B.3 Methods for Trajectory Smoothing
B.3.3 Adaptive Cubic Spline Smoothing
Queer theory emerged in the United States in the late 1980s out of LGBT activism and academia. It is concerned with the destabilisation, deconstruction, and transgression of existing gender and sexual identities, and also with creating space for imagining alternatives to the rigid gender binary system. Influenced by Foucault’s destabilizing of essentialist approaches to identity categories, queer theory emphasizes the idea of sexuality and gender as cultural not natural categories that are discursively produced, and questions the operation of the hetero/homosexual binary. Symbolic interactionism and phenomenology influenced queer theory in defining the social and interactional processes by which sexuality is seen as a set of meanings attached to bodies and desires by individual, groups, and society, and transformed into social categories with political significance.
Queer theory can also be regarded as poststructuralism applied to sexualities and genders: it is only through representations that we can know social reality. Language is an unstable system of referents; therefore it is impossible ever to capture completely the meaning of an action, text, or intention. It is not possible for a researcher to directly capture and represent lived experience, therefore it is necessary to examine textual and linguistic practices through which subjectivity takes shape. In queer theory gender is not a literal nor even a socially constructed reality, but a literary reality that requires a new mode of reading.
The term ‘queer’ began as a Foucauldian ‘reverse discourse’, a turning upside down of dominant categorical divisions, a reclaiming of a pejorative term from the past, a revalorising of the subordinate, an empowering of a previously oppressive category,
Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland
75 and a mobilising of new forms of resistance to compulsory heterosexuality (Halberstam, 1998). Queer theory redefined ‘queer’ as a positive term of self-identification, a rejection of gay and straight labels, and in common with other poststructuralist theories, challenges the very idea of identity as fixed coherent and natural. The two texts now widely regarded as being foundational to queer theory are Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet, both published in 1990.
In Gender Trouble Butler argued that queer gender performance, sometimes accused of replicating heteropatriarchal norms as in the feminist critique of transwomen, instead has subversive potential in its exposure of the non-natural, imitative character of gender behaviour through irony, parody and exaggeration (Butler, 1990:174–80). For Butler, all gender behaviour is imitative, biological sex is culturally instituted (within certain material limits), and gender performances such as femininity simply serve to generate the fiction of a pre-existing gender identity (Butler, 1990: 178–9).
In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick argued that standard binary oppositions limit freedom and simplify understanding, particularly in the context of sexuality. The
‘closet’ used to conceal (homosexual) identity is complex because concealment is not always total and there is always more than one closet. ‘Coming out of the closet’ is not just one step but has to be dealt with each time a new person is encountered so at times remaining in the closet may seem like a safer easier option: ‘Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not’
(Sedgewick 1990:68). Her discussion of the processes of secrecy or disclosure inherent in homosexual identity presaged the debates around visibility, stealth, and passing in relation to transgender identity. Sedgewick provided her definition of ‘queer’ in a later text Tendencies:
Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant.
The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically (1993:8).
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76 Queer theory examines ways in which binary oppositions have shaped moral and political hierarchies of knowledge and power. It critiques the way in which the recognition of a distinct sexual or gender identity inevitably reaffirms a binary opposition, and defining identity in relation to normativity has its limitations as a liberatory project. Sexual object choice as hetero or homosexual does not constitute the basis for an identity, and also acknowledges the dominance of normativity, much as essentialist models of gender construct transsexuals as incomplete subjects. Also, an open declaration of a particular sexual or gender identity may be personally liberating, but marginalizes those who do not wish to be open about their identities.
‘Queer’ can act as a noun, adjective, or verb, it is not a singular, or systematic conceptual, or methodological framework, but is always defined against the normal, the normative, the normalising. The term ‘queer’ is slippery, as is probably appropriate for a theory that denies fixed identity: ‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers’ (Halperin, 1995:62). Sometimes the meaning of queer is used synonymously with LGBT or as an umbrella term for non-heteronormativity. Queer studies are frequently linked to the transgression of categories of gender and sexuality and of heteronormativity in its various forms.
Although transgender is viewed by some trans-theorists as the subversion of gender norms (Bornstein, 1994), Jay Prosser argues queer theory would exclude and be resisted by those transpeople who identify as heterosexual or who wish to ‘pass’ in society in conventional gender roles (Prosser, 1998: 32). Butler interprets Foucault’s resistance to power as resistance to gender identity itself, and believes that ‘reverse discourses’ cannot be based on the very male/female binary identification they are meant to contest. Like Butler, Jack/Judith Halberstam argues from a non-essentialist, non-naturalist perspective influenced by Foucault, that gender is performative. In Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam recognizes that femaleness does not automatically produce femininity and maleness does not produce masculinity, and a diversification of gender identity categories creates:
‘
a reverse discourse... around the definitions of transsexual and transgender, it is extremely important to recognize theConstructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland
77 queerness of these categories, their instability, and their interpretability’ (Halberstam, 1998: 159).
The current study had an original assumption of the transgressive potential of transgender identities and practices. Thus it was initially drawn towards queer theory’s radical stance towards gender, denial of fixed categories, and subversion of tendencies toward normativity. However in its very blurring of boundaries, queer theory creates a category problem in its simultaneous presentation of a public collective identity in queer activism, together with a deconstruction of the very idea of gender identity that would abolish it as a field of study and politics. This ontological conundrum resonates with the conflict in transgender studies regarding issues of gender identity and binary categorisation, and connects to the wider problem of relativism in poststructuralism: if we think that all knowledge is merely determined by situation and power relations, there is no means of safeguarding the claimed truth of our own conclusions from others. Nevertheless, aspects of the work of some queer theorists overlap with other sociological theories and are therefore incorporated into the analysis of the current research. For example a research strategy of queer theory is similar to that of symbolic interactionism, to integrate the instability, multiplicity, and partiality of identities into the research program and analysis. But this is not to exclude the incorporation of a phenomenological model in which empirical data may reveal research participants’
deep beliefs in their own authentic selves and identities.
Queer theory has relevance for the current study in the following ways: first as a method of exposing underlying meanings and power relations emerging from the interviews; second the potential of queer theory to resist the binary system of classification; third when analysing the narrative textual productions of the interview transcripts while resisting the poststructuralist collapsing of social practice into the literary text, which can marginalise the importance of field research in which the current study is very much grounded.
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