an inclusive umbrella term for those not only deemed as sexually deviant in relations to a social hegemony but also used to describe those who feel marginalized as a result of social practices and identity. It is a “site of permanent becoming” (Giffney, 2004).

The term queer theory was introduced in 1990, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and Diana Fuss (all largely following the work of Michel Foucault) being among its foundational proponents.

Annamarie Jagose wrote Queer Theory: An Introduction in 1997. Queer is slang for homosexual and worse, used for homophobic abuse. Recently, this term has been used as an umbrella term for a coalition of sexual identities that are culturally marginalized, and at other times, to create discourse surrounding the budding theoretical model that primarily arose through more traditional lesbian and gay studies. According to Jagose (1996), "Queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. For most, queer has prominently been associated with simply those who identify as lesbian and gay. Unknown to many, queer is in association with more than just gay and lesbian, but also cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery."

In addition, it is important to understand that Queer Theory is not predominantly about analyzing the binary of the homosexual and heterosexual. There is an abundance of identities in which Queer Theory not only recognizes but also breaks down in relation to other contributing factors like race, class, religion, etc.

"Queer is a product of specific cultural and theoretical pressures which increasingly structured debates (both within and outside the academy) about questions of lesbian and gay identity," but now, with the evolution of language, it is important to understand that the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are static, Eurocentric labels that fail to be universal when looking at a transnational scale. It is merely reductive to view Queer Theory as a byname for Gay and Lesbian studies when the two fields have stark differences.

Queer theorist Michael Warner attempts to provide a solid definition of a concept that typically circumvents categorical definitions: "Social reflection carried out in such a manner tends to be creative, fragmentary, and defensive, and leaves us perpetually at a disadvantage. And it is easy to be misled by the utopian claims advanced in support of particular tactics. But the range and seriousness of the problems that are continually raised by queer practice indicate how much work remains to be done. Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded 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 realisation that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are".

Queer theory explores and contests the categorisation of gender and sexuality. If identities are not fixed, they cannot be categorised and labeled, because identities consist of many varied components, so categorisation by one characteristic is incomplete, and there is an interval between what a subject "does" (role-taking) and what a subject "is" (the self). This opposition destabilises identity categories, which are designed to identify the "sexed subject" and place individuals within a single restrictive sexual orientation.

History

The term "gay" normalized homosexuality. "Queer" marks both a continuity and a break with the notion of gayness emerging from gay liberationist and lesbian feminist models, such as Adrienne Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. "Gay" vs. "queer" fueled debates (both within and outside of academia) about LGBT identity.

There has been a long history of critical and anarchistic thinking about sexual and gender relations across many cultures. Most recently, in the late 1970s and 1980s, social constructionists conceived of the sexual subject as a culturally dependent, historically specific product. Before the phrase "queer theory" was born, the term "Queer Nation" appeared on the cover of the short-lived lesbian/gay quarterly Outlook in the winter 1991 issues. Writers Allan Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier drove home the point that Queer Nation strove to embrace paradoxes in its political activism, and that the activism was taking new form and revolving around the issue of identity. Soon enough Outlook and Queer Nation stopped being published, however, there was a mini-gay renaissance going on during the 1980s and early 1990s. There were a number of significant outbursts of lesbian/gay political/cultural activity. Out of this emerged queer theory. Their work however did not arise out of the blue. Teresa de Lauretis is credited with coining the phrase "queer theory". It was at a working conference on lesbian and gay sexualities that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990 that de Lauretis first made mention of the phrase. She later introduced the phrase in a 1991 special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, entitled "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities." Similar to the description Berube and Escoffier used for Queer Nation, de Lauretis asserted that, "queer unsettles and questions the genderedness of sexuality." Barely three years later, she abandoned the phrase on the grounds that it had been taken over by mainstream forces and institutions it was originally coined to resist. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, and David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality inspired other works. Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick arranged much of the conceptual base for the emerging field in the 1990s. Along with other queer theorists, these three outlined a political hermeneutics, which emphasized representation. These scholars questioned whether people of varying sexual orientations had the same political goals, and whether those in the sexual minority felt that they could be represented along with others of different sexualities and orientations. "While some critics insist that queer theory is apolitical word-smithery, de Lauretis, Butler, and Sedgwick take seriously the role that signs and symbols play in shaping the meanings and possibilities of our culture at the most basic level, including politics conventionally defined."

Queer theory has increasingly been applied not just to contemporary sexualities and identities but also to practices and identities in earlier time periods. Examination of Renaissance culture and literature, for example, has generated significant scholarship in the past 20 years.

Background concepts

Queer theory is grounded in gender and sexuality. Due to this association, a debate emerges as to whether sexual orientation is natural or essential to the person, as an essentialist believes, or if sexuality is a social construction and subject to change.

The essentialist feminists believed that genders "have an essential nature (e.g. nurturing and caring versus being aggressive and selfish), as opposed to differing by a variety of accidental or contingent features brought about by social forces". Due to this belief in the essential nature of a person, it is also natural to assume that a person's sexual preference would be natural and essential to a person’s personality.

Social constructivism is a concept that proposes the realities we produce and the meanings we create are a result of social interaction; communicating and existing in a cultural context that conveys meaning to us. Our world is a product of continuous “claims making, labelling and other constitutive definitional processes” (Biever, 1998).

Identity politics

Queer theory was originally associated with radical gay politics of ACT UP, OutRage! and other groups which embraced "queer" as an identity label that pointed to a separatist, non-assimilationist politics. Queer theory developed out of an examination of perceived limitations in the traditional identity politics of recognition and self-identity. In particular, queer theorists identified processes of consolidation or stabilization around some other identity labels (e.g. gay and lesbian); and construed queerness so as to resist this. Queer theory attempts to maintain a critique more than define a specific identity.

Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its – for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized." The mobilization of queer foregrounds the conditions of political representation, its intentions and effects, its resistance to and recovery by the existing networks of power.

The studies of Fuss anticipate queer theory.

Eng, Halberstam and Esteban Munoz offer one of its latest incarnations in the aptly titled "What is Queer about Queer studies now?". Using Judith Butler's critique of sexual identity categories as a starting point, they work around a "queer epistemology" that explicitly opposes the sexual categories of Lesbian and Gay studies and lesbian and gay identity politics. They insist that the field of normalization is not limited to sexuality; social classifications such as gender, race and nationality constituted by a "governing logic" require an epistemological intervention through queer theory" (Green 2007). "So, the evolution of the queer begins with the problematization of sexual identity categories in Fuss (1996) and extends outward to a more general deconstruction of social ontology in contemporary queer theory" (Green 2007).

"Edelman goes from deconstruction of the subject to a deconstructive psychoanalysis of the entire social order; the modern human fear of mortality produces defensive attempts to "suture over the hole in the Symbolic Order". According to him, constructions of "the homosexual" are pitted against constructions of "The Child" in the modern West, wherein the former symbolizes the inevitability of mortality (do not procreate) and the latter an illusory continuity of the self with the social order (survives mortality through one’s offspring). The constructs are animated by futuristic fantasy designed to evade mortality" (Green 2007).

"Fuss, Eng. et al and Edelman represent distinct moment in the development of queer theory. Whereas Fuss aims to discompose and render inert the reigning classifications of sexual identity, Eng. et al observe the extension of a deconstructive strategy to a wider field of normalization, while Edelman’s work takes not only the specter of "the homosexual", but the very notion of "society" as a manifestation of psychological distress requiring composition" (Green 2007).

Intersex and the role of biology

Queer theorists focus on problems in classifying individuals as either male or female, even on a strictly biological basis. For example, the sex chromosomes (X and Y) may exist in atypical combinations (as in Klinefelter syndrome [XXY]). This complicates the use of genotype as a means to define exactly two distinct sexes. Intersex individuals may for various biological reasons have sexual characteristics that the dominant medical discourse regards as disordered.

Scientists who have written on the conceptual significance of intersex individuals include Anne Fausto-Sterling, Katrina Karkazis, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Joan Roughgarden. While the medical literature focuses increasingly on genetics of intersex traits, and even their deselection, some scholars on the study of culture, such as Barbara Rogoff, argue that the traditional distinction between biology and culture as independent entities is overly simplistic, pointing to the ways in which biology and culture interact with one another.

Intersex scholars and scientists who have written on intersex include Morgan Holmes, Georgiann Davis, Iain Morland and Janik Bastien-Charlebois, in each case focusing on more particular realities of the intersex experience. In his essay What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex? Morland contrasts queer "hedonic activism" with an experience of post-surgical insensate intersex bodies to claim that "queerness is characterized by the sensory interrelation of pleasure and shame".

HIV/AIDS

Much of queer theory developed out of a response to the AIDS crisis, which promoted a renewal of radical activism, and the growing homophobia brought about by public responses to AIDS. Queer theory became occupied in part with what effects – put into circulation around the AIDS epidemic – necessitated and nurtured new forms of political organization, education and theorizing in "queer".

To examine the effects that HIV/AIDS has on queer theory is to look at the ways in which the status of the subject or individual is treated in the biomedical discourses that construct them.

1. The shift, affected by safer sex education in emphasizing sexual practices over sexual identities
2. The persistent misrecognition of HIV/AIDS as a gay disease
3. Homosexuality as a kind of fatality
4. The coalition politics of much HIV/AIDS activism that rethinks identity in terms of affinity rather than essence and therefore includes not only lesbians and gay men but also bisexuals, transsexuals, sex workers, people with AIDS, health workers, and parents and friends of gays; the pressing recognition that discourse is not a separate or second-order reality
5. The constant emphasis on contestation in resisting dominant depictions of HIV and AIDS and representing them otherwise. The rethinking of traditional understandings of the workings of power in cross-hatched struggles over epidemiology, scientific research, public health and immigration policy

The material effects of AIDS contested many cultural assumptions about identity, justice, desire and knowledge. One scholar claimed that AIDS challenged the health and immunity of Western epistemology: "the psychic presence of AIDS signifies a collapse of identity and difference that refuses to be abjected from the systems of self-knowledge." (p. 292) Thus queer theory and AIDS become interconnected because each is articulated through a postmodernist understanding of the death of the subject and both understand identity as an ambivalent site.

Role of language

Richard Norton suggests that the existence of queer language is believed to have evolved from the imposing of structures and labels from an external mainstream culture.

Early discourse of queer theory involved leading theorists: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others. This discourse centered on the way that knowledge of sexuality was structured through the use of language. Michel Foucault writes in "The History of Sexuality" that from the 17th to the mid-20th century the "'repressive hypothesis"' was an illusion, rather a suppression of western society's sexuality. In fact, discourse about sexuality flourished during this time period. Foucault argues,

"Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex;that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement,intensification, reorientation and modification of desire itself. Not only were the boundaries of what one could say about sex enlarged, and men compelled to hear it said; but more important, discourse was connected to sex by a complex organization with varying effects, by a deployment that cannot be adequately explained merely by referring it to a law of prohibition. A censorship of sex? There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy."

Foucault says at this time there was a political,economic and technical excitement to talk about sex. Sex became a call for management procedures. It became a policing matter.

Heteronormativity was the main focus of discourse, where heterosexuality was viewed as normal and any deviations, such as homosexuality, as abnormal or "queer". Even before the founding of "queer theory" the Modern Language Association (MLA) came together for a convention in 1973 for the first formal gay-studies seminar due to the rise of lesbian and gay writers and issues of gay and lesbian textuality. The convention was entitled "Gay Literature: Teaching and Research." In 1981, the MLA established the Division of Gay Studies in Language and Literature.

Media and other creative works

Many queer theorists have produced creative works that reflect theoretical perspectives in a wide variety of media. For example, science fiction authors such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler feature many values and themes from queer theory in their work. Patrick Califia's published fiction also draws heavily on concepts and ideas from queer theory. Some lesbian feminist novels written in the years immediately following Stonewall, such as Lover by Bertha Harris or Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, can be said to anticipate the terms of later queer theory. Nuria Perpinya, a Catalan literary theorist, wrote A good mistake, a novel about the awkward homosexuality in a London genetic engineering lab, between a young white man and a black scientist.

In film, the genre christened by B. Ruby Rich as New Queer Cinema in 1992 continues, as Queer Cinema, to draw heavily on the prevailing critical climate of queer theory; a good early example of this is the Jean Genet-inspired movie Poison by the director Todd Haynes. In fan fiction, the genre known as slash fiction rewrites straight or nonsexual relationships to be gay, bisexual, and queer in a sort of campy cultural appropriation. Ann Herendeen's Pride/Prejudice, for example, narrates a steamy affair between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, the mutually devoted heroes of Jane Austen's much-adapted novel. And in music, some Queercore groups and zines could be said to reflect the values of queer theory.

Queer theorists analyze texts and challenge the cultural notions of "straight" ideology; that is, does "straight" imply heterosexuality as normal or is everyone potentially gay? As Ryan states: "It is only the laborious imprinting of heterosexual norms that cuts away those potentials and manufactures heterosexuality as the dominant sexual format." For example, Hollywood pursues the "straight" theme as being the dominant theme to outline what masculine is. This is particularly noticeable in gangster films, action films and westerns, which never have "weak" (read: homosexual) men playing the heroes, with the recent exception of the film Brokeback Mountain. Queer theory looks at destabilizing and shifting the boundaries of these cultural constructions.

New Media artists have a long history of queer theory inspired works, including cyberfeminism works, porn films like I.K.U. which feature transgender cyborg hunters and "Sharing is Sexy", an "open source porn laboratory", using social software, creative commons licensing and netporn to explore queer sexualities beyond the male/female binary.

Criticism

Typically, critics of queer theory are concerned that the approach obscures or glosses altogether the material conditions that underpin discourse. Tim Edwards argues that queer theory extrapolates too broadly from textual analysis in undertaking an examination of the social.

Adam Green’s critique is one approach to queer theory, that leans towards a sociological stance on the issue of sexuality; primarily and rather exclusively, focusing on gay or lesbian subjects. Green argues that queer theory ignores the social and institutional conditions within which lesbians and gays live. For example, queer theory dismantles social contingency in some cases (homosexual subject positions) while recuperating social contingency in others (racialized subject positions). Thus, not all queer theoretical work is as faithful to its deconstructionist roots. Reflecting on this issue, Timothy Laurie suggests that "the desire to resist norms in some contemporary queer scholarship can never be entirely reconciled with an equally important challenge, that of producing both adequate and dynamic descriptions of ordinary events".

Queer theory's commitment to deconstruction makes it nearly impossible to speak of a "lesbian" or "gay" subject, since all social categories are denaturalized and reduced to discourse. Thus, queer theory cannot be a framework for examining selves or subjectivities—including those that accrue by race and class—but rather, must restrict its analytic focus to discourse. Hence, sociology and queer theory are regarded as methodologically and epistemologically incommensurable frameworks by critics such as Adam Isaiah Green. Thus Green writes that, in an introductory section, Michael Warner (1990s) draws out the possibility of queer theory as a kind of critical intervention in social theory (radical deconstructionism); despite this, he weaves back and forth between the reification and deconstruction of sexual identity. Green argues that Warner begins the volume by invoking an ethnic identity politics, solidified around a specific social cleavage and a discussion of the importance of deconstructing notions of lesbian and gay identities; but, despite its radical deconstructionism, it constructs the queer subject or self in largely conventional terms: as lesbian and gay people bound by homophobic institutions and practices.

So, one of the leading volumes of queer theory engages the subject via conventional sociological epistemologies that conceive of subject positions constituted through systems of stratification and organized around shared experience and identity.

In other way, for Ian Barnard, any consideration of sexuality must include inextricability with racialized subjectivities. Adam Green argues that Barnard implicitly rejects the queer theoretical conceptions of sexuality on the grounds that such work fails to account for particularity of racialized sexualities. He reasons that the failure arises because queer theorists are themselves white, and therefore operate from the particularity of a white racial standpoint. Barnard aspires to recuperate an analysis of race in queer theory, proposing that the deconstructionist epistemology of queer theory can be used to decompose a white queerness (first) in order to recover a racialized queerness (second). Thus, Adam Green argues that Barnard’s attempt to bring social contingency into queer theory violates the core epistemological premise of queer theory; in fact, by proposing that queer theory capture racialized subject positions, Barnard reinstates what it means to be a person of colour. His critique of the white subject position of queer theorists is itself a testimony to the stability of the social order and the power of social categories to mark a particular kind of experience, of subjectivity and, in turn, of queer author. He backs down the road of a decidedly sociological analysis of subject position and the self. Finally, Jagose Green observes that Jagose aims toward an analysis of social cleavages, including those accruing by race and ethnicity. Thus, on the one, Jagose underscores the strong deconstructionist epistemological premise of the term queer and queer theory more generally. Yet, she goes on to analyze identities and sexualities "inflected by heterosexuality, race, gender and ethnicity". Thus Adam Green states that by advocating the incorporation of social contingency in this way, Jagose offers neither the critical edge of queer theory nor the clarity of standpoint theory. However, on the topic of race, Jagose asserted that for a black lesbian, the thing of utmost importance is her lesbianism, rather than her race. Many gays and lesbians of color attacked this approach, accusing it of re-inscribing an essentially white identity into the heart of gay or lesbian identity (Jagose, 1996).

The criticism of queer theory can be divided in three main ideas:

Green’s views suggest gay conservation and assimilation that derive from a more traditional perspective. His concerns regarding the potential loss of a critical edge by incorporating too much discourse on nonsexual identities is valid, however, theorists like Ruth Goldman and Cathy J. Cohen, think elsewise.

In Ruth Goldman’s essay “Who Is That? Exploring Norms around Sexuality, Race, and Class in Queer Theory," she examines how rhetoric works to create a “normative discourse within queer theory” (169), and how that rhetoric serves to limit our perception of queer. In stark opposition to Green’s critique, Goldman argues that in order to comply with queer theories intent to challenge the normal, it must provide a framework in which to challenge other oppressive norms that intersect with sexuality (i.e. racism, misogyny, classism, etc.). By acknowledging the intersection of multiple oppressions is to dismantle a single-issue framework, and thus, creating a platform for a more intensive analysis.

Theorist, Cathy J. Cohen, offers a complex critique in “Punks, Bulldaggers and Wellfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics” that supports Goldman’s ideology. Queerness, according to Cohen, provides conceptualizations that break the traditional binary visibility. Unlike single-identity-based frameworks—failing to serve those with multi-oppressed identities—queerness has the potential to unite these aspects of self to spark a more cohesive understanding of oppression. Yet Cohen expresses concerns surrounding the dichotomy between queer and heterosexual. This binary has created a misdirection of dialogue surrounding power dynamics. Thus an undercomplicated understanding of power has been sexually categorized: all heterosexuals are characterized as privileged and all queers are deemed as oppressed. As a result, queer politics have prioritized only one factor, sexuality as the primary lens through which they structure their action. Encouraging this method of thinking rejects others that are in or in-between the margins. Cohen states that to fully grasp the advantages of queer theory, ideals need to be further radicalized; as well as, push an intersectional lens when analyzing issues.

Green argues that queer is itself an identity category that some self-identified "queer theorists" and "queer activists" use to consolidate a subject-position outside of the normalizing regimes of gender and sexuality. These examples call into question the degree to which identity categories need be thought of as negative, in the evaluative sense of that term, as they underscore the self-determining potentials of the care of the self – an idea advanced first by Foucault in Volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality.

The role of queer theory, and specifically its replacement of historical and sociological scholarship on lesbian and gay people's lives with the theorising of lesbian and gay issues, and the displacement of gay and lesbian studies by gender and queer studies, has been criticised by activist and writer Larry Kramer. Kramer reports on a retrograde book by Richard Godbeer, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Miami, called The Overflowing of Friendship. Kramer criticizes Godbeer’s account of 18th century Colonial times. Kramer writes, "Godbeer is hell-bent on convincing us that two men in Colonial America could have exceedingly obsessive and passionate relationships (he called them, variously, 'sentimental,' 'loving,' 'romantic') . . . [men would] spend many a night in bed together talking their hearts out, without the issue of sex arising in any way." Kramer does not agree with this theory and believes that the notion the same-sex sexual relationships and experiences existed.

Another criticism is that queer theory, in part because it typically has recourse to a very technical jargon, is written by a narrow elite for that narrow elite. It is therefore class biased and also, in practice, only really known and referenced at universities and colleges (Malinowitz, 1993). In addition, those in a position of power, have access to modes of communication where they can express their interpretation, definitions and descriptions of topics, sometimes regardless of the accuracy. This persons of power are given “privileged act of naming.” As a result, this can obscure the perception of reality for those in institutionalized settings. Academia often neglects works of theory by women or men of color. This can be attributed to the fact that institutions have imposed standards of critical evaluations for what is a work of theory and what is not. These standards have led to appropriation of work that was deemed unfit and have created a stark exclusion of people who can access the material. This turns the mass public against the idea of understanding theory; an important aspect in relation to understanding practice. The institutionalization of queer theory has imposed a threat of taming and domesticating critical energy.

An initial criticism on queer theory is that precisely "queer" does not refer to any specific sexual status or gender object choice. For example, Halperin (1995) allows that straight persons may be "queer," which some believe, robs gays and lesbians of the distinctiveness of what causes them to be marginalized. It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity (Jagose, 1996). On the other hand, Michael Warner argues that the objective of queer is to challenge normalness not heterosexuality. This ties back into Cohen’s point about the power dichotomy. Straight persons can be oppressed for behaviors that are seen as sexually deviant as well. One example is the “welfare queen,” a woman of color who is marginalized for her race, sexuality and gender—all identities which intersect to create this kind of oppression.

The critique of queer theory is not limited to the US. Queer theory was repeatedly criticized by the Vatican. Pope Francis spoke about "ideological colonization" by which he meant that queer theory, and more broadly critical gender studies, threatens traditional family and fertile heterosexuality. France was one of the first countries where this claim became widespread when catholic movements marched in the streets of Paris against the bill on gay marriage and adoption. Bruno Perreau in Queer Theory: The French Response has shown that this fear has deep historical roots in France. He argues that the rejection of queer theory expresses anxieties about national identity and minority politics. Minority groups could betray the nation and prefer transnational identities. Perreau maintains that queer theory shows that being part of a group requires the ability to critique one's own belonging. This is largely unbearable to reactionary movements, Perreau argues, all the more because queer theory is ironically largely based on French theory.