12
I get asked about the history of QT or women's studies pretty frequently, so I wanted to post this for my records (comments seem to disappear when they get too old).
Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory is really the best history of this in Women's Studies and how it slid into queer/gender--although that was not the point of the book. It also reflects a lot of the debates we have here on ovarit. I think every ovarit interested in the history of feminism should read it. She is much too generous to Butler, but some of her points about GT are accurate. [I am posting the archive links for most of these bc it allows you to read the books for free.]
I get that a lot of people think QT came out of critical theory, specifically postmodernism, but this really isn't an accurate story. No one in Continental theory was really part of the LGB struggle that birthed queer theory, except Michel Foucault and Guy Hocquenghem--but they were pretty peripheral.
Postmodernists (Lyotard, Jameson, Derrida, MF to a certain extent, Irigaray, Kristeva, Baudrillard, et al.) had absolutely no interest in identity politics of any kind, which is why feminists criticized them. It was only Butler who was narcissistic enough to want to account for her own butch specialness through philosophy by taking swipes at feminism. Just look at any pomo reader; hardly anything (if at all) on sexuality is ever included in them.
Queer theory came from the academics actively involved in the AIDS struggle and Queer Nation. They were mostly English lit nerds like Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. It is easy to follow this trajectory bc GT never once used the word "queer" in it ever, while Fear of a Queer Planet was published only 3 years later. The editor, Michael Warner (I am not a fan) is an 18th century Lit guy but very active in the gay community and wrote a famous piece with Lauren Berlant who helped found Queer Nation, but did her dissertation on American Literature, called "Sex in Public." This is much more the origin of queer theory and what we critique around here but they were both in English Depts and neither are particularly friendly towards postmodern theory (Lauren much more than Michael). Btw, Lauren declared herself a 'they' before she died. It was a thing (insert eye roll).
If you look at the table of contents at FoaQP, it has the who's who of where it all began. The one I truly dislike the most is Janet Halley--a law professor at Harvard, of course. She wrote a book about why we need to 'take a break from feminism' bc we, feminists, do not 'understand' sexuality. God I dislike her so, so much. Her book literally argues why queer theory should displace and silence feminism. If we want to blame someone--someone who actually influences legal policy--it should be her, not JB (though she can suck it, too, but that is more about her now, than GT which openly said men cannot be women.) And I am not exaggerating about her influence; just read how she informed Harvard's sexual assault policies in the NYT.
I do not lay queer theory at the door of cultural studies either, though there is a good deal of overlap, bc queer theory actually eclipsed the latter and stole its momentum. Queer theory killed cultural studies, much like how the trans movement eclipsed and deep-sixed the BLM movement. Note how for a minute the fight was about CRT in school, then there was an influx of books about gender out of nowhere? No one questioned this. Publishing is a big player in all this, of course. Cultural Studies was making great strides to ask important questions about the construction of identity, its instability and such, as well as about consumerism and power. Just look at any CS reader. Here is one of the best. It has one little section on sex and, ironically, they are both by straight people (essentially). But Duke University Press had this 'Queer Series' that was very popular and published a lot of books (re: Queer Art of Failure by 'Jack' Judith Halberstam) with queer in the title, mostly by lit professors trying to make themselves relevant and hip (Robyn Weigman takes them down for this quite nicely).
So there you have it: a brief academic history of queer theory.
Don't you think they mean teens, not children, in the vein of Call Me By Your Name, which won awards and was lauded everywhere? That is the kind of classic Greek homosexual, teen/adult sexual liaison MF writes about in HoS Vol 3. The fact is no child or even teen reported him acting on these ideas. Honestly I wish all these rapist teenage boys would just have sex with men and leave the girls alone. A 16 year old raped a 12 year old girl when he was 12. She ended up killing herself. He was given no jail time. I wrote Filia to ask the to contest the sentence. If 12 year olds are raping girls their own age, we have to face they are pornsick and laws are not going to stop them from being sexual or sexually violent.
I think these gay philosophers are talking about boys, not girls. Pedophile laws aren't doing anything to address these boys or curb their behavior, esp when judges let them get away with it. To be honest, I just don't think these gay men think about girls at all. I think they had sex in their teens with older men and are speaking from this experience, which they interpret as something they wanted.
I would agree that the men aren't considering girls much, if at all, and could definitely see them as speaking from their own experiences which they interpret as something they wanted. But even if they are speaking of teens, I'm pretty sure the article specifically says younger than 15, as that was the law of consent at the time. To me, a 20 year old having sex with a 14 year old is not ok and clearly taking advantage of naivety and a power differential. 20 and 17 is something that could be argued about. They don't make that clear at all in the conversation though. It sounds a lot more like they are talking about much older men and teens.
And still, in the farmhand story it is talking about a girl, and she sounds young because it's mentioned that the older girls refused him, and the description in his later talk of her taking the pennies he gave her and happily heading off to the fair to buy treats. Again, it doesn't come across as something in the grey area for older teens. Even if that was his mindset, he certainly didn't make that clear.
There is a lot of room for criticism in regards to current laws surrounding rape or pedophilia and how they are implemented and enforced, but it seems to me that saying they don't work properly so let's figure out why and fix them makes more sense than they don't work properly so let's do away with them altogether and have nothing. I personally think we need to take a much harder look at concepts of masculinity and how media represents and perpetuates them. But until we can change the culture of how men and boys view and treat women and girls, we probably can't do away with the laws entirely.
ETA: I have some more thoughts about the idea of it being something they experienced as teens and interpreted it as being wanted. I'll grant, I personally experienced this so I have that bias, but I understand that it's not uncommon for people who experienced child sexual abuse or rape at any age to become hypersexual in response, or to interpret it as wanted. It's a protective response to avoid the trauma, and also I think children are too young to process sexual experiences like that. So even for the boys, I think it's damaging to them even while they are potentially damaging other kids/girls. I don't think it's ok for any of them, and I think exposure to porn can have similar effects. I've read several stories from adults who explained how exposure to porn messed them up as kids. Including former porn performers who said it played a hand in grooming them into thinking doing porn would be ok, only to end up traumatized.