Abstract
This essay examines the current debate between proponents of "queer theory" and "gay and lesbian studies" in order to understand the way each sets forth a political agenda for disciplinary and institutional social change. The author surmises that the utopian hope invested in each critical perspective evinces an affinity that is often overlooked in the way the debate is presented. Further, she argues that neither queer theory nor gay and lesbian studies currently pays adequate attention to the "local" politics of the institution, and she raises the possibility of a political horizon for institutional change which we might call "queering the academy."
Highlights
In a fit of bad taste, I almost titled my paper "to queer or not to queer," partly because I kept hearing the phrase as if spoken in a dialect where "queer" shaded subtly into "care." I planned to use this shading to explore how so much of the controversy about the difference between lesbian and gay studies on one hand and this thing called queer theory on the other turned on the way each was perceived to care about and for gay and lesbian people
Savoy uses three phrases that most interest me: "at the very moment"; "who is being served"; and "definitional power over our own sexualities." He writes: it is supremely ironic that at the very moment when gay men and lesbians have acquired a genuine presence and legitimacy in the academy, we are being asked to abandon this hard-won position for, and to concede the superior theoretical sophistication of, a project that views us — and the desire to occupy a political "identity" — from a suspicious, critical distance . . . [I]t is necessary to ask precisely who is being served by such critical inquiry
If the project of locating the sites of queerness and defining its transgressive manoeuvres is completely dissociated and bracketed off from gay and lesbian identity politics, its seems inevitable that self-identified gays and lesbians will lose what we may currently have, that is, the definitional power over our own sexualities and cultural productions . . . [I]t is necessary to inquire whether the loss of lesbian and gay "coherence" entails a coterminous and systematic loss of both political integrity and political self-determination. [131, 134]
Summary
In a fit of bad taste, I almost titled my paper "to queer or not to queer," partly because I kept hearing the phrase as if spoken in a dialect where "queer" shaded subtly into "care." I planned to use this shading to explore how so much of the controversy about the difference between lesbian and gay studies on one hand and this thing called queer theory on the other turned on the way each was perceived to care about and for gay and lesbian people.
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