Presented at the 1997 annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association in San Diego, California in an “author meets critics” session on American Gay (University of Chicago Press, 1996)


    First, I balk at the term “queer,” which I do not think can be defanged. Moreover, I believe that those who despise differences will always be very happy to accord that label to anyone who wants it. Relatedly, I find it difficult to take seriously those who believe they can transvalue values and move away from “minoritizing” logic under an explicitly deviant label and in contrast to an explicitly normative one (“heteronormative”).

    Second, I find it difficult to take seriously an alternative to “binarism” built on a contrast of “normative” and amorphous contra-normativity. Rather than destroying binarism, replacing “gay” with “queer” merely further subordinates sexuality to gender which is a more deeply entrenched dichotomy in a continuing binary of domination.

    Third, idealism and very vulgar linguistic determinism: In American Gay and elsewhere, I take the agnostic position that ideas matter, but usually not all that much. In my view, representation is not the only kind of human action, and is not the most important one. I think that the “queer” perspective which I do not think deserves the name “theory” and certainly not that of “social theory” romanticizes ineffective substitutes for politics. The most prominent one is subjective reactions to seemingly randomly selected high culture and popular culture texts, with no demonstration that others, let alone the masses, receive the often occult messages that analysts claim to decode. I am not convinced that subjectivity is produced by these discourses or that such texts influence more than they reflect society and subjectivities already fashioned by various prior means, not least by primary socialization. Along with this fascination with idiosyncratic readings of texts not demonstrated to have any effect on anyone is a sentimental romanticizing of what seems to be more juvenile acting out than serious attempts to change anything in the world, what I would call with apologies to Lenin “infantile post-leftist adventurism.” Directly related to this is what I see as the apriori assumption that whatever subalterns do must be “resistance” in particular that “playing with” or “playing at” gender erodes gendered social organization of domination. Variant performances and discursive practices do not change societies. I think that we need fewer celebrations of “transgression” and more analysis of how subalterns reproduce their own subordination, both intra-psychically (call it self-hatred, with “self” being a kind of person) and interpersonally (call it socialization). And we need especially to look at practices persisting even when linguistic patterns change, as I have done with the diffusion of the word “gay” in Latin America and Thailand, and as could be done with “queer” in Anglo North America.

    Fourth, ethnocentricity and ahistoricism: For all the proclamation of difference, so-called “queer theorists” rarely look outside contemporary or very recent Northwestern Europe and Anglo North America. No more than the asocial constructionists I call “discourse creationists,” do they attempt to look systematically or historically at how sex, gender, and/or sexuality are organized and conceived elsewhere and at times before World War Two. Gender-crossing performativity exists and has existed in many times and places without challenging the subordination of those gendered as kinds of “females.” Those who live or play various transvestitic homosexual roles generally retain some male privilege, especially greater mobility or better access to the best materials for doing “women's work.” In the other major pre-late-modern organization of same-sex sexual desire and behavior, the young are subordinated to their elders.

    That is, being gender variant or engaging in same-sex sex has not been transgressive and has not destabilized hierarchies of domination. As I say in American Gay, I was very disappointed to realize that homosexuality is not necessarily oppositional. Indeed, rather a lot of those who engage in it are heteronormative. And by no means is it only “closeted homosexuals.” There are many open lesbians and gay men who align themselves with the repression of what they regard as less respectable forms of gender and sexuality. Although we often enough fashioned new conformisms, the egalitarian theory and occasionally egalitarian practice of my generation the “baby boom”/ gay liberation/lesbian feminist generation was a novelty, and increasingly appears to have been a temporary fluctuation rather than the world historical trend many of us once supposed.

    Sex between persons of the same natal sex has not been particularly problematic or condemned in some times and places, but almost always the sexually-penetrated biologically-male partner has been treated like a female wife, concubine, or prostitute by the older, more powerful, more conventionally masculine “partner.” Within narrowly circumscribed limits, “gender” is socially constructed in differing ways, but where it is a major organizing principle which is in most times and places differences are ranked. The boundaries of human categories in general not just of homosexual are fuzzy, but playing with fuzzy boundaries of gender and sexuality categories has remarkably little demonstrated history of destabilizing enduring hierarchies.

    Fifth, is the return of the repressed, that is, the revalorization of Freud's eternal and constant theory of motivation, further mystified in Lacanian rhetoric. Why so many deconstructionists are drawn to undeconstructed Freudianism is a mystery to me, one rife for sociology of knowledge analysis. Clearly, there is no place for social forces or spatial or temporal variability in this, and, of course, there is no basis for collective mobilization in Freudian or quasi-Freudian theorizing.

    From Marx and Weber I learned that consciousness of kind is a prerequisite of collective organization consciousness of kind is one idea that I think matters a great deal. Undermining it in the realm of literary criticism and other kinds of academic discourse does nothing to alter structured everyday domination of any sort in the workplace, law, education, or other public institutions.

    If and when queer theorists produce a theory that seems to explain or predict something other than textual representations, I will be attentive. Until such a time, aware as I am of the quietist anti-empiricist zeitgeist, I am content to be considered a pre-postmodern, skeptical, empiricist and comparativist social scientist. As I say on the penultimate page of American Gay, “I feel that the mists of what has misappropriated the label ‘theory’ will at some point dissipate” and the book that I conceived as a mesage in a bottle will be found by those “somewhere or at some time who are interested in how people involved in homosexuality live their lives.” I remain hopeful of that and having outlived what was my life expectancy when I wrote American Gay, I have even begun to hope I may live to see it.

    Implicit references:

Murray, Stephen O.:

    • 1983. Fuzzy sets and abominations. Man 19:396-399.

    • 1994. Subordinating native cosmologies to the Empire of Gender. Current Anthropology 35:59-61.

    • 1995. Discourse creationism. Journal of Sex Research 32:263-265.

    • 1996. American Gay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    • 1999. Homosexualities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 


Stephen O. Murray is a comparativist sociologist living in San Francisco. He is the author of American Gay and Homosexualities (both published by the University of Chicago Press) and a dozen other books.   


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