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Gender & Society
Not Yet Queer Enough: The Lessons of Queer Theory for the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
Stephen Valocchi
Gender Society
2005; 19; 750
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294
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The online version of this article can be found at:
10.1177/0891243205280294
GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH
The Lessons of Queer Theory for
the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
STEPHEN VALOCCHI
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the
insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory
in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor (2003), Seidman (2002), Bettie (2003), and Schippers (2000).
The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical
direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sex-
uality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or conflate it with the broad range of gender and sex-
ual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and
performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its
emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes.
Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological
analysis.
Keywords:
queer theory; performativity; power; ethnography
I
n 1994, Steven Seidman edited a volume of
Sociological Theory
on queer theory
(Seidman 1994) that introduced a queer theoretical perspective to a sociological
audience and suggested how queer insights might be useful in rethinking gender
and sexuality. Two years later, he followed up his appeal to sociologists to take
queer theory seriously by editing a collection of essays in which the contributors
utilized queer theoretical insights in their empirical work (Seidman 1996). Despite
these promising beginnings a decade ago, sociologists of gender and sexuality are
only now beginning to see queer theory as a legitimate and useful contemporary
social theory. This article will reassert the original appeal by reviewing some of the
recent work in gender and sexuality to highlight the insights garnered using queer
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
I would like to thank Mary Bernstein, Rob Corber, Stephanie Gilmore, Steve
Seidman, Arlene Stein, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this arti-
cle. In addition, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of
Gender & Society
,
Christine Williams, for their thoughtful and thorough comments.
REPRINT REQUESTS:
Stephen Valocchi, Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
06106.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 19 No. 6, December 2005 750-770
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205280294
© 2005 Sociologists for Women in Society
750
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 751
theory. Four monographs are evaluated in light of the main tenets of queer theory as
they have developed during the past decade. Using these tenets, the article engages
in a critical evaluation of the texts and, in so doing, indicates how they can be
extended in an even queerer theoretical direction. Conversely, the analysis also
indicates how queer theory can be pushed in more sociological directions to deal
with the materiality of sex, gender, and sexuality and the role of institutional power
in the construction of identities.
The article proceeds in three parts. I first describe the central concepts and
claims of a queer analysis. These involve a different way of understanding the rela-
tionship between sex, gender, and sexuality; a focus on the performativity of gender
and sexuality in the formation of identities; and a refusal of the easy conflation of
sexual identity with the whole range of sexual desires, dispositions, and practices
that constitute sexuality. These concepts are also based on and operate within a dis-
cursive understanding of power where sexual and gender subjectivities are fash-
ioned from the signifying systems of the dominant sexual and gender taxonomies.
These taxonomies, in turn, regulate subjectivity and social life in general.
Sociologists have made several different kinds of critiques of queer theory
(Edwards 1998; Green 2002; Jagose 1996; Seidman 1997; Walters 1996). These
critiques have pointed to its predominant focus on literary texts (Gamson 1994), its
lack of attention to the institutional and material contexts of discursive power
(Seidman 1997), and the critical deconstruction of identity or group empowerment
categories (Collins 1998; Walters 1996). The analysis below shares some of these
critiques but at the same time insists that because the insights of queer theory are
significant, we must find ways to make these insights amenable to empirical
analysis.
After laying out the central elements of a queer analysis, the next, larger section
of the article uses these elements to evaluate and extend the arguments of four
recent studies: Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor’s (2003)
Drag Queens at the 801 Caba-
ret
, Steven Seidman’s (2002)
Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and
Lesbian Life
, Julie Bettie’s (2003)
Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity
,
and Mimi Schippers’s (2000)
Rockin’out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alter-
native Hard Rock
.
These monographs were chosen for several reasons. First, these texts stand as
excellent examples of utilizing key components of a queer perspective in empirical
research; in this way, they serve as templates for future queer work in the area of
gender and sexuality. But while these works use elements of a queer perspective,
they do not go far enough. Thus, these texts provide perfect springboards for
addressing the ongoing tensions between sociology and queer theory. By pushing
the work in this direction, my analysis opens up new questions and important
insights into the sociology of gender and sexuality. Second, this research is
ethnographic in nature, and as I argue in the conclusion, ethnography is especially
well suited to handle the methodological challenges associated with distinguishing
practices, identities, and hegemonic structures of gender and sexuality, an impor-
tant component of a queer perspective. Third, these monographs, taken collec-
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752 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2005
tively, point to some weaknesses of queer theory as a social science perspective and
suggest ways to address these weaknesses. The final section of the article builds on
the insights of these monographs and offers guidelines for doing queer work in gen-
der and sexuality.
THE COMPONENTS OF QUEER ANALYSIS
Rethinking Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Sociologists are used to thinking of sex, gender, and sexuality as separate vari-
ables with discrete attributes defined in binary terms: Bodies are either male or
female; our gender presentation, behavioral dispositions, and social roles are either
masculine or feminine; our sexuality is either heterosexual or homosexual (Lorber
1996). We see each of these variables as signaling important social dynamics that
affect attitudes, behavior, and life chances. We also tend to see them as identities, as
bundles of norms, roles, and interests that are important indicators of the social self.
Thus, we are men or women, masculine or feminine, gay or straight. Of course,
sociologists admit that these are social constructions, but they are social construc-
tions with consequences.
Sociologists further acknowledge the normative relationship across these vari-
ables. As Lorber (1996, 144) states, “sociology assumes that each person has one
sex, one sexuality, and one gender, which are congruent and fixed for life. ...A
woman is assumed to be a feminine female; a man a masculine male. Heterosexual-
ity is the uninterrogated norm.” Although sociologists do recognize this alignment
as ideological and hence as a source of power, we conspire in reproducing this
alignment by treating the categories and the normative relationship among them as
the starting assumptions on which our research is based and the major lens through
which we interpret our data. The conflation of these variables with identities further
encourages this tendency. We look, for example, for sex differences in earnings or
in the time balance between work and home (Bittman et al. 2003); we examine
dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities among men and women
(Connell 1995); we narrate the changing nature of lesbian and gay communities
(Armstrong 2002; Stein 1997).
These projects are essential, but the danger lies in their implicit recognition that
the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual as well
as the normative alignment across them are more than ideological constructs but are
somehow naturally occurring phenomena. By taking these categories as givens or
as reified, we do not fully consider the ways that inequalities are constructed by the
categories in the first place. These categories exert power over individuals, espe-
cially for those who do not fit neatly within their normative alignments.
Queer theory turns this emphasis on its head by deconstructing these binaries,
foregrounding the constructed nature of the sex, gender, and sexuality classifica-
tion systems and resisting the tendency to congeal these categories into social
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Valocchi / NOT YET QUEER ENOUGH 753
identities. Because the binaries are revealed to be cultural constructions or ideolog-
ical fictions, the reality of sexed bodies and gender and sexual identities are fraught
with incoherence and instability. In other words, these binaries incompletely or
imperfectly represent a broad range of complicated social processes surrounding
the meaning of bodies and the social cues, practices, and subjectivities associated
with gender and sexuality (Jagose 1996; Lorber 1996). This gulf between the ideo-
logical construct and the lived experience is one contribution of queer analysis.
Queer theory focuses on the “deviant” cases, or the anatomies, genders, sexual
practices, and identities that do not neatly fit into either category of the binaries or
that violate the normative alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality (Corber and
Valocchi 2003). It also pays attention to how the dominant taxonomies fail to cap-
ture the complexity of individual gender and sexual subjectivities and practices
even among those who may define themselves in terms of those dominant taxono-
mies (Delaney 1999; Halperin 2002). While the dominant classification scheme
encourages us, for example, to view gender and sexuality as separate and independ-
ent dimensions of social and psychic life, queer analysis explores their interrela-
tionships and their unanticipated manifestations: the ways, for example, gender is
sexed and sexuality is gendered in nonnormative ways (Gagne and Tewksbury
2002).
As we will see below, rethinking sex, gender, and sexuality queerly opens up
new questions for sociologists and new ways of thinking about old concepts. For
example, what happens to the study of gay men and lesbians when gender is made
central to the analysis? In other words, what happens when the relationship
between gender and sexuality becomes an empirical question and individual
subjectivities and practices are not assumed to be easily read off the dominant tax-
onomies or identity categories? Gay femininity and lesbian masculinity may be
more useful analytical categories than the ones suggested by our dominant taxono-
mies of male and female, lesbian and gay. Also, what happens to the study of het-
erosexuality when sexuality and gender are understood queerly and used to analyze
subjectivities, practices, and subcultural formations? Queer analysis reveals the
instabilities in this hegemonic sexual formation and is sensitive to the ways individ-
uals may subvert the normative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the
construction of heterosexuality.
Rethinking Gay Identity
While a queer analysis deals centrally with the gulf between the normative
alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the lived experience of individuals, it
also pays special attention to one particular binary that has served as the trope of
difference structuring social knowledge throughout the twentieth and into the
twenty-first centuries: the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Seidman 1997). As lit-
erary theorists, film scholars, and cultural and social historians (Corber 2005;
Duggan 2000; Halperin 2002; Sedgwick 1991) have shown, the emergence of the
category homosexual at the end of the nineteenth century became a way not only of
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