A "History" more Superficial than Graphic

Since I was unable to attend the discussion of Queer: A Graphic History, I wanted to offer a few comments here. It’s a topic I know a little bit about, since “queer theory” was coming into full bloom during the last decade of my academic career. I even knew some of the contemporary luminaries mentioned in the book, such as Teresa de Lauretis.

As valuable as this book may seem at first glance to the lay person, I am disappointed by the superficiality of its treatment of nearly everything. Perhaps the problem lies in the very concept, that complex theory might be summed up in cartoons and bubble blurbs. In cases such as Foucault or Judith Butler, this problem is particularly vexing. I was thinking all the time to myself that these treatments prove "a little learning is a dangerous thing."

I do not particularly like the outsized illustrations. Rather than illuminating the text, too often they drag it down. And those lead balloons capture little of what the theoreticians have propounded in detail. For example, the "social construction of gender," elaborated by Butler, is never spelled out. Related ideas, such as "performing gender," are similarly left murky.

Another troublingly superficial treatment is that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, which the authors say "argues that we need to disentangle sexuality and gender, otherwise heteronormativity remains in place" (p. 94). This is certainly an underlying premise of Sedgwick's book, but it scarcely begins to suggest what the book is really about: how prominent authors like Henry James and Proust coded in their writing what at the time was considered deviant sexual object choice.

All that said, there are certainly values to this book. It acquaints the average reader with key names (from Kraft-Ebbing, Hirschfeld, Ellis to hooks and Sedgwick) and with a very general chronology from the late 19th century to the present. It introduces key concepts, such as heteronormativity and queer biology. It also includes a short list of further readings in queer theory. To the extent that it claims to be no more than introduction, the book succeeds.

But again, I'm troubled by the authors' throwing around of important concepts, only to move on to the next cartoon. For example, Foucault's "panopticon" is cursorily described as a prison with a central tower (it actually refers only to the tower) that presages a society, much like our own contemporary one, in which people might be watched at all times. Actually, the point is not to beware mass surveillance but rather to avoid the self-policing that such surveillance fosters.

Similar name-dropping occurs with the authors' desire to include every other contestatory movement of the last 75 years. We get a dash of existentialism, a splash of feminism (which of course is deeply embedded in early queer theory), references to poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, etc. I think this weakens the book. The suggestion that queer theory is actually linked to all these other modes of thought, if true, dilutes queerness itself.

This brings me to another concern: focus. I'm told the book is about queer theory; but, rather than providing a clear outline of that theory, the book regularly changes focus to talk about "queer" people and how gender and sexual categories are lived out in our society. The latter is a fine topic, but again it dilutes the idea of queer theory. There is a difference between talking about the performativity of gender and talking about the lives of Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein.

Anyway, for a short book with little print, I found it hard to slog through it. For those who can infer from a buzzword a fully elaborated theory, the book could be handy. For those seeking guidance in the study of queer theory, help must lie elsewhere.