“A More Thorough Resistance”? Coalition, Critique, and the Intersectional Promise of Queer Theory

• Author: Elena Gambino
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719853642
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719853642

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(2) 218 –244

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719853642

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Article

“A More Thorough

Resistance”? Coalition,

Critique, and the

Intersectional Promise

of Queer Theory

Elena Gambino1

Abstract

Queer theorists have long staked their politics in an engagement with

intersectionality. Yet intersectional scholars have been some of queer

theory’s most vocal critics, decrying its failure to adequately engage

persistent inequalities. I approach this seeming paradox in three parts. First,

I situate intersectionality within the field of critical theory, arguing that it

shares critical theory’s view of power. Both traditions, I argue, understand

power to generate the very marginalized figures that it subordinates. Second,

while intersectional and queer theories share this critical insight, the two

frameworks offer fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes

a democratic politics of redress. Where intersectional theorists promote

coalition-building between differently marginalized subjects, queer theorists

tend to figure sexually marginalized subjects as exemplary democratic agents.

Finally, I argue that this slippage in conceptions of democracy has had negative

consequences for critical theory and highlights the difficult but essential role

of coalition as a political resource.

Keywords

Intersectionality, queer theory, gender and sexuality, critique, coalition

1Department of Politics, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA

Corresponding Author:

Elena Gambino, Department of Politics, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA.

Email: egambino@bates.edu

853642PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719853642Political TheoryGambino

research-article2019

Gambino 219

Introduction

When Gayle Rubin wrote in 1984 that “the time has come to think about

sex,”1 she inaugurated a distinctive relationship between the academic study

of sexuality and a political commitment to democratic redress. Today, Rubin’s

is a view that is increasingly taken for granted among queer theorists: written

in response to antipornography feminists who Rubin argued “[recreated] a

very conservative sexual morality” and had “claimed to speak for all femi-

nism,” the essay makes the now-familiar claim that to commit to the study of

sexuality is to oppose any and all “hierarchical [systems] of sexual value.”2 If

antipornography feminism had begun making undemocratic, normative judg-

ments about “good” and “bad” sex, she reasons, then resisting the ways that

certain practices are policed by conservative discourses might open up space

for nonnormative sexual subjects—especially those constrained by racial,

classed, geographic, or other sexualized norms—to contest the terms of their

marginalization. For Rubin, a more democratic sexual politics—a “theoreti-

cal as well as sexual pluralism”3—was thus to be a thoroughly antinormative

one: it was a politics that promised nothing less than to undo the compulsory,

or normative, categories in which the left defined collective political action.

Since “Thinking Sex” appeared, analyses like Rubin’s—arguments that

critique undemocratic discourses that marginalize nonnormative subjects—

have increasingly become a starting point rather than a conclusion for queer

theorists.4 In this essay, I seek to recontextualize this theoretical move, argu-

ing that queer theorists’ emphasis on antinormativity as the central site of

democratic political struggle is a response to and a reflection of the analytic

and political contributions of intersectional theorists, broadly conceived. The

term, rooted in the political claims of Black, lesbian, and Third World femi-

nists in the United States, denotes the idea that the overlapping forces of rac-

ism, sexism, classism, and other forms of inequality are “greater than the sum

of their parts.”5 Broadly conceived, it identifies “the instantiations of margin-

alization that [operate] within institutionalized discourses and that [legiti-

mize] existing power relations” and reveals “how discourses of resistance

(e.g. feminism and antiracism) could themselves function as sites that [pro-

duce and legitimize] marginalization.”6 Although many theorists have con-

ceived of intersectionality and queer theory as fundamentally “autonomous”

political projects,7 I will argue in the following pages that, in fact, the key

premises of intersectional thinking have both historically motivated and con-

ceptually legitimized the central claims of queer theorizing. At its core, for

example, intersectionality helps to explain what Rubin calls “normative dis-

courses”—namely, the process by which closed categories like “good” and

“bad” sex enable conservative practices that marginalize certain subjects. It