Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele; Icon Books, $17.95
This being Pride Month, LGBTQ people are afforded the opportunity to become better acquainted with our history, politics, and culture. Academically, this understanding of what it means to be LGBTQ and how we came to view sex, gender, and sexuality, has been termed queer theory, featuring such key philosophers as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, David Halperin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. But if you have ever tried to pick up one of their books, much of this work seems incomprehensible, too abstract and opaque, for the educated "lay" reader. Activist and senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University (UK) Meg-John Barker and feminist cartoonist Julia Scheele's new concise, slightly irreverent, accessible, and delightful comic-illustrated introductory journey through the ideas, people, and events that have shaped queer theory has eliminated the excuse not to be better informed about this essential field.
The first issue that emerges in queer theory is how one defines queer. Once-oppressive hate speech used against LGBT folk that has been reclaimed, it is now an umbrella term for people outside both the heterosexual, cisgender mainstream and the conventional LGBT mainstream. Queer theory sees queer as a verb, something we do rather than something we are. Barker touches on some precursors to queer theory such as Sartre and the existentialists, Kinsey, Simon and Gagnon's sexual scripts, Bem's androgyny, and black feminists (Lorde, Bell Hooks). But the key features of queer theories are they "draw on post-structuralist theories to examine power relations relating to sex, sexuality, and gender, destabilizing the taken-for-granted dominant understanding that assumes that heterosexuality is the normal or natural standard of sexuality, and exposing how sexual and gender identities are constructed."
Identity of any kind is neither essential nor fixed, but feels this way through repeated performance. Neither sexuality nor gender is experienced as binary (clearly either-or) by everyone, but rather fall along a continuum of sexual attraction between exclusively straight and exclusively gay-lesbian. Queer theory questions the concepts of sexual and gender identity. It challenges all binaries since they favor one pole over the other (i.e., male better than female, straight better than gay). Queer theory questions what is meant by normal, critiquing all "regimes of normativity." In fact, queer theory's mission could be summed up by its resistance to the categorization (and hence judgment) of all people. Ultimately any category is contextual, based on geography, history, culture, etc.
The authors' willingness to grapple with criticism that their ideas have no practical relevance in real life is valuable. Barker is especially strong in showing how race is central to queer theory, primarily because race categories are a way people are identified in biologically essentialist ways, policed as much as gender or sexuality. While queer theory is mostly anti-identity politics, in recent years it has reluctantly embraced that it's sometimes advantageous for marginalized groups to essentialize themselves to achieve their goals or prevent assimilation.
The authors also discuss such hot-button topics as queer feminism, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, queer masculinity, genderqueer, poly-and kink-normativity, and cisgenderism. They argue that queer theory has much to offer LGBT and feminist activists about how they could organize more effectively around gender and sexual diversity rather than identity categories. All forms of sexual representations need to be subjected to critical thinking. To think queerly is a process of learning that aims to disrupt the status quo and retrieve what has been rejected, with a list of accessible print and online resources at the back pertinent. We can thank Barker and Scheele for helping us see life from a queer perspective, which can only make us more effective activists.