Knowing the Body

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Over the last two decades or so, the idea of queerness is one that has been utilized and considered by individuals and communities of marginalized sexualities and genders. The concept is one that has attempted to broaden and deconstruct traditional notions of gender and sexuality in order to include all of their incarnations as valid experiences and identities. Queerness endeavors to include all of those who feel they are a part of it yet, seemingly, not everyone can be queer without changing the very nature of queerness. Or can they? Queerness is a concept which resists borders and structure yet it seems as though there must be certain commonalities among all queer identities and behaviors.
In her book, Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick constructs queerness as a seemingly all-inclusive and individually determined space, writing that:
queer can refer to: the open mesh of
possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances,
resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when
the constituent element's of anyone's gender, of
anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made)
to signify monolithically. (8)
She expands queer beyond the bounds of "same-sex sexual object choice" making queerness about performative behavior rather than sexual mechanics (Sedgwick 8). For example, Sedgwick's idea of queer includes "feminists... masturbators... lesbian-identified men...[and] people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such" among others(8). She posits that the fundamental precondition, "to make the description 'queer' a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person" (Sedgwick 9). Yet is this self-determined queerness valid? Can actual queerness be claimed simply by those wanting to claim it?
Sedgwick's attempt to create an all-inclusive, individually driven, queerness makes it even more marginalizing and oppressive in some ways in that by including everything but vanilla sex between a man and a woman it singles out this particular act of sex and this particular binary gender structure as the non-queer, or the norm. Despite the fact that this is probably not Sedgwick's intention, her construction of queerness highlights the existence of a sexual and gender norm and simply clumps all abnormal sexualities and genders together under the category of queerness. The interpretation of queerness as being a "catch-all" category for sexualities and genders which do not fit into the category of heterosexual, man, and woman, supports the idea that queer status is a second class status because there is nothing particular about it other than the fact that it is not normal.
Her attempt to create queerness as a sort of democracy in which each individual determines his/her status as queer also has counterproductive consequences for queerness. Sedgwick, in an attempt to shift the power of labeling someone as queer from the straight labeler to the queer labeled, robs queerness of some of its potency and cohesion. For example, imagine queerness as being the popular table in a middle school cafeteria. I can decide to label myself as queer and then feel entitled to be able to sit at this table yet the students at the table can easily choose to reject me. If they do not reject me, and allow anyone and everyone to sit at this table, then, in some ways, the table of popular students loses its identity as popular. Sedgwick's claim that the only thing necessary to be queer is the desire to attach the label queer, "to the first person" faces the logistical challenge that the established queer community can reject an individual, and should in order to maintain its identity.
The previous example may highlight many negative aspects of exclusivity yet it nonetheless exhibits that groups exist because their members share common traits and that in order to maintain its identity a group must maintain these commonalities. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes that, "persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specifications of individuals" (42-3). In this text, Foucault details how, "the sodomite" was transformed from, "a temporary aberration" to "the homosexual [who] was now a species" meaning that their existed particular prescriptions of sexual mechanics that defines homosexuality (43). Therefore, according to Foucault's argument, claiming "queerness" is merely affirming your status as the oppressed and marginalized.
Sedgwick's idea that queer status can be assumed merely by wanting to assume it attempts to throw off the oppressive nature of claiming a queer identity that Foucault describes. Yet both Foucault and Sedgwick construct queerness in such a way that it is a perversion from sexual and gender norms because their theoretical representations leave the reader with the idea queerness is necessarily subversive and oppositional from the norms. Thus both Foucault and Sedgwick construct queerness in such a way that it oppresses those who claim a queer identity. Is this merely an intrinsic attribute of the construction of a queer identity or is their some way to inhabit a queer identity and not be passively buying into a system of oppression?
Michael Warner, in his essay, "Tongues United: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood" writes that there exists, "a horizon of significance within which transgressions against the normal order and the boundaries of the self can be seen as good things" (43). That which forces individuals claiming a queer identity under Sedgwick's or Foucault's construction of a queer identity is that they are claiming a singular identity. Whether it is based on performance or mechanics, identifying as queer under these two constructions creates a system in which the self equals one thing, which then can be processed into a system of oppression. Warner includes these, "discarded personalities, vestigial selves" and "visible ruptures with yourself" as a necessary part of claiming a queer identity, or any identity for that matter, because they disallow the claiming of an identity to be the means by which one can be oppressed.
This is why Warner advises his reader to believe when he/she is told that their, "current [personality] was a mistake you made" (45). He constructs queerness in such a way that claiming a queer identity, "[provides] a meaningful framework for the sublime play of self-realization and self-dissolution" (Warner 43). Thus, according to Warner, through the dissolution of the singular self through the realization of the ruptured self, one can claim a queer identity and escape oppression because a singular identity claim which is open to oppression, such as the claiming of a queer identity, cannot completely encompass a ruptured self. Excepting one's status as incongruent allows one to claim a singular identity without inviting oppression because one's incongruence prohibits a singular identity claim to completely describe the self.
The manner in which Foucault and Sedgwick construct queerness allows for oppression because they assume that the self is a singular cohesive body. Warner supposes that by realizing the fragmentation the self, one can claim an identity and escape oppression.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An
Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage
Books, 1980.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993.

Warner, Michael. "Tongues United: Memoirs of a Pentecostal
Boyhood." The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural
Studies Reader. Ed. Donald Morton. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1996.


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