History

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Common uses of the term indicate a general strangeness, or some kind of perverse social deviance usually involving sexuality, desire, or gender in some capacity. The term has, following its reclamation by activists (e.g. Larry Kramer, Brad Gooch, Sylvia Rivera, et al) predominantly during the AIDS crisis under the Reagan Administration in the U.S. in the 1980s, become associated with identities, such that queer names both something you do and something you are. Indeed, this indeterminacy is part of its critical appeal.

Focusing on the “politics of polyvalence” of the word “queer” itself, instead of a “monolithic queer” in Animacies, Mel Y. Chen provides a roadmap for thinking about queerness not for the purposes of defining it—but for appreciating its unfinished borders. Chen ultimately details how queerness can hold space for negativity and absence as disruptor, or additive presence as identity, and as well it can disorient the subject, but it can also congeal into a genre — of experience, of style, of form or content.

Mel Y. Chen argues in Animacies that the “bleeding” of “queer into diffuse parts of speech” reveals the indeterminacy of the meaning of queer-ness (i.e. the “stuff” that can be said to be included or possibly meant when using the word “queer”). Defining it, or settling on supposedly “authentic” examples is difficult and misses the point of queer’s semantic ambivalences.

“Queer” is a capacious sign, depending on the positionality and context of speakers and interpreters. It can indicate someone who may self-identify with it as a marker of their “nonnormative” (uncommon, for various reasons) sexual orientation, gender expression, or other identity. It can signal a disruption in the order or direction of things, and formerly meant “strange” or “perverse,” indicating deviance, or some kind of transgression. Queerness, then, can signal messiness, identity, certain subjects, cultural aesthetic expressions, absence, excess and the “too much,” camp, and many other meanings.

Examples

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Ambivalence and Identity

Which brings me to the question: who disidentifies, and how? And how does it function as a “survival strategy”? Are we always conscious of what we do to survive, or can something less known or immediately felt be at work? I have a few thoughts regarding the “how” of disidentification, in relation to its “what,” or definition. Let’s turn to José Esteban Muñoz’s close-reading of Marga Gomez.^[1] In her (solo) performance, Gomez relates a story of watching television with her mother. In David Susskind’s talk-show, Open End, the “special guests” brought on were lesbian panelists (Susskind identifies them as “‘lady homosexuals’”). Gomez recounts how they “were very depressed, very gloomy.” According to Muñoz, the guests were brought onto the show in order to recount why they were unhappy, and to suggest that their “homosexuality” was the cause. Represented or made to seem as “stereotypes in all their abjection,” these “lady homosexuals” were to be read by Susskind’s audience as “bad,” or “morally compromised” or “corrupted,” sexually deviant or transgressive in a spectacular way (hence the talk-show format), etc. In essence, the audience was meant to, was supposed to, disapprove of these women. Gomez, as an audience member, does not feel what she is supposed to be feeling in this moment, does not read these “lady homosexuals” as the abject stereotypes Susskind wants them to become before the viewer’s eyes. She does not identify with the audience who is to be appalled at these guests — is not indeed the intended reader of the text Open End, a talk-show by David Susskind — but is instead identifying with the guests themselves, their very presence an “erotic.” She counter-identifies with the intended audience, with the intended meaning of the text, but importantly does identify with some (“partial”) of what she is encountering. 

Disidentification, Muñoz is suggesting, is an ambivalent process, something we may not perceive as such when it happens. It is something that happens deeper within us than we may have access to, or at least not immediately upon sensation or perception. Further, disidentification does not stop with a recognition of what one does or does not identify with — it is an alchemical remixing of codes: Gomez “rehabilitates these images, calling attention to the mysterious erotic that interpellated her as a lesbian.” In her (solo) performance, she is recalibrating the “figure”—or “creative representation,” which informs how we understand and conceptualize real iterations of those figures, and suggests that our identities are partly informed by discourse and the social—of those lesbian guests into new meanings for her audience. This is, of course, her audience to her 1992 show “Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty, and Gay,” and—through writing (a performance) and through re-reading (a memory)—she turns those supposedly gloomy, depressed panelists into origin points for her own subject formation through a kind of erotic awakening or realization, small beginnings that likely had far-reaching ripple effects. Muñoz is perhaps suggesting we cannot entirely throw out what we do not ourselves identify with, but instead we work with the materials we have and inherited and which are sometimes made for others and sometimes made for us, to generate life and create new forms, shapes, codes, and meanings. That the “how” of disidentification occurs at levels we are both conscious of and will not really notice until way after it’s happened. It is a survival strategy, a process that occurs when subjects encounter parts of themselves in media, discourse, culture, or elsewhere and yet find other parts absent, or find parts present, but which are mis-represented, or violently treated, or meant to be disliked by the audience, collisions of intensity between text, reader, and audience.

Queerness—beyond its articulation in some iterations of queer theory as excess, or negativity, or anti-identitarianism, or as a rupture in the order of things—takes on another life as an identity category understood and made legible within a neoliberal framework. Queerness, as a project of modernity, is a crowning of secular legitimacy and the right to governance where good, respectable queers are only allowed to exist insofar as allowing them to exist proves the tolerance and thus validity of the secular state and of a “sexual exceptionalism” that renders other populations as too queer, and thus too deviant, too perverse, and too threatening, such that they are marked for death by the state, institutions, and other biopolitical technologies.[1] I am interested in the optics of queerness, or how it is communicated and taught as something legible, knowable, viewable, and how we can disrupt that legibility, knowability, and viewability through discryption.

Ambivalence and Race

Chen reads Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and notes her insistence on the term “mestiza queer” to repudiate the separation of “queerness from race.” Both terms are “crossroads, but queer can erase race.” Chen writes that Anzaldua’s “observation” that queerness “was threatened not, for instance, by inspecificity, but by whiteness itself” did not see “significant recognition” until much later; complicating origins, Chen notes a 1981 poem by Anzaldua, “La Prieta,” “was prescient of later coalitional queer politics,” negating the linear narrative of progress from unsophisticated politics to contemporary enlightenment.

Cathy Cohen, further, argues for new figures of “queerness” — like the welfare queen — that help us understand the “pattern[s] of regulating the behavior and denigrating the identities of those heterosexuals on the outside of heteronormative privilege,” especially “those perceived as threatening systems of white supremacy, male domination, and capitalist advancement.”

Italian scholar Teresa de Lauretis’s use of the term in 1990 as editor of a special issue for differences, entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” is held as the commonsensical “turning point in the history of ‘queer theory’” and a signal of the “shift from lesbian and gay to queer” — however, Chen’s invocation of Anzaldua demonstrates an alternative origin point that does not elide the other critical genealogies contributing to our conceptualization of queerness. 

Cohen’s example rightly points to the imbalance of the binary of heterosexuality against queerness, and that multiple iterations of (queer) desire perceived or interpellated as deviant and dangerous is subsumed under an ostensibly straight sexual orientation. The binary of straight/gay doesn’t hold up when considering the innumerable intersections of race, gender, and other kinds of difference. Oftentimes, racialized people are also sexualized at the moment of their racialization in the social, such that their “supplemental race” status is read as coterminous with sexual deviancy, as in Cohen’s figure of the Black welfare queen.

E. Patrick Johnson, in “‘Quare’ studies,” writes about the word “queer’s” failure to mean enough, or to be able to contain all possible things it is meant to mean, especially regarding its failure to address real issues and concerns of racialization:

Because much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of selfhood, agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from ‘raced’ communities. Gloria Anzaldúa explicitly addresses this limitation when she warns that ‘queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all ‘queers’ of all races, ethnicities and classes are shored under’ (250). While acknowledging that ‘at times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders,’ Anzaldúa nevertheless urges that ‘even when we seek shelter under it [‘queer’], we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences.’

E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother,” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 126-127.

Johnson uses his grandmother’s particular pronunciation of queer, “quare,” to foreground immediately the excess in meaning of words that ambivalently signal oppositions like desire and repulsion, or strangeness and ordinariness. He critiques the lack of material analysis and under-interrogation of whiteness in institutional and mainstream theoretical projects of sexuality: “queer theory has often failed to address the material realities of gays and lesbians of color” within the logics and effects of white supremacist structures. Johnson here is arguing for the importance of “vernacular traditions such as performance, folklore, literature, and verbal art” for formulating and enacting a “politics of resistance.”

Ambivalence and Mediation

What, further, does it mean to say that queerness is mediated? Mediation etymologically can signal both process and intercessor, both the events and actions related to mediating and also the mediating frames and membranes through which information must pass. At a broad level, language is a kind of mediation through which concepts and ideas must be expressed through. Further, metaphors, from the root metapherein, or “to carry across,” alter and act on meaning as it passes through the figurative device, altering the identities of both referents. Mediation, in our contemporary moment, according to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, involves three steps or main logic: remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” The authors argue immediacy is co-constitutive with hypermediacy; the latter refers to the experience of media that foreground their form as mediating entities, and immediacy refers to the experience of a medium effacing itself as a mediating frame: “immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented.”

In their glossary of terms, Grusin and Bolter further define their use of “remediation”:

Defined by Paul Levenson as the “anthropotropic” process by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. We define the term differently, using it to mean the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms. Along with immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation is one of the three traits of our genealogy of new media.

The Oxford Reference internet encyclopedia list two entries for Paul Levenson’s proposed understanding of remediation:
1: The process by which new media are developed to represent more fully human perceptual and communicational faculties: for example, stereo is an improvement on mono sound because humans have two ears.
2: The processes by which humans compensate for the unforeseen consequences of their technological innovation. For example, the problem of not being able to see through a wall is solved by a window and the problem of the window destroying privacy is solved by blinds.

Themes of contamination, pollution, toxicity, and poison are invoked by the term “remedy” as well as themes of healing, cure, antidote, and medicine—but often, one side is emphasized at the cost of obscuring the other. Related to Derrida’s writing on the “pharmakon” in Dissemination, if we understand writing as both poison and cure—indissolubly both presence and absence, what is there and what is not there—and not as an absolutist either/or formula which produces either truth or pure fiction is crucial to the study of description and the spread and fragmentation of meaning online. The terms depend on each other in this relation of polysemy, are mutually constitutive, and would not exist without the other. Writing, like the pharmakon, reveals an undecidable ambivalence that cannot be reduced to either idea of representation, but instead are inseparably woven together.

Remediation is not a term confined to media studies but also belongs in the realm of politics and ecology. Environmental remediation concerns the attempt to clean, or purify, elemental media that has been contaminated. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published an online guide in 2018 to environmental remediation, defining it as “reducing radiation exposure” of “contaminated land areas—or other contaminated media, such as surface or groundwater.” Further, they gesture towards geopolitical contexts and ethical issues surrounding remediation: “As every country is different and every site has its own characteristics, choosing the best possible environmental remediation solution means balancing between risks, costs, benefits and available technologies as well as public acceptance.” The IAEA here has acknowledged the ways in which remediation is a process of simultaneously helping and harming populations, as remediation “actions need to be justified and optimized” to strike a balance between cost and benefit, and to consider whether it is viable, or even possible, to remediate. In the “Key Aspects to Take Into Account” section, they argue that sustainability ought to be a primary factor in planning nuclear operations: “in a way that minimizes excessive need for remediation activities at the end of operations”; in the same section, they recognize an element of futility after nuclear operations have already taken place: “Returning a site to the conditions before the event that caused the contamination is not necessary and many times not even reasonably achievable.” Remediation, for the IAEA, is not a process of absolute purification, but of remedy, which always carries side-effects. It acknowledges that elemental media like soil or water, once polluted, cannot necessarily be entirely uncontaminated. The movement of meanings through corrupting media is not merely a problem for communication, but as the IAEA shows, an ecological problem for the environment. See IAEA, “Getting to the Core of Environmental Remediation: Reducing radiation exposure from contaminated areas to protect people,” International Atomic Energy Agency (May 2018): 1–6 Access via: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/18/05/environmental_remediation.pdf.

Barbara Johnson argues that Derrida’s philosophical and critical project across Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomena, all published in 1967, is to “reevaluate the structuring principles of Western metaphysics,” and describes Derrida’s writing target and primary object of evaluation as “binary oppositions,” a formula for Western philosophical projects and the under-interrogated grounds upon which argumentative logics are built.  These binary pairings are organized “hierarchically” to favor, privilege, or see as superior the first or “primary” term over the second term (e.g. good/evil, light against dark, mind and body, man and woman, civilization and savagery). Johnson continues: “According to Derrida, the opposition between speech and writing has structured similarly,” where speech is seen as “immediacy, presence, life and identity,” and writing is “deferment, absence, death, and difference.” Thus, writing is “called upon as a necessary remedy for differance, but at the same time it is the very differance for which a remedy must be sought,” or the double logic of the “supplement,” which means in French “both an ‘addition’ and a ‘substitution,” which are “not exactly contradictory, but neither can they be combined in the traditional logic of identity,” or equivalence.  Derrida’s theory of writing “turns out to have been, in fact, a theory of reading. Reading involves “following the ‘other’ logics of structures of signification inscribed in writing that may or may not be in conformity with traditional logics of meaning, identity, consciousness, or intention” and also involves “taking seriously the elements that a standard reading disregards, overlooks, or edits out.” Johnson is arguing that Derrida is inviting us to read for wholes and holes, what is said and what world the text creates in/dependent of/on any original speaker, and for “materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Visual Ambivalence

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Sometimes images can have multiple meanings, depending on audience and discourse communities.

Works Cited

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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, “Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation,” in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5–6.

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother.” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Muñoz, José Eesteban. Disidentifications (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Serpell, C. Namwali. “Notes on Shade,” Post45, Formalism Unbound 2 (January 2021). Access via https://post45.org/2021/01/serpell-notes-on-shade/.