Queer Theory

Breaking the binary?

This is a queer theory explainer, in which I steel man queer theory, then outline a couple of thoughts about the best way to argue with its advocates. It is not meant to be a comprehensive account, and I have simplified for the sake of clarity. I hope it’s helpful for those struggling with the absolutely self indulgent and pseudo intellectual way queer theorists choose to write.

In essence, queer theory holds that Western thought is based around binaries – black and white, night and day, men and women, straight and gay. One side of the binary is privileged, the other devalued. These apparently fundamental, essential binary categories are created through performance. You don’t identify somebody as a man because you have performed a genital inspection. You identify them as a man because they are downing a keg of beer at a party whilst their friends shout “chug.” Even the act of holding up a baby and saying “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” is performative. Butler thinks that this utterance speaks a gendered subject into being, in the same way that “I hereby pronounce you man and wife” speaks a marriage into being.

The binary categories are policed in a variety of ways. This can be literal policing (through laws that forbid homosexuality, for example). The binary can also be policed at other levels. For example, a teenage magazine that asks teenage girls “are you ready yet” isn’t asking a neutral question. The “yet” indicates that the reader will, at some point, be ready. The question is often put in the context of “really” having sex vs “messing around,” which privileges specifically penis in vagina sex, and devalues all other types. The question isn’t “what are you ready for,” but “are you ready for this specific act of penis in vagina sex.” A different question might be, “how can you say no to sex in a forthright way.” The “are you ready yet” question does not describe experience; it creates it, and polices girls’ experience as it does so.

Queer theory is particularly interested in moments that break through this policing, and “queer” the binary. For example, in Jane Eyre, when she says “I am not a bird and no net ensnares me” she asserts her independence – but in that same moment throws herself into abject penury. She breaks out of her role as a woman, a dependent, and asserts herself, refusing male control over her, thus breaking social taboos around sex and class, but she also reinforces her belief in the prevailing social and Christian mores, that bigamy is wrong, and that she will not be a mistress. She both breaks through social norms, and in the same moment reinforces them, that both asserts her independence, and destroys it. It’s a very “queer theory” moment.

Some people say “yes but hold on” at this point, because all this gender stuff is fine, of course people “perform” gender, but there are still men and women. Some things are still black and some white. There are male and female bodies under the performance. Jane Eyre might break society’s expectations on her as a woman, but they are not placed there because of her performance of gender, but because of her biological sex.

There are two answers to this in queer theory. The first is that biology is complicated – there are “intersex” people, for example, and people who “pass” as the opposite sex. This is easiest to defeat; the existence of trans and intersex people does not mean that there is a third sex or that the binary is non-existent or invalid; everybody is still male or female. This is the most used one by proponents of trans ideology - perhaps because it is most easily understood. I doubt many people have really got to grips with the second one - which is both more central to queer theory understandings of the world, and harder to defeat.

The second queer theory contention is this: when you say “look at THIS thing which makes biological sex real” you are, essentially, pointing at the thing. You are performing it. You are producing more text that refers to it. You are not, in fact, inserting a body into an argument, but instead, you are using the discourse of bodies and biological sex to wield power and reinforce the binary. You are, in fact, yourself, in the very moment that you point to a physical body, performing the gendered binary and enforcing power through discourse.

This sounds counter intuitive. it also sounds very abstract and pretentious. It isn’t the kind of theory you would develop, let’s say, between changing a nappy and comforting a crying toddler. Most people really believe in a material reality somehow underneath language. If you don’t believe in the material reality of bodies, then try going without water or oxygen, or even, let’s say, dealing with a serious disability, or giving birth. It was much easier to believe in queer theory before I gave birth.

But I’m trying to give a fair run to queer theory, to steel man it, so let’s try a thought experiment that illustrates this point about language not simply describing the world, but creating it. That there isn’t any way to experience the world, except in the chunks that language cuts it into. Wherever you are, look around you. You might see a phone, a computer, a bed, a chair, a window if you’re lucky. You know what they are. You have concepts for all of the things in your field of vision. You know what they are for. Now, instead of cutting up your field of vision into recognised objects, try to see it simply as a visual field of colour and light. Experience it the way that somebody who doesn’t know what cricket is would experience a test match. Experience it the way that a baby might experience it, on first opening its eyes. You will not be able to, unless you are an experienced meditator, and even then, only for short periods. But the effort itself will help you understand the extent through which we understand the world through language - there is no underlying structure to reality as we perceive it, until it is mediated through language.

Queer theory also argues that there is no getting “outside language” to experience the world as it is. We can only know the world as mediated and carved up through text. Any attempt to understand the world as having a material reality, outside of text, is doomed to failure. There is always and everywhere only language and performance, binaries and blurring of boundaries. Any attempt to deny this is, itself, an attempt to wield power, and create reality in discourse. In the moment you deny it the most, in that very moment, you are reinforcing it the hardest.

So if there is only text and power, what’s the point of anything? How are we supposed to “do” theory. It’s all just discourse, right? No. The aim of queer theory is to “queer” the binary. That is, to show up the performative and controlling workings of power, of attempts to police ways of being in the world. To turn things on their head. To find performances which subvert the restrictive binaries and allow meanings to proliferate.

One way to do this is to make “performances” which “queer” the binary, that show up the performative and controlling nature of attempts to police it. For example, we can perform our gender in a way that is, in and of itself, likely to make the gender binary seem absurd. I’m not against this. My wife and I are both women, which is already binary breaking. We play with gender binaries in our relationship too. I wrote about it recently - we are both dappled. She is velvet wrapped in steel, I’m steel wrapped in velvet. I love the moments of liminality, for example, when people I know vaguely realise that I’m a lesbian, and that lesbians really can look the way I do, is perfection. In fact, as a lesbian, it is a radical act to refuse to be confined to the devalued side of the binary - to burst out in songs of praise for women and for same sex attraction. I am not against it. I’m not.

I’ll just note something though, and put a pin in it. Why is it boundaries around gender and sexuality which queer theory has been particularly interested in queering? The experience of night and day, light and dark are perhaps even more central to human experience than that of sex - certainly, our far distant ancestors experienced light and dark before they moved from cloning themselves to sexual reproduction. So where are all the academic tomes “queering” that binary? What is it about sex and sexuality that is of such great interest?

It might be illustrative here to mention “limites experiences.” These are what Foucault describes as human experiences so extreme that the experience of coherent selfhood seems to dissolve - for example, it can happen in the depths of grief and in certain sexual experiences (particularly sado masochistic ones). I sought them out for years and years. I have some experience of them. Looking back now, I might like to gently point out to my younger self that Foucault was, in fact, lionising dissociation - but that’s by the by.

Despite all these grand attempts to transgress boundaries, find liminal spaces, queer everything, queer theory holds that any such attempt to break out of the binary is always ultimately doomed to failure. Marx said, more or less, that men make history, but not in ways of their own choosing. In queer theory, you can only ever temporarily escape the chains of binary language. Any such breakthrough is likely to either be policed out of existence, or policed in a way that creates a proliferation of meaning, or itself become the dominant narrative.

This, in my view, is where we have to take queer theory on. We need to point out, for example, that it is no longer transgressive and binary breaking to be “non-binary,” for example. First, the second you say “non-binary” you create a binary between things that are binary and things that are not. There is no escape, no matter what you wear. You can’t just opt out of discourse by adopting an identity. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way identities are constructed, even from within a queer theory standpoint. Even Foucault would be embarrassed.

Perhaps maybe even more helpful is the recognition that there’s nothing more binary than the male non-binary dress code (velvet, make up and some sort of smooth, flowing locks) and the female one (short hair, no make-up, masculine clothes). The binary is relentless and cannot truly be escaped. Attempts to do so might start off interesting, persuasive, but they end up boring and… binary.

Trans people who transition also fail to escape the binary. Transwomen get in the press for becoming CEOs and winning at sports, trans men for getting pregnant. Adopting the gendered dress codes for the opposite sex is not a revolutionary act, just because you have also adopted a special identity. Striving against your physical body to morph it into what it cannot be is not a revolutionary act; you are not queering anything. You are starting from a place where you acknowledge the physical reality of sex, and then submitting the sexed body to discourses of power. You are submitting your flesh to discourse. You are attempting to queer the gender binary but you are, in that same moment, inscribing it into a flesh whose physical reality you must begin by acknowledging.

Even dysphoria itself is absolutely grounded in the physical reality of the body. It’s not really gender dysphoria. That’s a misnomer. If it were gender dysphoria, you could just wear what you want, do what job you want. What it really is, is sex dysphoria. A visceral discomfort with the sexed aspects of your body. Periods, breasts, genitals, hair. A hatred of the way they intrude on and shape your experience of being in the world, and the way others treat you. It is, perhaps more than any other condition described in the DSM 5 except anorexia, about embodiment.

There is, really, no escape from queer theory. It is, in fact, correct that there’s no way of getting beyond language. But here’s the thing. Every single theory worth its salt has one thing in common. It has a piece of evidence that, if discovered, would refute the theory. If somebody discovered the “edge of the world,” where ships fell into a gigantic abyss, then the round earth theory would be refuted. If rabbit fossils were discovered in the precambrian layer, the theory of evolution would be refuted. But what, exactly, could refute queer theory?

Queer theory proponents are like those annoying people who say “but everything is selfish” kids that you meet at 6th form. The really annoying ones. I’m sure you will have had the conversation. “Everything is selfish,” they begin, two pints in, looking for you to give them counter examples. You give example after example, and they give you reasons that it is selfish. “They’re doing it for the glory.” There’s always an answer. But simply by engaging in the conversation as it is postulated, you have reversed the actual burden of proof.

In the real world, people do things that are unselfish all the time. The actual answer to this bozo is not to give him examples. That’s playing his game. The answer is to say “you are making an extraordinary claim - that altruism does not exist. I will not accept such an extraordinary claim unless you provide evidence for it.” We shouldn’t accept post hoc rationalisations of individual actions from this dude of why everything is selfish - we should ask him to justify his proposition.

Likewise, with queer theory, we shouldn’t accept all the examples given to “queer” binaries. Yes people with DSDs exist - but if you want to claim that there’s no such thing as men and women, or that men can literally become women, that’s an extraordinary claim, and I’m not going to take a bunch of examples as an answer. Even if people with DSDs were not, in fact, male or female, claiming that means that men and women are not meaningful categories would be like saying that because dusk and dawn exist, there’s no such thing as night and day. Likewise with the whole “you can’t get beyond language” claim. If every attempt to get beyond language fails, then your little game where you keep pointing out that you can’t get beyond language is also an attempt to wield power in discourse, and can be dismissed.

I, for one, am going to start calling queer theory beliefs what they are - magic beliefs. They are brain eating little worms. They lead otherwise apparently intelligent people to believe that because people with DSDs exist, men and women and children are meaningless categories. But somehow, at the same time as being meaningless, they are so important as categories that children can consent to life changing decisions and need to be sterilised and become lifelong medical patients based on what toys they like to play with. So important as categories that doctors need to hack away at people’s flesh, to make it more similar to the flesh of people on the other side of the binary.

It’s nonsense.

The individuals making these claim in fact reveal more about themselves and their own motivations than they do about the human condition.