Queer Studies: an Interdisciplinary Reader.

Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi, editors. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003.

The title of this collection might lead you to believe that it is the subject of queers that is to be taken up in the volume: the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community that we know in common parlance as "queers." Taking on a more challenging task, the essays brought together in this volume by editors Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi go further, and in doing so they demonstrate how to use "queer" as a verb. "To queer" is to disrupt the dominant cultural understanding of the naturalness of heterosexuality and conventional gender relations. Queer studies is an epistemology, an approach to knowledge, as much as it is a topical field. As the editors explain in the introduction to the volume, the term "'queer' names or describes identities and practices that foreground the instability inherent in the supposedly stable relations between anatomical sex, gender, and sexual desire" (1).

Demonstrating how "to queer" the fields of women's studies and LGBT studies has produced a new field in its own right, that of queer studies, and a second important aim of this volume is collect essays that demonstrate the origin and development of this new field over the last ten years or so. Thus, most of the fifteen essays in the volume were first published in journals and other edited books. Along with the editors' introduction, the essays offer a good overview of queer studies, including attention to two key features that distinguish it: the interdisciplinary approach to methodology and the specific body of theoretical work used for inspiration.

Scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as in the interdisciplinary fields of women's studies and gay and lesbian studies, all have been key contributors to the field's development. This means that the works selected here analyze all sorts of different texts: newspaper accounts, suicide letters, films, fiction, memoir, observations of social practices, oral histories, personal experiences, and the internet. Some authors focus exclusively on a particular text, such as Jennifer DeVere Brody's analysis of the blaxploitation film, Cleopatra Jones and its sequel Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, but, more often than not, queer studies scholars in this volume examine a variety of texts, crossing disciplinary boundaries in the process. In fact, the relationship between readers and these texts is examined as yet another text, which is analyzed. Thus, DeVere Brody goes on to consider the lesbian appropriation of the film as yet another text. Given that the editors of the volume hope to queer their readers' understandings of their own disciplines and work, I imagine that the conversations that are sparked by Queer Studies are another dynamic text that is in the process of creation.

Perhaps the trait that defines queer studies most centrally is the theoretical tradition on which it is based. Corber and Valocchi offer an excellent, if dense, theoretical introduction to the volume in which they outline key categories of insights and assumptions of the field. These categories reflect debates that have emerged among and within the disciplines in a variety of incarnations: the nature of self and identity and the nature of power at this particular moment in the late 20th century. They write that queer studies scholars are interested in analyzing regimes of power that are not just vested in traditional institutions, like the state, but particularly in cultural knowledge, following the work of Michel Foucault. Another central insight, drawn from the work of Foucault and from the tradition of psychoanalysis, is that our culturally produced knowledge (and thus our conventional mores and practices) constitute a regime of power in its own right, quite apart, though related to, the organization of class, gender, race, and nation-state relations. In their view, heterosexuality is a fragile construct that is shored up by the disciplining of a variety of "deviant" sexualities.

What distinguishes queer studies from women's studies and lesbian and gay history, is a conscious refusal of the identity politics approach that has defined much work in both fields. Thus, the construction of a monolithic category of "woman" as well as its attendant association with bodies of a particular type (ones constructed as female) is viewed as a dangerous misrepresentation. Scholars in this volume find femininity, and sexuality, to be situational and fluid. Thus, femininity is created in one particular way by the Brazilian transgender prostitutes and their boyfriends in Don Kulick's "A Man in the House." In C. Jacob Hale's piece, "Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies," lesbian women flow through various gender performances in a matter of minutes in their play at S/M leather parties. What counts as femininity and masculinity and who performs them, are questions which are raised in these essays.

For the study of lesbian and gay history, this approach means a rejection of the valorization of same sex relationships that occurred prior to the mid twentieth century as precursors to modern, Western gay and lesbian relationships. This means that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks need to examine our own desire to find ancestors way back in the closet, to chart a history of oppression. This does not mean that the political nature of the work changes, rather, it means that the project is different than we imagined it might be: it is to expose the unnaturalness of heterosexuality or what these scholars identify as "heteronormativity." Martha Umphrey in "The Trouble with Harry Thaw" writes about the temptation she felt to rewrite the story of the turn of the century aristocrat Harry Thaw as one of a gay man rather than, as she came to see him, a "sexual outlaw." In this sense, she argues, queer history is a process, a "way to critique homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality" (27).

A strength of this type of overview is that it points in the direction of new paths for research. The question of the queer practices of straight people is raised, provocatively, by Berlant and Warner in an aside in their essay, "Sex in Public." How can straight folks practice heterosexuality in ways that challenge heteronormativity? Since the series ended this season, I can't help but invoke Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an example here. In the final episode, the main character, Buffy, eschews romantic attachment to two men who offer themselves up to her. She doesn't foreclose the possibility of attachment in the future, but does in this climatic moment. Her refusal, not of a happy ending (Buffy and her fellow slayers do save the world), but of a romantic coupling as part of the resolution of the episode and the series is challenging both to conventional gender scripts and heteronormativity. Having Buffy securely paired up with a male lover at the end of the series is not necessary to end the story on a high note. She remains straight, but not in a straight way.

Does this make Buffy the new queer face of feminism in the third wave? Well, yes and no. As a sociologist and scholar of social movements, I read the volume with a particular eye toward understanding the relevance of this work for contemporary social movements. Overall, the volume presents two important insights. First of all, in demonstrating how a Foucauldian analysis is useful in understanding power in a new way with respect to gender, sex, and sexuality, we are encouraged to look for both power and resistance in places other than institutions, as social scientists have traditionally done. Thus, as Gayatri Gopinath argues in "Nostalgia, Desire, and Diaspora," home has been established as the site of unequal power relations for women in India, however, the separation of women in a separate, domestic sphere includes the potential that women will forge strong and sometimes erotic bonds with one another that challenge compulsory heterosexuality.

The second lesson is a caution against the tendency to recreate our own hegemonies in the service of establishing the political voice, or identity, of a particular group. Judith Halberstam, in "The Brandon Teena Archive" writes about the ways in which the conversations and films that emerged after the murder of the young transgendered man in rural Nebraska propped up a false dualism of the good and safe urban metropolis and the bad and dangerous rural landscape as site of queer practice. What she found was that this ignores the experience of many queers who positively choose to live in small towns. She finds danger in tying queer practice to urban areas. Similarly, Cathy Cohen, in "Contested Membership: Black Gay Identities and the Politics of AIDS," describes the moral dimensions of black identity as established by the black church. The failure of black church leaders to address HIV/AIDS is not merely homophobia, as some have identified it, rather, it is grounded in a specific history of racism which produced ideas about black deviant heterosexuality. The threat of HIV/AIDS demonstrates the fragile nature of the cultural capital of the respectable black church that has been at once empowering and repressive. Cohen asks, "How do we build a truly radical, liberating politics that does not recreate hierarchies, norms, and standards of acceptability rooted in dominant systems of power?" (48). The method must be rooted in this continued questioning, or queering, that fosters a necessary self-reflexivity. Cohen's question reverberates loudly coming on the heels of another great piece in this volume, Cheryl Chase's "Hermaphrodites with Attitude." In this selection, Chase writes her own history as an intersexual person, along with the history of contemporary activism on the issue. Cohen's question is general, but could be directed specifically at the emerging political identity of intersexuals. How do we build a movement that takes up the concerns of intersexual persons without creating a monolithic identity around it? That these essays read as a long conversation is the due to the excellent work of the editors in selection and placement of the works.

The articles in this volume are organized by what the editors call "different social locations or rites of power where sexual agency is at once exercised and controlled": community, culture, nation-state, and transnational or global (14). They acknowledge that this is a somewhat arbitrary categorization in that each essay could be placed in more than one of these sections. For the most part, these classifications hold together well, although, Corber and Valocchi reveal in the introduction that a section on capitalism was nixed because of space constraints. The third section on the nation-state presents a problem in that "Euramerican" is left as an almost unmarked category. With the exception of the final essay in this section by Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," the U.S. as nation-state is not directly taken up. Again, the strength of the volume is that it allows us to raise that question. Not until the section on transnational sexualities are we left to consider the "Americanness" of various queer subjectivities, but only in relation to other nationalities, as in the rich discussions of Brazilian and Indonesian notions of citizenship and sexuality. Perhaps the section on nation-state should have been collapsed with transnationalism in order to provide space for a section on the capitalism.

In preparing this review for Radical Teacher, I was struck at the difficulty of how to incorporate this work into the courses we already teach. This "trouble" is because the approach of queer studies would probably require many of us to rethink and rework our own courses. Remember, the intent of queer studies is to be disruptive. I imagine that the contributors want us to rethink our own categorizations and ways of teaching gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. For example, the lessons of this approach are that we should no longer teach an introduction to women's studies with separate sections for "lesbians" and "multicultural women." Doing so leaves the general category of "woman" unmarked as white, straight, middle class and first world. Furthermore, queer studies suggests the impossibility of studying gendered culture without a close examination of masculinity, anatomical sex, and sexuality more generally. As the field develops, and the conversation continues, I anticipate additional volumes that speak to these pedagogical challenges.

To queer is to force self-examination, to challenge the creation of categories like "woman" and "gay" and "asian," in order to expose the assumptions in those categories. Martha Umphrey, in her essay in this volume, "The Trouble with Harry Thaw," concludes by cautioning that the approach of queer studies "is not necessarily content to be celebrated, for to be celebrated is to be identified, and to be identified is to be stabilized, to lose the nimble stance of critique" (28). And this is the challenge of queer studies to itself as the field develops: to remain a methodological approach, a critique, rather than reifying its own canon and imposing its own disciplinary boundaries.

JULIE CHILDERS teaches sociology and gender studies courses at Babson College. Her research interest is in women's health, specifically the organization of midwifery and holistic practices inside traditional medical institutions.