DANGEROUS LIAISONS: QUEER SUBJECTIVITY, LIBERALISM AND RACE

Abstract

The emergence of queer theory has posed an incipient and significant challenge to the essentialism which has typically characterized theories of sexuality. In an attempt to eschew the totalizing effects of the categories ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’, queer theorists advocate a subjectivity which celebrates sexual difference without concern for achieved or ascribed characteristics. It is this remarkable capacity for inclusivity, attributed most immediately to the gender and race neutrality of ‘queer’, which is of particular interest here. More specifically, this article examines queer subjectivity's relation to a liberal humanist discourse whose purported universality requires the production of abstract, sovereign subjects without concern for their social location. The article in turn examines how the liberal premises which underlie queer subjectivity actually facilitate the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while undermining similar attempts to resignify racial epithets. Far from being a neutral subject position which ensures the liberty and autonomy of its inhabitants, the racial epithet here reinscribes the difference which the ‘queer’ subject and its liberal humanist prototype are perpetually trying to mask. I contend that it is this discrepancy in the capacity to mask difference – via a proximity to or distance from the liberal subject – which permits the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while racial epithets continue to remain taboo in the cultural mainstream.

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