Queer Theory, Gender Theory

Wilchins, Riki

the argument was not that women had the right to masculinity, but rather that such activities were not intrinsically masculine, and in any case women could do them and still be feminine.


But if it’s finally acceptable for women to have “masculine” jobs, wield “masculine” power, and achieve in “masculine sports,” it is still totally unacceptable for women to be masculine.


Actually, no one was gay. The word was not yet in popular use. All there was were ho-moh-sek-chew-alls, which in the mouths of some conservative critics sounded like it had about ten syllables.


Masculine symbols aren’t necessarily masculine. One of the paradoxes of language is that most signs don’t have to have any particular meaning. For instance, there is no necessary connection between the word red and the color we perceive as red.


As we’ve seen gay rights activists have responded to conservatives attacks by stressing the normality of homosexuals. We’re just like straight people; we just sleep with the same sex. This strategy has been enormously successful. It just happens to be based on false assumptions.


It is now acceptable to be gay, but it’s still not yet okay to be a fag.


“Where were all these transgender people in the ‘70s and ‘80s?” I replied, “Oh, they were here. They were just still gay.” These people had always been around, living under the broad umbrella of the gay community. But as gayness and gender became separated, a new term was needed—transgender.


Behind most of these laws was a handful of determined transsexual activists who had pushed, pulled, and prodded for action, often with the support of local gay groups (but seldom with the help of local feminist organizations).


The new reverse-hierarchy is forming around who is most transgressive and therefore least privileged. As one friend put it, “Transsexuals should come first, because they’re the most oppressed.”


for hundreds of years we’ve been telling ourselves that we are on a continuous upwards spiral. This story is what we mean by modernism. With its unquestioning faith in knowledge and progress—and knowledge as progress—it is so fundamental to how we think that it appears independent of us, as if it just appeared without pedigree or point of origin.


He was so complex, so profound, so deep, that even philosophers who heard him, men who read Sartre like you and I read Doonsebury, had no idea what he was saying.


Derrida based his attack in contexts that were particularly useful for thinking about gender and queerness: language, reason, and meaning. Gender is a language, a system of meanings and symbols, along with the rules, privileges, and punishments pertaining to their use—for power and sexuality (masculinity and femininity, strength and vulnerability, action and passivity, dominance and weakness). Since it is a system of meanings, gender can be applied to almost anything


it tends to name whatever is common and shared among members of a speech community. Which is another way of saying that language favors the same, and what is unique, unrepeatable, and private tends to go unnamed.


We know the meaning of chair by learning what is not chair. In other words, we exclude all the other close matches that that aren’t quite chairs: stools, chaise lounges, love seats, and so on. We create the template for chair by a process of exclusion. This means that from its inception, the meaning of chair depends on all those excluded things that are not-chair. With gender, we create the meaning of woman by excluding everything that is non-Woman, and vice versa for Man. We form idealized templates for what is perfectly masculine or perfectly feminine by excluding whatever doesn’t fit: the queer, the different, the mixed—people like me.


Because all our language affords is a string of insults, it is impossible to talk about someone who is brave enough to rebel against gender stereotypes without ridiculing or humiliating them at the same time.


Language works against you. It is meant to, because the language of gender is highly political.


The problem is that male, large, muscular, and hairy means masculine and hard, in the same way that petite, female, curvaceous, and large-breasted mean feminine, soft, receptive, and sensual. This fascism of meaning is a kind of crime—an assault of meaning that forces people to live as gendered impossibilities.


most non-normative experiences of gender are excluded from language, and because what little language we have for gender transcendence is defamatory.


She is denied the words with which to tell her story, to communicate something as basic and fundamental as this is who I am, this is how I see myself, this is how I want you to see me.


Trying to be inclusive won’t help when it comes to binaries. For instance, take the ever-popular “spectrum of gender.” It’s an effort to be more inclusive when it comes to gender. But it’s inevitably anchored by the only two real genders—Man and Woman. All those “other genders” are either strung out between them, like laundry drying on the line, or circling around them in orbit like some kind of errant Sputnik.


Binaries are like the black holes of knowledge: Nothing ever gets out. And nothing new can get in to replace it. That’s why a new, non-binary gender is as impossible to imagine as a new primary color.


In the end, binaries are not just a curious way we have of understanding the world. They are political. They are about power. They create hierarchies—male/female, white/black, colonial/native—that produce winners and losers.


We equate truth with unity. In fact, our attempts at truth are usually attempts to find and restore an underlying unity of things. Perhaps this stems from our Judeo-Christian tradition, in which the one, true God of the Hebrews is good and virtuous, and the faithful slaughter their enemies who believe in many gods—who are therefore false, duplicitous, and evil. In any case, we discount difference as a noise in the system, a problem to be resolved, a veil hiding the real unity of things.


This work also bred intolerance for any sort of totalitarian beliefs that might ever again lead to such blind obedience and destruction.


Derrida’s constructedness is not opposed to real. Rather, it is an attack on the very idea of Real.


Derrida means to demolish the fantasy that through reason we can reach a privileged place outside of language and culture where we can stand above the world and pronounce, with utter certainty, what is True. He wants us to forgo our arrogant dreams of infinite upward spirals and deal with the real-world effects of selfish demands for certainty on those who are smaller, weaker, and different.


I blush to admit that I made a great gay man. And except for the fact that I had a female lover and wasn’t sexually attracted to men, I might still be one today.


Over time, I realized I was a transsexual, as the literature put it: a woman trapped in a man’s body. Which helped explain why it always felt so crowded inside.


Although he was gay, Foucault refused to identify as homosexual. He saw that kind of identification as a form of self-knowledge to which he didn’t subscribe.


We are now so accustomed to thinking of sex as a central moral issue that it’s hard to appreciate just how far we’ve drifted from awareness of sex as just another pleasure. Sexual knowledge was once simply a means to better and more pleasure.


The politicization of food is almost non-existent. We fulfill our appetite for food a dozen times a day. Yet no one bases their primary social identity—vegan, meat-eater, lacto-vegetarian, French fries addict—on it. No one considers our appetites to be a source of self-knowledge.


We almost never mention technique and proficiency to one another.


Where homosexual acts had been what one sometimes did, the homosexual person was something permanent, what one was. For the first time it was possible, even necessary, to identify one’s self as a homosexual.


Of course we should all have equal rights. But what about the right to be defined by something other than our sexuality or gender?


Foucault wants to undermine our naïve belief in the Self as transcendent. He is showing how even this subjective sense of Self has a history and a pedigree, has arrived in response to specific cultural needs and demands. He wants us to understand that subjectivity can be a form of politics by other means.


impossible. We can no more escape discursive power than we can our