On the Domestication of Queer Within Social Work: Reflections from One Queer Social Work Instructor/Student

Something is happening within social work. A queer specter is haunting us. Sadly, it is not the ghost of Oscar Wilde encouraging us to “resist everything except temptation” (Wilde, 1906), nor is it the ghost of Leslie Feinberg passing along their riotous anti-cop militancy and potent queerness (Feinberg, 1993). Instead, social work is haunted by a domesticated queerness, a queerness far from illegality and hostility, illegibility, and malleability. This queerness seeks understanding, inclusion, stable counter-hegemonic stories, and bodies. This queerness is unsettled by unintelligibility and remedies this by seeking a definitional (disciplinary) home.

The queerness I speak of is the pacified version of queer theory that manifests in social work, when its visible at all, by way of doctrinaire perspectives like anti-oppressive practice (Zhang, 2018) and LGBTQ-“affirming” social work practices (Featherstone & Green, 2013; Hicks & Jeyasingham, 2016). From these perspectives it is assumed that queer is something that can be known, studied, generalized, and prescriptively addressed. Corralled by the liberal discipline of social work, domesticated queerness is tamed, no longer running wild, no longer feral.

It is precisely social work's tepid engagement with queerness, and its tendency to pacify its more abstract, insurgent, and anti-normative elements into palatable social work discourses that I will muse on what is dangerous about a knowable queerness, or what I have chosen to call domesticated queerness. In other words, a queerness that changes form and function when social work (attempts to) corral it. In this essay, I follow from Maggie Nelson's contention that “the intensity of our need to be understood [has] distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage” (Nelson, 2016, p. 82). We (those of us who have chosen social work as our disciplinary home) may remain caged by mainstream conceptualizations of queer, only capable of scratching its surface in college classrooms and academic journals, unable (or unwilling) to take queer within our own hands to explore its contours and practice its experimental invitations, only to destroy and remold it moments later.

Background

This short essay offers personal reflections on queer within social work and its subsequent defanging. In a small act of academic vulnerability, I have chosen to foreground my emotional responses and unrefined thoughts on the matter, favoring instead playful and informal prose. To some extent, this is a reflective practice since I write from within the academic social work world I admonish here. I make no claims of purity, nor do I offer prescriptive alternatives to my critiques. Instead, perhaps this nascent reflection can act as flint to the reader, striking at the banality of domesticated queerness, generating the tiniest spark of possibility.

One Queer's Reflections on Queer in Social Work

Within social work, queer has moved from the wild, dangerous, and contextually-specific to the symbolic, transcendent, and academically theorized (Hicks & Jeyasingham, 2016). Queer has been defanged and nearly purged of its insurgence against the totality of the social order. Where once queers and rebels spray-painted “be realistic, demand this impossible” on city buildings during the May ‘68 uprising in France (Polychroniou, 2018; Stangler, 2018), we write legibly now, within academic spaces designed to pacify. This subtle domestication is the slow and almost indiscernible effect of a knowable queerness.

Queer has become a fixed concept; even its dynamism is now understood as central to its academic definition. Students are readily positioned as separate from the term rather than of it, self-constructing and embodying it in ways unique to them. Social workers sit in college classrooms encouraged to “think critically,” understand, seldom inspired to create, to act.

Since queer theory in social work is frequently conflated with LGB(TQ+) visibility, cultural competence, and rights (Hicks & Jeyasingham, 2016), if queer theorizing is imbued with the idea of action at all, the advocacy practices that follow (predictably) aim for access and inclusion, not subversion and transformation. For example, LGB (sometimes T) inclusion into institutions and broader society (without meaningful critique of gender binarism), best practices (that offer little in regards to the complex role of sex work within queer/trans communities), and representation (of cis/homonormativity instead of nuanced engagement with experimental and queered relationship forms, e.g., polyamory) (Austin et al., 2016; Dodd & Tolman, 2017; McPhail, 2004). Unsurprisingly, gender expansive identities and queer life that disrupt the social order, rather than seeking assimilation into it, remain comfortably marginal within social work.

Although queer theorizing originated (in part) as a response to the limitations of Leftist epistemologies and – more centrally- as a critique of essentialist trends in feminist theorizing (Butler, 1990), within social work queer has yet to take up the anti-essentialism and anti-normativity that is at the heart of queer theorizing (particularly in non-academic queer writings such as Bash Back!). Frequently, social work engages queer theorizing by way of binary identity constructs (e.g., gay/straight or cis/trans) that not only draw from assumptions of sexuality and gender that run counter to the subversion of identity explicit within queer but supplant possibilities for nuanced discussions regarding the imposition of identity, in favor of identity itself.

Much of what is exciting about queer is lost when it is conceptualized solely as an oppressed identity. Queerness – like other marginal identities- has become an identity in need of liberation, rather than an embodiment of freedom via unique and emergent practices where liberation is not just conceptualized as opposition to oppressive structures, but manifests as an affirmation of experimental life forms, indefinable gender expression, and expansive and untamable sexualities! Here, I feel compelled to state explicitly that I am not suggesting the total eradication of identities; not only is this an impossibility, I fully recognize that maintaining racial, cultural, ethnic, and gendered identities can be both life-affirming and prevent forms of erasure driven be genocide, colonialism, enslavement, and cis/heterosexism. However, since all identities are more or less socially constructed, there is power to be found in both claiming and subverting identity, and it is up to an individual to decide what aspects of their identity are salient and why, what function their identities play, and what aspects of them they resist and seek to undo.

To some extent, the idea of social war is helpful here. The idea of social war is best understood as a theoretical frame that assumes, in addition to more overtly repressive strategies, the state is persistently waging a “soft” war on its citizens via counterinsurgency tactics (Williams et al., 2013). Insidious and enticing by design, to strengthen its control and ever intrude upon the daily practices and psychological processes of its citizens, the state shields itself from revolt by encouraging docility in people (e.g., normative and thus predictable identities and life trajectories that encourage buy-in, rather than resistance to, the status quo) and managing dissent when it does emerge. In other words, by way of both overtly repressive tactics (e.g., state violence) and social norms (e.g., static/binary identities) the state recoups territory within our daily lives and is rewarded with our consent.

A wild, even unhinged, version of queer encourages a confrontation of the taken-for-granted, the normal, the “sane” and thus the queer and queer theorizer opens up the epistemological and literal space to align with all others who would seek to overturn the current social order – both inside and outside the classroom. If we reorient to queer by way of ungovernability, of anarchy, queer emerges as an oppositional frame, (the queer could be considered an insurgent), that is both at war with words and knowledge and an inventive, playful epistemology willing to negotiate, reclaim, and invent new languages! By centering the anarchy implicit within queer, students can open possibilities for action now, such as direct actions that engender expansive human possibilities while actively confronting authoritarian structures and institutions. In this way, queer theorizing is prefigurative since, at its most insurgent, it is about both acting and speaking new worlds into existence. Prefigurative practices assume that one can live out their preferred realities in the here and now. It is a practice that arises out of anarchist traditions, a legacy that has been long ignored or entirely misunderstood within academia (Baldwin, 2019), and if included at all, frequently read through the lens of post-structuralist thinking (May, 1994). What changes about queer when social work engages with queerness as a prefigurative practice, rather than a site of academic inquiry?

When social work ignores anarchy's intersection with queer theorizing, domesticated queerness is able to flourish within institutional contexts, resulting in versions of queer that are milquetoast at best, and repressive at worst. Social work queer perspectives might theorize liberation, but this often occurs within unacknowledged Liberal frames that foreclose transgressive and transformative practices and limit imaginative thinking from the onset. As a result, students are frequently left feeling uncertain or unable to enact social/self-transformations. My hope is that the anarchy implied within queer can redress academic domestication and help us avoid the problematic consequences of liberal political frames and so-called radical theorizing. My hope is that queer might be taken up as a rejection of normal, in other words, a rejection of a dangerous and violent status quo. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam is quoted saying, “[when we] abandon anti-normativity [we] slip quickly into acquiescence” (Halberstam, 2015). I wonder if other social workers have felt this, apply this? I have - find me!

Although I want queer to remain wild, indefinable, and implacable, I – perhaps paradoxically- believe queer remains a theoretical location poised to catalyze radical transformation, even when taken up within the academy. It is the rebelliousness of queer, its inherent anarchic assets that enliven queerness with liberatory potential, even in profoundly confining academic landscapes. The classroom is a space of both discursive control and expansive possibilities, and domesticated queerness/queer theorizing trends to the former. I draw from Foucault in my conceptualization of the classroom as a space of control since it is an institutional setting that does not overtly display repressive tendencies and violence, yet structural violence contextualizes so much about the classroom and its associated practices. For example, the norms that grant authority to the professor, legitimize hegemonic knowledge, and normalize exorbitant tuition fees are just a few of the ways in which the violence underwriting normalcy masquerades as neutral. Simply put, norms function to maintain the status quo in ways often more effective and certainly more insidious than repressive practices.

Final Thoughts

In the oft-quoted words of Michele Foucault, “my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (Foucault, 1983, pp. 231–232). By now, it should be clear my concern is not that queer theorizing has been taken up in fundamentally normative spaces (i.e., academic social work); my concern is that queer theorizing has been decoupled from anarchy (creative and subversive) and prefigurative practices (actionable and agentic) in favor of Marxist-feminist (Leftist) traditions. Although Leftist feminist thought traditions are ever evolving, queered, and often coupled with post-structuralism (Featherstone & Fawcett, 1995; Sands & Nuccio, 1992; Wendt & Boylan, 2008), at their core, they remain tethered to abstractions like equality and inclusion, rendering the anti-normativity and insurgent aspects of queer grossly under-discussed and dangerously unpracticed.

What differentiates fierce queerness from its domesticated form within social work is the ongoing recognition that identity (even a transgressive identity) is still a performance, and thus fluid, spirited, and amazingly open to artistic license (Ahmed, 2020). Queerness, like all subject positions, is a performance to be joyously and experimentally practiced and does not exist in a vacuum. I, like others, understand queerness as inherently social, and it must be if we are to move beyond the choosing of abstract, prescriptive, and commodified identities a la neoliberalism, towards collective liberation (hooks, 1992). Given this, I think queer politics is about constant action. The queer is fundamentally a rebel, living and embodying utopia right now, untethered by the illusory limitations of the present (Muñoz, 2009). In fact, we queer people have had to practice indefatigable revolt to survive.

For me, queer is the interminable practice of revolt; not just against the imposition of identities, but against the legacies of violence and control that give rise to them. This is an engagement with queerness that is clearly distinct from social work's, and one that I feel is better equipped to catalyze personal/collective (false binary) freedom! I hope to find others like me in social work – I know you all are out there. It is likely our paths will never cross, though I hope they do. I am in the classroom, in the shadows, in the breakroom, in the streets practicing queerness and resisting domestication, by situating my theorizing within the legacies and philosophies that inspire transformative action, not just transformative thought. If you are doing this already, count me among your allies. If you are not, perhaps a spark has been ignited…I hope to find you too.