Sex, Needs, and Queer Culture: From Liberation to the Post-Gay

329 Pages·2016·2.338 MB·English

by  David Alderson

Sex, Needs and Queer Culture
About the Author
David Alderson is senior lecturer in modern literature at the
University of Manchester and visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao
Tong University. He is co-organizer, with Laura Doan, of the
Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture at Manchester.
Sex, Needs and
Queer Culture
From liberation to the postgay
DAVID ALDERSON
Zed Books
London
Sex, Needs and Queer Culture: From liberation to the postgay
was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval
Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © David Alderson 2016
The right of David Alderson to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Typeset in Scala by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
Index: Ed Emery
Cover design: Michael Oswell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or
otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78360-513-2 hb
ISBN 978-1-78360-512-5 pb
ISBN 978-1-78360-514-9 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78360-515-6 epub
ISBN 978-1-78360-516-3 mobi
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Transitions 34
2 Is Capitalism Progressive (for Queers)? 94
3 Feeling Radical: Versions of Counterculture 152
4 Subculture and Postgay Dynamics 224
Postscripts 282
Index 302
Acknowledgements
Writing a book inevitably renders one indebted to others, but in
the best possible ways.
I am fortunate to work in the kind of department in which I
can count all my colleagues as friends, but some deserve partic-
ular mention here. Laura Doan has been a collaborator for well
over a decade now. No one could have been more encouraging
and generously supportive than she has been at times when my
own enthusiasm for this project (and others) was at a low ebb.
Jackie Stacey, too, has provided moral support, but has also been
resourceful and imaginative in creating spaces for the kinds of
intellectual exchange that have both allowed me to try out ideas
and challenged me to think afresh. Howard Booth has often reas-
suringly confirmed my prejudices because his is a judgement I
trust (his taste for Kipling and Busoni notwithstanding). Jeremy
Tambling has been an irrepressible, but sociable, spur to thought
and hard work. Patricia Duncker always raises spirits and offers
sound advice.
Beyond the ranks of my Manchester colleagues, I have benefited
from numerous conversations with David Halperin on matters
related to this book in the different parts of the world we have
found ourselves in. Weekends at Benita Parry’s house have been
vi
Acknowledgements
an inspiring mixture of uncompromising talk, proper fun and
good whisky.
I have discussed the issues explored in this book with David
Wilkinson over the years so extensively that it seems fair to say
that we have evolved a shared perspective on them. He has also
generously offered feedback on more extensive portions of the
book than anyone else, and often at short notice. Others who have
read earlier drafts of individual chapters and offered valuable
suggestions include Iain Bailey, Daniela Caselli, Doug Field, Ben
Harker, Graham MacPhee, Stephen Maddison, Benita Parry,
Eithne Quinn, Robert Spencer and Jeremy Tambling. Of course, I
am solely responsible for the book’s shortcomings.
In recent years, I have spent a lot of time in China as a visiting
professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In various ways, this
has enabled me to focus on this and related projects, but it has
also been a fascinating and enjoyable experience. I am thankful to
Wang Jie for the invitation, for his remarkable energy in organizing
seminars and conferences, and for his splendid hospitality. I am
also grateful to my friends in Shanghai, Wang Bin, Chen Jing,
Ningjia Zhu and Yin Qinghong, for making my trips there so
convivial.
Colleagues in the Raymond Williams Society of Japan invited
me to give a version of chapter two of this book as a lecture in
Tokyo in 2015. The incisive response from Shintaro Kono and
wonderful discussion that followed made this a memorable event
for me. I am grateful not only to Shintaro, but also to Fuhito Endo,
Masashi Hoshino, Yasuo Kawabata, Asako Nakai and Ryota Nishi
for organizing it, and for their thoughtfulness and hospitality.
Lengthy visits to China have made my trips to Spain sadly much
rarer in recent years, and I very much regret the consequent loss of
contact with friends and collaborators at the Universitát Autónoma
vii
Sex, Needs and Queer Culture
de Barcelona – namely Sara Martín Alegre, Meri Torras and Diego
Falconi Travez – that I enjoyed in the early stages of writing the
book. I hope to return soon now that it is finished.
In a more general sense, the Didsbury Discussion Group has
kept me informed and on my toes for a long time. In ways they
may not be aware of, its hosts, Pat Devine and Elena Lieven, have
helped consolidate the political instincts and sensibilities that
are evident in the book, as have the annual fellow pilgrims to
Hellsgarth.
Jessie, Ian and Heather Alderson have tolerated my absences
and anxieties in recent years, and each remains an inspiration
to me.
I am delighted that this book is being published by the Zed
Books collective. Kim Walker has been an enthusiastic and patient
editor. What better qualities could an author hope for?
More formally, I would like to thank the editors of new
formations, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art and Textual
Practice for allowing me to reproduce here material published in
those journals in different forms.
The book is dedicated to someone whose example and wisdom
impress me more as the years go by: Alan Sinfield.
viii
Introduction
I began work on the project that has turned into this book many
years ago. It was then envisaged as a work on postgay culture.
That was not my term, but rather one that had been advanced
by others with quite diverse, even opposing, purposes. On the
one hand, it was used to highlight the potential for assimilation
that now exists (rendering a supposedly strident gay identity and
politics obsolete); on the other, it was associated with a perspective
that viewed ‘gay’ as the very sign of assimilation, and demanded
new forms of radicalism in its place. In other words, the term
seemed instructively contradictory, and I was more interested in
those contradictions and what they might produce than in any
homogeneous shift supposed to be taking place. The current
book retains some of that earlier impulse, but has become a
more expansive set of reflections on culture, theory and political
economy of the period since the 1960s in their relations with the
category of sexuality.
At a certain point in thinking about the book, then, I decided
to resist the normally very good advice that one should maintain
a precise focus, and instead followed my intuitions in allowing
it to become the project it seemed to be straining towards. If
the postgay related in some sense to assimilation and its
1
Introduction
be liberated from repression, Foucault argues, is itself an effect
of power – specifically, that is, of the discourse of sexuality that
produced new forms of subjectivity from the later nineteenth
century on through the taxonomy of individuals on the basis
of their desires, and the internalization of those taxonomical
categories by the individuals themselves. This was the ‘perverse
implantation’.12 However, the arguments on power that Foucault
develops in that work are ultimately abstracted from the particular
history he sketches, such that a work that begins by tracing the
emergence of a discursive field of sexuality specifically becomes
a theorization of power in general: ‘where there is power, there is
resistance’, Foucault influentially writes,
and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a
position of exteriority in relation to power … there is no single
locus of Great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions,
or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of
resistances, each of them a special case.13
In this formulation, the claim about resistance’s non-exteriority
to power seems also to necessitate recognition of its multiplicity,
but there is a telling ambiguity in the phrasing: it is not clear
whether the mere fact of there being special cases requires our
endorsement of each one, or whether, in describing things in this
way, he is refusing the authority implicit in the act of endorsing
struggles in the first place. It seems to me that the carefully neutral
tone may be a strategic way of keeping both possibilities open: a
claim about the nature of resistance in general merges with an
12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley,
London: Allen Lane, 1979, pp. 36–49.
13 Ibid., pp. 95–96.
11