Structurelessness, Structure, and Queer Movements

Abstract

Queer political work might appear to be grounded in a theory of struc- turelessness, at least as it relates to the making of an imagined queer com- munity/movement organized around the need to alleviate the unbending boundaries and centers of sexual identification. Yet it is also true that queer communities can be limited by the very ways they are structured by and constituted through race, class, ability, and other forms of social categori- zation. Critics have rightly asked, for example, what is at stake in the life of the queer who is not white, able bodied, cis-male, or naturalized as a U.S. citizen within a queer (mostly U.S. based) political movement organized around supposed visions of structurelessness? To what extent does this structureless politics of identity attend to the needs of those who exist within the margins—the structure of the other—of an already interstitial space? What is a stake for the queers of the queers within a movement that might easily establish centers even as it seeks to destabilize the same? E. Patrick Johnson offers the following query in response to the failures of academic queer theory in the way that it attends to the material needs of the multiply marginalized: What, for example, are the ethical and mate- rial implications of queer theory if its project is to dismantle all notions of identity and agency? The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which ideology functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing, but what is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the