“A More Thorough Resistance”? Coalition,Critique,and the Intersectional Promise of Queer Theory

Introduction

When Gayle Rubin wrote in 1984 that “the time has come to think about sex,” ¹ she inaugurated a distinctive relationship between the academic study of sexuality and a political commitment to democratic redress. Today, Rubin’s is a view that is increasingly taken for granted among queer theorists: written in response to antipornography feminists who Rubin argued “[recreated] a very conservative sexual morality” and had “claimed to speak for all feminism,” the essay makes the now-familiar claim that to commit to the study of sexuality is to oppose any and all “hierarchical [systems] of sexual value.” ² If antipornography feminism had begun making undemocratic, normative judgments about “good” and “bad” sex, she reasons, then resisting the ways that certain practices are policed by conservative discourses might open up space for nonnormative sexual subjects—especially those constrained by racial, classed, geographic, or other sexualized norms—to contest the terms of their marginalization. For Rubin, a more democratic sexual politics—a “theoretical as well as sexual pluralism” ³ —was thus to be a thoroughly antinormative one: it was a politics that promised nothing less than to undo the compulsory, or normative, categories in which the left defined collective political action.

Since “Thinking Sex” appeared, analyses like Rubin’s—arguments that critique undemocratic discourses that marginalize nonnormative subjects—have increasingly become a starting point rather than a conclusion for queer theorists. ⁴ In this essay, I seek to recontextualize this theoretical move, arguing that queer theorists’ emphasis on antinormativity as the central site of democratic political struggle is a response to and a reflection of the analytic and political contributions of intersectional theorists, broadly conceived. The term, rooted in the political claims of Black, lesbian, and Third World feminists in the United States, denotes the idea that the overlapping forces of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of inequality are “greater than the sum of their parts.” ⁵ Broadly conceived, it identifies “the instantiations of marginalization that [operate] within institutionalized discourses and that [legitimize] existing power relations” and reveals “how discourses of resistance (e.g. feminism and antiracism) could themselves function as sites that [produce and legitimize] marginalization.” ⁶ Although many theorists have conceived of intersectionality and queer theory as fundamentally “autonomous” political projects, ⁷ I will argue in the following pages that, in fact, the key premises of intersectional thinking have both historically motivated and conceptually legitimized the central claims of queer theorizing. At its core, for example, intersectionality helps to explain what Rubin calls “normative discourses”—namely, the process by which closed categories like “good” and “bad” sex enable conservative practices that marginalize certain subjects. It also points to the fact that marginalization can take place within purportedly liberatory groups like radical feminism, and insists that academics and activists alike attend to these complex internal relationships. To take an antinormative stance like Rubin’s, is, at best, to open oneself to the insights of intersectionality; it is to notice how racial, sexual, classed, and other inequalities within feminist discourse enable the marginalization of certain subjects deemed “deviant” and to consciously resist these premises.

Yet if claims like Rubin’s—and, as I shall argue below, calls for antinormative politics in queer theory more generally—depend on intersectional thinking, why is it that so many intersectional feminists remain skeptical of queer theory? From Cathy Cohen, who argues that queer theory has left intact many of the “ways in which power informs and constitutes privileged and marginalized subjects,” ⁸ to Barbara Smith, who wrote that “today’s ‘queer’ politicos seem to operate in a historical and ideological vacuum,” ⁹ some of the most vocal critics of queer politics have been the architects of the very intuition from which queer theory takes its cue. In what follows, I argue that this apparent contradiction has to do with the ways that queer theory has drifted away from the key political dimension of intersectional thinking, even as it commits itself to the interpretive lessons intersectionality has offered to critical theorists.

This article’s key claim—that a more capacious and directly political understanding of intersectionality might help queer theorists productively rethink the democratic promise at the heart of antinormativity—is a response to critiques of queer antinormativity from intersectional scholars like Cohen and Smith, as well as to a growing suspicion about the inherently democratic promise of antinormativity from queer theorists themselves. In a recent special edition of the journal differences, for instance, editors Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson mark a new agenda for queer theory, arguing that queer theory can and should “proceed without a primary commitment to antinormativity.” ¹⁰ If, as I shall argue below, queer theory’s commitment to antinormativity has emerged from its fraught engagement with intersectionality, then Wiegman and Wilson’s provocation points to questions that are broader still: How might we (re)evaluate queer theory’s response to intersectional scholars and activists? Does queer theory deliver on the intersectional promise that it extends? And finally, if it does not, upon what resources might a renewed queer commitment to intersectional thinking in the twenty-first century draw?

I will probe these questions in three main parts. First, I argue for an expanded conception of “intersectionality” to include work that is typically glossed as Black and Third World feminism. Doing so reveals the deep entanglements between intersectionality’s key claims about intragroup marginalization, on the one hand, and the broader field of critical theory, on the other. This expanded conception of intersectionality, I argue, reveals that it emerges from the sine qua non of critical theory: the insight that power is organized recursively. By this, I mean that critical theorists, broadly speaking, share the insight that hierarchies both produce and police the very marginal subjects they take as their premises. More than just a temporal process wherein oppressive logics like colonialism or racism appear over time as “reverberations with a difference,” ¹¹ I argue that recursivity describes a concrete “relation of ruling,” ¹² which must produce the very marginal subjects whose punishment, in turn, legitimizes various exercises of power. ¹³ For intersectional theorists such as Barbara Smith, Cathy Cohen, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and others, power operates by generating marginal subjects—for example, Black women—who must be disciplined in order to retroactively legitimize the (white) nuclear family. Because this recursive process is often left uninterrogated, intersectional scholars have argued that these marginal positions doggedly persist even in purportedly emancipatory projects, such as in feminist critiques of the nuclear family.

In part two, I argue that queer theorists have used the central insights of intersectionality to motivate and legitimize their own critical interventions in two ways. First, queer theorists have suggested that intersectionality evidences the need for new ways of contesting power by drawing attention to the recursive production of marginalized—or nonnormative—subjects. Second, drawing on the intersectional argument that recursive power can be at work within purportedly emancipatory movements, queer theorists have sought to broaden intersectionality’s political claims to develop a “more thorough” resistance to marginality; queerness, they argue, is an exemplary resistance to being “resubordinated to a unity that caricatures, demeans, and domesticates difference.” ¹⁴ However, this conception of marginality as an exemplary site of democratic resistance strains against the coalitional bent of intersectionality. Thus, despite the fact that responding to the recursive insight of intersectionality was, and remains, a motivating impulse in queer theory, the field has largely tended to view power as working in decontextualized, abstract, or metatheoretical ways. As a result, queer theory has largely departed from intersectional focus on coalition work, instead reconceiving of democratic redress in terms of antinormative critique.

Finally, I argue that queer theory’s tendency to privilege democracy-as-critique over democracy-as-coalition has displaced a key site of intersectional coalition-building—the family. I argue that attention to second-wave theorizations of the family, such as those found in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, reveals a distinctive paradox for antinormative theorists responding to intersectional scholarship. On the one hand, Firestone certainly falls victim to what many intersectional scholars might call conservative feminism, often presuming that white women’s experiences of family life are the model on which an analysis of all women’s oppression should be built. On the other, however, Firestone presumes neither that women are exemplary democratic subjects nor that revolutionizing the family can begin and end with the activity of critiquing normative gender roles. In this way, her analysis shares several key insights with the case for intersectional scholarship, even as it fails to produce a fully realized analysis of intersectional power. Such a paradox, which highlights the ambivalent nature of coalitional responsibility, reveals the ongoing importance of intersectional coalition work as a democratic resource.

Intersectionality and the Insight of Recursive Power

Before directly engaging the relationship between intersectionality and queer theory that animates my argument, let me say something about how I am using the term “intersectionality” itself. While the term first appears in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” ¹⁵ my aim is to situate the concept in a much broader conversation in the field of critical theory that includes, among other things, earlier debates in Black feminism. Indeed, while Crenshaw is often credited with having “exposed” the problems of racial and sexual marginalization within feminist politics, ¹⁶ she was hardly the first to notice that many political frameworks tend to produce marginal subjects whose experiences and political claims are silenced, misrecognized, or discredited. Crenshaw opens “Demarginalizing” by invoking All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave ¹⁷ ; throughout the piece, she develops her insights with reference to works by bell hooks, Barbara and Beverly Smith, Gloria Hull, Paula Giddings, and other Black feminists active throughout the 1980s. Thus, although contemporary proponents of intersectionality argue that the term circulates in contexts that exceed the project of Black feminism, ¹⁸ in the pages that follow, I will refer to “intersectionality” to denote an understanding of the term as situated in the Black feminist politics of the 1980s—one that locates the concept in a set of historical debates over intragroup power and that highlights its conceptual entanglements to prominent Black feminist arguments. ¹⁹ I do so not to displace Crenshaw’s important work but to capture some of the dynamic resonances it has with the widespread analysis of intragroup power that proliferated throughout the 1980s. As I will argue in the following sections, it is this broader conversation that both motivated and legitimized queer theory’s central theoretical moves.

The notion of intersectionality as I understand it, then, is an intervention into a series of longstanding debates over how theorists and political actors should best understand relations of power, domination, and marginalization. Although intersectional theorists have developed an approach to understanding power that differs in important ways from other theories in the Marxist, Foucaultian, or queer traditions, it is conceptually and politically related to this broader family of scholarship, which I am here calling critical theory. As its practitioners often note, critical theory is best understood genealogically, which is to say that it does not represent some unitary way of understanding the world but is rather “fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.” ²⁰ What unites its practitioners, then, is something of a “family resemblance”—the common intuition that power, wherever it emerges, is neither as natural nor as straightforward as it appears. Whether understood through the optic of money (Karl Marx), morals (Friedrich Nietzsche), symptoms (Sigmund Freud), ideology (Louis Althusser), or disciplining institutions (Michel Foucault), the circulation of power is understood in critical theory to generate the very marginal subjects that it disciplines. For critical theorists, analyzing power thus means looking past its alibis and training the eye, instead, on how dominant classed, racial, or gendered hierarchies generate the very relations of ruling they presume.

An emphasis on this self-referential dynamic—the recursivity of power—cuts across the several dimensions of critical scholarship with which this essay engages. The recursivity of power, for instance, was Marx’s key insight in The German Ideology; for Marx, the definitive mark of a “ruling class” is its capacity to generate the very social relations that legitimize and reproduce its dominance. Marx argues that although the “ideas of the ruling class” reflect only a limited point of view, the dominant classes retroactively install them as governing categories by speaking transparently for “the people.” To understand power, then, one must resist the ruse; the critical theorist, argues Marx, need not “look for a category, but [must remain] constantly on the real ground of history . . . not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history.” ²¹ For Marx, however, to notice that power produces invested categories of ruling is not simply to reverse the causal relationship between relations of power and their legitimizing discourses—it is not to argue, for instance, simply that practices exist prior to discourses. Rather, it is to notice how hierarchies central to a form of ruling co-constitute normative and institutional exercises of power. In The German Ideology as elsewhere, for instance, Marx shows that capitalist hierarchies generated new relations of ruling through money and private property, which in turn become new units of political control. To understand power as recursive is thus to grasp the self-referential relationship between existing hierarchies and the relations of ruling they generate.

Recursive theory, at its best, points to the need for highly contextual analyses of power—those that not only theorize about power in the abstract but that emphasize the ways in which power is self-referentially legitimized and deployed in concrete institutional, political, or economic contexts to marginalize certain subjects. Indeed, if Marx developed his insight in the context of the nineteenth-century factory, theorists from a variety of political and intellectual positions have advanced recursive accounts of power in other paradigmatic contexts, including the prison, the colony, and—most importantly for my purposes here—the family. Foucault, for example, describes a recursive function of power as it emerged in the bourgeois family; indeed, his primary project is to redirect critical energy away from a conception of the family as a “repressive” institution toward one that interprets the family as a site of recursive power. A repressive interpretation of power, Foucault writes, would hold that “The legitimate and procreative couple . . . imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy.” ²² For Foucault, interpreting the family as a repressive site in securing power relations fails to understand how sexual hierarchies generate various notions of normative sexuality in order to govern or discipline them. It is no accident of history, Foucault insists, that alongside the consolidation of the bourgeois family there emerged “a whole perverse outbreak . . . of the sexual instinct.” ²³ Rather, he writes that the “implantation of perversions is an instrument effect” of the regulation of sexual hierarchies, a “proliferation of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimization of the power to which each of these local sexualities gave a surface of intervention.” ²⁴ In other words, it is in the contextual interaction between existing hierarchies (for example, sexual hierarchies), legitimizing or normative discourses (medicine, psychiatry, the police), and disciplining institutions (the heterosexual family) in which specific relations of ruling emerge. In short, Foucault argues that the conjugal family is a nodal site that not only produces “deviant” sexual subjects but also enables a proliferation of institutions to manage and discipline these marginal subjects.

Like Foucault, intersectional theorists analyzing the heterosexual family have emphasized its recursive dimensions. Consider, for example, Hortense Spillers’ invocation of the name “Sapphire” to denote Black women’s marginality in the powerful opening sentences of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”: “I describe a locus of confounded identities,” she writes, “a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” ²⁵ Spillers’ point, of course, is that common conceptions of Black women in popular culture, political ideology, and institutionalized public policy have been recursively invented and governed. Throughout, Spillers details the ways in which sexual hierarchies, in the specific context of American enslavement, generated “Sapphire”—the “mocking double” of Black women—in order to legitimize the economic and political supremacy of the white nuclear family, on the one hand, and to justify the brutal treatment of Black women under slavery, on the other. Put simply, the emergence of new, sexualized institutions of white supremacy depended on—emerged in recursive relation with—disciplinary practices designed to brutalize and degrade marginalized Black women.

Spillers’ work—and, in particular, her conception of the family as an institution that invents the “Black woman” only to “ungender” and discipline her—is only one example of this kind of argument in intersectionality. For example, bell hooks shows in excruciating detail how the racial marginalization is imprinted on the family structure, both generating racist myths about Black women and, simultaneously, deploying these discourses to elevate the “legitimate” white family. ²⁶ Similarly, other intersectional scholars have shown how “Black womanhood” is simultaneously invented and punished through discourses about the family in order to legitimize new relationships of racial control. As Cathy Cohen points out,

it was not the promotion of marriage or heterosexuality per se that served as the standard or motivation of most slave societies. Instead, marriage and heterosexuality, as viewed through the lenses of profit and domination, and the ideology of white supremacy, were reconfigured to justify the exploitation and regulation of black bodies, even those presumably engaged in heterosexual behavior . . . ²⁷

As Cohen elaborates, it is not just the productive dimension of power—its ability to generate post-hoc legitimizing grounds for hierarchical subject-positions—that is at stake in understanding the raced and gendered dimensions of the family. These presumed grounds, in turn, generate new relations of ruling that systematically marginalize certain groups, legitimizing the “underprotection and overpolicing” of women of color. ²⁸ Importantly, if hooks, Cohen, and others detail how the heterosexual family became a political institution designed to both manage emergent discourses about normative (white) sexuality and surveil nonnormative (Black) sexuality, they also maintain that these meanings were coarticulated through highly contextual institutional mechanisms of control such as miscegenation laws, housing and employment codes, policing, and welfare reform.

Recursivity and the Conditions of Democracy

I spend so much time emphasizing critical theory’s use of recursivity as a shared analytic insight across theories of power because, as I will argue for the remainder of this essay, it is the ground on which critical theorists’ claims about democratic politics are built. Indeed, if the insight of recursivity is the backdrop against which a critical family resemblance has emerged, its political importance should be understood in the larger context of critical theory’s distinctive claims about democratic transformation. Unlike liberal or multicultural claims to democracy, which emphasize a broadening of the existing norms and institutions to include more voices, critical claims to democracy hold that because hierarchies generate the very relations of rule that reproduce them, expanding these relations to “include” the voices of the oppressed can do little more than misrecognize calls for redress. ²⁹ Drawing on the insight of recursivity, critical theorists argue that the very premises of politics are often symptoms of hierarchical relationships, and that a more democratic politics—one that can redress a wider set of claims about injustice—would be one that refuses to participate in any discourse that produces and polices marginalized, or nonnormative, subjects. Such a democratic politics premised in recursive thinking would require a foundational shift in the very relations of ruling that constrain political imagination.

Intersectional thinking, in particular, illuminates the ways in which Black women are recursively produced and policed as marginalized subjects, and calls for the end of any “relation of ruling”—such as the white nuclear family—that participates in this recursive process. One consequence of this way of thinking has been to notice how these discourses have been inadvertently picked up, deployed, and reinforced by purportedly emancipatory movements that fail to adequately grasp the recursivity of power. Crenshaw, for instance, points out not only that Black women are marginalized by recursive forms of power that both produce and police them, but also that feminist and antiracist organizations have inadequately grasped this problem as a recursive one, thus remarginalizing women of color in their struggles against gendered and racial violences. Crenshaw describes this failure as one that inadequately apprehends “how the production of images of women of color and the contestations over those images tend to ignore the intersectional interests of women of color”; an adequate political response, then, must therefore at minimum grasp both how recursive power produces Black women as marginal subjects and refuse any discursive framework that participates in the production and denigration of these marginal figures. ³⁰

In other words, any shift in the relations of ruling that marginalize Black women can only be considered democratic when the new forms of political engagement they generate actively work against the resubordination of this marginalized group. This refusal, for intersectional theorists, must be a polyvalent one; intersectional scholarship points to a variety of contexts in which Black women have been reinscribed in hierarchical relations, including in the racial and sexual division of labor (Spillers), in legal discourses concerning domestic violence and discrimination (Crenshaw), in movement politics that privilege white women’s voices over Black women’s (hooks), in geographies of racial segregation (Collins), and in the public policies that surveil Black women’s sexual practices (Cohen)—just to name a few. Because intersectional thinkers hold that no particular site of power is definitive but rather interacts with existing hierarchies in highly contextual ways, these thinkers also argue that theorists cannot “define” power in the abstract, nor can they predict how power might emerge to resubordinate the marginalized in the future. To make a transformative politics democratic, then, theorists and political actors alike must remain vigilant about the sites and contexts in which resubordination might occur, including in the very forms of political engagement they propose.

Thinking back to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” clear resonances between the democratic ambitions of queer antinormative and intersectional scholarship are apparent. Rubin, like intersectional scholars, insists both that sexuality is “constituted in society and history” and that sexual hierarchies produce marginalized sexual identities and mechanisms of sexual control. For Rubin, marginal sexual subjects—fetishists, sadomasochists, homosexuals, and trans people, to name a few—are invented as legitimizing grounds for distinguishing between good and bad sex and as justifications for new forms of sexual surveillance and control; in this way, they are analogous to other marginal figures like “Sapphire” in Spillers’ analysis of the family. Moreover, we might read Rubin’s invocation of “benign sexual variation” as an attempt to capture something of intersectionality’s emphasis on the refusal to remarginalize the most vulnerable: “One need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will,” Rubin writes, “and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party.” ³¹ In short, Rubin seems to echo the intersectional notion that it is the recognition of the irreducible multiplicity of marginalities that makes possible a more democratic sexual politics.

Rubin, of course, is not the only scholar of sexual politics to draw from the insights of intersectional thinking. In fact, locating intersectionality genealogically within the broader context of critical theory reveals that the rethinking of “Gay and Lesbian” studies—a rethinking that would result in the emergence of queer theory ³² —took its cue from many of the intersectional insights about recursive power and intragroup marginalization noted above. Steven Seidman, for instance, wrote in his contribution to Fear of a Queer Planet that

postmodern strains in gay thinking and politics have their immediate social origin in recent developments in the gay culture. In the reaction by people of color, third-world-identified gays, poor and working class gays, and sex rebels to the ethnic/essentialist model of identity and community that achieved dominance in the lesbian and gay cultures of the 1970s, I locate the social basis for a [queer] rethinking of identity and politics. ³³

Here, Seidman points out that the “eruption of difference” ³⁴ within lesbian and gay movements in the 1980s—and, with it, the growing awareness that these movements participate in the recursive discourses that produce and police marginalized subjects—both motivates and justifies queer theoretical interventions. And Seidman is hardly alone in making this case. Shane Phelan, too, locates her turn toward postmodern theories of the subject in the claims of the Combahee River Collective. Phelan writes that “the refusal to subsume one movement into another”—a refusal that for her animates both the Combahee statement and subsequent turns toward “queer” thinking—“offered greater possibilities for common action than an imperialist agenda resting on a binary opposition [between lesbians and straight women].” ³⁵ Teresa de Lauretis, in her introduction to the special issue of differences in which the words “queer theory” first appear, argues that it is in its commitment to making possible the multiple, overlapping, and as-yet-unseen differences between and among women that “queer” departs from “lesbian and gay studies.” “‘Queer Theory,’” she writes, “was arrived at in the effort to avoid all these fine [racial, gendered] distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities, but instead to both transgress and transcend them—or at the very least problematize them.” ³⁶ Indeed, even contemporary queer theorists situate and justify their interventions by appealing to the language of intersectionality; as C. Heike Schotten puts it, queer projects appeal as often to Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” to elaborate their resistances to resubordination as they do to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, or Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public.” ³⁷

What’s curious, however, is that in citing the work of intersectional theorists as having motivated queer theoretical interventions, queer theorists increasingly tend to do so by marking out the supposed failures of intersectionality as a transformative, liberatory, or “world-making” project. Kevin Duong, for instance, argues that while intersectionality attempts to combat “many feminists’ past and present tendency to reduce to a singular, privileged rubric the multiplicity of an individuals’ identity, such as privileging gender at the expense of racial identity,” ³⁸ intersectional thinking has largely failed to live up to these promises by remaining attached to a politics of visibility and a too-stable conception of group identity. By contrast, Duong suggests that queer theory takes up intersectionality’s recursive analysis and carries it further: “One of queer theory’s lessons for intersectional research,” he writes, is its insistence that “if we feminists want to respond adequately to the political problems that our intersectional research seeks to overcome, then we need to go beyond the paradigms hitherto employed.” ³⁹ While intersectional frames open up the possibility of conceiving of a politics that refuses the resubordination of marginal subjects, he seems to suggest, they need queer theory to embody and carry out this politics. In making this case, Duong shares a perspective with many other prominent queer theorists, including Jasbir Puar, who argues that intersectionality remains trapped in the logic of identity, ⁴⁰ and Schotten, who suggests that where intersectional frameworks point toward a continual awareness of the co-constitution of different axes of oppression, queer frameworks thematize and exemplify this vigilance. Queer theory, in other words, not only tells us something about the modes of power in which queer subjects are produced and policed (as in the recursive account of power I gave above), but also exceeds and transcends intersectionality by serving the more exemplary purpose of “[queering] the revolutionary project itself.” ⁴¹

If queer theorists’ main claim to democratic political practice rests on the claim that antinormativity does intersectional thinking better than intersectionality itself, however, it is striking that intersectional theorists, in large part, have been highly critical of this move. Cathy Cohen and Barbara Smith have argued that radical queer theory has largely failed to promote solidarity among marginalized people. Here, for example, is Barbara Smith in The Nation:

Unlike the early lesbian and gay movement . . . today’s “queer” politicos seem to operate in a historical and ideological vacuum. “Queer” activists focus on “queer” issues, and racism, sexual oppression and economic exploitation do not qualify, despite the fact that the majority of “queers” are people of color, female or working class. ⁴²

If queer theory is an engagement with the insights of intersectionality—namely, that transforming the grounds of politics must occur in ways that do not resubordinate the most marginalized—why have intersectional theorists been so vocally critical of queer theory’s political vision? I would argue that what distinguishes intersectional theorists’ emphasis on coalition from the more general project of political transformation that underwrites much of critical theory—indeed, the distinction on which the rest of this essay will turn—is intersectional theorists’ insistence that critiquing recursive dimensions of power from a marginal position is not coterminous with a coalitional political practice.

Indeed, intersectional thinkers have often argued that democratic politics do not emerge easily from an abstract commitment to marginality; they have not—indeed, cannot—occur seamlessly from a recognition of collective marginal subjects such as the proletariat, the woman, the colonized, or even the queer. They hold that no theoretical framework—even an intersectional one—will inevitably lead to more democratic politics. Smith argues, for example, that the dangers of queer theory lie in conflating one’s marginal position in relation to power with a conscious political commitment to coalition work:

homosexuality embodies an innately radical critique of the traditional nuclear family, whose political function has been to constrict the sexual expression and gender roles of all of its members, especially women, lesbians, and gays. Being in structural opposition to the status quo because of one’s identity, however, is quite different from being consciously and actively opposed to the status quo because one is a radical and understands how the system works. ⁴³

Cohen, too, argues that engaging in intersectional theory that identifies the complexities of recursive power should lead critical theorists to be wary of claims that conflate marginality with a shared political commitment:

in recognizing the distinct history of oppression lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people have confronted and challenged, I am not willing to embrace every queer as my marginalized political ally. In the same way, I do not assume that shared racial, gender, and/or class position or identity guarantees or produces similar political commitments. ⁴⁴

To the extent that critical theory identifies the recursive dimensions of power—that is, the ways in which it functions by producing and policing marginalized subjects—Cohen argues that various marginalized people might share structural positions in relation to power. But while understanding the shared marginality of such positions is the condition for a politics of coalition, Cohen also argues that democratic coalitions will need to remain vigilant in order not to conflate the structural location of marginalized subjects with a liberatory politics par excellence. Translating the contextual insights of recursivity into politics instead requires the ability to realize, as Bernice Johnson Reagon puts it, that “everybody ain’t your company,” but that engaging in democratic struggle can nonetheless “teach you how to cross cultures and not kill yourself.” ⁴⁵

I want to suggest, following thinkers like Smith and Cohen, that the apparent distance between queer theory’s intersectional motivations and its actual antinormative politics emerges in its practitioners’ conflation of queer people’s structural position in relation to recursive power—a feature of critique—with the political practice of coalition-building. This conflation has effected a radical decontextualization of the insight of recursivity, such that queer politics appears as an exemplary democratic praxis rather than a situated political practice within particular relations of ruling. This decontextualization strains against intersectionality’s two main insights about democratic politics: that power recursively produces and punishes certain marginalized subjects in specific institutional settings, on the one hand, and that these subjects are nevertheless not guaranteed to be liberatory figures, on the other.

“A More Thorough Resistance”

Let me proceed by way of an example. In her 1998 essay “Merely Cultural,” Judith Butler succinctly spells out her defense of queer politics through an extended reading of feminist engagements with the family. ⁴⁶ At the outset, Butler shares in what I have argued is critical theorists’ commitment to a recursive analysis of power, focusing on how gender hierarchies simultaneously produce and marginalize certain nonnormative subjects. Citing feminist arguments during the 1970s and ’80s, Butler argues that the family is a political site in which sexual hierarchies work together to generate both a normative discourse—compulsory heterosexuality—and a set of institutional practices: “a specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlements.” ⁴⁷ For Butler, as for the critical theorists above, heterosexuality and the entitlements it entails are generated by a need to retroactively legitimize the family as a concrete relation of ruling. In other words, Butler’s view is that the family is, ultimately, a recursive institution; its hierarchical dimensions are only reproduced to the extent that it generates “heterosexual persons, fit for entry into the family as social form.” ⁴⁸

At the same time as the family produces a concrete set of relations of ruling, Butler argues, it also must produce a series of marginal subject positions that are not fit for entry into the family—those who, by definition, will occupy marginal positions in the social order secured by the normative family. Again, like Spillers’ “Sapphire” and Rubin’s fetishists, these marginal subjects are what give the lie to the family’s legitimizing grounds and therefore open up the possibility of radically altering the exclusionary terrain in which sexual politics has been circumscribed. Thus, understanding the family as a site of sexual hierarchy—the political task she assigns to queer theory—reveals that the family, a “specific arrangement of kin,” is “historically contingent and, in principle, transformable.” ⁴⁹ In short, the transformative promise of queer theory is its ability “to argue that what qualifies as a person and a sex will be radically altered.” ⁵⁰

Thus far, Butler’s argument about how queers “confound” the self-referential relationship between the norms and practices of the nuclear family echoes the call for coalitional practices central to intersectional theories. However, Butler’s essay deploys this critique to make a broader point still. The essay, in addition to analyzing the nuclear family as a recursive institution, is an attempt to parry criticisms of queer politics for occupying a “merely cultural” space and for offering an analysis of power that is irreducibly distinct from economic or material concerns. Writing against such criticisms of queer politics, Butler seeks to defend the importance of queer marginality by arguing that the marginal position of queers “[confirms] the place of sexual regulation as a mode of producing the subject” ⁵¹ —an argument that is less about the highly contextual operation of power than it is about defending queer marginalization as a paradigmatic site of political struggle.

The importance of this distinction, though it emerges in defense of the worthy cause of including queer struggles in the agenda of critical theory, should not be underestimated. In defending the importance of redressing queer marginality, Butler diverges dramatically from the coalitional claims of intersectional theory, however much her preceding analysis of the family has echoed its critique of recursive power. In Butler’s essay, the figure of the queer, as that which confounds the recursive naturalization of the family, not only gives the lie to a particular hierarchy that restricts sexuality in the historically specific configuration of the family. Here, it becomes synecdoche for the process by which power in general marginalizes nonnormative subjects under the false sign of unity. For Butler, the queer is not only a marginalized subject whose subordination takes place in the localized context of the family but represents a broader “refusal to become resubordinated to a unity that caricatures, demeans, and domesticates difference.” ⁵² If the queer confounds the family by refusing to be “fit for entry into the normative family,” it is this refusal that for Butler “becomes the basis for a more expansive and dynamic political impulse.” ⁵³ Indeed, she writes, “this resistance to ‘unity’”—the lesson of the queer—“carries with it the cipher of democratic promise on the Left.” ⁵⁴ At the same time that Butler invokes the intersectional insight that marginality marks the convergence of recursive power and the possibility of radical contestation, an important shift has occurred; rather than advocating a coalitional practice, Butler has transformed the marginal figure “queer” into an exemplary democratic agent.

Thus, although queer theory emerges from the insight that critiquing recursive marginality is central to political struggle, queer theorists like Butler have tended to conflate intersectionality’s mode of critique with its political praxis by slipping from a specific site in which relations of ruling are generated—the family—to making the claim that the marginalized figure at its center—the queer—represents the democratic promise of the Left. From this angle, Butler’s democratic politics strain deeply against the insights of intersectionality. Whereas Smith, for example, explicitly cautions against conflating one’s structural relation to power with one’s commitment to democratic coalition-building, Butler does not acknowledge a distinction between the critique of “what must be cut out from a concept of unity in order for it to gain the appearance of necessity and coherence” and the queer’s political “refusal to become resubordinated.” ⁵⁵ For Butler, queer politics are thus less embedded in a coalitional practice than they are in a politics of critique.

Butler’s “Merely Cultural” is hardly the only text within queer theory that illustrates the slippage between democracy-as-coalition and democracy-as-critique. Michael Warner, for example, similarly elides the critique of specific form of queer marginality and a commitment to a democratic politics of antisubordination in his widely cited introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet. In it, he argues that “because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions,” the fact that queer struggles “may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are.” ⁵⁶ Like Butler, Warner describes the ways in which sexual hierarchy generates certain relations of ruling that become embedded in discursive and institutional practices. Also like Butler, however, Warner continues to argue that because sexual regulation underwrites the symbolic order, contesting the norms that reproduce this order can reasonably stand in for a democratic resistance to subordination in “an indescribably wide range of social institutions.” Warner continues:

Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is intricated with gender, with the family, with notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body. ⁵⁷

To be “queer,” then, is to be in opposition to any and all of these potential sites of power, a move that is understood to be democratic because it symbolizes the refusal to be resubordinated by new forms of power. Such an opening of the possible sites of critique carries the promise of contesting power wherever it appears; for Warner, queer antinormativity thus represents “a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.” ⁵⁸

In seeking to incorporate the lessons of intersectionality, queer theorists have paradoxically claimed to supersede intersectional theorists’ key political insight: for Butler and Warner, as for more contemporary thinkers like Duong and Schotten, queer theory’s ambition is to become a more thorough praxis than frameworks, like intersectionality, which take only contextual sites of power as their object and offer only coalitional promises. The queer—the exemplary figure produced and policed by recursive power—becomes the paradigmatic figure of democratic politics by superseding the challenges of coalitional work. José Esteban Muñoz, for instance, writes that a queer democratic praxis should exceed the apparently identity-invested practices of coalition-building. Coalitions, for Muñoz, require a form of undemocratic thinking that require marginalized subjects to invest in rarefied and discrete identities. In contrast, because they refuse marginalization in general as opposed to “merely” coalitional sites of “identification/counteridentification,” the more fluid disidentificatory practices of queers of color might furnish “the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.” ⁵⁹ Pausing on this final claim, then, the “more thorough resistance” that queer theorists have advocated appears to fold back on itself; while it emerges from and engages with intersectional thinking, queer theory has come to make the counterintuitive claim that queer politics represents an exemplary form of resistance that contains the emancipatory aspirations of all sorts of recursively marginalized subjects: “In this view,” for example, “‘queer’ is merely [the] structural, catchall designation” containing “black and indigenous folks, the disabled, and queer youths of color.” Queer politics, rather than a localized, contextual, or coalitional struggle, stands in for a liberatory “solidarity with people and knowledge from below.” ⁶⁰

Second-Wave Feminism and the Task of Coalition

Set against the apparently more modest and identitarian goal of coalition-building, queer theorists clearly see their task not only as promoting a situated politics of antisubordination, but a refusal of the dynamics of marginalization in ways that are motivated by intersectional thinking even as they claim to exceed and transcend them. But while these two conceptions of political engagement both emerge from the impulse to understand how hierarchies produce and marginalize certain subjects, on the one hand, and to inaugurate a political praxis that resists reproducing marginalizations, on the other, conceiving of democratic transformation in terms of coalition is fundamentally distinct from thinking of it in terms of the critique of normative identity. If intersectional scholars have criticized antinormative queer theory for its politics, then, I want to suggest that it is because they have conflated the task of coalition with the task of critique. Collins, for example, has pointed out that there is a danger in assuming that writing “from the margins” (either as Black women or as queer subjects) can rise to the level of an exemplary political stance. ⁶¹ Cohen, too, suggests that “deviance” is conceptually and politically distinct from “defiance”: “[O]pening up . . . new counter normative space is not enough,” she writes; “Organizations, networks, and groups have to be mobilized that will engage those making deviant decisions in a sustained discussion about opposition, agency, and norms. . . . Consciousness must be raised as processes and institutions of regulation are exposed.” ⁶²

It is in the spirit of recovering something of the project of transforming the family as a site of coalitional contestation that I turn, finally, to Shulamith Firestone. Such a move may surprise. I do so not to argue that Firestone exemplifies the task of understanding the family as a site of coalitional possibility, but because she shares surprisingly fundamental insights about the family as a nodal site of recursive power with intersectional theorists. In this way, reading her work from within the family of “recursive” critical theory—indicative as it is of much second-wave feminist theorizing—suggests a kind of coalitional accountability that queer theorists would do well to reconsider.

Works like Firestone’s represent, for many contemporary theorists, a form of thinking in which the category “woman” is taken to be the fundamental experience of oppression. Because Firestone does not adequately interrogate the central category “woman” for its racial, classed, or sexual differences, she is thought to be engaged in precisely the kind of marginalizing identity politics that queer theory imagines as its primary foe. Indeed, The Dialectic of Sex has been criticized for its lack of engagement with difference, for its reduction of race and racism to a derivative of sexist oppression, for its nearly exclusive emphasis on heterosexuality as the location of patriarchal norms—in short, for its insistence that the “sexual class system [is] the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution.” ⁶³ Understanding the text in this way, contemporary critical scholars have sought ways to move beyond limited critiques like Firestone’s. However, if Firestone shares key insights with both critical and intersectional theorists, does this “beyonding” come at the price of a shared political analysis of the family? When queer theorists presume to move beyond a text like The Dialectic, do they also sacrifice the opportunity to engage in the very coalitional work that intersectional theorists put at the heart of democratic politics?

Let us begin again from the basic premise that, like many forms of domination, sexism operates first and foremost by generating the very normative discourses and institutional practices—that is, the relations of rule—that it presumes. Like many other critical theorists, Firestone wishes to resist the ruse. She does so by drawing on the same insight that Marxist, Foucaultian, intersectional, and queer theorists do—by exploring the recursive dimensions of power. For Firestone, biological reproduction entails a basic, preexisting hierarchy; because women must bear children, Firestone maintains from the outset that “men and women were created different, and not equally privileged.” ⁶⁴ While this inequality preexists the nuclear family in any particular form, however, it alone does not explain women’s marginalization within the family in any particular historical context. Rather, Firestone holds that this inequality must gain social and political meaning by generating highly contextual relations of rule that legitimize its existence; in the American context, she writes, fundamental sexual inequality has given rise to a number of new forms of sexual control. From therapy, which she argues “became an applied science complete with white-coated technicians, its contents subverted for a reactionary end—the socialization of men and women to an artificial sex-role system” ⁶⁵ to the “invention of childhood” as a mechanism for disciplining gendered subjects, Firestone steadfastly insists that the nuclear family not only enforces an unequal sexual hierarchy, but that it generates new relations of ruling that both produce and police women as marginal subjects. The family, for Firestone, is not a repressive institution that enforces preexisting hierarchies, but a recursive one that generates the very marginal subjects that it presumes.

Fundamentally altering the structure of the family, however, is for Firestone, as for intersectional scholars, irreducible to simply occupying a paradigmatically marginal subject position. In a description of what she calls the “fifty-year ridicule” of feminist ambitions, for example, Firestone argues that even as popular discourses about women, motherhood, and the family changed rapidly throughout the twentieth century, the family itself—and its signature hierarchical relationship, the sexual division of labor—remained profoundly entrenched. Like Cohen, Smith, and Collins, she argues that critiquing one’s individual relation to power is fundamentally distinct from the political task of challenging the structures that sustain that relation. Moreover, she suggests that antinormative practices like sexual liberation can paradoxically “reprivatize” the political task of altering hierarchy, thereby leaving intact the deeply structural relations of ruling through which these identities are legitimized and enforced.

For Firestone, as for Cohen and Smith, feminist efforts to revise the norms of femininity have not only left the institutional arrangements of the family unit out of the frame but have in fact exacerbated them. For example, even as feminists attempted to denaturalize the norms that defined “traditional femininity,” Firestone argues, men devised various new strategies to subvert this project. ⁶⁶ By 1970, Firestone writes that

the rebellious daughters of this wasted generation no longer, for all practical purposes, even knew there had been a feminist movement. There remained only the unpleasant residue of the aborted revolution, an amazing set of contradictions in their roles: on the one hand, they had most of the legal freedoms, the literal assurance that they were considered full political citizens of society—and yet they had no power. They had educational opportunities—and yet were unable, and not expected, to employ them. They had the freedoms of clothing and sex mores that they had demanded—and yet they were still sexually exploited. ⁶⁷

Indeed, she suggests that it is the conflation of realizing one’s marginal position with accomplishing institutional change that enables hierarchies to continue generating new forms of rule. To the extent that we occupy ourselves with critiquing the women’s marginal position within the family, she argues, we fail to notice that the underlying hierarchies that these marginalized subjects legitimize remain entrenched. Thus, Firestone writes, “Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.” ⁶⁸ Conflating one’s relationship to power with a political practice aimed at ending structural hierarchies, she thus argues, can never fundamentally change this institution, for “as long as we have the institution we shall have the oppressive conditions at its base.” ⁶⁹ For Firestone, this would be the difference between the critique of the family and coalition as a political activity.

In her insistence that altering the conditions of recursive power is not coterminous with critiquing one’s structural relation to power, Firestone shares an important—and largely ignored—political insight with intersectional theorists. To be sure, criticisms of Firestone’s work have been warranted. ⁷⁰ But in my view, the move to charge Firestone as resubordinating the marginalized, while important, also sidesteps her distinctive engagement with the task of forging a distinctly political praxis—a praxis that shares important features with intersectional theorists’ insistence that democratic politics are irreducible to the critique of marginality. Through her engagement with the logic of recursivity, Firestone’s claim is that any conception of power would need to include an analysis of how the family as a specific institution secures the oppression of women, precisely because it brings into view the deep-seated relations of rule that would have otherwise been left intact.

By turning to the example of second-wave feminist analyses like Firestone’s, I mean to reopen conversation about the political ambitions of the intersectional project: what does it mean to think, act, or resist in coalition? Beneath this question lie deeper, more profound questions about the ways in which queer theory has taken up the insights of intersectionality. In suggesting, in ways both implicit and explicit, that queer theory is a more thorough resistance than intersectionality, queer thinkers run the risk not only of decontextualizing the relations of ruling, such as the white nuclear family, in which marginal subjects are produced. Just as importantly, in arguing that the queer’s paradigmatic marginality is a cipher for all other forms of recursive marginalization, queer theorists have paradoxically homogenized the tensions between the political lessons on offer by Firestone and her intersectional critics by claiming that “queer” represents all recursively marginalized subjects at once.

Coalition-building, instead, requires that no single critique of recursive power stands in for the difficult process of building coalitions across a range of highly contextual, and often conflicting and contradictory, sites of struggle. The example of Shulamith Firestone, then, is an important one in this context—one which I would suggest points to a more demanding democratic practice than queer theorists have often imagined. What might it look like to act in coalition with those who, like Firestone, are committed to the political contestation of recursive hierarchies, even as they fail to radically contest their own tendencies to reproduce marginalization? The lessons of intersectional coalition-building suggest the need for a politics of accountability that would simultaneously share in her opposition to structural power even as it holds her responsible for the ways that she has failed to refuse to resubordinate others. It would echo Cathy Cohen, who argues that a “reconceptualization of the politics of marginal groups allows us not only to privilege the specific experience of distinct communities, but also to search for those interconnected sites of resistance from which we can wage broader political struggles. . . . And it is in these complicated and contradictory spaces that the liberatory and left politics that so many of us work for is located.” ⁷¹ Such a politics would also echo the Combahee River Collective statement, which holds that allies need not perfectly embody antisubordination politics in order to be held accountable to them. ⁷²

Conclusion

These questions about the relationship between democracy-as-coalition and democracy-as-critique are vitally important in a context in which it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile these two modes of politics. As queer organizations struggle to parse difficult and intractable questions about internal hierarchies—between, for example, cisgender lesbians and transwomen ⁷³ or between white queers, queers of color, and queers of the global south ⁷⁴ —questions about whether queer critique has actually produced a more democratic politics have only become more urgent and uncertain. In such a context, I think, it is worth returning to the lessons of intersectional coalition, which have been a persistent refrain in queer politics since its emergence.

I want to suggest that making a claim about the exemplary nature of discursive power participates, paradoxically and perhaps unconsciously, in the notion that certain exercises of power are “more fundamental” than others. At best, this is a spurious assumption. At worst, as Firestone and intersectional theorists alike warn us, it can actually enable the persistence of institutional power as we fail to notice the ways in which some institutions stay profoundly the same even as marginalizing discourses about them shift and change. In this vein, queers and queer theorists should remember the extent to which the antinormative claim has been, historically, deeply imbricated with the promulgation of so-called family values. Indeed, it was Gayle Rubin who wrote in “Thinking Sex” that rapidly changing normative discourses about sex and sexuality often occur in conjunction with legal and political battles seeking to shore up the institutional legitimacy of the family. In this sense, the family and its “values” are a nodal point in which normative discourses about sexuality (Rubin’s “hierarchical system of sexual value” ⁷⁵ ) coincide with attempts to strengthen the institution of the family through state-sanctioned reproductive practices, the extension of marriage rights, and the legal codification of gendered violence and hierarchy. Because of the novelty of different domains that feminists and queer theorists explore, readers tend to be captivated by new arguments without realizing that making these moves has failed to deal with the intersection of norms in persistent nodes, like the family, in which power accumulates.

What’s worse, however, is that conflating antinormative thinking with the very possibility of democratic transformation puts critical theorists in the position of making judgments about what—or who—counts as “exemplary” agents in relation to the interlocking sites and logics of power. In arguing that queer theory exceeds and transcends intersectional thinking—even as it emerges from and engages in intersectional lessons—queer theorists have run the risk of making judgments that render all recursively marginalized subjects as “queer” subjects. The apparent need for ultimately impossible judgments about whether Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized women are really “queer” figures, for example, bespeaks the paradoxically undemocratic features of a critical theory that has conflated the general political refusal to resubordinate the marginalized with the specific institutions of domination in which the marginalized are produced and policed. Although antinormative critique is intended to avoid such political challenges by insisting on a radical contingency, antinormative theorists have paradoxically put themselves in the position of deciding which sites, subjects, and dimensions of power are appropriate targets for political critique and praxis, and which ones are simply particular instantiations of “queer” marginality. It is time, I think, to reopen the question of intersectional coalition; from what multiplicitous sites would we need to think in order to understand the scope of power?

Queer critical theorists concerned with a reinvigorated critical and political praxis should, I argue, return to interrogating contextual sites of recursive power—like the nuclear family—in which power may well function in ways that are irreducible to normativity but that are nevertheless persistent sites of continued oppression. This task, I would argue, will prove to be neither as clear-cut nor as seamless as queer theorists have often hoped. It will, instead, recall Bernice Johnson Reagon’s warning about coalition: sometimes we will have to work with people who “ain’t our people”—perhaps, even, with thinkers like Shulamith Firestone—in order to think and act coalitionally. Engaging in Firestone’s fraught text provides a good example of what this kind of coalitional work might look like; while her analysis remains irreducibly imbricated in a white point of view that fails to take adequate account of racism, homophobia, and other privileges, she nonetheless shares the key goal of ending hierarchical relations of ruling. The task of coalition, then, may not be to move beyond thinkers like Firestone but to hold those whose politics they have influenced accountable for working against the resubordination of their political allies. Feminist, queer, and critical theorists have long known that claiming one’s critical perspective to be exemplary is a grave danger; multiplying our perspectives on power will thus continue to be a responsibility required by and for political engagement. “The responsibility is twofold,” writes an author in the lesbian publication Sinister Wisdom in 1985; “not to silence others, and not to let ourselves be silenced. Neither is easy.” ⁷⁶ This is the lesson that underwrote both intersectional and antinormative queer theory; it is time to reclaim it.