Queer Is? Queer Does?: Normativity and The Problem of Resistance

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
QUEER IS? QUEER DOES?

Normativity and the Problem of Resistance
Janet R. Jakobsen
I have a problem ending papers, a problem specifically with the structure and
writing of endings. For a long time I ended all of my papers as follows: “alliance
politics.” In various and sundry ways I invoked the importance of alliance politics
as the ending to whatever narrative I had developed in the paper. Although they
made for closure that was in many ways satisfying, these endings came to have the
status of invocations, and eventually I had no idea what those words, alliance poli-
tics, meant. In fact, as I pursued the question, it became clear that alliance politics
was often a matter of invocation rather than, say, of enactment. In various forms of
progressive politics, calls for alliance politics are common, even de rigueur. Yet in
my study of alliances in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. women’s movements,
I found that the call for alliances often expressed a particular movement’s imagina-
tion of itself as much as it did its commitment to ally with others.1 I began to suspect
that the relationship between invocation and enactment was both naturalized
— as if invocation were a step toward enactment — and deeply confounded. Invo-
cation seemed to produce the spirit of alliance building, as if saying it regularly
made alliance a common everyday occurrence, but it rarely seemed to produce
alliances in their embodied form. I came to ask whether invocation might be more
of a block than an inducement to action. Thus, in the hope of avoiding the invoca-
tional ending, I began to look for a new ending to my papers. I started listening
very carefully for the endings that were offered in the field of what we might call
“lesbian and gay studies.” Most of the papers ended as follows: “Queer.”
Queer Is?
The invocation of queer in these papers marked a site of alternative possibility in

relation to whatever problem had been laid out in the body of the paper, most fre-
GLQ 4:4
pp. 511–536
Copyright © 1998 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

512 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
quently a critique of lesbian and gay politics. I concur with this theoretical move
and, in fact, have written papers structured in this way myself. Yet, as with
alliance politics, I began to lose track of the meaning of queer. What, for example,
did it mean to say “queer” at the end rather than the beginning? What was being
invoked? Queer worked in those papers as that which was not already written over
with identity (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc., in the never-ending list) or
with other possible determinations of the field. But was that space of possibility
available to us if it always came at the end, as the (logical?) conclusion to the
problems of lesbian and gay politics? Did not placing “queer” at the end of papers
make it into the telos of a progress narrative with its own determinations, thus
undercutting the openness to possibility that queer was supposed to invoke?
We face, it seems, a twofold problem of narrative determination that leads
to so many endings written in this way. First, we face the need for an ending itself
and for the accompanying inducements and enforcements that cause it to take a
particular form; second, we face the determination of political possibility by nar-
rative and narrative structure, meaning that it might not be politically helpful to
write our way into the space named queer. The inducement to hold it open and the
fear of writing or speaking our way into it are based on the likelihood that once
there, given the overdetermination of endings, we will simply reproduce the prob-
lems that the invocation is meant to dislodge. We may, for example, only reiterate
the problematic of identity.2 We stick with invocation in part because we don’t
fully know how to talk or write differently, to produce something other than an
ending.
As with the problem of enactment in relation to alliance politics, the invo-
cation of queer in relation to the body of the paper raises the complications of
embodiment. The corporeal metaphor is not dead here. Queer cannot be simply
embodied. The critique of identity it carries means that under contemporary
social and political conditions, it resists the normative inscriptions through which
bodies are produced. In fact, queer is often defined precisely as resistance to
norms and normativity. Yet to move beyond the invocational ending, which by sim-
ple reiteration keeps us in a static relation to the problems of lesbian and gay pol-
itics, we need a way to think through the complications of embodiment, of resis-
tance, of norms, and of the associated terms of normativity and the normal.
Queer theory often defines itself through claims of resistance and, in par-
ticular, of resistance to “the norm,” the “normal,” or “heteronormativity.” Both
Michael Warner and David M. Halperin virtually define the word queer as a resis-
tant relation to these terms. In his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet Warner
describes “a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal,” while in Saint

NORMATIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF RESISTANCE 513

Foucault Halperin writes of “the ability of ‘queer’ to define (homo)sexual identity
oppositionally and relationally but not necessarily substantively, not as a positiv-
ity but as a positionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm.”3 Thus
queer is not to be “identified with any of its positive forms.”4 The appeal to resis-
tance is supposed to provide a route out of the problematic of positivity, out of —
or, more accurately, in resistance to — the constraining power of positive gestures.
What we would resist — the norm, the normal, or heteronormativity — is a
site of frequently overlooked complexities. The regime of the normal to which
Warner refers is (as both he and Halperin point out) not a coherent thing; it is a
matrix of multiple, contradictory norms. In other words, it stands in complicated
relation to various norms and to the power structure of normativity. Yet the politi-
cal invocations of resistance rarely take this fact into account. Perhaps this omis-
sion is strategic, motivated by the belief that to address complexity is to vitiate the
political effectiveness of resistance, but the reduction of resistance to the mere act
of “resisting the norm” has serious and unwelcome consequences.
In this essay I will explore some of these complexities. In particular, I will
lay out a set of distinctions among the norm, the normal, and normativity to show
how the contradictions among them undercut the political effectiveness of resis-
tance. Recognition of the complex matrix of norms that make up any given norma-
tivity opens new doors to resistant action that, for example, plays various norms off
each other. Further, the distinction between norms and normalization allows us to
ask questions about the relationship between norms and power: Can norms be dis-
articulated from normalization? What would such norms look like? How would
they work? Queer activism thus requires the reworking of the basic concepts and
terms of both moral and political agency.
Resistance?
I mentioned to a friend and colleague recently that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

begins “Can the Subaltern Speak?” with a critique of Michel Foucault and his
concept of “subjugated knowledges” that can “speak for themselves,” which he
articulates in conversation with Gilles Deleuze. “That doesn’t sound very much
like Foucault,” my friend responded, and certainly Spivak’s point is that the con-
versation between Foucault and Deleuze is noteworthy precisely because it takes
place between two theorists of the radical critique of subjectivity who should per-
haps “know better.”5 It doesn’t sound like Foucault because Foucault so rarely
endorses anything he writes about, including resistance. He points out that actors
across the political spectrum resist. Thus resistance is not necessarily progressive.

Even when Foucault provides examples of alternative possibilities, historical

moments when things were otherwise, he doesn’t necessarily endorse them as cur-
rently viable or desirable.6 Why, then, in conversation this “mistake,” this slip-
page into the ubiquitous discourse of the subject? Is it merely a failure on Fou-
cault’s part to be completely Foucauldian, or can it be read as something more?
Spivak argues that the slippage indicates a deeper problem, based on the lack of a
theory of ideology in post-Marxist, poststructuralist thought, which thereby con-
flates and naturalizes desires and interests (an analysis with which I do not dis-
agree). I would like to consider whether this conversational moment also indicates
the repressed shadow of desire for a particular kind of resistance, a shadow cast
over many of his texts, despite Foucault’s stated intentions, and a problem that
surfaces in various political appropriations of them. The slippage may suggest ten-
sions in the project of critical theory and politics and in that of queer theory and
politics in particular.
When Foucault’s work is taken up unproblematically or dismissed as apo-
litical, ineffective, or even conservative, the ways in which a tension remains in it
or in the Foucauldian project — a tension between the radical critique of subjec-
tivity that has become almost de rigueur in critical theory, on the one hand, and
the political project of undertaking the equally de rigueur task of “resistance,” on
the other — are ignored. Either one side or the other of the project is taken up, or
the problem is solved through, for example, appeals to the practical or to “strate-
gic” essentialism. The tension does not reflect a simple theory-practice split. The
radical critique of subjectivity is itself undertaken for the sake of political effec-
tiveness, for the sake of not merely reproducing those conditions of subjectivity
that make for subjection, and the appeal to resistance is theoretically motivating
and necessary (hence its popularity within queer theory). If the issue is not prac-
tice versus theory—if we can’t say that the theoretical intervention is ideal but, for
practical or strategic reasons, we need to do otherwise — then the problem that we
face is one of both theory and practice. We must ask not only what the possibili-
ties are in any given political moment but how we think about possibility, its con-
ditions, its imagination.
The paradigmatic moment of possibility for Foucault is the invocation of
“bodies and pleasures,” the positing of a possibility for bodies not already
enmeshed in the discourse of sexuality, at the end of the first volume of The His-
tory of Sexuality.7 To move beyond this invocation without moving into the prob-
lematic that Spivak points out, it becomes necessary to think about how it would
be possible, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, to “actualize” these bodies and (their?)
pleasures.8 Over against a progressive view of history, Benjamin invokes actual-


ization to rematerialize the past and open an underdetermined future not always
already written over by progress. This project simultaneously requires resistance
to the conditions of materiality and elaboration of an actuality extending beyond
them into the “imaginary domain.”9 Such complexity, rather than a split between
theory and practice, produces the tension in Foucault’s work. Foucault handles the
need to elaborate the productive power of resistance variously, sometimes by invo-
cation, sometimes by the example of historical alternative, and sometimes by
appeal to the knowledges of the imagined other through which, as Spivak points
out, the Western self is produced. Invocation and an appeal, without endorsement,
to historical example ensure one the safety of opening a space without having to
show how to move and act within it; thus they keep possibility open without writ-
ing over it or narrowing it at all. But the desire betrayed in an appeal to subjugated
knowledges indicates our need also to enter such spaces, to move and write our-
selves through political practice and articulation. This writing both narrows and
actualizes possibilities, as Foucault shows with the recognition that power simul-
taneously produces possibility and subjugation, that every action carries particu-
lar dangers, and that the political (and perhaps also moral) task is to decide what
the “main danger” is.10 Thus actualizing bodies and pleasures is precisely the
type of activity that enters into the complexities of simultaneous resistance and
elaboration, or what might be called the complications of embodiment.
The complications of embodiment are the relations between resistance to
the conditions of materiality, of human being, on the one hand, and elaboration or
actualization of the possibilities of human doing, on the other. In this space there
is no pure or safe positionality, but only various means of negotiating the compli-
cations. This is the task that queer theory has often taken up, and it is a task that
has often been played out precisely around the issue of norms.11
Queer Does?
In Saint Foucault Halperin lays out a number of issues involved in keeping queer
open as a site of possibility and lists the political gains to be made by maintaining
this site. He also lays out the problems of actualization that go along with this
understanding of queer:
“Queer” ’s very lack of specificity, which I consider its chief advantage, has
also become its most serious drawback, and for several reasons. First, as
the term is used, it sometimes gives a false impression of inclusiveness, of
embracing in equal measure all species of sexual outlaws. It thereby

promotes the misleading notion that a queer solidarity has decisively

triumphed over historical divisions between lesbians and gay men (or
between lesbians and gay men, on the one hand, and [for example] sado-
masochists, fetishists, pederasts, and transgender people, on the other) and
that differences of race or gender no longer pose political problems for
queer unity that require urgently to be addressed. . . . Second, and perhaps
even more important, the lack of specifically homosexual content built into
the meaning of “queer” has made that term all too handy — not for gener-
ating a de-essentialized identity or defining a marginal positionality so
much as for multiplying the opportunities for disidentification, denial, and
disavowal. . . . There is nothing enviable about the lot of lesbians and gay
men who wind up living in the sort of queer world where, as a friend of
mine reports about a certain New England women’s college, all the women
who are sleeping with men identify themselves as lesbians and all the
women who are sleeping with women identify themselves as bisexuals.
Hence the stunning headline of a recent lesbian ’zine: “LESBIANS WHO SLEEP
WITH WOMEN!”
Despite all its present political liabilities, however, “queer” can

still stand for the possibility of a radical reversal in the logic of homopho-
bic discourses. . . . My purpose [in defending “queer” has been] . . . to
highlight and to preserve a dimension of that category’s meaning which
seems to me uniquely useful and worth cherishing, whether or not it is
realized as the term is deployed in current political practice. I want to keep
open a possibility that may remain, for all I know, largely potential, that
may indeed already be foreclosed, but that represents one of the important
possibilities that some of its earlier advocates saw in the term “queer” and
that may yet constitute one of its crucial uses: namely, the ability of
“queer” to define (homo)sexual identity oppositionally and relationally but
not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not
as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm.12
Halperin’s claim on behalf of queer possibility can be most fully realized if

we complete the Foucauldian move from human being to human doing.13 In other
words, what would happen if we thought of queer not only as a nonessential iden-
tity but as a verb — if as an identity at all, then as an identity of doing rather than
being?14 Halperin himself urges us to recognize queer “not as a thing” but as a
particular type of action: “resistance to the norm.” This move points to the ten-
sions in much queer theory between queer as a noun (even if not specifying a pos-


itivity), as a (de-essentialized) identity position, and as a verb, suggesting the
work of queering, of acting in relation, opposition, or resistance to the norm. Even
when we see queer as a position of identificatory practice, that is, as a site where a
particular set of practices can be enacted, we focus perhaps too much on the site
and not enough on the practice. What I want to consider is the relation among the
three forms of the term: verb, noun, and adjective. Ultimately, we need all three
forms; we cannot escape our implication in being or in the description of being,
but we can emphasize doing and thus shift queer’s relation to being as well as
highlight the available modifications of being.
But what type of action is “resistance to the norm”? Just as I have pointed
to certain complexities of the appeal to resistance, so I would like to examine the
implications of identifying “the norm” as that which is to be resisted. The effec-
tiveness of this incitement depends on a series of complexities that can be articu-
lated through a set of distinctions among norms, normativity, and the normal.
Making these distinctions is important, because too often the imperative to resist
the norm is taken as an imperative to resist any and all norms, a position both
appealing and problematic in its utopianism and undercut when the norms that
form any particular practice are considered.15 The issue for queer theorists is
instead the relation among a particular set of norms, the regime of power that is
normativity, and the inducement and enforcement of normalization. Not all norms
are related to normativity and the normal in the same fashion.
Normativity is a field of power, a set of relations that can be thought of as a
network of norms, that forms the possibilities for and limits of action. Norms are
the imperatives that materialize particular bodies and actions.16 As Judith Butler
points out, for example, “sex,” insofar as it is a norm, materializes sexed bodies
through power that is at once constructive and constraining.17 The normal could
be simply the average, the everyday, or the commonsensical, but norms and the
normal can also become hooked together so as to make the average not only nor-
mal but normative. In her analysis of the Sex in America survey, for example, Mary
Poovey shows how the statistical claim that most people have sex with others just
like themselves in most respects except gender slips into the normative imperative
that most people should sleep with others just like themselves in most respects
except gender.18 The mechanisms by which the normal becomes attached to norms
are the processes of “normalization,” and, as Foucault has argued, they form a
central field of power in the modern period. Particularly in the modern period
there can be a slippage between the statistically normal and the imperative power
of moral norms. Norms themselves become organized according to what can be
read as normal, and their constraining and productive power is tied to disciplinary

apparatuses, technologies of government, organized around “statistically imagined

norms.”19 Thus “ethics” becomes a matter of evidence, a scientific enterprise based
on data. Only under such a regime could moral issues concerning queers’ “respon-
sibility” for their sex practices be thought to be determined in any part by the sta-
tistical prevalence or biological basis of homosexuality. Jerry Falwell’s concern with
the truth or falsity of Alfred C. Kinsey’s 10 percent number can make sense to the
“Moral Majority” only if norms are tied to normalization. In the contemporary
period, then, the dominant normativity is organized around normalization.
In the United States heterosexuality constitutes such a dominant normativ-
ity. “Heteronormativity,” for example, normalizes heterosexuality, making het-
20
erosex the normal term, the commonsensical position, unremarkable and everyday,
in relation to which nonheterosex is queer, odd, to be commented on and policed.
Heteronormativity, however, is not only the norm that enforces heterosexuality over
against homosexuality but the network of norms that sustains its organization.
These norms are various and ubiquitous: marriage laws; tax laws; social organiza-
tion based on “the couple”; national holidays as family holidays; women’s maga-
zines; standards of beauty and attractiveness; the organization of the workplace;
family dramas on television; the organization of gender, race, and class; the use of
biological metaphor, in which plants have “male” and “female” parts; and on and
on. Such networks of norms become both complex and contradictory. The question
of resistance, then, is about how to engage this complex field rather than how to
reverse or oppose the norm.
Moreover, for Foucault the modern normative configuration in which norms,
normalization, and normativity are so closely tied together as often to be indistin-
guishable is not a necessary historical configuration. One of his central questions
in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality is whether norms and
their practices could ever be disengaged from normalization and from dominant or
hegemonic regimes of power. Foucault argues that the ancient Greek “care of the
self” is a form of “experience” materialized through particular norms and tied to a
normativity (even a ruling normativity), but these norms are not those of normal-
ization.21 As Halperin points out, they are rather the norms of a small group of
elites who wished by “stylizing freedom” to attain “mastery over themselves and
others.”22 Foucault concludes that three axes of experience (in the technical sense)
can be differently configured at different historical moments: (1) a domain of
knowledge, (2) a type of normativity (e.g., in the specific case of mental illness: “a
normative system built on a whole technical, administrative, juridical, and medical
apparatus”), and (3) a mode of relation to oneself. In describing his genealogical
investigations of the self, Foucault seeks to trace the history of the “ontology of


ourselves” as subjects of knowledge, in relation to fields of power, and as moral
agents.23
Within this schema a number of openings, or points of articulation among
the axes, could be configured differently in different historical moments. For
instance, normativity is not coextensive with the realm of ethics; it can be a sepa-
rate realm, organized by a technology of government, rather than an elaboration of
the self as ethical. The two realms are articulated; ethics is not completely
removed from power, but neither is it connected to power historically in the same
way that it is in the modern period. Moreover, the norms associated with care of
the self as an “aesthetics of existence” are not those of normalization.24 Foucault
pursues historical example to show that not all technologies of the self are normal-
izing in the same way. The different axes that form experience produce different
effects, depending on how they are each configured and how they are related to
each other.
Foucault elaborates the argument about care of the self precisely to demon-
strate a normativity that is not based on normalization. The purpose of this exam-
ple is to show that norms, normativity, and normalization need not be tightly
sutured together as they are in the modern period and to show that a self might be
organized around “pleasure” rather than the modern “desire.” This alternative
normativity is not, however, specifically endorsed by Foucault (although the vari-
ous texts in which he speaks and writes about it betray an ambivalence toward
it),25 nor is it necessarily a nondominating regime of power. For the few elite
ancient Greek citizens who participated in it, care of the self may have allowed for
practices of freedom denied by the regime of the normal, but the system as a whole
was not necessarily nondominating: “In antiquity, this work on the self with its
attendant austerity is not imposed on the individual by means of civil law or reli-
gious obligation, but is a choice about existence made by the individual. People
decide for themselves whether or not to care for themselves.” While pointing to
one of the elements that he finds distinctive about this period, Foucault is not as
careful as he might be. “Individuals” in this context are not just any “people” but
those empowered within the normativity to create a beautiful existence. Women
and slaves, for example, cannot be the “individuals” to whom Foucault refers. As
he points out, the specifics of care of the self are enacted within a strictly hierar-
chical and, in relation to women and slaves, dominating regime of power: “The dif-
ference is that in the classical perspective to master oneself meant, first, taking
into account only oneself and not the other, because to be master of oneself meant
that you were able to rule others. So the mastery of oneself was directly related to a
dissymmetrical relation to others. You should be master of yourself in a sense of

activity, dissymmetry, and nonreciprocity.”26 Thus Foucault’s cautionary state-

ments against taking the Greek example as a simple alternative to contemporary
regimes of normalization are crucial. Similarly, a shift to an aesthetics of existence
would not necessarily resist dominating power but might only reinscribe other
forms of power sutured to domination in ways different from, but as effective as,
those connecting normalization to domination. Normalization is only one form of
domination.
In the modern period, however, norms and ethics are indeed closely tied to
normalization, which involves the construction of a “self.” The connections
between the disciplinary practices of the Kantian self-legislating individual who
gives the law to himself and the disciplines of the bureaucratic individual make
for these ties, which have intensified over time.27 As his gesture toward “bodies
and pleasures” indicates, however, Foucault suggests that if norms have not always
been organized around normalization, then it might be possible to disarticulate
them once again, opening the door not to a reiteration of Greek practice but to a
different actualization of bodies and pleasures.
This argument implies that to claim queer is to engage the complex of
uneven relations among norms, normativity, and normalization. The specifics of
these relations can serve as guides to negotiating the complexities of power. Two
crucial issues arise for the conceptualization of resistance. First, the call to resist
the norm effectively refers not to any singular norm but to the network of norms
that form a particular normativity or regime of power. Too often claims about the
norm are confused with normativity, that is, with the contradictory set of norms.
What is lost, as we return to some kind of binary analysis, is precisely the com-
plexity of the network. Second, the call to resist the regime of the normal can be
(misleadingly) appropriated as if resistance to normalization undid the question of
normativity rather than moved us into another normativity. The question of resis-
tance is therefore a complicated one, dependent on the particular norms and nor-
mativity that one resists. This complexity is vitally important to possibilities of
and limits on action and actualization.
Consider Halperin’s amusing example of queer practices at a women’s col-
lege that produce lesbians who do not sleep with women. While the young women
in this example may, in the context of an undergraduate college, be acting
provocatively, playfully, or earnestly, Halperin points to a serious problem: the
ways in which resistance to the norms of identity, a resistance often taken up in
queer terms, can simply reinscribe dominant norms. The multiple norms operat-
ing in the situation he describes induce movement in different directions, but the
action takes place within a hegemonic regime structured around normalization. As


Monique Wittig points out, the norms that constitute women also constitute het-
erosexuality.28 Indeed, they constitute women as the subject of heterosexuality. Yet
they are invoked at a “women’s college,” whose “single-sex” organization already
makes the heterosexuality of these women dubious. The norms that constitute les-
bian, on the other hand, run counter to heteronormativity, but they too can have
normalizing effects, given their presence within a regime of normalization. They
may discipline those subjects who are constituted as lesbians to be the same as
each other in the way that, as Biddy Martin suggests, coming-out stories tend to
lead to the same “lesbian” ending, and they may produce lesbians who look much
the same as women of the dominant culture, who are, for example, dedicated to
nuclear family life, property ownership, and reproductive labor.29
As a complex of norms whose connection to each other produces normal-
ization, the regime of the normal can operate within counternormative social
movements as well as within dominant society. Lesbian in this sense can become
a specific regime of the normal embedded in the generalizing tendency of a regime
of power organized around normalization. This complexity can lead movements to
reiterate the very structure that they were established to contest (hence lesbians
who sleep only with men).30 The critique of identity politics has been geared pre-
cisely to resist the disciplinary aspects of normalization within social movement,
but resistance is not effective if it only pushes movement back toward the domi-
nant normativity. Nonetheless, the two forms of normalization of lesbian— normal-
ization that produces lesbians who are the same as each other and normalization
that produces them to resemble women of the dominant culture — do not neces-
sarily have the same effects. Lesbians may take up sets of practices similar to each
other but distinct from those of the dominant culture. Or the two forms of normal-
ization can become causatively linked: the force of the ways in which lesbians reit-
erate the dominant can also enforce lesbians as all the same. These distinctions
have important political effects, and whichever form of normalization is at work,
the norms that constitute lesbian are not tied to the dominant normativity in the
same way as the norms of heterosexuality. Something called “homonormativity”
cannot exist in the current regime of power, a crucial point made by Berlant and
Warner but missed when the critique of identity politics works as if lesbian alone
were the norm rather than one set of norms within a complex of power relations.31
The context—lesbians at a women’s college in a heteronormative society—is lost.
I suggest that where lesbian means sleeping only with men, relations have been
confused among the norm, particular norms (lesbian and women) that may or may
not be closely sutured to a dominant normativity, and the normal that is constitu-
tively so sutured. Social movements cannot successfully resist the forms of disci-

plinary power they face if they cannot analyze multiple, complexly interrelated,
and even contradictory norms.
Norms, Networks, and Queers
Opposition to the norm, rather than pointing us to this complex of norms, can pre-
sent the problem of being definitionally determined by what we would resist. The
need to avoid such a trap is motivated by the overdetermined and thus (un)neces-
sary limits set by the binary structure itself: one reason that homo is unable to
queer itself effectively is that it is defined by, even as it defines, hetero. As Susan
Gubar indicates in considering “the paradox of ‘it takes one to know one,’ ” if one’s
position is relationally defined over against the norm, one does not necessarily
move out of the definitional terms of the binary itself.32 Gubar is writing about
feminist politics, but her point clearly has reference to the politics of sexuality. If
social movements stick to the terms of a single binary — man-woman, hetero-
homo, even straight-queer —they have trouble actualizing relations among the var-
ious groups that are, in different ways, made deviant by the “mythical norm.”33
The problem in not realizing queer solidarity is not necessarily despecification but
the invocation of particular networks of relation by “the binary”— if those rela-
tions themselves are not queered.
In order not to be trapped in opposition to the norm, in order not simply to
supply the definitional labor that homo provides to hetero, we have to take up an
analysis that extends beyond definitional binaries to the network that forms the
normative and normalizing structures we face. Catherine Bell theorizes the func-
tioning of such a network, arguing that the complex interrelations of the binaries
are what allows it to provide a (common) sense of “a loosely knit and loosely
coherent totality.” Within such a network the binaries both line up — Bell uses the
examples of light-dark, good-evil, culture-nature, male-female — and don’t line
up.34 The oppositions are treated as homologies — light is to dark as good to evil,
culture to nature, and male to female—but there is also slippage among the terms,
so that they are not precisely homologous. However, this slippage, rather than
undermining the network, can actually reinforce it by providing a shifting site of
reference in the face of counterevidence. In the process of shifting among binaries,
claims are articulated with each other, but they can be defended on the grounds of
the single binary that makes the most sense in a given moment or argument.35 If
men show themselves to be not necessarily good, the terms can slip to the culture-
nature binary, and whatever “evil” men do — wars, for example — is then placed
in the context of the (necessary and) good production of culture. The slippage to


the culture-nature binary shifts the meaning of the good- evil binary so as to return
male to its homologous relation to good. Culture becomes a node that articulates
in two directions — to good and to male — and as such it also stabilizes the mean-
ing of good in relation to male. The possible incoherence sparked by empirical
counterexample is in this way averted. The network of binaries allows precisely for
the management of incoherencies. When one binary is challenged, threatened,
insufficient, problematic, or itself incoherent, it is possible to slip discursively to
another, thus protecting the network as a whole. The work of queering binaries
within such networks is so difficult precisely because it is their incoherence that
makes them effective.
Homophobic discourse is constituted through a similar set of incoheren-
cies, powerful because incoherent.36 Following Bell’s analysis, we could provide a
list of binaries that make up homophobic discourse: hetero-homo, moral-immoral,
natural-unnatural, civilized-animal. Here the incoherence is apparent because
homosexuality is both unnatural and animal. Nature is a potential site of destabi-
lization, since it too could mean animal, and yet the ties among the terms in the
list stabilize the natural through its connection to the moral as civilized rather than
as animal.
If all of the terms were completely homologous, then disabling one would
disable them all, whereas in its incoherent form the network is what I call a
“working alliance.” A working alliance sustains itself not through the similarity of
its constituent parts but through a series of nodes that function as culture does in
Bell’s example to connect otherwise dissimilar and even contradictory elements. It
does no good to intervene in a working alliance simply by pointing out some obvi-
ous incoherence. Statements like “Ronald Reagan is the president who is sup-
posed to have returned Christianity to government, but he himself never even went
to church” or “All the advocates of the Defense of Marriage Act have been married
multiple times” never work effectively.
Thinking about the network of norms that make up normativity in relation
to queer (as a verb) is important, because it can provide us with another way of
thinking about the conundrum of those arguments that so often get stuck on the
question of whether resistance is really going on or not. The proliferation of such
arguments, whose conclusion Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has summarized as “kinda
subversive, kinda hegemonic,” produces a distinction without a difference.37 The
question of possibility that I have posed about resistance need not, however, con-
cern specific acts, images, or texts but rather might address the processes and net-
works through which power works. The power of a working alliance, a network of
incoherent norms that work together, can explain how, even in the face of acts

sanctified as resistance, the world in which we live seems to be “self-correcting for

patriarchy.”38
The network implies not only that resistance to the norm can trap one
within mutually defining binaries but also that binary terms like homo and hetero
import a networked set of norms. In this network hetero can never be a singular
norm. These additional norms are precisely the ones you would expect — white,
male, middle-class, Christian— and the tightness of this network explains how in
homophobic discourses (like the gays-in-the-military debate) all the “homos”
turn out to look like the white guys on the other side: Sam Nunn, Ed Meese, Jesse
Helms. Given such networks, our task is not to pull out the “truly” resistant from
the “kinda” (subversive or not) but to shift, to queer, the network as a whole.
As an example of how a network of binaries can, if unchallenged, invoke a
complex set of relations, I turn to work I have been doing on the relationship in the
1950s between the constitution of “gay identity,” on the one hand, and those dis-
courses that posed the threat to “America” as the trinity of “godlessness, commu-
nism, and homosexuality,” on the other, a relationship that tied together modern
anti-Semitism and anticommunism with antihomosexual discourse. These dis-
courses remain crucial to the invocation of both “family values” and queer possi-
bility in the 1990s. In “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” a devastating
analysis of modern anti-Semitism, Moishe Postone demonstrates the specific way
in which the long-standing association of Jews with money has been articulated in
the modern period with the discourse of value under capitalism. Jews came to be
identified with, indeed to embody, “the abstract domination of capital, which —
particularly with rapid industrialization — caught people up in a web of dynamic
forces they could not understand, [which] became perceived as the domination of
International Jewry.”39 Yet that antimodern impulse did not necessarily produce a
critique of capitalism itself. Jews were also marked as the locus of the conspiracy
behind international socialism. Postone provides the example of a Nazi poster in
which a Jew pulls the strings of both a threatening capitalism and socialism.
Postone’s analysis is particularly useful in studying how a set of social rela-
tions of hate crystallized in the 1950s in relation to (1) certain continuations of
modern anti-Semitism, (2) the postwar development of “gay identity” as inter-
twined with new forms of “antihomosexual” discourse,40 and (3) an ongoing con-
testation and reinvention of white supremacy, in which, for instance, various forms
of white supremacist retrenchment were iconographically signified by the addition
of the Stars and Bars to some southern state flags. The American cold war dis-
course of the 1950s that connected “godlessness, communism, and homosexual-
ity” both as a description of the external evil opposed to the United States and as


the constituted threat of subversion from within was, to some extent, a continuation
of precisely the ideology that Postone depicts. The culture that the Nazis sought to
destroy in the Holocaust, he argues, was often designated as Eastern European
Judaism because significant parts of Eastern European Jewish culture were secu-
lar and socialist.41 Godlessness in the cold war formulation can work as a code
word for this type of secular Jewish socialism. Naming communism in relation to
godlessness, moreover, plays on the double nature of anti-Semitism in relation to
communism: godlessness can also name those Jews who are not thought to be com-
munists but who represent the international finance conspiracy. Adding homosex-
uality to this list in the postwar United States provided an embodied site for the
conspiracy theory. Here we see the reinvention of the long-standing association
of Jews and homosexuals. This association implies that the development of “gay
identity” as described in the 1950s occurred not only in relation to mobility,
urbanization, and freedom from the “family” as a unit of economic production, as
D’Emilio suggests it did, but also in relation to an antihomosexual discourse con-
nected to anti-Semitic (capitalist-communist) conspiracy theory.
The pairing of Jew and homosexual also places homosexuals in a particu-
lar location vis-à-vis the quintessentially American form of racism tied to white
supremacy. In this case, anti-Semitism and white supremacy function as different
forms of hate separated and projected onto different sites. This differentiated hate
provides white Christian society with both visible and invisible enemies. Two
oppositions that work differently, Christian-Jewish and black-white, are articu-
lated to materialize an opposition between Jews and blacks that connects Chris-
tianity and whiteness and then locates Christian whiteness at the center of the
network. African American Christianity and non-Christian whiteness are margin-
alized, but differently, so as to do different work in the network. The main work of
the invisible threat alluded to above is to posit a site of menacing power in excess
of any visible power relations in U.S. society.42 Because in the post-Holocaust
moment “homosexuals” occupied a position that could stand in for “Jews,” the
threat of homosexuality could also be paired with racial threat: “homosexuals”
could be opposed to African Americans as invisible and visible enemies. In such
a network the invocation of homosexuality can import a series of relations that
includes the assumption of whiteness.
Indeed, as Didi Herman points out, contemporary “queers” are assumed to
be white in the discourse of the Christian Right, and as I have argued elsewhere,
this assumption often carries over into movements opposed to the Right.43 In its
dependence on “(homo)sexual” identity, queer politics must be careful not to
import a set of assumptions from the same network. The effectiveness of this net-

work is what makes it so unlikely that “queer solidarity [will] decisively triumph”
or that the simple assertion of queer will actualize its promise of queering the
binary itself.44 Subverting the network is the challenge faced by those who would
claim queer in order to make available under its sign forms of solidarity that would
be barred by an identity category.
Queer Activity
Thinking about the way we do queer, about queer as a verb, as action within such
networks of norms, helps us meet this challenge. Yet to name queer as an action
implicates us in the search for moral and political agency that resistance is sup-
posed to name. The traditional narratives of agency are now often eschewed in the
face of Foucauldian critique, but continuing commitments to political engagement
have made agency a site for both critical activity and anxiety.45 Resistance is often
appealed to as if it had solved the problem of articulating political action while
allowing us to avoid implication in the problematic narratives of agency, but the
complexity of the activities named by resistance is only beginning to be explored.
Butler, who has worked to reconceptualize agency in the context of power rela-
tions, argues that instituting any norm also institutes within the subject of power
an ambivalence that induces both the iteration of the norm and resistance to it.
This ambivalence therefore can become the site for agency, for iterating the norm
differently.46
Analyzing and acting in relation to the network of power that is normativ-
ity open two new possibilities for understanding and enacting the agency so
longed for in much critical theory. First, the network of power relations that forms
a given normativity implies that agency can be constituted not just from different
iterations of the norm and the ambivalence within the subject but also from vari-
ous norms played off against each other within the network. The incoherence
within the network can be played differently so as to shift the relations that make
up the network itself.47 Second, just as making different connections to articulate
various norms differently enables action, so also does making alliances among
those differently positioned in relation to the norms that make up a normativity.
Such a shift decenters the norm-deviant relation by making alliances that focus on
relations among various “deviants.” Thus the move to solidarity, rather than sim-
ply opposing or even resisting the norm, also shifts the network of power relations.
Here the subject of agency is a network of connections and contestations.48
In thinking through the possibilities of playing multiple norms off each
other, I am deeply indebted to a panel on Jewish performativity at the 1997 Amer-


ican Studies Association meeting that included Carol Batker, Jill Dolan, Stacy
Wolf, and my religious studies colleagues Laura Levitt and Ann Pellegrini. In a
complicated reading of Barbra Streisand’s queer performances, Wolf argues that
Streisand queers norms of voice, body, and action. Wolf’s analysis provides a use-
ful example of the move from noun to verb by reading Streisand’s Jewishness not
in her identity but in a varied set of embodied activities. The crucial point is that
to move from being to doing is not to leave the body but to do things in, on, with —
even constitutive of — the body; it is to be implicated in the complications of
embodiment. Wolf reads the paradigmatic marker of Streisand’s Jewishness, her
nose, not simply as a physical characteristic but as an action—a refusal, in fact, to
get it “fixed.” In other words, Streisand’s enactment of her body is a mode of resis-
tance to normativity and its contemporary normalizing power. Within the impera-
tives of normalization one would, if one had the means, fix one’s nose as a matter of
course to become more like the “mythical norm.” Interestingly, Streisand’s refusal,
and the difference that embodies it, works to her advantage in relation to market
norms. It does not queer her marketability but is instead part of her star quality.
“Difference as charisma,” Wolf says. This complication is crucial, and thus Wolf
writes that “it’s impossible to identify with Streisand’s body. Hers is not a face that
makes an un-bobbed nose take heart.” This claim follows Wolf’s expression of her
own desires to be “not a JAP, not a mother — but a star.” Certain of Streisand’s
queer resistances to the mythical norm, because of their complex relation to other
norms (like star quality), are not available to anyone or everyone.49
It is the complicated relationship between queer and Jew as intertwined
sites of resistance that Wolf pursues. The queer possibilities of Streisand’s perfor-
mance of Jewishness depend in part on the historical twinning of Jews and homo-
sexuals, a twinning that is not precisely homology. As noted above, the point of the
twinning within anti-Semitic and antihomosexual discourses is to avoid the failure
of one, when it threatens, by slipping to the other; hence the network’s effective-
ness. But twinning also sets up important possibilities for resistance. Jewish and
homosexual are not precisely like each other — twins are, after all, different peo-
ple — but they may work together, as Streisand’s popularity within a queerly
inflected homosexual culture suggests. Depending on how it is played, twinning
may either reinforce the dominant network or undergird an alliance that chal-
lenges it.
Because of these complexities, Wolf pursues the queer-Jew relation mainly
through the interrogative. For example, in her examination of Funny Girl, which is
not so much about Fanny Brice as about Streisand playing Fanny Brice, Wolf
makes the following observation concerning the norms of “womanhood”: “As she

[Streisand/Fanny] becomes what a ‘woman’ should be — a star, married, moneyed

—the film reiterates how Fanny is not like other women. Is this difference queer?”
“For me,” Wolf continues, “Barbra-as-Fanny becomes, in the words of musicologist
Elizabeth Wood, ‘a destabilizing agent of fantasy and desire.’ ” Then she asks:
“What’s Jewish about this? What’s queer about this? What is queer about Streisand’s
Jewishness?” The questions imply that Jewishness can queer certain dominant
norms like woman (and its presumption of both hetero- and Christian normativity).
Yet later Wolf argues that the way Streisand does Jewishness might also queer dom-
inant representations of Jewish women: “After World War II, images of the Jewish
mother appeared, and then around 1960, images of the Jewish American Princess
proliferated. Streisand’s performance in Funny Girl relies on and troubles (queers?)
these representations.” Once again queers is placed in the interrogative. At this
moment Wolf shifts from adjectival forms in “What’s Jewish about this? What’s
queer about this?” (emphasis added) to the verb form: Streisand “queers?” domi-
nant representations. Further, she suggests that this action — to queer?— both
“relies on and troubles” the norm. The network of norms is both empowering and
constraining, and Streisand’s ability to trouble some norms—Christian, American,
woman—is enabled, in part, by her reliance on others, for example, marketability.
The panel discussion following Wolf’s presentation revolved around two
potential (and intertwined) relations to the norm — assimilation and excessiveness
— and how they are done. While Jewish assimilation to dominant norms of Amer-
icanness obviously recenters and attempts to enact the norm, such assimilative
iterations remain troubled by excessiveness, which, as Streisand shows, can be
accentuated in various ways. It can be performed so as to enact Jewishness and
thus foreground the “trouble” for the norms that connect Christian and America.
Now this excessiveness is not, as Levitt so often points out, unambivalent: it can
not only make trouble but get you in trouble.50 It is not without its own dangers,
but it does provide another means of acting in relation to American Christian nor-
mativity. Because Streisand simultaneously queers norms of Christian American-
ness and womanhood, she also fails properly to enact the norms of the effectively
minoritized identity “Jewish woman.” In this instance she provides a means of
acting that is not simply the relational doubling of inside-out, center-margin, or
norm-deviant.51
To queer is both to do differently and to make a particular set of relations
that are different from the binary oppositions defined by the norm. In the Streisand
example, queering works most effectively when it troubles multiple norms at once,
when it addresses a network of dominant norms. Network shifts that alter power
relations are enabled by creating relations, or making alliances, that connect dif-


ferent iterations of these norms. Thus Streisand queers in part by refusing both the
norms of Christian embodiment and those of proper womanhood.
Simultaneous resistance to multiple norms also admits connections or
alliances among persons or movements that might not be available if the norms
were played differently. The twinning of Jew and homosexual might not produce a
queer alliance, but depending on how the connection is played out, it might pro-
vide the site for queering both anti-Semitic and antihomosexual discourses. Henry
Abelove, who first suggested to me that “queer is as queer does,” has argued that
queer is a politically useful sign because it is a possible site of alliance among per-
sons who might not otherwise recognize themselves as allies. Abelove bases his
claim on a historical reading of a set of 1950s alliances, thinking particularly of
Frank O’Hara and Paul Goodman.52 This type of relational positioning is a form of
“troubling” a variety of norms. Forging connections between those who are vari-
ously marginalized makes it difficult to enforce both the norm and its essentialized
opposite. Such actions are both hard to accomplish and not unambivalent.53 Like
excessiveness in the Streisand example, they can also get you in trouble.
To establish such a relational positioning — queer because of the “differ-
ent” kinds of relationships it enables — is a complicated task. To intervene in the
network of relations invoked by any binary difference, we cannot line up terms in
never-ending lists — gender, race, class, sexuality — but must instead consider
their interrelational complexity in the hope of establishing a different type of net-
work. The move to complexity also shifts (queers?) the prevailing terms of social
movements in the United States. For example, to enact a feminist movement
through the sign queer decenters gender or, more precisely, the male-female
binary, as the definitional feminist term. This decentering move may be important
for “homosexual women” and for “women” for whom the male-female binary may
not be the primary axis of gender self-organization — who may, for example, per-
ceive their gender to be lesbian and their sexuality to be queer or homosexual.54
But it is important not just for “homosexuals,” for, as Aihwa Ong points out, the
focus on the male-female binary in U.S. feminist movements can also disable
alliances with international feminist movements.55 Gender-identificatory practices
that decenter the male-female binary are often themselves responses to “trouble,”
for example, the violence faced by gender deviants on the street and the constitu-
tive violences enacted in, through, and as the institution of sexual difference. It is
important to remember, however, that to decenter gender is not to remove it from
feminist movements; it is not to make feminist movements somehow not about
women and what they do but to make gender nondefinitional, nondelimiting, to
make gender and feminist not coextensive terms.

To use (and enact) queer in this way also decenters the hetero-homo binary,
running the danger that Halperin points to of losing sexual specificity. But, as with
feminist and gender, to make queer and sexuality not coextensive is not to remove
(homo)sexuality from queer movements. Nor is it to “dequeer” homosexual poli-
tics (despite the fact that lesbian and gay politics, particularly in its “mainstream-
ing” form, sometimes wants to dequeer homosexuality). In a heteronormative con-
text homosex remains a central site for queer activity’s potential, which may or may
not be actualized. Here the complicated relation between queer as a verb and the
various other terms (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of sexuality and gender politics
becomes important. The terms that have been produced or reclaimed through
social movements, and thus are so hard won — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
homosexual, butch, fem, sissy, feminist, womanist, mujerista, transsexual, sadist,
masochist, masturbator—have work to do. Part of the purpose of formulating queer
as a particular kind of verb is to leave space open for it in relation to these other
terms, so that it is not their replacement in some kind of progress narrative. I do
not think that the verb can fully replace the nouns and adjectives of identification
and positioning. Action and identity continue to inform each other, and different
identities work and can be queered in different ways. To queer, we must, as Wolf
points out, both rely on and trouble norms. Moreover, there are good reasons to
reverse the hetero-homo binary and claim the position of homosexuality, particu-
larly when to do so is to claim a specific position in relation to antihomosexual dis-
courses and the network of relations that they depend on and constitute. Claiming
homosexuality in relation to “godlessness, communism, and homosexuality” can
be to enact a queer alliance between homosexual and Jew and thus to open possi-
bilities for a number of relationships: Jewish homosexual, homosexual Jewishness,
homosexuals and Jews . . .
Open Endings
What does it mean to write “queer” and “resistance” as dependent on how we

play with complexity? Can we articulate the complications of embodiment so as to
actualize new possibilities for bodies and pleasures, or will such complications
continue to work against us? The question of whether we can disarticulate norms
from a normativity structured by normalization remains open.


Notes
I would like to thank Henry Abelove, Christina Crosby, and Ann Pellegrini for their
readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank my copanelists,
Daniel Boyarin and Ann Pellegrini, at the session “Foucault, Spiritual Exercise, and
Practices of the Self: Responses to David M. Halperin’s Saint Foucault,” at the 1997
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Francisco, and David M.
Halperin for his gracious response to our papers.
1. Janet R. Jakobsen, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Fem-
inist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
2. On the problems concerning the production of the “lesbian” ending to coming-out sto-
ries see, e.g., Biddy Martin, “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s],” in
Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77–103.
3. Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social The-
ory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi;
David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 66.
4. Judith Butler makes this point with regard to kinship in “Against Proper Objects,” dif-
ferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 14.
5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Inter-
pretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988), 272. The conversation to which Spivak refers appears as “Intel-
lectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1977), 205 –17.
6. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, “Why the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, But What
We Can Learn from It Anyway,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), 344–51.
7. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hur-
ley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 159.
8. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, quoted and translated in Susan Buck-Morss,
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1989), 79.
9. See Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual
Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).
10. Foucault used the category of “dangers” to indicate his skepticism that any action is
wholly good or wholly bad. Any action runs dangers, some more pressing than others.
This category allows one to evoke the polyvalent and context-determined nature of any
action without abandoning judgment. Thus for Foucault (who is particularly concerned

with dominations) the primary moral task is to determine “which is the main danger”
and resist it: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,
which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have
something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic
activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to deter-
mine which is the main danger” (“On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work
in Progress,” in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 343).
11. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993); and Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
12. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 64–66.
13. Elizabeth Grosz makes a similar claim in “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer
Subjectivity,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994),
133–57. Grosz, however, makes the following claim about the relation between being
and doing with regard to oppression: “I would argue that all . . . forms of oppression
[other than that based on homosexuality] are based primarily on what a person is,
quite independently of what they do. Or rather, what they do is inflected and read
through who they are. . . . In the case of homosexuals, I believe that it is less a matter
of who they are than what they do [that] is considered offensive” (150). I argue below,
however, that there are good reasons to read various forms of oppression and resis-
tance, including anti-Semitism and Jewishness (Grosz’s example), as based on what
people do. One of the shifts realized by National Socialist anti-Semitism was to enforce
Judaism as an aspect of what people were rather than of what they did, so that many
persons who did not recognize themselves as Jews—who did not enact Jewishness—
became Jews. Similarly, much public contestation in the United States concerns the
question of whether homosexuality should be read as an aspect of what people are or
of what they do. This caveat points to the complexities of the relation between being
and doing that cannot be resolved a priori for any particular case.
14. Here I am indebted to the students in my Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies
550a course, “Queer Theories,” particularly Karen Wyndham, and to their reading of
Saint Foucault.
15. On the dangers of “radical anti-normativity” see Biddy Martin, “Extraordinary Homo-
sexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 6, nos. 2 – 3 (1994): 100 –125; on the distinction that “to be against hetero-
normativity is not to be against norms” see the response by Lauren Berlant and
Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 357.
16. For more on the definition of norms and the relation between norms and values see
Jakobsen, Working Alliances, 15 –19.
17. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1–2.
18. Mary Poovey, “(International Prohibition on) Sex in America,” Critical Inquiry 24
(1998): 366 –92.

19. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 357.

20. As Berlant and Warner note, “Heterosexuality involves so many practices that are not
sex that a world in which this hegemonic cluster would not be dominant is unimagin-
able” (“Sex in Public,” 357).
21. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986).
22. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 69.
23. Michel Foucault, preface to The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality,
quoted in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 333; Foucault, “On the Genealogy of
Ethics,” 351.
24. Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Inter-
views and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheri-
dan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47–53.
25. E.g., Foucault states quite clearly that he wishes not to create a history of “solutions”
but to trace a genealogy of problems (“On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 343). In formu-
lating his understanding of a particular “problem” for the Greeks, however, he slips in
a “we”: “What I want to ask is: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their plea-
sures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other? Is the plea-
sure of the other something that can be integrated in our pleasure, without reference
either to law, to marriage, to I don’t know what?” (346).
26. Ibid., 357. This regime of power is dominating in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault’s
definition of domination (in contradistinction to typical definitions based on the “ille-
gitimate” use of power) turns not on the absence of hierarchy but on the restriction of
opportunities for reversal or movement in a given power relation. His example is “the
traditional conjugal relationship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”: “We
cannot say that there was only male power; the woman herself could do a lot of things:
be unfaithful to him, extract money from him, refuse him sexually. She was, however,
subject to a state of domination, in the measure where [i.e., to the extent that] all [of]
that was finally no more than a certain number of tricks which never brought about a
reversal of the situation” (“The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,”
interview by Paul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Müller,
trans. J. D. Gauthier, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Ras-
mussen [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987], 12). It is clear that women and slaves
in ancient Greece also lacked options for bringing about a fundamental “reversal of
the situation.”
27. Foucault offers an alternative reading of Kant in “What Is Enlightenment?” (Rabinow,
The Foucault Reader, 32 – 50), and Ian Hacking suggests that overall Foucault takes
seriously the spirit if not the letter of Kant’s texts (“The Archaeology of Foucault,” in
Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986],
27– 40). However, the increase in and intensification of bureaucratic institutions,
described by Jürgen Habermas as “colonization of the lifeworld,” sets limits on the

possibilities of enacting this spirit or attitude (“Taking Aim at the Heart of the Pres-
ent,” in Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, 103 – 8 [response to “What Is Enlighten-
ment?”]; and The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols.
[Boston: Beacon, 1984– 87]).
28. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
29. Martin, “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s]”; for more on the com-
plexity of norms of femininity see Martin, “Sexualities without Genders and Other
Queer Utopias,” in Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 93.
30. On the problem of social movements that reproduce the conditions they set out to con-
test see Jakobsen, “(Re)producing the Same: Autonomy, Alliance, and Women’s Move-
ments,” chap. 2 of Working Alliances.
31. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 548 n. 2.
32. Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes
One to Know One,’ ” in Feminism beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 133–54.
33. Audre Lorde talks about a “mythical norm” to remind us that no one fully embodies it;
further, the denial required to maintain the “mythical” belief on the part of some peo-
ple that they do embody the norm is what costs the rest of us so much (“Age, Race,
Sex, and Class: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches [ Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing, 1984], 116).
34. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 106, 104.
35. Here Bell makes a Bourdieuian point. In the first seven pages of Distinction, for exam-
ple, Pierre Bourdieu offers the following set of binaries: sacred-profane, beautiful-
ugly, tasteful-vulgar, quality-quantity, form-substance, liberty-necessity, upper-class–
lower-class (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984]).
36. On the incoherence of homophobic discourse see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemol-
ogy of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
37. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,”
GLQ 1 (1993): 15. See also Ann Pellegrini, “Building Bodies: Transgressive Perfor-
mances in Religion,” panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion Annual
Meeting, San Francisco, 1997.
38. Karen Anderson, pers. com., 1997.
39. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reac-
tion to ‘Holocaust,’” New German Critique 19 (1980): 107.
40. This development has been traced by Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The His-
tory of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume, 1990); Leisa D.
Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps during

World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and John D’Emilio,
“Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann
Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1983), 100–113.
41. See Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America,” in Dreams of an
Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes (Portland, Ore.: Eighth
Mountain, 1990), 143–66.
42. We see this phenomenon in Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent
from the decision on Colorado’s Amendment 2 in which the “fact” that “gays” were a
“small minority” yet had the political ability to establish antidiscrimination policies in
some localities—hardly an earthshaking development—showed that they held “inor-
dinate power,” which the state of Colorado was justified in legally restricting for the
sake of all. A similar dynamic is at work in discussions of race in affirmative action
hiring policies when changes in labor market segregation that are small relative to the
structure of the labor market as a whole are considered to have “solved the problem”
of race or even to have gone “too far” the other way.
43. Didi Herman, The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jakobsen, “Working the Public: Social
Change in Diverse Public Spheres,” chap. 4 of Working Alliances.
44. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 64.
45. See, e.g., Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory
and Practice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
46. See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1–30.
47. For more on agency as a play on norms see Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual:
Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
48. For a more extensive explanation of the relation between alliances and agency see
Jakobsen, Working Alliances, 19 –22.
49. Wolf’s analysis appears in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin,
Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, forth-
coming).
50. See Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
51. One obvious point of twinning here is “camp,” both Jewish and queer, as Pellegrini
indicated on the American Studies Association panel. The term camp, with its clear
references, in a Jewish context, to sometimes horrific types of camps, was also prob-
lematized by Levitt in her remarks. On “inside-out” see Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991).
52. Henry Abelove, pers. com., May 1997. For a brief rendition of his reading of Frank
O’Hara see Abelove, “The Queering of Lesbian/Gay History,” Radical History Review
62 (1995): 55.

53. In fact, certain forms of ambivalence may enable the production of such relationships.
See Kobena Mercer’s use of ambivalence in rereading the Robert Mapplethorpe series
of black nude photographs in “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the
Homoerotic Imaginary,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-
Choices (Seattle: Bay, 1991), 169 – 210; see also Janet R. Jakobsen, “Agency and
Alliance in Public Discourses about Sexualities,” Hypatia 10 (1995): 133–54.
54. Miranda Joseph, pers. com., May 1996.
55. Aihwa Ong, “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in
Non-Western Societies,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 79 –93.

Queer Is? Queer Does?: Normativity and The Problem of Resistance

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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

QUEER IS? QUEER DOES?

The invocation of queer in these papers marked a site of alternative possibility in

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NORMATIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF RESISTANCE 513

I mentioned to a friend and colleague recently that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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514 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Even when Foucault provides examples of alternative possibilities, historical

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promotes the misleading notion that a queer solidarity has decisively

Despite all its present political liabilities, however, “queer” can

Halperin’s claim on behalf of queer possibility can be most fully realized if

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apparatuses, technologies of government, organized around “statistically imagined

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activity, dissymmetry, and nonreciprocity.”26 Thus Foucault’s cautionary state-

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Norms, Networks, and Queers

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sanctified as resistance, the world in which we live seems to be “self-correcting for

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[Streisand/Fanny] becomes what a ‘woman’ should be — a star, married, moneyed

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What does it mean to write “queer” and “resistance” as dependent on how we

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19. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 357.

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