Straight Sex by Lynne Segal

Author:Lynne Segal [Segal, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-757-4
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

Who’s a pervert?: queer theory and gender sabotage

When Susan Sontag wrote her ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ in 1964, she saw ‘Camp’ sensibility as preserving a determined but detached, ironic, extravagant, playful and creative aestheticism in the face of mass culture. It is a style and taste, she wrote, peculiarly linked with homosexuality, one which sees life as theatre, understands ‘Being-as-Playing-a-Role’: ‘Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.’ It is also, Sontag believed then, essentially ‘apolitical’.74 Soon, however, camp would find itself heavily politicized, occupying the paradoxical position where its significance and meaning would be fought over with an engaged and committed seriousness quite at odds with its traditional frivolity and aestheticism.

For most gay men and lesbians moving into the Western gay liberation and women’s movements in the 1970s, camp humour and drag suggested only the self-mocking, misogynist expression of internalized oppression, reproducing rather than challenging the gender stereotypes of dominant culture. The ‘butch shift’ in male gay subcultures in the USA and Britain in the 1970s, as pre-Stonewall drag queens were overtaken by ‘macho men’ – the short-haired ‘clone’, men in uniforms, all-leather or denim-men – was even more problematic for some gay activists. John Marshall suggested that the shift served merely to illustrate ‘the extent to which definitions of male homosexuality continue to be pervaded by the tyranny of gender divisions.’75 Gay machismo, Andrew Britton argued, allowed men to hold on to their privileges, while enjoying the illusion of flouting them, and it undermined the political role David Fernbach had asserted on behalf of gay men who, he claimed, ‘really are effeminate’, and therefore women’s closest allies.76 But other gay men at the time, like Jack Babuscio or Gregg Blachford, were already suggesting that the capacity to either ‘camp it up’ or ‘butch it up’ at will, served, albeit mildly, to mock and ridicule traditional gender imagery, while helping gay men to survive in a hostile world.77

Camp, drag and machismo may have initiated ongoing debate between gay male activists, but it provoked public warfare in lesbian communities. While most lesbian feminists at the close of the 1970s were inclined to damn any signs of ‘butch’ (or ‘femme’) display – in men or women – as participation in patriarchal domination, those lesbians who expressed dissent would find themselves embroiled in conflicts far sharper and deeper than any disrupting gay men’s politics. This is perhaps why it has been, predominantly, dissident lesbian feminists, embattled alike from within and without as they resist gender and identity categories (while also seeking strategies to combat both heterosexual and male privilege) who have most comprehensively theorized the new queer project.

Judith Butler has become one of the more prominently cited lesbian theorists who, following Foucault, calls into question the need for a stable ‘female’ identity for feminist theory, exploring instead the political possibilities of a radical critique of all categories of identity. In Gender Trouble she offers an analysis of gender and sexuality not in

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