Victoria Clarke / Elizabeth Peel

University of the West of England / Aston University

Abstract

In this article we consider the relationship between lesbian and gay psychology, latterly known as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) psychology and queer theory. We signal some ways that the field could become more intersectional by, for example, taking gender seriously, before turning our attention to queer theory. We explore some of the critiques of incorporating queer theory more fully into the field. In conclusion, we suggest that a tentative queering of LGBTQ psychology will provide fruitful possibilities for the future of the field.

Keywords lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, LGBTQ, psychology.

Daqui ao queer? Armadilhas e possibilidades

Neste artigo, consideramos a relação entre psicologia gay e lésbica, recentemente mais conhecida como psicologia lésbica, gay, bissexual, trans e queer (LGBTQ) e a teoria queer. Assinalamos alguns dos modos através dos quais este campo de estudo se pode tornar mais interseccional, por exemplo, levando o género mais a sério, antes de voltar a nossa atenção para a teoria queer. Exploramos algumas das críticas à incorporação da teoria queer neste campo do saber. Como conclusão, sugerimos que uma tentativa de queerização da psicologia LGBTQ criará possibilidades frutíferas para o desenvolvimento desta área.

Palavras-chave lésbica, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, LGBTIQ, psicologia.

Résumé

D'ici au queer? Pièges et possibilités

Dans cet article nous considérons la relation entre la psychologie lesbienne et gay, plus récemment connu comme psychologie gay, lesbienne, bisexuelle, trans et queer (LGBTQ) et la théorie queer. Nous signalons quelques modalités qui permettent plus d’intersectionnalité dans ce domaine, par exemple, en prenant le genre au sérieux, avant de tourner notre attention sur la théorie queer. Nous explorons quelques critiques à l'intégration de la théorie queer dans le champ. En conclusion, nous suggérons que la queerization provisoire de la psychologie LGBTQ offrira des possibilités pour l'avenir du domaine.

Mots-clés trans, lesbiennes, gays, bisexuels, queer, LGBTQ, psychologie

Sexuality is frequently assumed to be the primary, and even sole, basis of oppression for non-heterosexuals, and the intersections between sexuality and other forms of marginalisation and privilege are too often overlooked (see Clarke et al., 2010). Opening the door of lesbian and gay psychology to bisexual, trans and queer (and heterosexual [Dworkin, 2002]) psychologies compels us to consider other forms of diversity (Humphrey, 1999). Likewise, engaging with issues of gender, race, culture, class and ability creates an onus to consider seriously the concerns of bisexual and trans people, alongside queer challenges to fixed identities. First we consider engagement with gender and feminist psychology before considering some of the tensions and possibilities in (more fully) incorporating queer theory into the field of LGBTQ psychology.

Taking gender seriously

Just as feminist psychology developed in response to women’s oppression and to the androcentric bias of psychology, so lesbian and gay psychology – as it was historically called – developed in response to lesbian and gay oppression and the heterosexist bias of psychology (Kitzinger, 2001). Lesbian and gay psychologists and feminist psychologists have resisted the discipline and practice of psychology (Burman et al., 1996; Kitzinger, 1990). In 1970, to take one example, pioneering second wave feminist psychologist, Phyllis Chesler (1989: xvii), took the platform at the annual American Psychological Association (APA) convention to demand that the APA provide:

One million dollars “in reparations” for those women who had never been helped by the mental health professionals but who had, instead, been further abused by them: punitively labelled, overly tranquilised, sexually seduced while in treatment, hospitalised against their will, given shock therapy, lobotomised, and, above all, disliked as too “aggressive”, “promiscuous”, “depressed”, “ugly”, “old”, “disgusting” or “incurable”.

Three years later, during the annual American Psychiatric Association convention, a panel of “experts” debated whether homosexuality should be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. One of the participants, Ronald Gold (1973/1999), denounced the illness model of homosexuality as «a pack of lies, concocted out of the myths of a patriarchal society for a political purpose. Psychiatry dedicated to making sick people well – has been the cornerstone of a system of oppression that makes gay people sick» (178).

Kitzinger and Coyle (2002: 4) argue for greater alliances between lesbian and gay psychology and the psychology of gender, and caution against drawing the boundaries of the field around sexuality: «lesbian and gay issues have always been deeply implicated with notions of gender (as in the stereotype of «mannish» lesbian women and «effeminate» gay men)». Taking gender seriously also makes it easier to build connections between lesbian and gay psychology and transgender psychology.

Moving toward a more intersectional approach to LGBTQ psychologies requires us to pay attention to the gender divide between lesbians and gay men, and the ways in which (individual) lesbians and gay men (and BTQ people) are differently (and similarly) positioned in relation to gender and heteronormativity. There is also a need to acknowledge the different ways in which lesbians’ and gay men’s oppression functions: for gay men overt visibility often leads to oppression, for lesbians’ oppression often hinges on invisibility (Edwards, 1994). Both arguments for separating lesbian psychology and gay psychology (to acknowledge lesbians’ and gay men’s different positioning in relation to gender and redress lesbians’ marginality under the banner of lesbian and gay psychology) and for including lesbians and gay men in a rainbow coalition (that acknowledges similarities and differences) are compelling. It seems that the best way forward for LGBTQ psychologies in the foreseeable future is to use either or both strategies where appropriate, and to do so in a conscious and reflective manner in order to avoid the default separatism and privileging of gay male experience that defines lesbian and gay psychology.

Que(e)ring psychology

The fracturing of lesbian feminism and the AIDS epidemic led to the regeneration of lesbian and gay coalitions in the 1980s and 1990s, and these coalitions gave birth to queer activism and, hot on its heels, queer theory. Queer theory has taken (some sections of) academia by storm, but, until recently (see Barker & Hegarty, 2005; Hegarty, 1997; Hegarty & Massey, 2006; Jalas, 2004; Minton, 1997; O’Rourke, 2005; Speer, 2005; Warner, 2004) queer theory has passed by the heavily policed boundaries of psychology (Hegarty & Massey, 2006)³. This is symptomatic perhaps of lesbian and gay psychology’s lack of engagement with interdisciplinary LGBT studies (Hegarty, 2004). Peter Hegarty and Sean Massey (2006) point to the disjunction between queer theory’s concern for psychoanalysis and the dominance of the cognitive-behavioural paradigm in psychology. They argue that lesbian and gay psychology is a «more cautious disciplinary project» (19) than queer theory; for instance, queer theorists have focused on sexual practices, whereas lesbian and gay psychologists have prioritised sexual identity.

Any attempt to define queer theory is, as any queer theorist worth their salt will tell you, bound to falter because the “essence” of queer theory (and one thing that queer’s detractors find deeply irksome) is its refusal of fixed definitions. As Daniel Noam Warner (2004: 322) notes «there is not one queer theory, but many queer theories». Nonetheless, for readers unfamiliar with queer theory, we will offer a, necessarily brief and simplified, account of what queer is or might be (for an accessible introduction to queer, see Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 2004). The coining of the term “queer theory” is credited to Teresa de Lauretis (1991) and oft claimed as «the founding moment of queer theory» (Gamson, 1995: 394) is the publication of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s (1990) Epistemology of the Closet. Henry L. Minton (1997) argued that the key to understanding queer theory is its reclamation of the word queer, which signifies something different and peculiar (and also someone non-heterosexual). As such queer has become a site for transforming and resisting heteronormativity. Queer has defined itself against conventional lesbian and gay, and feminist politics (Gamson, 1995), and more specifically against identity politics, so much so that some commentators have argued that it makes an enemy of feminism (Walters, 1996), even though it has strong roots in feminist theory. There are no clear membership criteria for queer (Rudy, 2001), queers are not defined by their sexual identity, but by their opposition to heteronormativity, which raises the – for some, uncomfortable (Walters, 1996) – spectre of straight queers (O’Rourke, 2005). Queer only has meaning in relation to its opposition to that which is normative (Minton, 1997). Queer, thus, draws the boundaries of its membership more inclusively than the lesbian and gay movement, including potentially anyone, such as bisexual, trans and heterosexual people, who rejects heteronormative conceptions of sex/gender and sexuality.

Prominent queer theorists include (among many others) Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) and Michael Warner (1993), but the grand daddy of queer is the French post-structuralist theorist, Michel Foucault (1978). As Minton (1997) outlined, Foucault challenged traditional understandings of power as a possession, instead conceiving of power as a relation. Power is everywhere, freedom cannot operate outside of power, we can never achieve freedom from power, thus the goal of oppositional politics is not liberation but resistance. Queer theorists have used Foucault’s conceptualisation of power to theorise resistance to heteronormativity.

One of the most well known and widely used, and misused, queer concepts is Butler’s (1990) notion of the performativity of gender (something that she has revisited in her subsequent work, see Butler, 1993; 2004). To simplify Butler’s rather complex and subtle argument, categories like gender are neither natural nor essential but are nonetheless foundational, and occupy the status of social norms that serve particular regulatory purposes. Gender is the discursive effect of reiterative “acts”, acts that are repeated within a highly ordered frame and which «congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being» (33). Butler uses the concept of performativity, rather than performance, to avoid the connotations of intentionality: there is no agent who performs; rather, the agent is constituted in and through the performative processes (Sullivan, 2003). If gender is a cultural fiction, then too are heterosexuality and homosexuality. Power/knowledge regimens – such as psychology – do not simply describe identities; rather, they produce identities in the service of particular projects. Butler and other queer theorists aim to “denaturalise” sex, gender and sexuality and the relationships between them.

Queer theory «shakes the ground on which lesbian and gay politics has been built» (Gamson, 1995: 390), there is a tension between the lesbian and gay movement’s concern to shore up identity categories and the queer impulse to deconstruct them. As Joshua Gamson (1995) outlined, the lesbian and gay movement is based on the assumption that clear collective identity categories are necessary for political action. By contrast, queer challenges the content and utility of identity categories: power operates through the very production of sexual categories as well as through their repression, therefore deconstructing identity categories is the key to meaningful resistance. As Butler (1990: 13-14) argued, «identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalising categories of oppressive structures, or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression». Queer can be viewed as a contemporary antiassimilationist politics, opposed to mainstream lesbian and gay inclusionary (but not inclusive) identity/rights politics. Queer’s more inclusive politics requires «not simply an expansion of identity, but a subversion of it» (Gamson, 1995: 399).

Over the last decade or so, outside (and occasionally inside [see Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1997, Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996]) of psychology, queer theory has been the subject of much debate and vociferous critique. Lesbian/feminists feature prominently among queer’s detractors (e.g., Jeffreys, 1994, 1996, 2003; Walters, 1996). Gamson (1995) argued that because of the greater invisibility and fragility of the category “lesbian” there have been greater levels of anxiety about its deconstruction, than about the deconstruction of the category “gay man”. Some critiques are forwarded by authors who are not wholly unsympathetic to the project of queer theory (e.g., Jackson, 1999; Walters, 1996), whereas others are forwarded by those who see little promise in a queer future (Jeffreys, 2003). To provide a sense of some of the possible limitations of engaging more thoroughly with queer theory in lesbian and gay psychology we briefly outline some of the key themes in critiques of queer that have emerged from feminism and sociology. Writers both sympathetic and hostile to queer highlight the potential for the boundaries of queer’s inclusionary politics to be drawn so wide as to be meaningless, to erase internal differences (Gamson, 1995; Gamson & Moon, 2004), and to create a new and reductive binary of everything queer/heteronormativity. Many critics, and some queer theorists, argue that just like gay liberation, queer is synonymous with white, gay male experience (Barnard, 2004; Riggs, 2006), so much so that a number of lesbian feminists have revived their earlier critiques of «homosexual patriarchal culture» (Jeffreys, 2003: 3). Queer theory is said to be male centred, to “disappear” lesbians and assimilate them into gay male culture and politics and to ignore the specificity of lesbian experience (Jeffreys, 1994; Rudy, 2001; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996). Queer implicitly and explicitly portrays lesbians and feminists as boring, prudish and politically correct. Suzanna
Danuta Walters (1996: 844) most vividly captures this objection to queer:

Once upon a time there was this group of really boring ugly women who never had sex, walked a lot in the woods, read bad poetry about goddesses, wore flannel shirts, and hated men (even their gay brothers). They called themselves lesbians. Then, thankfully, along came these guys named Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan dressed in girl’s clothes riding some very large white horses. They told these silly women that they were politically correct, rigid, frigid, sex-hating prudes who just did not GET IT – it was all a game anyway, all about words and images, all about mimicry and imitation, all a cacophony of signs leading back to nowhere. To have a politics around gender was silly, they were told, because gender was just a performance anyway, a costume one put on and, in drag performance, wore backward. And everyone knew boys were better at dress up.

Moreover, queer is said to ignore or reverse feminist critiques of S/M, pornography, transsexualism, bisexuality and heterosexuality (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996) and to be generally hostile to feminism (Walters, 1996). Queer is argued to prioritise a male sexual freedom agenda, and to immunise gay male sexual practices from political critique (Jeffreys, 2003). Some lesbian feminists maintain that gay men, bisexuals and transgenderists/transsexuals do not share political ground with lesbians (Jeffreys, 2003). Many critiques allege that queer is fundamentally elitist, an obfuscatory, unintelligible political theory, that is accessible only to some (predominantly privileged, white, middle class) academics (Jeffreys, 2003; Walters, 1996). Queer replaces the meaningful programme for social change developed by feminists and others with political quietism (Murray, 1997, cited in Jeffreys, 2003), and romanticises transgression – «a pleasure of the powerful» (Jeffreys, 2003: 43) – and playing with or “fucking” gender (feminists, by contrast, argue that gender should be resisted and eliminated).

Queer is also alleged to be unoriginal, parasitically laying claim to insights that are more appropriately credited to others (Epstein, 1996; Jackson, 1999; Jeffreys, 2003) or incorporating the work of feminists (see, for examples, Minton, 1997; Sullivan, 2003), without fully taking account of their opposition to the queer project. Queer places «a fashionable intellectual gloss on old-fashioned liberalism and individualism» (Jeffreys, 1996: 372) and ignores the material realities of oppression (Jackson, 1999, Jeffreys, 2003, Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996). Some writers have asked where «the actual vulgar oppression of women fits into all this» (Jeffreys, 1996: 361)? Related to this, queer is argued to provide an impoverished understanding of the social – some commentators express concern about the utility of a political theory that emanates from the arts, rather than the social sciences (Gamson & Moon, 2004; Jackson, 1999; Jeffreys, 2003). Peter A. Jackson (1999) argues that queer theory works at the level of the cultural/discursive, and reduces the social to this level (sometimes practices are included, as in Butler’s [1990, 1993] discussion of performativity, but these are not located in their interactional or institutional setting). Some feminists have called for a reinvigoration of micro-sociological perspectives that account for agency and structure, everyday interaction and its institutional settings, and the ways that interaction is furnished with and shaped by the meanings it has for participants, such as ethnomethodology, interactionism and phenomenology (Jackson, 1999; Speer, 2005). Joshua Gamson and Dawne Moon (2004) argue that since the late 1990s there has been something of a reconciliation between queer theory and sociology, and sociological theory provides an empirical anchor for queer’s abstract theorising.

There are many other critiques of queer in circulation, perhaps the most fundamental is that queer signs the death warrant of a lesbian and gay rights agenda, and, moreover, the categories “lesbian” and “gay” (Gamson, 1995; Humphrey, 1999). The deconstruction of identity categories makes meaningful political action difficult, if not impossible (Jeffreys, 2003), and denies a voice to those who have only just begun to acquire one as a result of their deployment of particular categories (Gamson, 1995; Jeffreys, 1996).

The possibilities of queer theory

Warner (2004; see also Hegarty, 2003) queerly interrogates how Evelyn Hooker’s (1957) groundbreaking research on homosexuality established the ways in which «queers were made intelligible to the psychological gaze» (326). The choices Hooker made in collecting and presenting her data constructed the «normal male homosexual», an identity «within the matrix of intelligibility» (327) that dominates contemporary LGBT research. Hooker sought to locate a sample of «pure» homosexuals (men with no heterosexual experience); thus she defined homosexuality negatively, as not heterosexual. Warner argues that a true homosexual (or heterosexual) «cannot be known outside of someone’s identifying with the identity» (329), sexual behaviour is linked to identity through the assumption that a pure homosexual core is organising a person’s behaviour. In the absence of this assumption, the behaviour could be organised in any number of other ways. Hooker sought to avoid homosexuals of less than «average adjustment» (such as prisoners), but, Warner argues, given that her aim was to show no personality differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, she could have used a prison population. If she had made this choice she could have avoiding making any statement about norms and avoiding dehumanising prison populations, but Hooker also aimed to show that homosexuals are “normal”. The population of men from which Hooker drew her sample were largely white, middle class, urban dwelling, self-identifying homosexuals and members of the Mattachine Society. As Warner notes this population was far from representative or normal. By selecting her sample from this population, Hooker created a norm against which other queers were going to be judged and that new queers could strive for.

Hegarty and Massey (2006) re-interpret the findings of experimental social psychological research on the behavioural effects of anti-homosexual prejudice within what Sedgwick (1990) called a universalising view (the assumption that sexual definition is an issue for all people, rather than the homosexual minority). Hegarty and Massey ask to what «are the anti-homosexual attitudes which social psychologists have measured opposed? Is the homosexuality in question a minority group, a form of sexual practice, an identity performance, or a political moment?» (5). Research on the behavioural effects of anti-homosexual prejudice involves participants making judgements about a target individual whose perceived sexual orientation is experimentally manipulated. Target individuals perform homosexuality (and straightness) in a variety of ways, including through direct disclosure and wearing gay pride badges. Such performative processes constitute identities, rather than report the same core identity. Participants’ responses to these processes have been understood as reactions to lesbians and gay men versus heterosexuals. But Hegarty and Massey argue these may also be understood as assessing different responses to out and passing lesbian/gay individuals, to ways of performing minority sexual identities, rather than to lesbians and gay men versus heterosexuals. Hegarty and Massey suggest that future experiments that acknowledge the performativity of identity could examine if different sexual identity performances regulate the relationship between participants’ attitudes and behaviours, and what particular performative processes accomplish. They conclude that queer theory enables social psychologists to use and deconstruct the technologies of attitude research, to work with and acknowledge the contingency of psychological knowledge, and to pursue anti-homophobic inquiry «within mutually incompatible epistemologies» (21).

Warner (2004) advocates the use of qualitative approaches because these «have a better chance of accounting for queer experiences in the same terms as the actual people living these experiences» (335). Hegarty and Massey (2006), by contrast, do not consider quantitative/experimental research as «devoid of epistemic value». In their view, queer theory does not require a rejection of scientific epistemology.

Concluding remarks: to queer or not to queer?

We tentatively suggest queering LGBTQ psychology with caution, mindful of queer’s own distrust of anything that positions itself as inherently radical. A number of commentators (e.g., Gamson, 1995; Humphrey, 1999) have argued for the need to both shore up and deconstruct identity categories (stable identities are necessary for specific purposes⁴) because different forms and sites of oppression require different political strategies. Gamson (1995) argued that the label “LGBTQ” orients to both strategies – highlighting both the strategic importance of identity categories and the need to undermine those categories. Jill Humphrey (1999: 239) similarly argued against collapsing lesbian and gay, and queer politics into one another:

Since our oppression is multidimensional, we can ill afford to sacrifice one set of insights or strategies to another, and if we succumb to the temptation, we may delude ourselves that the battle has been won, when in fact the sites and symptoms have been displaced.

To conclude, we reiterate Humphrey’s (1999: 240) caution that justice for lesbians and gay men is a step not the final goal, and «quite simply, it is difficult to justify any vision of justice for lesbian woman and gay men [or indeed BTQ people] if the pursuit of this vision, and its end product, entails injustices against other sexual and gendered minorities».

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Notas

1 Acknowledgements: An extended version of this article was originally published as ‘From Lesbian and Gay Psychology to LGBTQ Psychologies: A Journey into the Unknown (or Unknowable)? in our edited collection Out in Psychology: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer perspectives (2007, Wiley). Out in Psychology won the American Psychological Association Division 44 Best Book Award 2007. We are grateful to the publisher for their permission to reproduce some of this material here.

2 This is one of many potential approaches to analysing gender in LGBTQ psychologies: see, for instance, Jalas (2004) for an alternative queer account of how gender norms shape lesbian experience.

4 This chimes with some lesbian feminists’ theorisation of the category “lesbian” as a strategically useful social construction (Jeffreys, 1996).

Victoria Clarke is a Reader in Sexuality Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. She has published three books on LGBTQ psychology – Out in Psychology: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer perspectives (Wiley) with Elizabeth Peel, British Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Psychologies: Theory, research, and practice (Haworth Medical Press) with Elizabeth Peel and Jack Drescher, and LGBTQ Psychology: An introduction (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with Sonja Ellis, Elizabeth Peel and Damien Riggs. She is writing a textbook on qualitative methods in psychology (for Sage) with Virginia Braun.

Endereço electrónico: Victoria.clarke@uwe.ac.uk

Elizabeth Peel is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, School of Life & Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She is a critical psychologist with interests in health, gender and sexualities, and has recently published a Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology on LGBTQ Health Psychology (2009, 19[4]; with Michael Thomson). Her latest book is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer Psychology: An introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2010), with Victoria Clarke, Sonja Ellis and Damien Riggs.

Correio electrónico: e.a.peel@aston.ac.uk

Artigo recebido em 01 de Maio de 2009 e aceite para publicação em 06 de Novembro de 2009.