Mark Anthony Masterson: Mark Anthony Masterson is Ph.D. student in Classics at the University of Southern California. He is doing research on the construction of masculinity and sexuality in the fourth century CE Roman Empire. He also is a member of Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educators' Network.
FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY is a reprint of the journal DIFFERENCES (volume 6, summer/fall 1994). Pitched for an academic audience, FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY is postmodern in its orientation. The seven essays (one with a response and a counter-response), two interviews, and book review (with a response) keep in view how it is that feminism and queer theory support, interrogate and diverge from each other.
The manifold nature of queer theory makes this a difficult collection to read. Born under the sign of postmodernism, queer theory is more an indication of activity that moves in various directions than a unified approach. Prescriptive and extremely self-conscious, queer theory problematizes identity and perception relentlessly. It questions ideology and takes its objects from a wide range of material. Within FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY, literature, society, sexuality, mythical origins of the sex/gender system, photography, popular songs, the confrontation between the first and third worlds, the end of communism, and psychology are discussed.
It is natural that queer theory should be deployed like this in a book that also has the spotlight on feminism. Beginning in the 1980's, feminism took the postmodern turn. The postmodern feminisms that resulted are also prescriptive and extremely self-conscious. Both queer theory and the postmodern feminisms reject essences as constituent of identities and look at the ways in which identities are produced through the interplay of difference; there is not some inner truth to a person, it is, rather, a simulacrum created by the opposition of various “perceived” identities.
In spite of everything queer theory and the postmodern feminisms have in common, there are important points of contestation; there is ground to be cleared. Some of the pieces in FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY do this. Judith Butler questions the notion that the queer theory should have sexuality (difference defined through sexual practice) as its proper object while feminism take as its object gender (difference defined through biological sex and gender role). Evelyn Hammonds outlines the collision course, in the context of the AIDS crisis, between perceptions of gay white males and black women in the media and popular imagination. Trevor Hope, in a rigorous essay, challenges the idea of Irigaray (and others) that there is a foundational homosexuality that undergirds the sex/gender system, which, though immediately disavowed, nevertheless is a driving force behind the subjugation and marginalization of women.
There are also pieces in the collection that are not as overtly partisan. Kim Michasiw analyzes the differing roles that camp performance and hypermasculine masquerade play, respectively, in gay men's economies of community building and desire. Judith Butler interviews Gayle Rubin in a piece wittily called “Sexual Traffic” (in reference to Rubin's two groundbreaking, lucid, and essential essays, “The Traffic in Women” of 1974 and “Thinking Sex” of 1984). Butler and Rubin discuss the genesis of the two articles and the directions Rubin is going in now.
In summation, FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY is not for the faint of heart. Its language is technical and it demands engagement from its readers. In order to read this book, one must be prepared for and have an interest in the solvent-like strategies that postmodern approaches take toward perception and identities. Perhaps a theme, or something to keep in mind, is that the relentless problematizing that occurs is part of a larger program of the revelation of coercive structures that govern perception and identity in the world today. Also, perhaps some the difficulty in the writing stems from the fact that the objective is to unseat and problematize what seems natural—perforce this must seem counterintuitive.
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