Strategic Subjects: The Sexual Binary, Transgression and the Ethics of Strategic Essentialism

Rob Cover
2017
For more than ten years the collective set of critical post-structuralist positions labelled 'queer theory' has been deployed to show that sexual identity—and particularly hetero and homo sexual subjectivities—are produced through discursive knowledges; contingent and historical. Such work has usefully opened paths for the examination of racial, ethnic and gendered tensions within the ethnic-minority grouping that is the lesbian/gay (or 'queer') community. What might be considered the largest
more » ... ntribution of queer theory to the field of lesbian/gay politics has been the ways in which it can be deployed for the examination of lesbian/gay (and 'straight') subjects as they are subjectively performed in accord with various discourses of sexuality and subjectivity, thus prompting examinations of how these discourses are governed by the cultural construct hetero/homo binary. Nevertheless, much of this work is ignored in the praxis of lesbian/gay politics which continues to assert and reassert the hetero/homo binary as 'sexual truth'.
doi:10.4225/03/5918478792eaa fatcat:d7ucqiexevb5vdd3cniz3wbyji