This week’s “Go-To” piece of criticism comes to us from Mel Stanfill – currently the editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and author of books such as Fandom is Ugly (NYU 2024) and Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (U Iowa 2019). Their choice: Cathy Cohen’s 1997 article, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Mel also sent us a picture of their own, well-loved copy! –FC
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Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–65.
I often say Cathy Cohen changed my life. Reading “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” in grad school was the first time I really got how intersectionality worked—how structures of inequality create stratification even within marginalized groups.
That has been essential to my thinking about how fans—although they may be treated as weird by the mainstream, although they may be women, although they may be queer—show that there are “varying degrees and multiple sites of power distributed within all categories” (p. 439), and particularly how fans’ marginalization along some axes often suppresses attention to fandom racism.
–Mel Stanfill, Associate Professor in the Texts & Technology Program, University of Central Florida
Transcription of Excerpt:
Despite the possibility invested in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, I argue that a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism. In many instances, instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of sexual identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything “queer.” An understanding of the ways in which power informs and constitutes privileged and marginalized subjects on both sides of this dichotomy has been left unexamined.
I query in this essay whether there are lessons to be learned from queer activism that can help us construct a new politics. I envision a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades. I’m talking about a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work. Thus, if there is any truly radical potential to be found in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, it would seem to be located in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms, a space where transformational political work can begin.
Emergence of Queer Politics and a New Politics of Transformation
Theorists and activists alike generally agree that it was in the early 1990s that we began to see, with any regularity, the use of the term “queer.”1 This term would come to denote not only an emerging politics, but also a new cohort of academics working in programs primarily in the humanities centered around social and cultural criticism (Morton 121). Individuals such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, and Michael Warner produced what are now thought of as the first canonical works of “queer theory.” Working from a variety of postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical perspectives, these scholars focused on identifying and contesting the discursive and cultural markers found within both dominant and marginal identities and institutions which prescribe and reify “heterogendered” understandings and behavior.2 These theorists presented a different conceptualization of sexuality, one which sought to replace socially named and presumably stable categories of sexual expression with a new fluid movement among and between forms of sexual behavior (Stein and Plummer 182).
Through its conception of a wide continuum of sexual possibilities, queer theory stands in direct contrast to the normalizing tendencies of hegemonic sexuality rooted in ideas of static, stable sexual identities and behaviors.
Posted: Francesca Coppa