What Is Queer Theory? A Rejection of the Received Wisdom of Our Ancestors

Because many social norms are generally good, queer theorists’ campaign against all social norms will result in serious harm.

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About the Author

Julian Adorney

is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

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When I first heard about queer theory, I assumed that it had to do with gay rights. I was familiar with the LGBTQ acronym, and I assumed that a field called “Queer Theory” would have as its central focus helping to advance lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans rights. But while queer theory does focus a lot on advancing negative and positive rights for trans people (for those not familiar with the philosophical distinction, negative rights don’t infringe on others’ rights, and would include in this case the right for adults to get gender-transition surgery; positive rights do infringe on the rights of others, and would include in this case the “right” of trans-identified males to enter women’s bathrooms), its central focus is very different.

The central focus of queer theory is on rejecting the received wisdom of our ancestors. That is: our society has certain things that we consider “normal,” such as monogamy, having a job, or the notion that there are two (and only two) separate and distinct sexes. The central aim of queer theory is to subvert, problematize, and ultimately undo these norms. Here’s how women’s and gender studies professor David Halperin defined queer theory in his book Saint Foucault:

As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

What does this attack on social norms look like in practice? It can take almost any form; society has a lot of norms, and a field that defines itself in opposition to these norms will have a target-rich environment.

But let’s walk through a few examples.

First, queer theorists reject what they call “homonormativity.” This is the idea that gay people are just like straight people, and want to fit into the mainstream of society rather than simply living at the margins. It’s the idea that gay people, like straight people, mostly want to put on a suit and tie, go to work, get married, and have children. For queer theorists, this is problematic. Here’s how professor Tyler M. Argüello put it in a paper for the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services:

Extending modern capitalism and consumption, homonormativity has emerged in queer theory, entrenching a transparent White, neoliberal subject, one who replicates heteronormativity (Duggan, 2004). In this variation, homonormativity anesthetizes queer communities into passively accepting alternative forms of inequality in return for domestic privacy and the freedom to consume (Manalansan, 2005).

This rejection of homonormativity can even lead queer theorists to oppose (or at least problematize) the gay and lesbian community’s long fight for marriage equality. Argüello, again: “A preeminent example of this is the fight for “marriage equality,” which privileges a specific form of intimacy and relationship-making (i.e., legal marriage) while silencing and eclipsing other aggrandizing notions of intimacy, domesticity, sexuality, and sociality, among other discourses.”

That is: it’s problematic that gay people fought for the right to get married because this prioritizes (or “privileges”) monogamous relationships over other expressions of sexuality and intimacy (such as hook-ups or open relationships).

Queer theorists also take aim at traditional gender norms. In their paper “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood,” co-authors Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess (no, really) complain that society and schooling can reify traditional gender norms.

Although individuals’ experiences are profoundly complex, schooling often categorizes people in ways that train each of our ways of being into compliance with an inflexible ‘script’ (Keenan, 2017b). That script, which is enforced through formal institutions as well as through social interaction, operates on multiple levels. The script of gender teaches the public not only what gender is in some essential sense – setting up a binary between womanhood and manhood – but that some gendered ways of being are acceptable and others are not. In the USA, for example, many people learn that the most valued boy will be white, engage in rough-and-tumble play with other boys that will toughen him up and straighten him out, allowing him to mature into a man who wears a suit and tie, makes a lot of money, enters into a sexually monogamous marriage with a woman, buys a home, and has enough but not too many children. In other words, a script that may begin with gender shapes how individuals are taught to understand their expected roles in society in ways that extend far beyond gender alone.

For queer theorists, even the existence of this script is problematic—adhering to it even more so. Boys shouldn’t be encouraged towards rough-and-tumble play, and men shouldn’t be encouraged towards monogamy, high-paying jobs, or buying a house. According to queer theory, men who find a wife and a high-paying job aren’t following their passions or a well-worn societal template that mostly works. Instead, they are merely playing roles that were not written for them, adhering to rules not of their making but imposed by societal pressures.

Queer theory sees these scripts, especially around gender, and delights in breaking them. Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess’ paper is about drag queen story hours, which involve drag queens teaching children. A key aim of these story hours, they argue, is to allow and even encourage children to break conventional rules. Because the teacher in this setting is a drag queen, he “breaks the limiting stereotype of a teacher: she is loud, extravagant, and playful.” As a result, he “encourages children to think for themselves and even to break the rules.” They note that drag, which is a powerful manifestation of queer theory, “ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible!” Of course, this goal makes sense because the authors don’t believe that rules (even the rules of a classroom) matter. They talk about the “arbitrariness of rules” and how drag queen story hours can make this arbitrariness apparent.

Because queer theory focuses so much on sex and gender, norms and social rules of decency are frequently in its crosshairs. In their book Queer Theory, Gender Theory, Riki Wilchins describes a surreal interaction with one of their trans-identifying friends.

I am reminded of the first time my friend Tony pulled down his jeans to show off his new $33,000 penis. As I looked on with fascination, he began razzing me with various invitations, all of which had the words “my dick” and “suck” in them. I quickly found myself immersed in the usual complex reaction I have to the idea of giving head, until it dawned on me that—given the donor site for his graft—I would be sucking off his forearm.

As far as I can tell, there’s no point to this story. It doesn’t advance any of the conscious arguments that Wilchins makes in their book. The only point seems to be that it’s subversive. Wilchins gets to talk about performing oral sex on a simulated penis in a quasi-academic book, which certainly breaks some social norms.

It gets worse. Wilchins, to their credit, wrote their sexually subversive passage in a book primarily read by adults. However, some other queer theorists target a more foundational and essential norm: the idea that we shouldn’t sexualize children. Michel Foucault might be called the grandfather of queer theory. While not himself a queer theorist, he (along with Jacques Derrida) founded the school of postmodernism which has heavily influenced queer theory. Celebrated by queer theorists from Wilchins to Judith Butler, Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, dismissed the criminalization of pedophilia as a solution in search of a problem. Here’s the relevant passage:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded…was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. 

Got that? The man in Foucault’s story paid a small girl to give him sexual favors. Foucault dismisses this act of sexual abuse as one of life’s “inconsequential bucolic pleasures.” He’s struck most by the “pettiness” of putting this man in jail, a man who until then had been “an integral part of village life.” For Foucault, it seems that laws criminalizing sexual abuse of children represent just one more socially constricting norm that we should interrogate, problematize, and ultimately do away with.

Why have queer theorists built an entire field centered around identifying and rejecting societal norms?

First, because they think that all knowledge is socially constructed. This idea goes back to Derrida, another grandfather of queer theory. Derrida rejected the idea that we can ever find or know capital-T truth. Instead, all of our knowledge is arbitrary; and we only think that it’s all true because we’ve been conditioned to think this way. Here’s how Wilchins summarizes Derrida’s argument: “Derrida’s constructedness is like what you get when you use a cookie cutter on a freshly-rolled sheet of dough. There is no truth to the cookies, and no particular shape was any more inherent in the dough than any other.” Our “discourse”—the intellectual paradigm of our society, the ideas in which we swim—is the cookie cutter, and it determines how we see the world.

Given this premise, we could have a discourse that emphasizes and focuses on the separateness of men and women. Or we could have a discourse that emphasizes their sameness. Or a discourse that has six sexes, or none. We could have a discourse that sees penises and vaginas as different. Or, as Wilchins argues, we could have a perfectly valid discourse that sees a vagina as just an inward-facing penis (no, really); as “providing, not primal difference, but strong evidence of [male and female] bodies’ underlying and inherent similarity.”

Of course, this can take us into territory that normal people find pretty offensive. For instance, Wilchins argues that there’s no such thing as a real woman. Drag performers frequently seek to imitate women, but for Wilchins, they aren’t imitating anything real. What they’re imitating is itself an imitation. Biological females, in their view, are simply “doing” their best impression of womanhood in an attempt to fit in, and their performance is no more or less authentic than the performance of men wearing dresses and makeup who are also trying to “do” womanhood (in Wilchins’ sort-of defense, they’re not singling out womanhood as fake; to them, manhood is equally fake). Here’s how Wilchins puts it: “Woman is to drag—not as Real is to Copy—but as Copy is to Copy. Gender turns out to be a copy for which there is no original. All gender is drag. All gender is queer.”

Not only is all knowledge socially constructed in the worldview, but it’s constructed for a particular reason: to keep the dominant people in society in power. Knowledge is a weapon used to build some people up and keep others down. Or as Wilchins quotes Foucault: “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”

This brings us full circle to why queer theorists reject social norms. For the queer theorist, norms are built from knowledge that is arbitrary and socially constructed, and in turn are constructed only in order to help the ruling class to maintain its power. In this worldview, the dominant intellectual paradigm of any given period doesn’t tell us any more or fewer true things than would a different paradigm. Indeed, the current paradigm is particularly bad because it’s a tool for perpetuating racism, sexism, homophobia, and (worst of all, and somehow intermingled with all of them) capitalism.

The second reason that queer theorists reject so many social norms is that there’s a certain presentism to queer theorists’ worldviews. The idea is that what’s come before hasn’t worked, and so we need a radical break from tradition. In a discussion on HIV, Argüello argues that “Queer theory can be a productive, additive analytic to comprehend risk and radicalize this longstanding war [against HIV].” Why? Because existing tools haven’t worked: “Frustratingly, incidence (of HIV) persists to be stable annually in the United States.” Our progress has stalled, and so we need to try new and different tools.

Of course, our society has made (and continues to make) remarkable progress in many areas. This means that sometimes presentism has to rely on claims that aren’t true. In the case of HIV, for instance, the CDC notes that we have made tremendous progress in reducing incidence of this deadly disease. New HIV infections per year fell from over 130,000 in 1985 to just 34,800 in 2019. 34,800 is of course still far too high, but it’s tough to look at a decline of 73.2 percent in just over 3 decades and conclude that our tools aren’t working.

So queer theory sees all knowledge as socially constructed in order to entrench the dominant group’s power, and sets itself in opposition to what it sees as the rigid and oppressive norms that this socially-constructed knowledge creates. Fine. In queer theorists’ defense, sometimes knowledge production does look like what they describe. For example, the 19th-century science of phrenology, where white intellectuals sought to maintain dominance by promoting a false science claiming genetic inferiority in non-whites, supports this view. The pathologization of homosexuality is another example where knowledge production looks both arbitrary and malicious. Pathologizing people for wanting to have sex with other consenting adults isn’t something we should ever have done.

However, many social norms are generally good. Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess bemoan the idea that men should get married and put on a suit and tie and go to work. But, for most men, this lifestyle works. Monogamous relationships endure better than polyamorous ones. Humans’ willingness to go to work is one reason that our society is so wealthy and that we’re able to provide materially better lives for our children than we ourselves were given (economic data show that Generation Z is on track to be the wealthiest generation in human history).

More broadly, capitalism gets a bad rap from queer theorists, but it’s also lifted billions of people out of poverty.

Source: World Bank

Norms against pedophilia are unequivocally good. So are norms against cheating on our spouses, abandoning our kids, and (I would argue) biological males hanging out in female locker rooms.

In their campaign against social norms, queer theorists might accidentally do a lot of harm. For instance, Argüello bemoans the fact that “barebacking [having sex without condoms] is met with social and public health policing.” He argues that barebacking isn’t “reckless,” and that, “Instead of indictment, a queer epistemology would be interested to regard this phenomenon as one of strategic behavior and dialectical.” But normalizing barebacking might do a lot to increase the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections, for the simple reason that using condoms actually does work to reduce transmission.

It seems to me that knowledge can fit into one of two categories. First, it can be born out of, and reify, our existing biases. Phrenology and the pathologization of homosexuality are examples of this kind of “knowledge.” Alternatively, it can represent the received wisdom of our ancestors: what millions of humans have learned through trial and error before us, and passed down to us so that we don’t have to make their same mistakes.

Sometimes, knowledge can fit into both categories. For example, monogamous marriage grew out of a Judeo-Christian norm, which might be called a bias. But data also suggests that this norm works. Research is hard to come by, but one study suggests that open marriage has a 92 percent failure rate. The rate of failure for monogamous marriage is much lower.

Queer theorists assume that all knowledge fits into the first category. This makes them good at seeing the flaws in society and the areas where our collective biases are running away with us. However, it makes them bad at seeing the areas where our accumulated inter-generational knowledge actually makes life better for almost everyone most of the time. 

If queer theorists consider social norms to be oppressive and want to tear them down, what do they want to put in their place? No one knows—not even the queer theorists. In a book that otherwise spends a lot of time praising both deconstruction and postmodernism, Wilkins acknowledges that:

Deconstruction and postmodernism are not so much a set of truth claims as a set of philosophic tools and ideas for dismantling existing truth claims. That it, is [sic] intended to take knowledge systems apart rather than to suggest what might take their place […] It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that ‘tomorrow…is another day,’ without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be. In this sense, postmodernism seems to trade on the assurance that newness itself is filled with enough promise.

In his book Cruising Utopia, queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz put it even more bluntly.

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.

To put it another way: queer theory is nihilistic. It’s better at throwing bombs than creating blueprints. It wants to tear society down, but has no idea what to build in its place. It promises that once we tear down the oppressive norms, our politics can have a different shape; but theorists openly acknowledge that they don’t know what that shape is.

The received wisdom of our ancestors is part baby and part bathwater. Queer theorists are very good at identifying the bathwater, though they’re far from the only ones. But they assume that it’s all bathwater; they’re completely blind to the existence of the baby. Queer theorists deserve a seat at the table, because no society is perfect and they might be able to see bathwater that other people can’t.

Those of us who see the baby need to have the courage to speak up to ensure that, in the pursuit of progress, we don’t inadvertently transform our world into something far worse than it is now.

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