Identity Judgements, Queer Politics

Abstract

Political identities have received bad press for quite some time. Sexual identities constitute no exception to this trend. Nearly ten years ago Judith Butler expressed her ambivalent relation to identity categories by calling them ‘necessary errors’, whilst at the same time holding that ‘there remains a political imperative to use [them]’. 1 In more recent times, Alan Sinfield has suggested that we might be entering a period which he labels ‘post-gay’. This period is characterized by the realization that metropolitan post-Stonewall gay and, perhaps, lesbian identities ‘are historical phenomena and may now be hindering us more than they help us’. 2 Sinfield gives voice, then, to the hope that in this new period ‘it will not seem so necessary to define, and hence to limit, our sexualities’. For reasons not dissimilar to those advanced by Butler, however, Sinfield cannot bring himself to reject identities altogether. Instead, he enjoins us ‘to entertain more diverse and permeable identities’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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