2.3 The Queer Theory
2.3.2 Criticism of the Queer Theory
The way to ground the Queer Theory in less objective epistemic aspirations is through engaging with the critical and contemporary theorists of this theory as well as through a rigorous definition of its limitations. According to Tim Edwards (1998), a criticism of Queer Theory as it relates to the ability to define lesbian issues is that, although Queer Theory celebrates difference, queer politics makes the ‘gay’
or ‘lesbian’ identity too central. This view is in contrast to the aims of showing that sexual orientation is a mere part of how a person acts and feels (Butler, 1994). The research addressed this criticism by consulting current third-wave feminist scholar Susan Archer Mann’s (2013) work. Her explanation is that Queer Theory utilises queer as an umbrella term which includes groups regardless of class, race and gender. Therefore, the research’s intention was to contextualise the idea of queer studies in a contemporary setting and to introduce the Queer Theory as a foundation for more fully understanding the role online media play in framing how and why lesbians are being targeted as murder victims not
56 only as an explanation of report content, but also from a disruptive feminist narration. Through the utility of the Queer Theory, this research was able to articulate the gaps in knowledge pertaining to the research problem. The heuristic value of the Queer Theory is that it contributes to post-structuralist ideology of gender to such an extent that it decentralises institutional heterosexism, thereby ending judgement of queer behaviour, queer sexual identity, queer reality, and LGBTIQ issues such as
‘queercide’.
In contextualising LGBTIQ issues − and lesbian murders in particular – this research found that it had often been argued that a lack of education could lead to violence against LGBTIQ people, especially as categories such as heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual had been developed largely in the late Nineteenth Century. The Social Dominance Theory by Pratto and Stewart (2011) describes how societies maintain their group-based dominance – such as heteronormative understandings of LGBTIQ issues – and how an understanding of this type of dominance can be enhanced by the Queer Theory.
The axiological assumption of the Social Dominance Theory values hierarchies in nearly all stable societies that can be considered group-based. In such groups one social grouping, such as heterosexuals, hold disproportionate power and enjoy special privileges, whereas at least one other group has relatively little socio-political power. This is a significant notion in terms of the validity of the Queer Theory and the Standpoint Theory relating to lesbians as a disruptive group to normative gender performativity (Butler, 1993), having a subjective epistemic position and thus view and conceptualise ‘queercide’ as a way of emancipating and empowering their sub-culture group. However, currently they are subservient because of their lack of power (Sicetcha, 2018) in relation to the dominant heterosexual society in which they live.
As an iconoclast in gender studies, Foucault postulates various arguments in The history of sexuality (1976 – 1984) and The gay science (2011). These works have influenced contemporary utility of Queer Theory, particularly as expressions of his resistance to identity politics. The rejection of the psychoanalytic concept of objective choice contradicts some more accepted theories of queer identity and thus forms part of the third wave critical studies. In The history of sexuality (1976), Foucault considers the formation of power exercised rather than the indulgence thereof and refers to the construction of specific individuals within the broader societal framework. This means that perversions, as ‘other’ or deviant, become embodied in a new specification of individuals. Thus, the homosexual, according to Foucault (1976), becomes a type of person with a history and a biology rather than a type of act, like the act of sodomy, that is usually associated with heterosexist discourses. Such classifications of natures multiplied first in medicine through rational inquiry and publication and then in laws, such as the legalisation of same sex marriage in South Africa (Daniels, 2018). In The gay science, Foucault’s (2011) contributions to the understanding of queer are further expanded by the explanation that discussions surrounding LGBTIQ communities are again being referred to as overused, worn-out and
57 overdetermined — for example, terms such as repression and oppressed are used — and these need to be investigated to understand what they mean and how discourses could be made to function in a contemporary socio-political environment within a debate where their discursive angle has changed since Foucault’s original assumptions.
Building on the works of Karl Marx and Foucault on post-structuralism of class and sexuality, Judith Butler (1990), in Gender troubles: Feminism and subversion of identity, posits that gender is performed based on the values learned from birth through a series of socialisation customs such as dress and talk.
Therefore, gender is performative and the understanding of gender is socially constructed and grounded in the assumption that gender is based on biological sex. Thus, if a person is born female, she will be feminine, be attracted to men, and be predisposed to behave in accordance to the ideals associated with her sex. According to Butler (1990), although these assumptions about the relationship between sex and gender seem natural, they are not. In her article Critically queer, Butler (1993: 25) continues to challenge dogmatic conventions surrounding sex and gender by claiming that “...gender is the repeated stylisation of the body. It is [thus] a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance”. Mainstream online media continue to play a significant role in constructing public meanings of LGBTIQ issues through writers’ understanding of sex and gender, and these media thus influence reporting frameworks (McKinnon, Gorman-Murray &
Dominey, 2017). The work of Butler (1993) made a significant contribution to the research by problematising ‘queer’ as a definition as well as providing an investigative framework for uncovering ideologies used in online reports on ‘queercide’.
In her work Epistemology of the closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) contributes to Queer Theory debates by reflecting about the ‘closet’ metaphor that refers to gay men and women living public lives by hiding their sexuality ‘in a closet’ (GLAAD, 2016). As a regime of regulating comments on gay and lesbian lives, this term seems important to heterosexuals because using it guarantees their dominance.
Sedgwick (1990) claims that the regime of "closet" or the "open secret" has been basic to the lesbian and gay reality even after the germination of the Gay Rights movement of Stonewall in 1969. This regime, with its constraining limitations about public and private, privacy and disclosure, knowledge and ignorance, has shaped the way in which many questions about epistemology and values are comprehended in Western society as a whole, and in South Africa in particular. It is significant to understand Sedgwick’s (1990) view of the origin of Queer Theory as it highlights the frustrations experienced by the LGBTIQ academic community on the staleness of homosexual discourses. Berlant and Warner (1995) further belaboured the issue of ‘queer’ to contribute to Queer Theory’s utility for journalism. For instance, in their article Guest column: What does Queer Theory teach us about X?, Berlant and Warner (1995) argue that this theory has incited a vast labour of metacommentary in sections of journals, anthologies and omnibus reviews and even appear as dictionary entries. Though
58 hesitant to proclaim “queer theory as a thing”, Bertland and Warner (1995: 345) wonder whether “queer commentary” might not more accurately describe phenomena linked to the theory intended as academic objects; that is, that the “meta-discourse of queer theory” has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalism and that it is multi-disciplinary. Although Berlant and Warner’s (1995) article can be seen as a criticism of Queer Theory, their contribution to the theory’s utility in discourses around journalism and its validity to queer issues such as ‘queercide’ ingratiates it. However, Berlant and Warner’s (1995) use of the term ‘queer’ still remains an umbrella term for those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. Halberstam (1998), on the other hand, conceptualises Queer Theory from a transgender and lesbian perspective in the book Female masculinity. Halberstam (1998) discusses biological male masculinity and posits that female masculinity has offered an alternative to it since the Eighteenth Century. Through textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam (1998: 72) uncovers female masculinities while at the same time arguing for a “more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologise queer categories”.
Halberstam (1998) also explores issues of transsexuality among transgender dykes, which are lesbians who can pass as men, or female-to-male transsexuals that are often labelled as "lesbian", and the phenomenon of male impersonators. In Female masculinity, Halberstam (1998) signals a new understanding of masculine identities and behaviour by demonstrating that female masculinity is not a challenge of virility, but a performativity of hybrid and minority genders, which is a view that was of significant support to the qualitative aspects of this research, particularly in terms of how codes would be administered to online texts.
One of the first full texts dedicated to the principles and assumptions concerning ethics espoused in Queer Theory is Edelman’s (2004) No future, wherein the LGBTIQ community is urged to abandon the stance of accommodation to heteronormativity and rather accede to being figures of disruption. Also significant to this research was Edelman’s (2004) description of ‘queer’ as powerful, not power abdicating, and a representation that acquiesces to the idea that being homosexual imbue its members as somehow “less than”. As an extension of Edelman’s (2004) call for ideological reform and the reconceptualisation of queer, the seminal work of Muñoz (2009) cannot be excluded. Queer Theory validates and even contributes to Marxism in its fundamental interpretation to explain the disconnect between the lived experiences of those who are oppressed and utopia. Through his examination of queer aesthetics from dance and cinema, building on the works of Berlant and Warner (1995), and consultations with and inclusion of diverse thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Ernst Bloch, Muñoz (2009: 40) challenges, in Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity, the dominant cultural logistics of heterosexuality and capitalism to imagine a utopia where there is “something missing”.
From this challenge, the assumption was made that online reports may be perceived as an opportunity to become deconstructivist; that they are interrupters of sorts when better understood.
59 In light of the above expositions of Queer Theory, the Meaning Theory of Media Portrayal could also be a viable theoretical framework to use when investigating how online media play a role in shaping and influencing ideas about groups of people such as the LGBTIQ community. It is such groups who produce those ideas and distribute them as they may have vested interest to do so. However, the work of Bersani (2015) legitimises Queer Theory as the assumption is made that queer angles are presented in media to have disruptive properties in the understanding of gender and its significance for reporting in a libertarian approach to LGBTIQ issues. The Meaning Theory of Media Portrayal explains that
“communication is a tool that is used to process meaning, where an individual create, interpret and retain [all sic] a sense of meaning through the media content and [where] meaning resides within people who relate it to media content” (DeFleur, Kearney & Plax, 1993: 85-86).
Bersani (2015) specifically explains how the “something missing” referred to by Muñoz (2009) could somehow be addressed through reference to desire. In the chapter entitled Father knows best from Thoughts and things, Bersani (2015) quotes Foucault and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in a pre- Freudian explanation of desire. According to Bersani (2015), if ‘otherness’ is somehow reduced to difference, then the paranoid suspicion or moral panic caused by how queer is presented in media could be a logical strategy of defence, because the desire to know the other is inseparable from the need to master the other. Therefore, the desire for mastery becomes a motivator to know the other. However, the key question Bersani (2015) poses is, What does it mean to know another human being – to truly empathise in a situation that extends an ethnorelativistic desire to know the other? According to Bersani’s (2015) readings of Foucault, he understands that to know the other is to know the other’s desire. For Bersani (2015) the most unique part of another person’s individuality is what is desired. In other words, desire is human only if a person desires not the other’s body, but the desire of the other.
Therefore, in reporting on LGBTIQ issues, the utopian achievement of the report would be to affect perfect understanding of a queer person; thus, what are the ideological frames used in online reports on
‘queercide’ to achieve or diverge from this ideal? Of course, perfect understanding is impossible – as Dean C. Barnlund’s (1962) Transactional Model shows – because when participants of the communication process communicate, they communicate with everything that they are, which is non- identical. Thus Queer Theory is heavily criticised for its idealist views of LGBTIQ theorising. Peter Sanders (2017), Chief Executive Officer of the Forum of Christian Leaders, echoes in a YouTube video the reservations that Berlant and Warner (1995) have regarding Queer Theory by proclaiming his understanding of Queer Theory to be that people create their own identity from what they feel and reject regarding any inclusion of biology. Queer Theory echoes Freire’s (1970) philosophy that only the oppressed have the subjective epistemic privilege to emancipate themselves and that true revolution can only be led by the singular vision of a marginalised group. In stark contrast with the arguments posed by Butler (1990), Queer Theory therefore has limitations in understanding the standpoint of LGBTIQ individuals as part of ‘queer commentary’ in text.
60 2.4 The Standpoint Theory
Standpoint Theory emerged as a feminist epistemological, post-modern method for analysing inter- subjective discourses after the criticisms of standard objectivity and value neutrality that was the theme of the 1970s Women’s Rights Movement in the United States of America (Butler, 1993). The three main assumptions of this theory are: (1) knowledge is socially situated, (2) marginalised groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible to be aware of subjective realities, and (3) when conducting research, begin with the lives of the marginalised. For this section, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed (1965) will support ideas of the position of the oppressed as empowerment in the process of their own emancipation. Important theorists consulted include George Willhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807), Karl Marx (in Ellis & Fopp, 2001), Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Dorothy Smith (2005), political philosophers Nancy Hartsock (1998) and Alison Jagger (2015), and Sharon Crasnow (2006). Hegel (1807: 58), in The phenomenology of spirit, argues that:
“The fear of truth may conceal itself from itself and from others behind the pretence that it is precisely the ardent zeal for truth which makes it so difficult, and indeed impossible, to find any truth other than vanity’s own truth of being always still cleverer than any thought that one gets either from oneself or from others.”
In other words, those reporting on the events in society that they deem newsworthy and the truth have a passion that drives their reading, their interviewing, their writing and their presentation – but their unique understanding of those events, however, prevent them from knowing. As a reference to the ontological assumption of Standpoint Theory, Hegel (1807) presents a philosophy, that is later echoed by Freire (1965), in which he states that the only foundation of revolution should originate from the perspective and efforts of those who are being marginalised. In the research, this translated into the ideological frames used for the LGBTIQ community; for instance, Black lesbians victimised and institutionally voiceless and the trauma of families and friends who are affected by violence and
‘queercide’.
In The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology, Smith (1987) argues that individuals are not able to perceive reality in any other capacity than their given standpoint. By making this claim, Smith (1987: 28-29) states that: “(1) No one can have complete, objective knowledge, (2) individuals must not take the standpoint from which they speak for granted, and (3) no two people have exactly the same standpoint”. Individuals, including reporters of ‘queercide’, must recognise this, be reflexive about it, and problematise it. “Our situated, everyday experiences should serve as a ‘point of entry’ of investigation” (Smith 2005: 10). The goal of Smith’s (1987: 36) feminist sociology is to “explicitly reformulate sociological theory by fully accounting for the standpoint of gender and its effects on experiences of reality”. Through this criticism of objectified knowledge and its use in the management
61 of institutional life, Smith (2005: 21) suggests that “the categories and conceptual frameworks of administration are inattentive to the actual circumstances of the diverse lives people, such as LGBTIQ members, live in contemporary societies”. In his book Institutional ethnographic, Smith (2005: 57-58) extensively refers to Marxism and claims that “studies should contribute to a social justice agenda by making knowledge from the standpoints of people’s everyday lives, thereby demystifying relations of ruling, and pointing to possible interventions in ruling relations”. Smith’s (2005) understanding of Marxism contributed to the assumption made that doctors, teachers, social workers, journalists and online reporters who want to be acknowledged as credible, as a professionally skilled, should conscientise their work to be used in socio-political activism from a subjective epistemic privilege, starting with the oppressed person, and not from an objective epistemic vantage point. Both Hartsock (1998) and Smith (2005) contribute to the theoretical assumptions of Standpoint Theory by explaining that female voices tend to be ignored in favour of male domination in social conversations about feminine issues such as abortion, rape, and femicide. In their respective studies, both researchers propose that women possess subjective epistemic knowledge which is generated only by the lived experiences of being marginalised and oppressed by heteronormative, masculine structures in society.
Both theorists argue that standpoint is a way to emphasise what is known as being affected by where one stands in society. They differ, however, insofar as Hartsock’s (1998: 42) reference of Smith’s (1987) work describes the “radical division between spheres of action and consciousness of the middle class and how it came to emerge”. This point conceptualises ‘ruling relations’ as not only modes of domination, but also forms of consciousness. For the research, this meant that the naturalisation of heterosexuality in texts needed to be explored by identifying the use of monikers that referred to lesbians in online reports, highlighting engendered or non-binary/neutral pronouns, and exploring comments whenever they appeared in the online reports. These elements would of necessity have be seen by audiences and they thus contributed to the context of the report frames.