Opengender

Black feminists have frequently objected to the ethnocentricity of the universalising construct of 'sexuality.' Butler, following Foucault, had argued that 'power' is inadvertently productive as well as prohibitive and thus produces a diversity of subjectivities:

Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible. (Butler, 1990: 29)

Butler saw this instability in the production of subjectivity as, nevertheless, most marked in the area of sexuality because it is through 'sexuality' that the naturalisation of 'subjectivity' is effected. It is the centrality of this focus on 'sexuality' in queer feminism which has been argued to reveal the very ethnocentricity which, among other things, it sets out to deconstruct.

Inasmuch as work on sexuality [...] insistently draws attention to sexuality as process, produced by discursive sites of power, it erases the ways in which racist discourses work through the cultural imaginary continuously to produce the all-too-visible stigmata of race that may be taken for granted and overlooked. (Dhairyam, 1994: 31)

Whilst queer-lesbians celebrate the liberatory possibilities of transcending the containing force of categories of identity in an indefinite significatory openness, others feel robbed of an enabling frame of reference. It has often been argued, particularly by black lesbians, that it remains strategically necessary to claim (counter-)identifications if minorities are to avoid being "homogenized and censored." Pérez (1994) noted that it would seem that the problematisation of the concept of 'subjectivity' coincided with the historical moment when so many 'subjects' of previously occluded subaltern or sub-cultures began to speak out. Citing the specificity of collectivising historical narratives is thus perhaps now becoming still more crucial. Pérez, as have many white feminists, argued that subaltern identities thus might cite a 'strategic essentialism:'

Strategic essentialism is a type of caucusing with each new caucus making its own rules, agreeing upon its demands, restrictions, freedoms. The process is not permanent or fixed but instead somewhat dialectical, acknowledging irreducible differences within separate sitios y lenguas where the resolution of differences is neither desirable nor necessary [...] essentialising ourselves within countersites thwarts cultural and political suicide [...] (Pérez, 1994: 105)

Pérez' strategy of 'counter-naturalisation' or 'strategic essentialism' does not refer for substantiation to "the (racialised or sexualised) body" but mobilises, instead, a (more Foucauldian) process of recalling collectivising experiences to enable the production and (re)citation of collectivising historical narratives. Such strategies are, nevertheless, routinely dismissed as misguided or outmoded forms of 'subjectivisation' (Pérez, 1994).

Queer's prioritisation of concepts of denaturalisation has also been reframed as despecifying. Pérez noted that, in a repositioning of Irigaray's (1985) argument in "When Our Lips Speak Together" as 'biologistic,' Jardine (1989) omitted sections of Irigaray's original argument (graphically describing female masturbation) because the language "deliberately discountenances" men and "we, too, have always felt a certain uncomfortableness with it" (Jardine, 1989: 66-67). Pérez questioned the falsely inclusory authority of this implicitly heterosexual-feminine 'we' who speak of 'discomfort' with imagery of female genitalia and autonomous female sexual pleasure. Pérez argued that Irigaray herself had demonstrated an awareness of the contingency of her strategic intervention into the Lacanian discourse of 'sexual indifference' on behalf of "the woman." Critique of the "essentialising" tendencies of her work perhaps masks an equally strategic critical occlusion of Irigaray's opening out of a 'female imaginary' and lesbian eroticism in her writing.

Readings of lesbian theorists as 'merely' essentialist are not only heterosexist, but "reduce the experiences to univocality" (Pérez, 1994: 113). Power differences between diverse groups — for example between white women and women of colour — cannot be "reduced by a dream of a common language." It is only through "a political, historical and regional analysis of race and gender relations" that the totalising tendencies of discourse can be circumvented (Pérez, 1994: 112).

Lesbians have also articulated more general anxieties about what seems to be a "loss of memory and location" in desubjectivising models (Creet, 1995: 183). Whilst many recognise a necessity to supersede the exclusionary aspects of identity politics, there is an accompanying unease about the political, or psychic, effects of its loss on those whose identity and status remains fragile.

[T]he insistence on the distinctness of homosexual identity functions politically as a defense against re-incorporation into heterosexuality or into the categorization of what more accurately might be bisexuality. (Creet, 1995: 186)

More recently, bisexuality has, of course, claimed precisely this confusion as the post-modern edge of its bisexual (refusal of) choice (of object) (Hemmings, 1993). The privileging of a degendered construct of 'sexuality' may be motivated by a disavowal of privileged sites of enunciation. 'Sexuality' might appear as the primary referent more readily to white queers and bisexuals.

[I]n privileging the parodic aspects of sexuality through drag, she [Butler] implies that, unlike sexuality, other identities of race or class have more at stake in foundationalist identity politics and are therefore less able to mobilize subversive drag. (Dhairyam, 1994: 29)

Race and class identities are far more likely, although not exclusively, to be mobilised as resistant subjectivities by reference to a shared history of oppression. Like Pérez, Creet effected a Foucauldian transit route from discourse to history via memory: "recollection, contextualised historically, is what gives repetition memory" (196). This is at odds with Butler's privileging of 'performative' counter-identities which are less amenable to being sustained over time in order to "safeguard the openness of the signifier" (Dhairyam, 1994: 29). Finally, an author's own 'performance' as such, as a product of power relations, may also be disavowed in the process of 'desubjectivisation.'