QUEER MOVE/MENTS

Marie-Hélène Bourcier

La Découverte | Mouvements

2002/2 - No 20
pages 37-43

ISSN 1291-6412

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Marie-Hélène Bourcier, « Queer Move/ments »,

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Mouvements, 2002/2 No 20, p. 37-43.
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Translated from the French by JPD Systems

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Marie-Hélène Bourcier "Queer Move/ments",
Mouvements, 2002/2 No 20, p. 37-43. DOI : 10.3917/mouv.020.0037
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 Queer Move/ments

Queer thought has experienced significant turmoil for several M ARIE -H ÉLÈNE
years, bringing theoretical contradictions to materialist feminism B OURCIER *
as well as a replacement of practical positions. Conceived as a
toolbox intended to open new spaces beyond the frontal impact
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made to gender, queer thought can seem artificial through

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its obsession with the performance and the staging of bodies
and actions. However, the controlled science of excess that
queer reveals should not mask the significance of its proposals
concerning identity politics and capacities for subversion that
the manipulation of “difference” contains. Marie-Hélène Bourcier
proposes a manifesto to us here for a post-identity strategy.

“J
udith Butler is completely crazy, don’t you think?” a “great” * Auteure de Queer
Zone, Balland, 2001.
French editor was saying to me the other day. After having
dreamed very briefly of translating the author of Gender Trouble, 1. De Lauretis. T.
Technologies of
he had decreed her intellectually and editorially incorrect. We live in a Gender, Essays on
decidedly reluctant country in matters of sexual politics: having just gone Theory, Film and
through feminism that, at best, pleads for its survival and which has com- Fiction. Bloomington
& Indianapolis, IN:
pletely avoided its reflective and critical phase, at least at the moment. . . Indiana University Press,
Our borders are locked up. We do not translate the reference texts that 1987.
deal with feminism, post-feminism, queer theory or postcolonial theories, 2. Segdwick, E.K.
whereas they are read in Spain, in Germany, in Italy or in Mexico. Epistemology of the
This lack of circulation of knowledge deprives us of many other Closet. Berkeley, CA:
University of California
women theorists and practitioners of queer theory: Teresa de Lauretis 1, Press, 1990.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 2, Gayle Rubin 3, Judith Halberstam 4. It partially 3. Rubin, G. “Thinking
explains the definitional pressure that continues to trigger “the queer” in Sex: Notes for a Radical
France. Ze queer. The substantialist wording could pass as an ontologi- Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality.” In Pleasure
cal joke with the followers of queer theory since they have tried so hard and Danger: Exploring
to wage war with essences and naturalized identities. For after all, this is Female Sexuality edited
the heart of the queer theory-politics-movement: a hypercritical relation- by C.S. Vance, New
York: Routledge, 1982.
ship to identity and identity politics, be they homo/heterosexual, national,
related to gender, class, race, and including the intersection of identity 4. Halberstam, J. Female
Masculinity. Durham,
traits. With a pointed awareness of identity possibilities (considering that NC: Duke University
they are exploited on a daily basis in businesses, in the army, in show Press,1998.

•I
 Queer Move/ments

business, on television – neither Star Academy nor It’s My Choice will

prove the contrary to us – and in the bedroom. . .), which opens up onto
a way of making theory and politics that do not fit into a scenario of rev-
olutionary Marxist inspiration (with the oppression/revolution/abolition/
eradication sequence) but, more modestly and less summatively, into a
logic of micropolitical resistance that borrows from resignification, desig-
nification, proliferation, reappropriation (of genders, for example, but not
of them only), like so many ways that make use of identity resources in
a post-identity way.
To understand better how we got here, theoretically and politically, in
the United States as in France, I would just like to outline a quick geneal-
ogy of queer theories and movement, as a series of Queer Move/ments,
successive uncouplings in relation to certain sexual policies, certain (sex-
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ual) identities often worth being political subjects and that have become

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hegemonic. May those who see Franglais whom this bothers monumen-
tally please forgive my writing of Queer MOVE/ments; by closing their
eyes, the phonetics will give them back a Frenchness to which it does not
seem relevant to allude in transnational sexual politics and referential traf-
fic. And since the term “movement” is likely to summon the theory/move-
ment binarism, I also use MOVE to confuse them.

•Beyond
Queer Queens
the differences of approach and problematics that separate
them, the American women queer theorists of the nineties all have in com-
mon problematizing identity by feasting on French poststructural theories,
and most particularly on Foucault. It would perhaps be more appropri-
ate to say that these feminists and postfeminists, of whom a great major-
ity are lesbian or who claim to have hetero-staggered identities – as is the
case with Sedgwick – have succeeded in diverting the Foucauldian prob-
lematization of identity. This was indeed necessary given the resolutely
mono-gendered options of the author of The Will to Knowledge. Foucault
was hardly interested in femininity, in lesbians or in heterosexuality as a
bio-political system. But he came just at the right time to boost a radical
constructivism that emphasized the constructed and discursive character
of homosexuality and heterosexuality, sexual identities as we know them,
as they are produced by the modern era. A little doxography in a rush.
5. De Lauretis, T. De Lauretis 5, for example, used Foucault to redefine “the construction
Technologies of of gender as being at the same time the product and the process of rep-
Gender. . ., Chapter 1. resentation and self-representation” 6 and took advantage of it to regroup
6. De Lauretis, T. under the semi-Foucauldian inspired denomination “gender technology”
Technologies of all languages and all social and cultural representations that produce gen-
Gender. . ., 9.
ders. For de Lauretis, and too bad for heteronormative orthodox psy-
choanalysis, gender is not derived from sexual difference either. It is a
7. Butler, J. Gender varied ensemble of effects that produce behaviors and social relation-
Trouble, Feminism
and the Subversion of
ships in bodies and that feed institutionalized discourses, critical, episte-
Identity. London, New mological and daily practices as well as cinema. According to Butler, the
York: Routledge, 1990. reconceptualization of our sex/gender system 7 begins with the criticism

II •
 Queer Move/ments

of the category of sex utilized by Foucault. In the same way that, as Fou-
cault tells us 8, sex and sexuality are not the expression of an inner self, 8. Foucault, M. The Will
to Knowledge. Paris:
gender, Butler tells us, is not the expression of sex. The discourses that Gallimard, 1972.
feed the truth of sex position sex as the cause of urges or desire even
though it is an effect of these discourses. The discourses on gender posi-
tion them as being caused by sex (read: biological), as if sex and gender
maintained an expressive or descriptive relationship (the masculine gen-
der would naturally express the masculine biological sex), even though
gender identity is the result of an effect of regulated repetition of gender
performance codes.
For Sedgwick 9 and Rubin 10, the detour through Foucault leads rather to 9. Sedgwick,
relativizing the theoretical usage of the category of gender that they both Epistemology of the
deem insufficient to take sexualities into account, in particular alternative Closet.
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sexual practices, S&M for Rubin. It would take too long to go back into 10. Rubin, G. “Thinking

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detail about these processes, but let us say that they are at the same time Sex. . .”, art. cit.
representative of the conceptual and political uncouplings carried out by
the first-wave women of queer theory (that I will call queer queens and
of which Rubin and Sedgwick are a part) and those who engage in queer
politics while still including a seed of criticism that will prove decisive
for the second-wave queer theory women (the queer kings), the second
wave being related to the omission of sexuality.

•The
Queer move/ments
first major uncoupling: the one that consists of deconstructing het-
erosexual identity, the way in which heterosexual identity produces its
deviant other, homosexuality, and the normative sex/gender system that
is connected to it. This translates, in particular, into a serious challenge of
sexual difference and its guardian discourse, psychoanalysis, as well as
straight (heterocentric) thought in general. The second uncoupling is the
one that no longer does away with sexuality, sexual practices and sexual
subcultures deemed different or perverse in analysis and politics. These
two queer move/ments suggest another movement that is no less funda-
mental and that is found in our queer queens: the moment when femi-
nism is toppled towards post-feminism or queer feminism. A good part
of Technologies of Gender as well as Gender Trouble consists of a criti-
cal analysis of the feminism of the eighties and the identity of “woman”
that it promoted at the same time as ideal and as a subject of politics. The
questioning is far from concerning only the essentialist feminists of the
second American wave and often proves to be pertinent for French femi-
nism in its various components: the psychoanalytico-essentialist feminine
feminism of Psych et Po as well as the materialist lesbianism of Marxist
inspiration, or even radical French lesbianism that, curiously, remained
adhered to the paradigm of woman (except for Monique Wittig 11). What 11. Wittig, M. The
about a feminism that posed as a point of departure for the emancipation Straight Mind and Other
Essays. Boston, MA:
of the sexualized body according to sexual difference? Did it not favor
Beacon Press,1992 (La
the renaturalization of the feminine body and femininity instead of mak- Pensée Straight. Balland,
ing it into an object of criticism, deconstruction, de-identification with 2001).

• III
 Queer Move/ments

“woman”? What about a feminism with universalizing claims that is quick

to export the model of oppression to fight against “universal patriarchy”?
What about a feminism that, because it was founded on the pseudo unity
and purity of “woman” as a subject, obliterated the differences of class
and race as well as their interaction and generated exclusions, in particu-
lar with respect to lesbians and then transsexuals (Friedan in the United
States, Beauvoir and all the trends of French feminism that claimed to
adhere to the author of the Second Sex, and that, even when they were
led by lesbians – to the closet, admittedly – confined the lesbians of the
“Movement” to a sexual role and forbade them visibility and the formu-
lation of a lesbian politic)? In fact, if the identity of “woman” refers to a
unified, stable, coherent subject, the risk is that this identity will become
synonymous with regulation and reification of gender relations as part
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of the heterosexual matrix. The feminism that counts on this identity of

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woman at the same time as a subject and as a horizon for politics is nat-
uralizing, summative and eventually exclusive. This is apart from the fact
that it often gets missed alongside the deconstruction of masculinity, that
it packs into the transhistoric and transnational reality of patriarchy, in
“favor” of a victimizing presentation of women. From the original premise
that its purpose was to commence a continuity amongst women, the iden-
tity of “woman” became a cultural fiction, the normative effects of which
were countered by queer politics.
This fundamental uncoupling in relation to a certain feminism already
allows us to catch a glimpse of how the queer move/ments constitute a
reaction in relation to the hegemonic, reductive and naturalizing potential
of identity politics (which I will call back into focus and of which I will
give a few examples, so that it is not an Anglo-Saxon special feature. . .
Heterosexual identity politics are thriving in France, thank you. Quite
simply, it is not marked, it does not need to make itself noticed in order
to exist as a natural norm. Regarding the politics of gay identity – funda-
mentally integrationist – stamped as “communitarian” to incite fear by Le
Figaro, it is making gains in economic and political arrogance).
If queer post-feminism is a critical return to the politics of woman’s
12. Anzaldua, G. “To(o) identity promoted by an often essentialist and white feminism, it is pre-
Queer the Writer: Loca, cisely because it has had to take into account the development of postco-
Escrita y chicana.” In
Versions: Writings by lonial criticism and the demands of women and lesbians of color 12. But
Dykes, Queers and the queer movement is also a reaction to the rise in power of assimilation-
Lesbians, edited by ist gay politics. These politics appeared in the United States in the nine-
B. Betsy Warland.
Vancouver Press Gang, ties through the development of gay political and economic enclaves that
1991. produced compartmentalization according to class and race in “the com-
munity”: the predominance of Whites and middle classes modeled on the
13. Differences. A
Journal of Feminist neighborhoods of the Mission in San Francisco and the Village in New
Cultural Studies, “Queer York. The identities that were more queer than homosexual or gay were
Theory, Lesbian and relegated to the margins. It was probably not by chance that the term
Gay Sexualities,” Brown
University Press, vol. 3, queer made one of its first appearances in 1991 on a cover of the femi-
summer 1991. nist culturalist journal Differences 13. Teresa de Lauretis, who supervised
this edition, did not fail to specify in her introduction that the presence of

IV •
 Queer Move/ments

the quote queer theory beside the title lesbian and gay sexualities was a
way to remove the branding from the slogan “lesbian and gay,” that had 14. The reaction
become a generator of silence for lesbians from the time that it meant gay towards heterocentric
feminism and the
only on. This fourth uncoupling was thus done in relation to gay identity reappropriation of the
politics, which had itself become hegemonic, normative and exclusive. texts of Monique Wittig
The initiatives of queer groups that have risen in France since 1996 are in relation to criticism
of heterosexuality
located in this ambivalence in relation to identity 14, by demanding that as a political regime
identity politics also be politics of differences and resistance to norms 15. and lesbian politics
Post-identitarian identitarians, often convinced of the productive con- versus feminine politics
occupied a good
structability/deconstructability of identities (sexual identities and gender number of the seminars
identities), these “gays” and these “lesbians” are no longer straight and of the Le Zoo queer
do not want to become straight after more than forty years of post-Stone- association in 1999.
It also materialized
wall culture. But they criticize the limitations and the infradiscrimina-
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because of the
tions that post-Stonewall culture produced as well as the identitarian and translation into French
of Wittig’s political texts

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political freezing that it secretes 16. It is in this perspective that we must
as well as the holding
interpret the spectacular creation in 1999 of a collaboration parody like of a colloquium in her
Homosexuality and Bourgeoisie by Madame H., and in which meetings presence at Columbia
are as much performances and lessons on upkeep that tell a lot about University in Paris
in June 2001. The
class discrimination and the gauging of bodies in effect in dominant gay publication of the acts
culture. A task force like the very recent Gloss (Group of Organically Sex- from the colloquium is
ual and Subversive Queers) (G.roupement de L.opettes O.rganiquement scheduled for Spring
2002 in the Éditions
S.exuelles et S.ubversives), established in 2001 cut off the homophobia of Gaies et Lesbiennes.
the Egyptian government and French colonial culture by blocking off the
15. This is the case
gallery of Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre and staging people dressed
for example for the
as Egyptians who danced to the music of Dalida who distributed pam- Zoo and the Queer
phlets denouncing the condemnation of Egyptian gay male bottoms to Factory group, founded,
respectively, in 1996
cultural tourists. But Gloss cut off the institutionalization of gay iden-
and 2001.
tity also by “glossing” ACT UP on December 1st, and the gay magazine
Têtu for the heterocentrism of its pornographic culture, given the way 16. The emergence
of claims of butch/
in which the magazine, in its December 2001 edition, deemed a bottom femme identities
porno actor unworthy of appearing in its ideal video library because he in French lesbian
wasn’t hard when he was getting topped superbly. Transversely, with or culture is a step in this
direction. This was
without the Egyptian performance, Gloss clearly meant a resistance to expressed in particular
the production of sexual identities and normative genders, in particular by the publication of
in relation to gay male homosexuality that suppresses dissonant gender a collection of texts in
2001: C. Lemoine and
identities by promoting a masculinist, anti-feminist and lesbophobic cul- I. Renard, Attractions,
ture, which can only be distinguished from heterosexual homoerotic cul- Femme Lesbians, Butch
ture through its sexual practices. The cross-sectional groups that met as Lesbians (Attirances,
Lesbiennes Fems/
a coalition of minorities to oppose, for example, the Documentation Cen- Lesbiennes Butch),
ter and Gay Archives’ project filed in the city of Paris and approved by Éditions Gaies et
Lesbian & Gay Pride (that still hasn’t managed to call itself LGBT [lesbian- Lesbiennes.
gay-bi-trans] pride) 17, took part with the same determination in block-
17. The last news
ing non-lesbian, non-transgendered gay identity politics, in this case by from January 2002
developing a knowledge policy that imagined a non-administrative, non- was that this was
exclusive vision of the archives and taking into account the advances of accomplished. . .but it
took time.
non straight historiography. It must be admitted that the committee in
charge did not integrate any lesbian historian or activist into its team, not

•V
 Queer Move/ments

a single transsexual – it went without saying – and displayed a very long

list of some forty sponsors decorated with four women.
History repeats itself: the identity of the “homosexual” like the iden-
tity of the “woman” and the identity of the “heterosexual,” understood as
stable and coherent subjects, is synonymous with the regulation and rei-
fication of stable gender relations and gets closer generally to the hetero-
centric matrix. As possible a basis as it was to establish continuity between
gays and lesbians or gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons,
homosexual or gay identity became a source of norms and invisibiliza-
tions for the other minorities who brought about the queer/move/ment.

•The
Queer Kings
determination for denaturalization and use of identity that we just
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glimpsed to which these queer/move/ments bear witness imagines con-

18. Namaste, V. K.

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Invisible Lives, The ceiving of identity as a strategic political instrument, likely to serve to
Erasure of Transsexual deconstruct masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual iden-
and Transgendered
tities that secrete forms of violence and oppression. A reason for which
People. Chicago, IL:
Chicago University we cannot “be” queer, nor man nor woman, as a matter of fact. Not
Press, 2000 and in because the ideal is surpassing identities or genders – this would be tan-
particular the chapter
tamount to falling into the depoliticizing trap of individualism or dandy-
entitled “Tragic
Misreadings: Queer ism – or because we could aim to eradicate the social relationships of sex
Theory’s Erasure to take back a more materialist terminology – but ultimately unrealistic. It
of Transgender
is rather because sexual identities are multipliable and “resignifiable,” the
Subjectivity.”
body included. If it were necessary to add a fifth queer/move/ment that
19. Prosser, J. allows us to locate ourselves on the spiral, it would be that represented
Second Skins, the
Body Narratives of by a new generation of activists and theorists, the queer kings, that this
Transsexuality. New time have in common having drawn back from Judith Butler’s definition
York: Columbia of sexual identity (as being performative or the effect of gender perfor-
University Press, 1998.
mances) because that generation forgot sexual practices, the body and
20. On the spatial the effects of incorporation.
control exerted on drag
queens in bars, cf. V. Ki Namaste 18, Jay Prosser 19 and Beatriz Preciado, and the transgender
K. Namaste, Invisible and transsexual communities have not failed to criticize the instrumental-
Lives. . . Namaste ization of the drag queen that took place in Gender Trouble: entirely con-
rightly remembers the
ambivalence that drag centrated on her preoccupation with mentioning rather the dissonant and
queens arouse in the playful gay identity (why did she not take the example of the drag king
gay and lesbian pride that came out of lesbian culture?), Butler seized the drag queen as a heu-
parades.
ristic model for the explanation of the construction of gender, and gen-
der alone, forgetting along her way that many drag queens are also trans
– and that having come out of the theatrical enclosures that are reserved
for them in gay bars, their modified bodies will be rejected by the gay
men who clapped for them on stage 20. Making the drag queen into proof
that all gender (heterosexual femininity and masculinity included) is per-
formance, that is to say, formed by the repetition of an imitation without
an original, leads to doing away with the weight of corporality, the resis-
21. In the sense that B.
Preciado understands it, tance of transformed bodied and sexual practices in order to talk about
Contra-sexual manifesto, (sexual) identities and dissident post-identities. It is reckoning without
Balland, 2000. the “sex technologies” 21 that we would obviously be wrong in believing

VI •
 Queer Move/ments

that they are to be confused with sex change techniques, even though a 22. Halberstam, J.
Female Masculinity,
number of these techniques are gender stabilization techniques currently op. cit. and J.
practiced on heterosexual bodies (from silicone breasts to lengthened Halberstam, “F2M:
penises) and on which the intersex movement, the work of Halberstam 22 The Making of Female
Masculinity.” In L.
on the butch-drag king-Female to Male continuum or Preciado’s work on Doan (ed.), The Lesbian
dildos and contra-sexuality effectively turns away our attention. Maybe Postmodern. New York:
it was time for gender fucking not to forget. . .the body, and that it was Columbia University
Press, 1994.
Foucault, the sadomasochistic disciple of fist fucking, who was likely to
encounter Gayle Rubin in the same sex clubs of San Francisco for high- 23. On the way in
tech sexuality 23, who is once again inspiring the queer/move/ment. • which Foucault made
the contemporary
language of the S&M
community talk to
Greeks and to fool
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his world and the

philosophers, it is

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necessary to read the
delightful article by
B. PRECIADO, “Sex
Machine. Introductory
notes to a radical theory
of sex toys.”

• VII