Content area
Full Text
Queer political work might appear to be grounded in a theory of structurelessness, at least as it relates to the making of an imagined queer community/ movement organized around the need to alleviate the unbending boundaries and centers of sexual identification. Yet it is also true that queer communities can be limited by the very ways they are structured by and constituted through race, class, ability, and other forms of social categorization. Critics have rightly asked, for example, what is at stake in the life of the queer who is not white, able bodied, cis-male, or "naturalized" as a U.S. citizen within a queer (mostly U.S. based) political movement organized around supposed visions of structurelessness? To what extent does this "structureless" politics of identity attend to the needs of those who exist within the margins-the structure of the other-of an already interstitial space? What is a stake for the queers of the queers within a movement that might easily establish centers even as it seeks to destabilize the same?
E. Patrick Johnson offers the following query in response to the failures of academic queer theory in the way that it attends to the material needs of the multiply marginalized: "What, for example, are the ethical and material implications of queer theory if its project is to dismantle all notions of identity and agency? The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which ideology functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing, but what is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or any place where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed-indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?" (2001,5).
In what follows, I revisit Jo Freeman's essay "The Tyranny of Structure- lessness," and complicate her specific turn to structure. More specifically, I offer thoughts on queer political work and the ways that the "queer" serves as a sign for structurelessness even while queer movements might easily...