What the queer theorists get right
By now I’ve learned that when my mind keeps worrying over some contradiction, I need to pay attention
This week I’m using my newsletter to think aloud about something rather abstract: what the hell is queer theory all about? Not in the sense of what it says it does, but in a very queer-theoretic way, what it actually does. I hope this isn’t too tedious for those who think it’s all intellectual masturbation. I agree with that assessment, to a large extent. But by now I’ve learned that when my mind keeps worrying over some contradiction, I might as well pay attention. That’s what happened with the mantra “trans women are women”, after all, and look where it led me!
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I remember the first time I referred to “queer theory” in an article. The editor I sent the draft to messaged me back, asking: “What does this mean? I don’t understand”.
I had written something like:
“This hard-to-define field seeks to up-end conventional thinking about what is normative or deviant; innate or socially constructed; stable or mutating; singular or multiple.”
That’s the wording that made it into my first big piece on transgender ideology, which appeared in 2018 in Quillette under the title “The New Patriarchy” after being rejected everywhere else I tried. (Thank goodness for newer outlets, willing to publish things that would have too many staff at pretty much all legacy publications up in arms.)
But that first editor was right: what the hell does it mean? Are queer theorists simply saying that “nothing means anything”, or “everything good is really bad”? Is their point to do with the difficulties of definition or the difficulties of action, or both? Are they nihilists or are they cynics? Or is the point something else entirely?
I often re-read “The Professor of Parody” when my rage at the sheer futility of much of what now calls itself feminism bubbles over. This wonderful essay by philosopher Martha Nussbaum excoriating Judith Butler was written in 1999, but reads like Nussbaum had a crystal ball that allowed her to see the dire state of mainstream feminism today. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to do so.
She writes:
“Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.”
I couldn’t agree more that the point of activism should be to make life perceptibly better for people who are getting a raw deal—not to provide fancy redefinitions, or justifications for doing nothing. But I’m also someone who has a pretty high tolerance for abstruse definitions, and for “academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness”. So what is it that bothers me so much about this particular sort of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness?
I think it’s that it’s not just obscure and abstract; it’s uselessly so. And I don’t mean merely in terms of the activism it does or doesn’t support; I mean on its own terms.
Forgive me for a somewhat lengthy detour into my long-ago degrees in mathematics. For a lot of people, the moment they give up on maths is the moment it all becomes meaningless. The moment they ask themselves, and are unable to give any satisfactory answer to, questions such as: Why do you change the sign when you bring a number across to the other side of the equals? Or: Why does the minus b formula solve a quadratic? Or: Why do you differentiate by multiplying by the power of x and reducing the power of x by 1?
Learning formulas and procedures like these off by heart in order to regurgitate them in response to the right cues is recipe-book mathematics. And many, many people pass the last maths exam they ever take by memorising without ever understanding why.
I remember a fellow student on my undergraduate course telling me that when he started to learn differentiation in school, he and a few friends found it so incomprehensible that they invented a joke procedure they called “neaptopolation” (to be clear, by the time we were talking about it he was no longer puzzled). I don’t remember exactly what neaptopolation was, but it was something like: “Cross out all nines, invert all fractions and increase all powers of x by two.”
Nonsense, in other words. But why is it nonsense, when differentiation isn’t? The answer is neaptopolation gives you nothing useful, and differentiation gives you so, so much—both in the real world and within mathematics itself.
People have been noticing how well mathematics works to explain the world around us for a long time now. Galileo said that mathematics was “the language in which God has written the universe”. There’s a famous paper written in 1960 entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”.
And it’s true: as soon as you try to understand anything about the natural world, you’re in the realm of mathematics—as soon as you try to work out where things are going to be in a second’s time, or whether they’ll fly or how hard you can twist them before they break. And it doesn’t just help you understand concrete things about the physical world; it helps you understand abstract things about human behaviour, expressed in terms of probabilities. You’re not just describing either; you’re predicting.
We all know this so well that its strangeness mostly goes unnoticed. Why does this work, when numbers, operations and functions—the ingredients of mathematics—are so abstract? When mathematics effortlessly involves things you can never see or touch—points with no extension; spaces with infinitely many dimensions; continua where, no matter how close two points are, there are infinitely many more points between them? What is zero, anyway? Why do one and one make two?
There are people who spend their lives thinking about the soundness of the foundations upon which mathematics rests. But most mathematicians don’t bother. Most are unconscious, natural Platonists: when they are doing mathematics, they take the abstract ideas they’re working with as real. And if you were to ask whether those ideas are really real, they would laugh, shake their heads and say they don’t care.
It’s a long time since I’ve done any mathematics, but it certainly felt real. The main result of my PhD thesis, which appeared in a paper entitled “Concerning the Problem of Subsets of Finite Positive Packing Measure”, involved constructing an infinite-dimensional space that had a particular counterintuitive property, and which therefore provided the counterexample for a proof by contradiction. This is obviously an extremely abstract sentence! But when I visualised the key element needed to construct that space, it didn’t feel like I had pulled it out of nowhere, or even that I had in any sense invented it. It felt like it had always been there and I had finally looked in the right direction.
I can’t claim anyone ever used that result for anything else—in fact I doubt it, since the point was to show that a potential alternative definition of a certain mathematical concept wouldn’t work, and so to close off an avenue of inquiry rather than open one up. And I’m pretty sure that the total number of readers in the past quarter-century for that paper, indeed probably for all my papers put together (here they all are...), never reached three figures.
To the extent that my work was “useful”, it certainly wasn’t in the sense of making anyone’s life better. But it did resolve a question that mathematicians I respected had asked and failed to answer. Despite its consistency with all the rest of mathematics, demonstrating the truth of that result was non-trivial. It filled in a detail, admittedly a tiny one, in the vast, featureless swathes of “here be dragons” on the mathematical map.
I don’t think anything like this can be said of a paper in queer theory. That it’s internally consistent; that it answers a question other queer theorists want answered; or that it makes life better for anyone. The field is the absolute opposite of “unreasonably effective”; in fact, someone should write a paper entitled “The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Queer Theory in Everything, Including Itself”. In many respects the entire field is an excuse for incomprehension—and, as Nussbaum noticed, inaction.
I used to think that was all there was to it. And then I read this thread by Ceri Black, who tweets as @femmeloves. She used to be a transactivist, but is now what we call gender-critical. She used to be besotted by queer theory, and now looks at it with a critical eye. And that thread started a train of thought I think is worth sharing.
Ceri starts by pointing out that a lot of what queer theorists spend their time on is saying that it is impossible ever to provide stable definitions for your terms. That is because all definitions are in terms of other definitions—words are defined by other words. And you can’t escape that self-referential quality by pointing—the very pointing, the gesture, is in itself a type of language. It’s hard to see how the whole process of definition, of creating a shared language, gets off the ground.
More than you might think, the same is true in mathematics. It turns out to take a surprising amount of work just to define the most basic terms—the counting numbers, 1,2,3…. I still remember starting with a definition of “zero” as “the cardinality [number of things in] of the empty set [collection with nothing in it]” and learning a series of mathematical constructions that allow you to build up from that slender start the entire edifice of numbers: rational, irrational and imaginary.
Unless you have done a university course in mathematics you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about. And most people who use mathematics—engineers, physicists and so on—have never been walked through this proof. Nor, of course, have the toddlers learning to count on their fingers.
And yet they all manage just fine. It’s the same with language: philosophers find it really hard to say how it gets off the ground, but toddlers learn how to speak seemingly effortlessly.
In that thread, Ceri then moves on from the problem of defining to queer theorists’ next move: the claim that since definitions are all intertwined, with everything pointing to everything else, decisions about what anything means are made by the people with power. People whom the status quo benefits cordon bits of the world off into categories and police the boundaries, squashing rebels back into their boxes and ignoring any possibility for blurring, exception or redefinition.
This is the source of the nihilism and cynicism Nussbaum described. In this mental framework, attempts to escape from this hegemonic power, as it operates to lock everyone and everything into this matrix of categorisation, are doomed to failure. All that’s possible is to cock a snook at power—to do drag, to shock the bourgeoisie with BSDM and age play, to provoke extreme emotions like rage, or extreme sensations like pain—in order to gain temporary freedom from your quotidian self before power reasserts itself once more.
This way of looking at the world leaves no room for pragmatic policymaking or coalition-building. There’s no point in trying to make the world better, not even a little bit at a time, because nothing can truly change.
Fortunately, I don’t think that’s a good description of the world as it actually is. If you go back to the examples of mathematics and natural-language acquisition, it’s simply not true that they are structured according to the operation of power, through and through. For the queer-theoretic description to be accurate, it would have to be the case that a parent could, instead of allowing a toddler to learn to speak an ordinary language, teach them madeup nonsense. Or that instead of teaching mathematics students differentiation, a lecturer could teach them neaptopolation.
But then you’d have to control the toddler’s entire environment to stop them learning a shared language naturally from their peers. And even if you could do that, are there really no external constraints on what the parent could teach the child? Could you really teach an entirely nonsense language, in which words mean entirely different things from one day to the next? Or where they refer to useless categories that don’t help any as you move around the world; categories like, say, “black ash and white bread” or “fingerless gloves and headaches”?
As for neaptopolation, it’s simply meaningless. You could teach it, sure, but why would the operation of power lead you to bother? Why would anyone who had learned to neaptopolate keep doing so? And meanwhile, differentiation would remain what it always has been—one of the most powerful intellectual tools for understanding and altering the world. Someone, some day, would rediscover it, as they contemplated the way objects move when thrown or dropped, or wondered about the changing position of the planets and stars.
Then we reach the point in Ceri’s thread that really struck home for me. Suppose for a moment that queer theorists are right, and you can never break free of the operation of power except temporarily and at the margins. Well: then queer theory itself is a power grab. I don’t think “power grab” is at all a good description of teaching a child to speak or a student to do mathematics. But when it comes to queer theory, I think we’re really talking.
Because the most remarkable thing about the sorts of topics queer theorists seem obsessed by—overturning cisheteronormativity; queering childhood; gender self-ID—is that they are naked power plays. More than that: they started out as genuine transgression against societal power structures until the operation of power co-opted them and turned them into their precise opposite.
Here’s an example: Pride marches. They started out as a few unbelievably brave gay men and women risking violence and ostracism to “come out”—that is, to say publicly that they refused to remain inside the acceptable boundaries of behaviour for males and females. Those individuals were truly transgressive, and brought about genuine change: an end to bans on gay sex and laws like the infamous Section 28 in the UK, and eventually gay marriage.
And then power did its thing. Pride today is anything but transgressive: it’s a corporate rainbow-washing jamboree. More than that, it’s an unbridled celebration of male sexual licence and men’s institutional power over women. It gives cover to men who want to have sex and indulge their kinks in public. And it’s used to discipline lesbians who demand the right to reject all men as sexual partners, however those men identify. All those Progress Pride flags mark public spaces as not safe for any woman who seeks control over her own boundaries and the right to self-definition.
Or take childhood transition. There are still enough homophobes in the world that a sweet little boy who wants to wear a skirt and play with Barbie dolls is transgressive, even if he doesn’t know it. Gender medicine uses hormone-blockers, cross-sex hormones and ultimately castration to discipline his wayward little self, ultimately depriving him of a sexual future in which his transgressions continue. The doctors who oversee this operation of power might as well breathe in his ear: “So you thought you could get away with overstepping the boundaries between masculinity and femininity without being punished, did you? Well, we’ll see about that.”
Once you start to notice these queer-theoretic reversals—the moments when power co-opts transgression and reasserts itself, all the while claiming to be transgressive—I guarantee you will see them everywhere.
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