Re-claiming the Right to Queer

By: Rodrigo Abenes

History is been considered as the history of the class struggle. This

statement is indeed true. It was for this reason that Marx had proclaimed this
statement as his opening line in his classic book “The Communist Manifesto”.
Marx had proclaimed this statement due to the realization that the term ‘class’
signifies a group of person with a common economic relationship as to bring
other groups having different economic relationship to these means.
Furthermore, Marx added that if we are going to analyze class historically, the
existence of class differentiation emerged due to the appearance of the prevailing
mode of production. Some men own the means of production, whereas the others
do not. The ones who owned the means of production are in the position of
powers – exploiting class, where as the one who does not have is the exploited
class. In so doing, there are two classes in every existing society: the exploiting
class and the exploited class. The former is that which owns the means of
production and consequently, is in hold of power. The members of this class, do
not labor, but live a life of luxury. They do not own the laborers, yet he has power
to dictate the hours which the laborers shall work. The latter class does not own
the means of production. They are the one who constitute the major portion of
society but are in the position of servitude with respect to the exploiting class.
(Faddin, 1939)
As a student of feminism, it made me inquire on the parallelism of Marx’s
theory of class to the status of women: that there is a parallelism on these two
statements: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggle” and the “history of all hitherto existing societies is the
history is the history of gender struggle.” (emphasis mine) What
prompted me to claim as such is because of the realization that the “the parallel
drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever
formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. But proletarians have
not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in
virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always
been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a
historical event or a social change – it was not something that occurred.” (de
Beaviore, 2011, 5)
In her Second Sex, de Beaviore tried to compare this parallelism.
According to her, in some societies the proletariat had successful revolutions in
other parts of the world but still the status of the subordination of women
remains and the male domination had been still an acceptable reality. The lower
class had already transformed and challenged the status quo of the upper class.
These transformations are basically manifested in the successful social structure
upheavals like that of British Revolution and French Revolution. These two
revolutions had changed and had brought new ideologies and structures. In this
dense, historians had considered that these two revolutions had marked a turning
point in human history wherein almost all aspect of human life had transformed
into new social structures. This upheaval had transformed the whole world into a
promise of freedom, enlightenment, progress, autonomy and social order
specifically for the lower class of the societies specifically the slaves and the serfs.
Taking into consideration, these two important turning points in human
struggle enlightenment, these two revolutions had not changed the status of
women in the male subordinated society. British revolution, for instance,
becomes problematic for it is a revolution that does not promise liberation and
emancipation for all, particularly to women. What makes British revolutions
problematic is because it is an ideology that proclaims equality, representation,
democracy, participation, freedom, rights and autonomy, that is not for all
individuals but rather are only limited to men. This political constraints had its
loopholes particularly to women, for liberal democracy is basically grounded on
economic welfare or better still work, in which women themselves were been
alienated. With this, one would consider that female subordination “is rooted in a
set of customary and legal constraint that blocks women’s entrance to and
success in the so-called public world.” (Dagmang, 2011) Female are considered
less-intellectual and less-physical for they are given less consideration in the
structures such as economy, education, religion, politics, academe, forum and
mark. French revolution, on the other hand, though had promised new
enlightenment for the serfs but not promise liberation and emancipation for
women; for women had been a new form of objectification and objectification of
capital. Women had been part and had been unconsciously commodified in this
new economic social system.
It is along with this scenarios and situations that queering theorists had
tried to challenge. With the situation and status of women in the male dominated
society, that men themselves had created, women had to right to queer. What
made them have the right to queer is because of the realization that:
“We are women from the start. That we don’t need to
be produced by them, named by them made sacred or
profane by them. That this has always already
happened, without their labors. And that their history
constitutes the locus of our exile. It’s not that we have
our own territory, but their nation, family, home and
discourse imprison us in enclosures where we can
longer move – or live as ‘we’. Their property is our
exile. Their enclosures, the death of our love. Their
words, the gag upon our lips. (Irigaray, 209)
 Irigaray claimed as such is because of the assumption that female sexuality
is dependent upon male sexuality. “Womanhood and manhood are
complementary not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but
also from the ontological. It is only through the duality of the “masculine” and the
“feminine” that the “human” finds full realization.” (Pope John Paul, 2011, 4)
With this context, Irigaray questioned and tried to deconstruct this binary
opposition. According to her, sex is not penetrative, for penetrative sex itself is
problematic. She added that this sexual framework is phallocentric and
androcentric. What made this sexual paradigm problematic is because man and
woman are different because of its negative sexual opposition. “Man can think of
himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is
simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she
appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute
sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he
with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the
essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” (de Beaviore,
2011, 9)

In deconstructing the said binary opposition, Irigaray in her essay: “This

Sex Which Is Not One” (1977) posited female pleasure as auto-erotic. She
proclaimed that women are not subjected to masculine sexuality for women
“have sex organs just about everywhere. She experience pleasure almost
everywhere” (Irigaray, 204). With this, it is therefore not women who needed
men but rather its is men who needed women. Men, therefore, should not be
considered as the subject but rather should be considered as the other, for
women are not subjected to men’s sexuality because women’s sexuality is self-
sufficient in themselves. Irigaray had its exaggeration, for it is a way towards
liberation and emancipation from the naturalization of heterosexuality. Auto-
eroticism is a new approach of sexual pleasure, as a new approach it tends to
promote other ways of bodily pleasures not just through heterosexuality but also
homosexuality.

It is along with this that Chris Cuomo in her article “Claiming the Right to
be Queer” and Kathy Miriam’s “Toward a Phenomenology of Sex-Right: Reviving
Radical Feminist Theory of Compulsory Heterosexuality” had its point of
departure. Coumo had focused himself about homosexuality. He argued that a
current perspective concerning homophobia is a false belief for homosexuality is
viewed only as only sexual inclination towards their same sex. This false belief
had been rooted on the naturalization of heterosexuality and the deviation of
homosexuality. As a false belief, this had been a meta-narrative and had been
accepted as facts and been considered as universals. As a meta-narrative,
heterosexuality had been the basis of the culture of discrimination. Thus, going
against with this naturalization is considered as deviation.
 Departing from this deviation, Cuomo went to argue that sex-gender-
desire-identity matrix needs to be revisited, reconsidered and revalued. In this
dense, he believed that “enlightenment view’ would be a way towards chasing out
the false metanarratives about heterosexuality. This could be achieve through
education and awareness and eventually would lead to social progress and
greater justice among homosexuals.

Kathy Miriam, on the other hand, used phenomenological method in order

to deconstruct heterosexuality. Sex-right, according to her, is not heterosexual
but rather heterorelational. What prompted her to claim is such because
heterosexuality is problematic. For it would be a misleading point that sex-right
be understood as men’s right to the body of women. Instead of heterosexuality,
Miriam claimed that sex-right is heterorelational, meaning sex-right involves co-
creation. Sex-right is actually mutual and not an androcentric reality. In this
dense, Miriam made an analogy that heterorelational is like a role-playing game;
men act as the consumers whereas women as a negotiator on how the product
should be consumed or used. Women, therefore, as a negotiator have already the
freedom to participate in the mystery of creation.

Sharon Bong, on the other hand, made a queer revision of Christianity

specifically by reflecting on the Letter to Women of Pope John Paul II. According
to her, the Pope had unwittingly betrayed the prejudices of Christianity. In order
to illustrate, her queer revisions, she made three focal points as her point of
departure: the lesbian mother, the lesbian nun, and the butch/femme.

The lesbian mother, accordingly, is an embodiment of Irigayan embrace of

woman’s autoeroticism. As a lesbian mother, she has the potential to liberate
herself from the world that man himself had created. Being a lesbian mother,
though for some its degrading is a way towards liberation and emancipation from
sex/gender/desire/identity matrix. With this, Bong went further on criticizing
Pope John Paul’s contention that “Mary is a female genius. According to her,
lesbian mothers are not ‘lipstick lesbians’ who just wanted fashion accessory, but
rather she invested herself with “self-determination and agency in her
controversial choice of parenthood.” (Bong, 236)

`The lesbian nun, on the other hand, is considered as that which

constitutes a paradox. In saying that “she is invisible yet multiple”. (Bong, 239) ,
lesbian nuns are apotheosis, it is because she “accentuates that emancipation of
body, sexuality, and self that is absent from the parameters of masculinist
signification for she is defiantly other than others” (Bong, 239) She is a
conficuration of that deconstruct the sex/gender distinction that is
““Womanhood and manhood are complementary not only from the physical and
psychological points of view, but also from the ontological. It is only through the
duality of the “masculine” and the “feminine” that the “human” finds full
realization.” (Pope John Paul, 2011, 4) As a lesbian nun, she is an embodiment of
all forms, a godlike that beyond the sex/gender distinguishing features.

On the other, the butch and the femme according to Bong, concretizes the
“lesbian/feminist aphorism of the turn of the century; that “gender is
performative.” In this regard, using the Butch and the femme, Bong had also tried
to question the authority of the Church concerning the ontological
complementary of the full realization of humanity in heterosexuality. What made
Bong claimed as such is because for her homosexuality is not a deviation. It
would be a deviation from heterosexuality but not in humanity primarily because
heterosexuality does not really confer on sex-gender-identity matrix.