On the Political Character of Queerness
Billie Cashmore
16 April 2025
16 April 2025
This piece pertains to a structure of political-philosophical argument that has become widespread in public thinking about queerness. It is written out of a frustration with, an anger at, queer people, including myself.
The argument runs something like this: the normativity of social roles - including (especially?) those relating to the matrix of sex(uality) - require the figure of an excluded being against which the coherence of that norm is defined. In a sense, this is a kind of transfiguration of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, wherein the coherence of any system requires a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction. In Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault’s introduction to the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin’s journal, the limit of the matrix of representation we call “gender” is reached, such that “Herculine is not an ‘identity,’ but the sexual impossibility of an identity”. Now, perhaps the most significant aspect of Butler’s position, and no doubt its truest element, is that sex/gender is the result of a kind of acting-out that cannot be thought in terms of a pre-existing identity, but rather whose articulation prevents us of speaking of identity in any substantial sense. That is to say, there is no substance of “male or female”, neither in the biological nor, of course, the socio-psychological (there is no “body” as such, let alone a “wrong one” that we could be born into). Yet we live in a world in which substance is acted out: the problem, then, for gender theory in general is to think the categories necessary for the description of this normatively mandated process, to think how it is possible that substance could be performatively constituted.
The argument runs something like this: the normativity of social roles - including (especially?) those relating to the matrix of sex(uality) - require the figure of an excluded being against which the coherence of that norm is defined. In a sense, this is a kind of transfiguration of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, wherein the coherence of any system requires a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction. In Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault’s introduction to the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin’s journal, the limit of the matrix of representation we call “gender” is reached, such that “Herculine is not an ‘identity,’ but the sexual impossibility of an identity”. Now, perhaps the most significant aspect of Butler’s position, and no doubt its truest element, is that sex/gender is the result of a kind of acting-out that cannot be thought in terms of a pre-existing identity, but rather whose articulation prevents us of speaking of identity in any substantial sense. That is to say, there is no substance of “male or female”, neither in the biological nor, of course, the socio-psychological (there is no “body” as such, let alone a “wrong one” that we could be born into). Yet we live in a world in which substance is acted out: the problem, then, for gender theory in general is to think the categories necessary for the description of this normatively mandated process, to think how it is possible that substance could be performatively constituted.
But there is another argument here that it is the brilliance of Butler’s book to sneak through the gate. That is, given that this “performative constitution” is the sort of doing that constitutes something as the case (recall, of course, the judge who declares “guilty!” and thus constitutes the defendant as a convict) it must thereby lie outside the matrix of constituted representation. It is this which is the condition of possibility of what Butler calls subversive gender acts, the kind of act that, like Herculine, cannot be understood within matrix of representation that in its commitment to the substantialism of patriarchal categories disallows the thought of these categories as being acted-out, as producing the appearance of substance as so many effects of these multiple and always illegitimate acts. For Butler,
the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. [1]
This is really the key political moment in this great foundational text of contemporary theory. Precisely because it locates in all constitution of gender a moment of the Herculininean failure to be categorised in its varying forms - notably the “parodic repetition” of drag that representatively mirrors gender but in fact performatively constitutes something altogether different - queerness is thus located as the necessary included-excluded moment in all of our representations of sex-gender-sexuality. There is then a kind of (ontological?) difference between queerness and queer people, wherein the former is a necessary condition of gender(ed) representation, the latter are just those who have more explicitly failed to repeat their performance, those of us a bit too ill-disciplined for patriarchy.
Butler’s conceptual virtuosity, their undoubtedly far-reaching arguments, have allowed them to revolutionise several philosophical fields, not only that of feminism, and so it is no surprise that this argument has echoed out much further than the academy to which its arguments are indebted. [2] What this has allowed for is an insistence on the ontological difference between queerness and queer people, such that a particular kind of gendered expression which celebrates its performative constitution is destabilising to patriarchy, and which is only contingently related to queer people insofar as this latter are predisposed toward such performances, and sometimes unable to do any other sort of performance. Queerness is thereforere defined here in a way that makes its explicit politicisation possible. Of course, queer people have, as long as sexuality and gender has been the concern of the state, been necessarily involved in politics, but what Butler’s redefinition accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state, but rather is related to its persistent destabilisation of patriarchal matrices of representation. We can now arrive at what feels like a slogan of queer politics of late, that queerness is “inherently”political. It is not just inherently political, it has an inherent politics, that is, its destabilising position is necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist. Hallelujah! Communism in the present.
This is a little unfair on Butler, I admit, but the politics is broadly there, and repeated. In “Critically Queer”, an essay which appears in Bodies that Matter, the claim is, again, that subversive performative acts, such as those articulated in drag performance, are radical (only) to the extent that they call the truth-regime of sex into question. That is to say, to outline the queer moment in the constitution of heterosexual norms that is always present as cis-heterosexuality’s constantly effaced condition of (im)possibility. Thus Butler’s move, as we must always know, is to consider how resignification is possible in this performativemode, constantly implicated in that which it opposes. The answer, of course, is located in this ontologisation of the concept of queerness as a moment of all gendered acts, indeed a condition on discourse in general. But its ontologisation means that Butler has a problem locating what is distinctively queer about a particular act, what makes one queer and another not, if queerness is constantly located as the productive site of discourse itself. Butler, it seems, can provide no concept of this, but rather always makes a particular refrain in varying forms that function as something of a terminological constellation around the real moment of significance in their work. The clearest summary is as follows:
The resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabitingthe practices of its rearticulation. The critical promise of drag does not have to dow ith the proliferation of genders, as if a sheer increase in numbers would do the job, but rather with the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals. [3]
There is something here of an immanent critique, though its relation to its Hegelian or Frankfurt School variants is left (perhaps deliberately) unclear. But what is this “inhabitation” of a practice of rearticulation, upon which the politics of queerness now seems to hang? We appear to be approaching the claim that “queerness” is accessible by something like an authentic form of Being-queer that is separated by a radical difference from being a queer person, always having to do with a particular politics of calling into question the norm. And if this is read to be queerness’s real function within the performative construction of all gendered norms, not strictly as a representational other against which these norms are defined but rather a moment of failure in the en-actment of those norms themselves, then such calling-into-question is really the mode in which queerness is representationally registered. Butler’s sense of an inhabitation of queerness might then, via this sense of being-at-home in queerness, offer us a surprising appearance of a well-known formulation, albeit in another form, that queer gender is that gender for whom its gender is in question. All problems of queerness then become the problem of this non-relation between queerness and queer people, where this latter finds itself in representation yet must always attempt to find its home in queerness. ‘Queerness’, then, is always destabilising to gendered norms, and thus always political, though its entry into representation is only possible by a calling-into-question that involves an authentic inhabiting of the ontological structure of discourse, an authenticity always articulated as the impossibility of all performative authenticity. While Butler’s position may vary well disallow any appeal to an authentic maleness or femaleness - even a sense of an authentic queerness itself - this sense of inhabiting queerness as critical instability calls into being the possibility of a queer person who is not inhabiting this queerness, where this queerness is constructed at such a general level so as to be a condition on all discourse. It is in this sense that Butler ontologises queerness: even if it is raised to the level of always destabilising the possibility of ontology, it takes this status only in being ontologised as the condition of impossibility of ontology.
Such a position leads to a widely acceptable politics of inclusion and universality - especially when combined with the solidaristic politics of intersectionality with which Butler opens their argument in Gender Trouble - that locates the possibility of a feminist politics not in a shared characteristic (since, strictly speaking, people do not have genders or sexes according to Butler), but rather in the shared goal of an abolition of patriarchy. Intersectionality, rather than merely being read as a necessary identification of the ways individual subjects are constituted and dominated at the site of intersection between varying relations of domination, now reads each of these relations as reciprocally constitutive, such that there is no sense of what patriarchy is without white supremacy, no sense of queerness without a resistance to colonialism, and so on. As such, the interconnectedness of all struggles allows for some of the more politically questionable claims - for instance, that polyamory is necessarily connected with anti-colonial struggle - which thereby allows for a sense of activism through a set of choices one applies to one’s own life, by virtue of their apparent connection to all other modes of domination. No doubt there is not a struggle against oppression that we should not be committed to, and the interconnectedness of, for example, the genocide of Palestinians since 1948 by the settler colonial state of Israel is funded and technologically aided by the data-production of the tech industry which is now forming a new fascism in the United States. But claims to interconnectedness that imagine a total social space in which all relations can be said to depend on one another both misunderstands the radically disconnected quality of our lives under globalisation, but also allows for a form of political activism that functions as a resignation, a participation in only one’s own individual life, and which takes on the whole by its (often deeply tenuous) connection to all others.
The problem in ontologisations of queerness is that by establishing them as general conditions on (gendered) discourse they thereby lose all partiality, and thus all sense of an opposition to anything beyond a loosely-defined norm. “Queerness” becomes accessible to everyone, as long as they are regarded as somewhat “calling into question” gendered norms. In a sense, this is what has allowed TERFs in the UK to refer to straight white women as “gender non-conforming” just because they have short hair: it’s essentially true! [4] There seems to be little, then, that would separate queerness in this rather minimal sense from others in the queer community, who lie further outside the bounds of normative gender enactment for whatever reason. The attempt to articulate a notion of “queerness” that allows for radical inclusivity now flattens the varying and distinct representations of this “queerness”, reducing its political meaning to null, an empty signifier in which seemingly all can participate if they make the right choices about what shoes to buy, or what haircut to ask for. This is not an emptying of the political meaning of queerness by capitalist appropriation, but rather a process by which the establishment of queerness as ontological condition ensures that it loses all connection to its diffuse, particular discursive representations. Nonetheless, the necessity of discourse means that a certain set of representations have no doubt become associated with “queerness”, though these are now completely arbitrary once queerness has been generalised as that which lies as the condition of (im)possibility of discourse. This is a queerness whose politics has now ceased to exist entirely, since it bears no necessary relation to anything other than living truly with the always-extant deconstruction of norms that is already occurring: there is nothing, strictly, that must be changed, from the point of view of “queerness”. There is no politics of queerness.
I suspect that this is not a problem with Butler’s analysis, which to me seems absolutely correct from the point of view of drawing out what must surely be meant by “queerness” and its alleged politics. The problem is with this idea of “queerness” as something that exists at such a universal level. Helpful for a culture in which activism is demanded of all of us but the possibilities of radical change seem increasingly foreclosed, the inhabitation of queerness offers us all a radical politics that demands remarkably little of us. This might explain its defeat across Europe and North America in the last decade, culminating now with Trump’s ban on all trans healthcare for under 19s (which therefore includes some trans adults in the ban), and the enshrinement into law of the illegitimacy of transness. What is remarkable in these moves is that, while no doubt the forces of reaction behind them are opposed to queerness in all its forms, the oft-professed claim that an attack on trans people is an attack on all “queer” people seems not to have been borne out: the Labour Party in the UK is more than happy to erode the rights of trans people in a rather extreme fashion without moving toward anything which would target cisgender queer people, and this equally doesn’t yet appear to be the case in Trump’s America. After all, it has not been lost on many of us that many of the figures leading this assault on trans people are cisgender gaymen. If “queerness” has a politics, that is to say a politics associated with this particular understanding of the world, then it clearly has not amounted to much, and has been perhaps more resoundingly defeated than any other politics around the globe.
What is more, what marks out our situation, in the UK especially, is the way that the far right has been able to adopt a key premise that most liberal cisgender people will also accept, namely the biological reality of sex in contrast to the - always implicitly lesser in its reality - social or cultural concept of sex. As I write this, the UK Supreme Court has recently announced its judgment that trans people are no longer to be protected against discriminationon the basis of sex. This should, of course, be added to the ever-growing list of failures of the discourse that trans people are those whose “gender” is somehow different from their “sex”. But the belief that gender exists as a kind of historical (un)reality is touted as the ultimate moment of liberation for some within the community; the affect associated with living in the truth of this isolation from history is the affirmation of joy. But in so doing, such a position risks an essentialism generated precisely out of its profession of non-essentialism, fixing in place a particular relation to the history of gendered representation, along with a fixed representation of the unfixity of the body that coagulates around particular meanings and symbols. Both straight-liberal and queer-radical positions have a tendency to set themselves up as subjects responding freely to an all-too-fixed set of meanings passed down by history, thereby reproducing the conception of the liberal Enlightenment subject, who does what they will with nature via a set of actions that take place in a representational vacuum. In so doing, they forget the fixity of themselves as actors prefigured by actual meaning, and the unfixity of history as a meaning that must always live in the present.
I foresee that the time-limit on “queerness” is approaching, and we will have to look for new ways to articulate our place in this world, and our mode of opposition to patriarchy, in all its instantiations. This will, I suspect, be accompanied by some rather stark divisions inthis community that was once able to call itself “queer”, as we discover that if it was only thisidea of queerness that was holding us all together, then perhaps we were not held together atall. We stand in danger of losing even more than we have already lost, not only if we continueto hold onto this unproductive and unsuccessful way of thinking, but also if we fail to find away to continue the fight, on new terms, appropriate to our situation.
It might be nice to end here, with a call for finding new ways of thinking our politics, but unfortunately things are even worse than this. Indeed, if we accept that our categories of queer gender and sexuality are informed by a politics - and I have suggested that in many cases the distinct politics of queerness as I have described is precisely this informing politics - then the calling into question of our politics in response to the failure of queerness will necessarily involve also reconsidering the very categories that we have thus far sought to defend. “Queer” politics is far too recent, I would wager, to have informed absolutely any of these categories, and ascribing their meanings to all those who find expression in them to a singlepolitics would be exceptionally reductive. Still, this gives us a new problem, of not only to consider how our gender categories are caught up in the politics we oppose, but how our modes of opposition need to be reformulated in response to their defeat; and, in turn, the identity categories with which we have become used to ascribing ourselves must also be reformulated. This will perhaps involve an incredible amount of pain, leading to the feel of a necessity (or a demand by a malicious other) to cut ourselves off from what we are. But we know this feeling rather well: we, those who have called ourselves queer, know keenly the uncertainty of what to call ourselves, the anxiety that hangs in the realisation that our names for ourselves are neither our own nor enacted entirely upon us, but rather played out in a constant struggle with the matrix of representation.
The consolidation of particular modes of representation registers to discourse the aporia of the representation of queerness, that if there is any sense in which queerness is a condition of discourse and thus destabilising to this matrix, its articulation will nonetheless require its representation as such, and this negativity cannot be sidestepped by appealing to the performative as always that which enacts, and in so doing fails to enact, this representative schema. That is to say, we cannot have it both ways: either queerness lies outside representation, and so none of us can really represent it, or the situation is more difficult, and it lies thoroughly within representation, always swallowed-up, entirely, into that which it must represent itself as opposing. The self-certainty of pronouncements of what one is - even if that which one is is thought to be a destabilising nothingness romantically understood as transcendent of gendered representation - is a feature of the problem of representation that affects all of us, not of queerness as such: the problem would be with a politics that thinks it has resolved this issue by finding itself as the condition on representation, which will only ever discover, to its shame, that it was completely beholden to representation all along. A politics of queerness would be that which lives in this absolute untruth, in its failure both to represent itself, but also the impossibility of non-representation. This double bind of falsity registers to discourse the falsity of the world at large: we only experience the truth of what we are at the moment of failure for everything we thought we were.
The destabilisation of norms is no longer, here, an ontological condition, but rather is called into being precisely at this moment, the moment of danger, as our lives are at stake. We have the ability to be those ones free from normativity, at least for a moment, precisely because the norms we have so far adopted now seem irrecoverably defeated.
We have a rubric for all this, of course, from a familiar and welcome source. Judith Butler writes:
[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when ourwillingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance ofbecoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to besure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but alsoto be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate theself-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. [5]
The politics after queerness is not yet formed, nor will its establishment be painless. This does not make it any less possible, nor any less an imperative if we are to win. That we can - we must - be something else, is the shaking to the ground of all thusly constituted identity. Perhaps it is only here that we can feel the call of a liberated future.
1. Judith Butler, 1990 [1999] Gender Trouble, (London: Routledge). p.179
2. Though I note that I don’t particularly see the motivations behind the text as all thatacademic. It is rather clear that Butler is driven, at all moments when they are writing aboutgender or identity, from a rather profound love and care for queerness and queer people. It isa book that comes from dyke bars and drag shows as much as the seminar room.
3. Judith Butler, 1993. Bodies that Matter, (London: Routledge) p.257.
4. Why do they all have that haircut?
5. Judith Butler, 2005, Giving an Account of Oneself. (New York, NY: Fordham UniversityPress). p.136