Does Queer Studies Have an Anti-Empiricism Problem?
This article responds to Lisa Duggan's "The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies" (1995), which was published in an early issue of GLQ. In arguing queer theory's disinterest in empirical research in the 1990s, Duggan's article seems to anticipate Laura Doan, Valerie Traub, and Heather Love's recent critiques of queer studies' anti-empiricism. However, although ostensibly in line with Duggan's argument, most of this recent work lacks Duggan's attention to how specific institutional practices give shape to the field. In emphasizing discursive debates over material institutional practices, I argue that queer studies scholars often produce stories about queer studies that are strikingly at odds with what the field actually looks like on an institutional level.
queer theory, queer studies, anti-empiricism
"The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies," by Lisa Duggan.
GLQ 2.3 (1995).
In 1995, early in GLQ's publication run, Lisa Duggan contributed a provocative article on the state of the field. At the time, Duggan was a relatively recent PhD, having completed her degree in history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. With a dissertation on the trial of Alice Mitchell, which was later revised into Sapphic Slashers (2000), Duggan struggled to find a job in a history department. Bouncing around for three years, Duggan ended up accepting a postdoc in criticism and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois (1992–93), followed by a visiting position in American studies at Brown (1993–95), before securing her current position in American studies at New York University in 1995.
While she was still navigating the job market, Duggan presented an early version of the essay that would become "The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies" (1995) at the 1994 meeting of the American Historical Association. As a conference paper and article, "The Discipline Problem" centered Duggan's plight as a historian of sexuality in order to lodge broader critiques of, on the one hand, the marginalization of historians of sexuality in history departments and, on the other, the disinterest of queer theory in empirical research. "For us," Duggan wrote, "isolation equals cultural and professional death," suggestively riffing on ACT UP's famous mantra of silence=death (ibid.: 189).
In recent years, Duggan's argument from the 1990s has taken on a new resonance in queer studies, as a number of scholars have advanced similar critiques of the field's pervasive anti-empiricism in the current moment. InDisturbing Practices (2013) [End Page 57] , Laura Doan, for example, revisited Duggan's essay to diagnose a continued rift between academic history and queer studies, which she attributes in part to a queer discomfort with the "enduring importance of the empirical" in academic history (27). Published the same year, Valerie Traub's (2013: 78) widely read PMLA article "The New Unhistoricism of Queer Studies" eviscerated a distinct cohort of queer early modernists for their shared "apathy to empirical inquiry." While Traub's article left open the question of the general applicability of her analysis, her more recent monograph Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) doubled down by expanding her critique beyond her initial target into a more generalized appraisal of queer studies' proclivity toward "universalizing modes of thought" and attendant doubts about empirical research (278). In a final example of this critical trend, Heather Love's contribution to a much-buzzed-about special issue of differences titled "Queer Theory without Anti-normativity," "Doing Being Deviant" (2015), similarly polemicized the field's "frequent dismissals of social science methodologies and epistemologies" (77), stemming from a queer skepticism about empirical claims.
Although this recent work ostensibly extends Duggan's earlier argument, I am struck by the comparative lack of attention to the specific institutional practices—such as hiring trends, publications, or conferences—that featured so prominently in Duggan's article. Instead, most of the above-cited work is principally concerned with probing what Traub (2015: 266) terms the "field habitus" of queer studies, which I understand as referring to the field's critical tendencies. In emphasizing discursive debates over material institutional practices, I argue that queer studies scholars often produce stories about queer studies that are strikingly at odds with what the field actually looks like on an institutional level. In this reflection, I make this case by focusing on the discipline problem as it existed in the 1990s and continues to circulate in critical conversations today. I begin by returning to Duggan's essay to historicize the development of queer studies in the early 1990s, especially Duggan's engagement with Jeffrey Escoffier's earlier article. In the second part of this essay, I speculatively question the continued existence of a discipline problem in order to more broadly argue the necessity of grounding arguments about queer studies in relation to the specific institutional histories that shape the field.
The History of Queer Studies
In "The Discipline Problem," Duggan expended a good deal of ink on Jeffrey Escoffier's controversial essay "Inside the Ivory Closet" (1990). Published in the [End Page 58] gay periodical OUT/LOOK, Escoffier wrote this essay at a moment when gay and lesbian studies was finally developing university-based research centers (such as CLAGS), journals (such as GLQ), book series (such as Series Q), and a short-lived but significant national conference series, after two decades of gay and lesbian studies work outside universities. In contemplating this historical shift, Escoffier identified two distinct generational cohorts of gay and lesbian studies scholars, which he termed the Stonewall and post-Stonewall generation. In Escoffier's account, the former included academic and community-based historians, archivists, sociologists, anthropologists, and writers with strong ties to the political movements of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The post-Stonewall generation, in contrast, consisted of younger scholars trained in the humanities at prestigious universities. Clearly written on behalf of the Stonewall generation, Escoffier bemoaned the predominance of theoretical work while calling for sustained "dialogue with the communities that created the political and social conditions" for the field (116–17).
Five years later, in "The Discipline Problem," Duggan read this essay in terms that are more legible to us today than Escoffier's generational argument. In essence, his essay traced the ascendency of queer theory within the broader field of gay and lesbian studies, which was, by 1995, often referred to as queer studies. In a clarifying footnote to a recent essay, Robyn Wiegman offered a similar distinction between "queer theory" and "queer studies." Queer theory, Wiegman (2015: 67) noted, refers specifically to a "genre of critical analysis that emerged largely in US English departments in the late 1980s"; queer studies refers to a more expansive "interdisciplinary project" that is "increasingly institutionalized in formal terms" through courses, certificate programs, and undergraduate degree programs.
Without question, queer theory profoundly shaped gay and lesbian studies in the early 1990s, as evidenced, for example, in the rebranding of the institutional presence of the field as queer studies. However, as much as I am persuaded by Duggan's account of the discipline problem in the mid-1990s, I am less certain of the persistence of queer studies' disciplinary alignment with theoretical work in the humanities. In fact, I worry that overemphasizing the influence of queer theory in the development of queer studies occludes the strong influence of other intellectual lineages—such as the history of sexuality, feminist sexuality studies, lesbian feminism, sociological studies of sexuality—in the formation of queer studies, a field that arguably bears little resemblance to the field Duggan critiqued in the mid-1990s. [End Page 59]
The Discipline Problem Today
If, as Wiegman suggests, queer studies is an internally complex field that is inclusive of a wide range of disciplinary traditions, some of which are an uncomfortable fit with queer theory, why does the discipline problem remain a touchstone in recent writings by Doan, Traub, and Love, among others? To begin to answer this question, I am struck by an observation that Escoffier made in passing. In the late 1980s, when gay and lesbian studies first achieved some measure of institutional presence in the US academy, the field notably privileged its intellectual development (research centers, journals, book series) over curricular development (programs, departments, courses). Not only did this emphasis distinguish gay and lesbian studies from nearly every other interdiscipline that grew out of a late twentieth-century social movement, this institutional history also continues to have significant ramifications for how we understand queer studies today.
Since the 1990s, queer studies course offerings have expanded, and a smattering of US colleges and universities now offer minors, majors, and certificates in the field, most often under the auspices of women's, gender, and sexuality studies departments. But despite this growth, queer studies continues to lack the infrastructure to exist in the same way that nearly every other field exists. In the absence of most credentialing mechanisms, we become queer studies scholars primarily through self-identifying as such and then convincing others we are queer studies scholars by publishing in queer studies journals (especially GLQ) and presses associated with queer studies (such as Duke or NYU). Furthermore, precisely because of the amorphous institutional existence of queer studies, claims about what the field does (or does not) do are invariably predicated on very selective constructions of the field. On some level, all claims about fields function in this way. However, the nature of queer studies may explain why arguments about this particular field take on unusual polemic force. Not surprisingly, most arguments about queer studies evidence the continued gravitational force of queer theory in the field's critical imagination. Since the 1990s, for example, queer theory and queer studies have routinely been imagined as male dominated and/or oppositional to feminism, despite a preponderance of key scholars who are not male, a thriving body of work on the intersection of feminist and queer thought, and the fact that queer studies is routinely housed in women's, gender, and sexuality studies departments.1 Similarly, as I have already shown, queer studies' proclivity for theory and/or anti-empiricism has been argued with a comparable strength of conviction stretching back to the 1990s, and continuing today. [End Page 60]
More striking still, the above-stated claims about queer studies are now so firmly rooted in critical common sense as to require very little stated proof. The introduction to "Queer Theory without Antinormativity," for example, explains that Love's article challenges queer studies' "long-standing tradition" of privileging "the humanities and their culture-oriented forms of critical practice," a claim more presumed than substantiated in the introduction or Love's longer article (Wiegman and Wilson 2015: 19). I do not intend this as a pointed critique of Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson as the editors of this special issue, or for that matter Love. On the contrary, as Clare Hemmings (2011: 21) points out, decisions about "which aspects of an article are assumed to need referencing, which ways of telling stories need further explanation or argumentations, are never individual decisions alone." In other words, much like Hemmings's broader critique of the reductive stories feminists tell about the development of feminist (and queer) theory, I am suggesting that queer studies' purported hostility to empirical work might be best understood as a story we tell about the field, even as we know that the field is more complicated than the stories we tell about it.
Queer studies, I would thus wager, no longer has the same discipline problem that Duggan tackled in the fifth issue of GLQ. In fact, the new discipline problem might instead be our failure to recognize the field's (inter)disciplinarity, amid concerns that queer studies remains stubbornly tethered to the humanities. To solve this problem, what we might need most—and what this essay has preliminarily worked toward—is a reckoning with the institutional history of queer studies as a way to understand the field in all its underappreciated complexity.
Rachel Corbman is a doctoral candidate in women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation, "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969–1989," is a history of the acrimonious feminist conflicts over women's studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Note
1. As an early example, Suzanna Danuta Walters's "From Here to Queer" (1996) critiques the male bias in queer studies. More recently, Janet Halley's Split Decisions (2006) premised her argument on a sharp division between feminism and queer studies.
