I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press. The publisher's blurb proclaimed it
a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established. Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities. The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental. With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.
Hm. Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it. I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.
The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.
I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements. Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people." Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.
What is "a people"? The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities. The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental." Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either. Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier. Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).
Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present. It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.
I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time. It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.
