1 Niel Rosenthalis Queer Theory Second Paper 10/27/11 To Theorize or Not To Theorize: Problems and Responses for Theory

and Social Justice

Having emerged into greater prominence in the last century, theory, as relates to our purposes, has transformed into a very specific kind of site where thinkers of various backgrounds go to consider, in various degrees of abstractness, social problems and issues. In this essay I will compare how anthropologist Gayle Rubins Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality (1984) and philosopher Judith Butlers Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991) view theory and use it to negotiate the terrain of gender and sexuality. These two theorists are fully engaged with the realities they describe but articulate that engagement in contrasting ways that relate to their backgrounds. Butler, a philosopher, approaches her work on the realm of concepts with extreme self-consciousness and disclaimers, while the anthropologist Gayle Rubin rigorously introduces data, law cases, and diagrams into her explanations and historicizings of how sex has undergone intense periods of politicization in the form of sex panics. Rubin aspires toward the creation of a radical theory of sex while Butler, theorizing gender via its performativity, nonetheless seeks to destabilize theory as a reified and elitist space.1 Both texts confront the problems of theory itself and include that confrontation as a kind of framework. In these different ways, both use as well as analyze theory to denounce social oppression.

Although Rubin focuses on sexuality and Butlers title indicates a greater focus on gender, both papers think about gender and sexuality because neither notion can really exist without the other, though the need to give a separate treatment to each emerges as an understanding in both works. Rubin defines sexuality as a nexus of the relationships between genders, and this seems to me a suitable way to think about sexuality and gender together (Thinking Sex 28).

2 We can identify three problem areas for theory. First, skeptics of theory and theorists alike see theory in a complicated relationship with practice and engagement. As theorists, Butler and Rubin themselves have different relationships with practice. Rubin understands that theory and practice reinforce and challenge each other in a specific kind of dialogue2. In Thinking Sex, Rubin cites the need for a theory of sex, because in order to make informed decisions about which policies to support and oppose, citizens need to understand current politics, which relies on understanding the various perspectives on sex, which is where a coherent and intelligent body of radical thought about sex becomes essential (8-9). In this historical moment of the 1980s, where the state, institutions of medicine, and popular media, were helping to perpetuate a sex panic, theory emerged out of a need for clarifying a cloudy political climate (4).3 Butler also sees a problem that Rubin does not explicitly addressButler sees theory and practice as equally problematic in how they represent the identity categories of gay and lesbian as entities stable and thus liable to control (308). Butler further identifies this problem as a political one: whereas Rubin goes on to specify and defend sex perverts, like S/M lovers as well as lesbians, Butler uses the space of theory to reconsider that specificity, because it merely reinscribes lesbian sexuality (as well as others) within a heteronormative matrix4

This understanding of theory and practice as a dialogue becomes complicated as theory and practice become increasingly separated when gay/lesbian theory becomes institutionalized into academia in the early 90s. But the papers we are discussing were written before and during that shift. Butlers article, written in 1991, conveys her reluctance with the the gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks domestication within the academy (308). To be discussed.
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Who is Rubins audience in Thinking Sex? It seems to be feminists, which is important to note because it makes us ask to what extent theory can be accessible to people outside of academic and movement circles. The follow-up question might be to what extent theory could even be useful for people in such a position of noncritical engagement with social injustices. This turns into larger questions of how citizens are equipped to become engaged with social injustices. These questions are outside the scope of this paper.
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We will examine Butlers uneasiness with theory later. I mention her in this first problem of theory because her work, highly theoretical, is connected to issues that trickle down philosophically into practice. She claims in this essay that she is not speaking of unemployment or public attack or violence, which are quite clearly and widely on the increase but rather she works to examine the notion of subjectivity and its linguistic representation (308). The

3 (310). Within this judgment, Butler understands theory to include an overly concretized set of terms for identities (308). She is uneasy with any system of thought that rests on stable identity categories, for whether those identities are being used by activists or an oppressive power structure, those identities are sites of trouble for Butler because stable identities are forms of control (308). Theory, then, becomes a question of not only engagement and practice but also one of specificity and naming. The second problem of theory confronts the problem of naming by looking at the challenge of developing a useful critical vocabulary. Butler, fearing these accepted terms fundamental susceptibility to misappropriation, favors adopting a less clear system of signifiers (308). She recognizes the necessity of having some kind of vocabulary, however: This is not to say that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies (308). The solution for vocabulary for Butler (and we will examine this more below) lies partly in the understanding of how gender constitutes itself through a continual failure to replicate some high ideal of what a male and female are; this understanding must coexist with a given vocabulary to help prevent the appropriation of that vocabulary into regulatory regimes of power (317). Rubin, on the other hand, advocates for a fresh formation of a critical vocabulary because a new theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution (Thinking Sex 9). Key here is how the descriptions of sexuality must attend to historical elementsthis framing is her

first section of her paper is entitled To Theorize as a Lesbian? and so she situates the problem of theory specifically into the situation of identifying as lesbian, an identification which is complicated by the fact that lesbians are women in a sexist culture so their burden of identification is already heavy.

4 version of the kind of theoretical deconstructive awareness Butler so abundantly demonstrates. Taken together, these two theorists agree on the self-awareness that must attend the vocabulary. This historical element that Rubin emphasizes as part of the solution for a vocabulary indicates a third problem of theory: theorys histories and perspectives often become associated with or subsumed into other theories, which complicates how theorists understand and choose which theoretical tools to apply to which problems. Both Rubin and Gayle are particularly preoccupied with the legacy of feminism in terms of how it feeds into their thoughts on sexuality and gender5. But Rubin cautions against applying theories outside of those areas the theory was intended to circumscribe. Feminism, for instance, is not designed to describe problems of sexuality and neither is Marxism intended to analyze problems of gender inequality that feminism is more adequately equipped to handle (34)6. This kind of mis-application of theory coincides with a kind of popularity trend, where one theory is favored over another, and as one begins to gain favor, like feminism over Marxism, the relationship of influence between the two becomes muddled7. Moreover, the crowning of one theory over another seems to occur in different periods, but no theory is head-of-court; each set of conceptual tools must be used where it can give the user the most leverage into seeing and identifying problems and patterns. In addition to privileging one theory over another, theorists can also forget the history of what we might now call theory before its incorporation into academia, when the gay liberation

Both also discuss psychoanalysis, but Rubin treats psychoanalysis more directly in Traffic in Women, while Butler in her essay notes how easily simplification[s] occur in later psychoanalytic inquiry; since they dont both discuss psychoanalysis in the two articles Ive selected, I have opted to exclude it from discussion.
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She highlights how much feminist thought treats sexuality as a derivation of gender rather than a separate considerationthe result has been the oppression of females with nonheterosexual sexualities, namely lesbians.
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And the element of historicizing makes the relationships between theories more complex. Marxism gave lesbian much of its conceptual framework, even though the issues more specific to the social structure of gender were not amenable to Marxist analysis (Thinking Sex 33-34). Rubin argues that feminism must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex which in turn will enrich feminism (34).

5 movement, and the homophile movement before it, was producing its own thoughts on social problems (Thinking Sex 9). It is important to retain a more complex narrative of the history of the ideas in examining where intellectual work comes from and how it works on identifying different problems that emerge over time. Although they often differently respond to the problems of using theory, Rubin and Butler both rely on it to expose and challenge dominant structures of sexuality and gender. Both Rubin and Gayle recognize that theory, as a conceptual space, is powerful for helping to work out problems of discrimination, harassment, and injustice, and both operate within a kind of vigilance against these problems. Both are working to respond to address a void in intellectual work: Rubin recognized at the time in which she was writing that the issue of sexual variation had yet to be considered a significant oppression to merit its own direct treatment. The overarching goal for Rubin is the creation of a radical theory of sex that must identify, describe, explain and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression separate from, but still related to, the issue of gender oppression that feminism, the leading theory of the period, highlighted as primary (9)8. She does not really claim to speak for the sex deviants represented in her categories in terms of representing their own viewpoints per se, but she uses theory as a space to champion their cause as a signal of a broader problem of oppression (10). The theoretical perspective enables this viewpoint to emerge, where she can have a relationship with

Much of the work that Rubin calls for is not only theoretical regrounding but also researching: she notes that although anti-homosexual crusades are the best-documented examples of erotic repression in the 1950s, future research should reveal similar patterns of increased harassment against pornographic materials, prostitutes, and erotic deviants of all sorts. Research is needed to determine the full scope of both police persecution and regulatory reform (Thinking Sex 6).

6 practice based on figures and data9 as well as analyze how ideas about sex and politics came to structure the political climate. Although Butler is also concerned with the issue of sexual variety,10 her focus is elsewhere. For Butler, theory, as of the early 90s, had yet to imagine one of its most troublesome sites: its own reliance on stable categories (312). Butler sees theory itself, a discourse, as a problematic area because it depends on treating terms like gay and lesbian as stable identity categories that can be used as forms of control by regimes and activists for suggesting certain stable ideas about sexuality and its practitioners (308-9). Coming out, for example, only means creating for oneself another closet that the gay person in question implicitly agrees with those in power to define a certain way (309). Is it ever possible to stop creating new closets? Butler suggests not, but the solution lies in identifying how the terms will be legislated versus used (309). It is in this vein of theoretical questioning that Butler is able to imagine these issues as even approachable in terms of beginning to secure social justice. Theory emerges as an ethical space in tune with the issues of its time. The different ways the texts foreground their relationship with and attitude toward theory relates, in terms of essay organization, to how the theorists address the voids in theory. Butler
As the previous footnote shows and as my opening paragraph mentioned, Rubin uses research as a way to source her theory. Rubin takes data from police records and histories of enactment of different laws (6-8). Butlers more philosophical and abstract method avoids Rubins anthropological specificity, instead opting for a few occasional examples, like the lyrics of Aretha Franklin song, you make me feel like a natural woman which illustrate the distance between feeling oneself as being a natural woman and being like a natural woman (317). The differences in sources help identify how they use theory differently for the same ends. She is concerned with sexual pluralism implicitly, for in considering the claims of heterosexual priority she also refers to homosexualities of all kinds and the question of sexual identity forming against the backdrop of this heterosexual priority. At the same time, her argument focuses most explicitly on how the lesbian sexuality is understood as precisely that which cannot or dare not be (312). It might be notable that she doesnt make the decision to explicitly discuss sex deviants in this essay, even as the implications of the work apply to them and anybody else who can empathize with the position of feeling that the norm of compulsory heterosexuality implies that being lesbian is always a kind of miming, a vain effort to participate in the phantasmatic plenitude of naturalized heterosexuality which will always and only fail (311). Implicit here, though, is a question: to what degree have sex perverts been labeled the way lesbians have, where lesbians understand themselves in relation to compulsory heterosexuality.
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7 makes her feelings known in the beginning of her essay and by so doing calls attention to how theory itself had become a problem, from something one could wish for richer gay/lesbian intellectual work in, around 1984 when Rubin was writing, to something one had to analyze more rigorously itself in addition to the body of intellectual work to which it responds. Butler opens her essay by noting that she feels uncomfortable with lesbian theories, gay theories (308). The kind of theorizing that reinforces problematic categorical labels instead of deconstructing them, she implies, seems to be prevalent among current work and is associated with an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to establish the legitimacy and domestication of gay/lesbian studies within the academy (308). Here the problem of practice re-emerges, since the question becomes where best to build and discuss theorythe academy is not only elite but can be increasingly isolated it purports to consider. But this is to not say that Butler condemns theory or dismisses it as no longer useful; she strives to make clear the care with which theory and its ideas must be considered and undertaken. Rubin demonstrates a similar self-analysis in her essay by highlighting, in the fifth section (The Limits of Feminism), how her analysis has changed since the writing of her well-known essay The Traffic in Women to a recognition of the need to treat sexuality and gender separately (Thinking Sex 33). So although both theorists are addressing how theory has functioned previously and how it has understood itself, the way they organize these addresses can be read not as just a superficial difference of argumentation but as a signal of a key shift. We can track from one essay to the other a development in how theory is regarded as well as how it is utilized in relationship to each theorists evident proximity to practice. Two other questions about theory are due for further consideration. Perhaps one of the largest ones: when does theory become theory? The answer would seem to relate as much to

8 the institutionalization of academia as to assumptions of what institutions recognize as theory, which leads us to a second question. Early on in her essay, Butler wonders about possible development away from theory into intertextual writing, writing outside the traditional boundaries of theory, that might well generate wholly different epistemic maps (308).11 Butlers self-conscious use of theory calls attention to theorys tenuous relationship with its subject and the broader discursive oppressive power it resists: Can this writing, can any writing, refuse the terms by which it is appropriated even as, to some extent, that very colonizing discourse enables or produces this stumbling, this resistance? (308). The only kind of solution that each theorist seems to imagine is paying more attention and care to how one speaks about problems. Rubin, relying on data, and Butler, turning around only occassionally to look at the street though thinking about it the whole time, show alternative approaches and navigations of intellectual work.

This kind of intertextual writing had already been happening in the efforts of Audre Lorde (The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power; 1978) and Cherrie Moraga (1981). One assumes Butler is aware of this and so must mean a more extensive or somehow more deliberate (or even theoretical?) intertexuality than these two writers were producing. If she did not know about these kinds of writings, this call for a different kind of theoretical writing that was already happening could be significant in indicating and even symbolizing the increasing split between theory and practice.

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Works Cited Rubin, Gayle. Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, (1984). The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, (eds.) Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin (Routledge, 1993): 3-44. Print. Butler, Judith. Imitation and Gender Subordination (1991). The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, (eds.) Henry Abovelove, Michele Barale and David Halperin (Routledge, 1993): 307-320. Print.