Glenna Goldis’s Queers Rush In represents a long-overdue corrective to the dominant narrative about gay and lesbian history, especially in elite academic and activist circles.
For the last 30 years, that history has been refracted through the distorting lens of queer theory, which treats fixed sexual orientation as passé, erases the specificity of same-sex attraction, and valorizes “fluidity” and anti-normativity as political goods in themselves. The result has been a profound flattening of gay and lesbian experience, a rhetorical sleight of hand that collapses hard-won civil rights gains into a diffuse project of “queering” institutions rather than securing equal citizenship.
Goldis restores analytic clarity to the conversation by insisting that male and female homosexuality are not merely social constructs or aesthetic sensibilities, but historically situated, materially grounded identities with their own trajectories, communities, and cultures. This is not nostalgia—it’s recovery work, and it’s essential.
Many readers may find Goldis’s argument startling not because it is polemical, but because it revives a history they’ve never been taught. For most people under 40, “queer” has always been the default identifier—presented as inclusive, liberatory, and intellectually evolved beyond “gay” or “lesbian.” They were educated in an environment where “fluidity,” “constructedness,” and “anti-normativity” weren’t hypotheses but background assumptions. They have no memory of the intellectual and cultural life that preceded queer theory, and no felt sense of what has been overwritten. Even those who intuit that something vital has been flattened or erased often lack the historical knowledge or conceptual tools to name what’s been lost. Social pressure reinforces this: raising doubts about queer orthodoxy, even in good faith, risks being cast as exclusionary or reactionary. Goldis’s piece is valuable precisely because it helps restore access—not just to memory, but to options.
Glenna details preconditions and conditions under which the movement formed, including its greedy motives. But good on her for calling out their covetousness and lust.
I appreciate your summary: "The distorting lens of queer theory... treats fixed sexual orientation as passé, erases the specificity of same-sex attraction, and valorizes 'fluidity' and anti-normativity as political goods in themselves." You are either cool or not cool, in or out, profane or sacred, secular or religious.
I especially want to call out the greedy resource guarding, the grant gatekeeping, and the way institutions have cannibalized themselves and each other in my lifetime.
This is just a natural devolution from the sexual revolution, whether one of many possibilities or the culmination.
I appreciate the effort to trace the current confusion back to the sexual revolution, but I’ve rarely given that period much thought—mainly because the sexual revolution was heteronormative to the core. The Pill wasn't the powerful sociosexual catalyst for gays the way it was for heterosexuals. For gay men like me, liberation meant something entirely different. It wasn’t about escaping bourgeois repression or redefining desire within the “war of the sexes.” It was about avoiding jail or being fired for having sex with another man.
Surely that depends on your framing of the sexual revolution only being about the avoidance of pregnancy? Decriminalisation of homosexuality was happening at the same time. See for example the Lord Montagu case in England in 1954, which lead to a report on decriminalisation in 1957. This was ahead of the general availability of the contraceptive pill.
The nineties "fag hag" resonates for me. Growing up with Michael Stipe and Morrissey, apparently, set me on my way. Recently I'm charmed by them on YouTube. But back then, we just made up words to REM songs, either listened to their music on repeat or found magazine articles to read, occasionally late night TV... As a reader, I was aware of many artists who suffered when it was illegal to have gay sex. I thought Glenna's writing shed a good deal of light on the opening up of society. And then I read a piece by Aja the Empress. Do you know her on Substack?
Back to the whole compare-and-contrast gay liberation and feminism... oh, yes, how our attitude towards fertility has changed over the years. It's almost like a sacred/profane duality...
One doesn’t need to look only at academic departments to see the effects of the paradigm shift Glenna Goldis is describing. The ideas that originated in queer theory have, over time, migrated outward into media, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and even the basic vocabulary public institutions use to describe same-sex attraction and identity.
This influence is concrete and visible in several places:
Language and naming. Major media outlets, arts organizations, and nonprofits increasingly default to “queer” as the umbrella term for all sexual minorities. In the process, more historically grounded words like “gay” and “lesbian” are often omitted even when they would be more accurate or respectful of how people actually identified.
A striking local example: a number of years ago, Portland’s principal theater company staged a production about the life of James Beard. The program described Beard as “queer.” Whatever the intention, this was a striking and irresponsible anachronism. Beard lived in a period when “queer” had very different connotations, and he never publicly used that language for himself. The choice to retroactively apply contemporary queer-theory terminology felt less like historical representation and more like present-day conceptual frameworks being projected backward onto people who would not have recognized them.
Institutional design and priorities. At Portland State University, where I am currently enrolled, there is no LGBTQ+ center or gay and lesbian center. There is only the Queer Resource Center, whose stated mission is to support “queer and trans students” through “advocacy, community, and celebration,” and which emphasizes a “racial justice framework” as core to its mandate. While many students benefit from this work, others—especially those who identify simply as gay or lesbian and do not use “queer” language—may not immediately see themselves reflected in it. I certainly do not. This is another example of how institutional vocabulary has shifted decisively toward queer-theory terminology.
Cultural narratives. In many arts and entertainment contexts, narratives centred on same-sex identity are expected to adopt the language and themes associated with queer theory—fluidity, anti-normativity, and boundary-crossing. More traditional or historically grounded depictions of gay and lesbian life are sometimes treated as less current or less “inclusive,” even though they reflect real histories and experiences.
Historical memory. Many younger readers have limited exposure to the intellectual and political history of the gay and lesbian movements as they actually developed. Their first introduction is often through frameworks shaped by poststructuralist queer theory rather than through the archives, debates, and community institutions that defined earlier eras. As a result, much specificity has faded from view. For example, how many young people are familiar with the world depicted in Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series?
None of this is an argument against people using the terms they prefer. Rather, it is a reminder that one conceptual framework—shaped largely by post-1990s academic queer theory—has become the default language in many public settings. That shift has had real consequences for how gay and lesbian history is told, how cultural figures from the past are described, and how institutions structure their support for students and communities.
Recognizing this helps restore the historical and cultural richness that preceded queer theory’s ascendancy—and makes space for people whose sexual orientation, experiences, or histories do not map neatly onto its vocabulary.
I asked ChatGPT: Glenna's downplaying of queer theory and political praxis undermines her noble goal of taking down trans insanity. What does it mean?
ChatGPT answered: Here’s what that sentence is trying to say—with clearer, neutral language and without endorsing any harmful framing:
Meaning (plain English):
The author is arguing that Glenna wants to criticize or challenge certain ideas about gender and transgender issues, but because she minimizes the role of queer theory and political activism in shaping those ideas, she actually weakens her own argument. In other words, the writer thinks Glenna is missing important context, so her broader critique becomes less effective.
About the wording:
The phrase “trans insanity” is derogatory and stigmatizing. A more accurate and respectful phrasing would be something like:
“current debates around transgender identities,”
“certain transgender-related policies,”
or “gender-ideology frameworks she disagrees with.”
If you'd like, I can help rewrite the whole sentence in a more professional, academic, or neutral tone.
I didn't run into it much in college but then in law school electives, Foucault was around every corner. My guess is that a lot of older profs weren't into it so it only became inescapable as they retired.
Paisley Currah has a new piece in the NYRB that name-checks you (Kara Dansky) within the first several paragraphs. Currah also refers to WoLF, seemingly without irony or self-awareness, as a "self-described" radical feminist organization--which I suppose in Currah's world means it really is a radical feminist organization? I mean, if it self-identifies as such, who is to question? I am Facebook friends (and actual friends) with some people who are friends w/Currah and thus am able to see all their rah-rah comments in the FB post where Currah posted a link to the NYRB article.
Some, but not all, members of WoLF do refer to themselves as radical feminists. Others refer to themselves as gender critical feminists or sex realist feminists.
Perhaps it would have been better if, in the end, you had. It might have prevented you from getting lost in the land you're in now:
Kara Dansky in her talk with Bridget Phetasy:
"It's very much a top-down, male-driven thing. There's billions of dollars behind it. There are very rich men who are benefiting from it. And there are some really creepy, fetishistic men who have a lot of power and a lot of money who are driving it. I think it's very wealthy, very fetishistic men who are driving this whole thing...
The one guy is named Martine Rothblatt...he's behind a large part of it... Rothblatt thinks he's going to turn us all into cloud people, that we're all going to exist in the cloud, and that we're not going to have any need for human bodies. And that's partly why they're going after women. In the words of Jennifer Bilek, she founded the 11th Hour Blog, they are colonizing our sex. These very wealthy men are colonizing our sex to make it disappear."
I lost my undergrad years to this. I was interested in women, but in 1998 or so at the University of MN Twin Cities, Women's Studies was in the late stages of being morphed into Gender Studies.
I wish I knew! The people who come here from more rural areas, or the people who've lived here for a few generations, tend to be taciturn, predictable, conflict-averse people who want to do the right thing, especially if it involves looking the other way. They are sadly susceptible to empathy hijacking and also really believe in just "minding their own business." Historically we are heavily labor/left leaning politically and haven't got the memo that the Democrats no longer represent working class interests. We have a strange ethos of being utterly normal and yet putting up with a lot of weirdness and wearing it like a badge of honor. In my opinion, it would have been very easy in the 1960s and even still today it is easy for those with niche predilections to take over existing structures here because of the unassuming, mild-mannered, virtue-signaling nature of a lot of the established people here. I feel like lesbians here were targeted in the 90s. (I am straight, so this is just observations based on my social life.) I saw and felt the lesbian culture as I knew of it change from a very fun and creative group to a closed, suspicious, hurting and obsessively introspective group or groups. Oh, and another thing is our alternative health thing we have going on here. We had a big New Age (Aveda), natural foods co-op, and naturopathy, holistic medicine, massage and bodywork community, which logically would not be into unnecessary medical interventions, but again I think they fell for the empathy trap. It's like we can't resist a dare to embrace something weird. What is it with this denial of our own disgust instinct? I could go on and on with a litany of weird movements and groups we've absorbed or nurtured here over the years. But it's not even really that--it's that PLUS the very thick layer of dependable, salt-of-the-earth types who keep everything going, or have done up until recently.
Language Jones says the pronoun wars are really a proxy for relgion v. secularism, and I'd say that's a good place to start. He's done some videos about pronouns, but this one looks super interesting and I haven't seen it yet.
Hello, comrade! My father pulled the plug on my funding as soon as my credits were done, J-term senior year. I was just getting into this stuff... lit crit and theory, and fun little Independent Studies on Sappho and Catullus, plus Virginia Woolf.
Oy! This (almost) makes me glad to be as old as I am. I am certainly ecstatic to have been long gone from academia before all this nonsense hit. Loved this: “Queer feminists did not pass Title IX. They did not research how to expand economic opportunity.” And I say amen. Thank you for unqueering the historical record bit by agonizing bit. For this alone, you should be awarded several gold medals 🥇 🥇 🥇
I cannot thank you enough for calling attention in your usual brilliant way to the nonsense propogated by Fish and Sedgwick in particular. In the late 80's, they were, in turn, invited to give prestigious and very lucrative lectures at Tulane University (in New Orleans, a city they were happy to be paid to visit) when I was in the English PhD program there. The junior faculty made the grad students feel as if we had to worship them or risk seeming anti-intellectual and uncool. Sedgwick's lecture was indeed a display of finding "gay inuendo in old books," as you put it so well. On that evening, she did just that to Henry James's novels, ha ha! The senior faculty seemed unimpressed, and my mentor, one of the senior profs, advised me to trust my intuition that they were not actually geniuses.
(I am sorry that you had to read all this awful murky writing, however...)
Great ending:
"Forget how sexual harassment laws affect women. What violence do they inflict on the discourse?
Queer feminists did not pass Title IX. They did not research how to expand economic opportunity. They never promised you they wouldn’t sexually harass gay guys. In fact, they gave you every indication that they would sexually harass gay guys. Their MO is to cross boundaries and subvert reality using language, i.e., to deceive, in a manner that is risque and ropes in handsome men whenever possible.""
Both Patsy Mink and Bernice Sandler were associated with liberal feminism. Recently, I've noted that it is popular on several feminist substacks to dismiss liberal feminism as "feminism in name only" (FINO). I'm not sure where this comes from, but it shows ignorance.
Before Title IX, passed in 1972, most women couldn't even apply to medical, law school or engineering. Women were not eligible for most academic scholarships. Women's sports were either non-existent at most universities or were drastically underfunded.
When critical strategies overtake the arts, watch out – theory gravitationally collapses in on itself and not even light will escape. (I read some QT, including these guys, in the 90s because it was required. Fortunately my lit department was more classically rooted, so we weren't required to confuse theory with art.)
All academia has failure modes and problems, but science at least has to maintain some relationship with truth even if it can get caught in decades long pursuits such as strong theory with barely any testable hypotheses resulting.
I am curious how many people in such fields as queer theory know they are frauds but perpetuate the grift anyway. My surmise is once you set up a game like this which doesn't even have to make sense, you will select for narcissists.
It would be easy to turn things around, just encourage dissent and critical thinking in youth and they will happily tear down the vanities of the past, but everyone in academia is still so captured and implicated I guess to allow it to happen, as some of these fields need to die to be reborn.
Dayum, gurl, this is a tour de force. I wrote my (not good) undergraduate thesis on Foucault (in my defense it was the mid-late 80s). In the early 90s I started grad school (political science) with every intention of being a political theorist. This essay stirs up so many memories from that era. Judith Butler's wife later joined our department, though that was several years after I had finished my coursework and passed my exams; by that point I was writing a dissertation on Chinese politics, not political theory. I feel fortunate to have escaped relatively unscathed; in my grad program and field, clear writing was/is appreciated.
As usual, lots of hilarious and astute observations. "Like a lot of queers, Ronell wears a gay skinsuit: short hair, designer glasses, and button down shirts. But you can tell she’s straight because in photos she’s baring her chest and covering her arms. Lesbian sex pests show off their biceps." lol.
"States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995)"
"In this work Brown asks how a sense of woundedness can become the basis for individual and collective forms of identity. From outlawing hate speech to banning pornography, Brown argues, well-intentioned attempts at protection can legitimize the state while harming subjects by codifying their identities as helpless or in need of continuous governmental regulation. While breaking ground in political theory, this work also represents one of Brown's key interventions in feminist and queer theory. The book offers a novel account of legal and political power as constitutive of norms of sexuality and gender. Through the concept of "wounded attachments", Brown contends that psychic injury may accompany and sustain racial, ethnic, and gender categories, particularly in relation to state law and discursive formations. In this and other works Brown has criticized representatives of second wave feminism, such as Catharine MacKinnon, for re-inscribing the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury."
So, in other words, Brown thinks that victims of sexual violence should not ask for legal protection or laws to protect women from violence because she thinks this may perpetuate racial, ethnic and gender categories. I see.
Where has this analysis been? 35 books and countless blog posts into this topic - and I've finally found what I've been looking for. A deeper understanding of the origin story of this barking madness being passed off by literally all Western power structures as simply the - "new normal." Thank you Glenna.
I don't think they broadly referred to themselves as radical feminists. The women who were involved with Women in Focus came from many different backgrounds and political orientations. Some were lesbians. Some were straight.
They also organized an art exhibit of erotic lesbian art, so as an organization, their views about pornography were complex. However, they don't appear to have been co-opted by queer activism.
More on Women in Focus:
"Women in Focus had “a mandate to emphasize women’s and artists’ issues among public policy makers on regional, national, and international levels.” As such, Women in Focus participated in and/or was a member in organizations such as: The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-Run Centres, the Independent Film and Video Alliance, the Canadian Museums Association, Amnesty International, the B.C. Museums Association, the British Columbia Federation of Women, Vancouver Artist’ League, Vancouver Cultural Alliance, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the B.C. Film Industry Association and the Coalition for the Right to View. The society also organized several film festivals in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, and attended festivals elsewhere, becoming part of an international network of feminist groups. Women in Focus was further involved in multiple projects and groups dealing with violence against women, pornography, child abuse, women’s labour laws, lesbian rights, racism, education, women in politics, and women in prison. They distributed a variety of educational materials on these subjects and maintained a significant print library of books, newsletters, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers."
"During the period covered by these records the society moved from the Women’s Office to #6-45 Kingsway, Vancouver, then to #204-456 West Broadway, Vancouver, and then to their final location at 849 Beatty Street, Vancouver. The office on Kingsway was next door to the office of Vancouver Rape Relief, and there was close community between the two groups, as well as with other local women’s groups. By 1990, Women in Focus’ film library had almost 200 titles and they were distributing tapes all over the world."
In 1992, Women in Focus ran into various leadership and financial difficulties and ceased to exist. Notably, during the conservative and corrupt Mulroney government period, federal Canada Council funding was withdrawn.
Wikipedia page for Women in Focus and some of their members:
Queer activism since the mid 1990s has largely tried to over write this feminist history in Vancouver. A vestige of Women in Focus feminism was and is Vancouver Women's Rape Relief. This organization has been repeatedly sued by queer activists for it's women only policy.
I do not know what Elaine Craig's current position is on transgender ideology. She did write about it about 10 years ago, before transgender ideology took over so many institutions. Unfortunately, at that time, she argued against the gender binary and said that getting rid of it was a way to reduce gender based discrimination.
Here I disagree with her. I have a rather unique experience with gender discrimination. I'm straight, with mid length hair, tall and wear minimal makeup. As a woman engineer, I've noticed that it didn't matter whether I wore a skirt, whether I wore makeup or not, whether I wore a feminine style suit, a masculine style suit or wore jeans and T-shirt. I still frequently experienced sex based discrimination. Based on my voice and facial structure, people immediately identified me as female. So it was easy for me to figure out early in my career that I experienced discrimination not on how I presented myself, but simply on being female. It was inescapable.
I mention I am strait to illustrate that the discrimination I experienced wasn't because of my gender orientation.
Once I became a mother, if people knew that I was a mother, I got an extra dose of discrimination as an engineer.
In any case, I was always quite comfortable with being female, and often thought it foolish to think one could avoid discrimination as a women in engineering by trying to hide this through wearing less feminine clothing or adopting a masculine hairstyle.
Craig tries to argue that if we got rid of the gender binary, there would be less discrimination. The problem is that the gender binary is based on material reality and can't be gotten rid of through making people pretend it doesn't exist.
In any case, I do think that a lot of trans behavior is driven by pornography, so I'm thankful to Craig for her recent book on pornography.
I'm reading this series with great interest, because even though these internecine battles from decades ago may seem passé, they're the academic root whose tender shoots seem to inform so much of the out-there discourse we see in the LGBTQ world, and in the amorphous world of chronically online activism and social media.
It's just incredible how batshit crazy this clearly brilliant people could be. I've had to go back and reread several paragraphs just to be getting it. I even looked on Wikipedia to try to get a basic idea of what Sedgwick was talking about. The article has to be seen to be believed. What. The. Fuck. I'm more than open to transgression, to revelation of nuances and subtexts, but there is also such a thing called Insanity. If anything, her conservative critics undersold just how utterly bananas the whole thing is.
Glenna Goldis’s Queers Rush In represents a long-overdue corrective to the dominant narrative about gay and lesbian history, especially in elite academic and activist circles.
For the last 30 years, that history has been refracted through the distorting lens of queer theory, which treats fixed sexual orientation as passé, erases the specificity of same-sex attraction, and valorizes “fluidity” and anti-normativity as political goods in themselves. The result has been a profound flattening of gay and lesbian experience, a rhetorical sleight of hand that collapses hard-won civil rights gains into a diffuse project of “queering” institutions rather than securing equal citizenship.
Goldis restores analytic clarity to the conversation by insisting that male and female homosexuality are not merely social constructs or aesthetic sensibilities, but historically situated, materially grounded identities with their own trajectories, communities, and cultures. This is not nostalgia—it’s recovery work, and it’s essential.
Many readers may find Goldis’s argument startling not because it is polemical, but because it revives a history they’ve never been taught. For most people under 40, “queer” has always been the default identifier—presented as inclusive, liberatory, and intellectually evolved beyond “gay” or “lesbian.” They were educated in an environment where “fluidity,” “constructedness,” and “anti-normativity” weren’t hypotheses but background assumptions. They have no memory of the intellectual and cultural life that preceded queer theory, and no felt sense of what has been overwritten. Even those who intuit that something vital has been flattened or erased often lack the historical knowledge or conceptual tools to name what’s been lost. Social pressure reinforces this: raising doubts about queer orthodoxy, even in good faith, risks being cast as exclusionary or reactionary. Goldis’s piece is valuable precisely because it helps restore access—not just to memory, but to options.
Glenna details preconditions and conditions under which the movement formed, including its greedy motives. But good on her for calling out their covetousness and lust.
I appreciate your summary: "The distorting lens of queer theory... treats fixed sexual orientation as passé, erases the specificity of same-sex attraction, and valorizes 'fluidity' and anti-normativity as political goods in themselves." You are either cool or not cool, in or out, profane or sacred, secular or religious.
I especially want to call out the greedy resource guarding, the grant gatekeeping, and the way institutions have cannibalized themselves and each other in my lifetime.
This is just a natural devolution from the sexual revolution, whether one of many possibilities or the culmination.
I appreciate the effort to trace the current confusion back to the sexual revolution, but I’ve rarely given that period much thought—mainly because the sexual revolution was heteronormative to the core. The Pill wasn't the powerful sociosexual catalyst for gays the way it was for heterosexuals. For gay men like me, liberation meant something entirely different. It wasn’t about escaping bourgeois repression or redefining desire within the “war of the sexes.” It was about avoiding jail or being fired for having sex with another man.
Surely that depends on your framing of the sexual revolution only being about the avoidance of pregnancy? Decriminalisation of homosexuality was happening at the same time. See for example the Lord Montagu case in England in 1954, which lead to a report on decriminalisation in 1957. This was ahead of the general availability of the contraceptive pill.
Actually. That's really interesting!!!
The nineties "fag hag" resonates for me. Growing up with Michael Stipe and Morrissey, apparently, set me on my way. Recently I'm charmed by them on YouTube. But back then, we just made up words to REM songs, either listened to their music on repeat or found magazine articles to read, occasionally late night TV... As a reader, I was aware of many artists who suffered when it was illegal to have gay sex. I thought Glenna's writing shed a good deal of light on the opening up of society. And then I read a piece by Aja the Empress. Do you know her on Substack?
Back to the whole compare-and-contrast gay liberation and feminism... oh, yes, how our attitude towards fertility has changed over the years. It's almost like a sacred/profane duality...
One doesn’t need to look only at academic departments to see the effects of the paradigm shift Glenna Goldis is describing. The ideas that originated in queer theory have, over time, migrated outward into media, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and even the basic vocabulary public institutions use to describe same-sex attraction and identity.
This influence is concrete and visible in several places:
Language and naming. Major media outlets, arts organizations, and nonprofits increasingly default to “queer” as the umbrella term for all sexual minorities. In the process, more historically grounded words like “gay” and “lesbian” are often omitted even when they would be more accurate or respectful of how people actually identified.
A striking local example: a number of years ago, Portland’s principal theater company staged a production about the life of James Beard. The program described Beard as “queer.” Whatever the intention, this was a striking and irresponsible anachronism. Beard lived in a period when “queer” had very different connotations, and he never publicly used that language for himself. The choice to retroactively apply contemporary queer-theory terminology felt less like historical representation and more like present-day conceptual frameworks being projected backward onto people who would not have recognized them.
Institutional design and priorities. At Portland State University, where I am currently enrolled, there is no LGBTQ+ center or gay and lesbian center. There is only the Queer Resource Center, whose stated mission is to support “queer and trans students” through “advocacy, community, and celebration,” and which emphasizes a “racial justice framework” as core to its mandate. While many students benefit from this work, others—especially those who identify simply as gay or lesbian and do not use “queer” language—may not immediately see themselves reflected in it. I certainly do not. This is another example of how institutional vocabulary has shifted decisively toward queer-theory terminology.
Cultural narratives. In many arts and entertainment contexts, narratives centred on same-sex identity are expected to adopt the language and themes associated with queer theory—fluidity, anti-normativity, and boundary-crossing. More traditional or historically grounded depictions of gay and lesbian life are sometimes treated as less current or less “inclusive,” even though they reflect real histories and experiences.
Historical memory. Many younger readers have limited exposure to the intellectual and political history of the gay and lesbian movements as they actually developed. Their first introduction is often through frameworks shaped by poststructuralist queer theory rather than through the archives, debates, and community institutions that defined earlier eras. As a result, much specificity has faded from view. For example, how many young people are familiar with the world depicted in Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series?
None of this is an argument against people using the terms they prefer. Rather, it is a reminder that one conceptual framework—shaped largely by post-1990s academic queer theory—has become the default language in many public settings. That shift has had real consequences for how gay and lesbian history is told, how cultural figures from the past are described, and how institutions structure their support for students and communities.
Recognizing this helps restore the historical and cultural richness that preceded queer theory’s ascendancy—and makes space for people whose sexual orientation, experiences, or histories do not map neatly onto its vocabulary.
I sympathize with your anger for the way these bitches coopted and cannibalized gay and lesbian identities.
I appreciate that GG draws out samples from their noxious texts to illustrate the deconstructive wordplay and weaponization of language.
I wholeheartedly want to boost your comment about how this has gone mainstream, because it's also parasitized childhood.
Wow that's interesting.
I asked ChatGPT: Glenna's downplaying of queer theory and political praxis undermines her noble goal of taking down trans insanity. What does it mean?
ChatGPT answered: Here’s what that sentence is trying to say—with clearer, neutral language and without endorsing any harmful framing:
Meaning (plain English):
The author is arguing that Glenna wants to criticize or challenge certain ideas about gender and transgender issues, but because she minimizes the role of queer theory and political activism in shaping those ideas, she actually weakens her own argument. In other words, the writer thinks Glenna is missing important context, so her broader critique becomes less effective.
About the wording:
The phrase “trans insanity” is derogatory and stigmatizing. A more accurate and respectful phrasing would be something like:
“current debates around transgender identities,”
“certain transgender-related policies,”
or “gender-ideology frameworks she disagrees with.”
If you'd like, I can help rewrite the whole sentence in a more professional, academic, or neutral tone.
I often wonder how I managed to get through college (1990-1994) without getting lost in the land of postmodernism.
I didn't run into it much in college but then in law school electives, Foucault was around every corner. My guess is that a lot of older profs weren't into it so it only became inescapable as they retired.
Queer theory was the hot new thing in my grad program in the early 1990s.
Paisley Currah has a new piece in the NYRB that name-checks you (Kara Dansky) within the first several paragraphs. Currah also refers to WoLF, seemingly without irony or self-awareness, as a "self-described" radical feminist organization--which I suppose in Currah's world means it really is a radical feminist organization? I mean, if it self-identifies as such, who is to question? I am Facebook friends (and actual friends) with some people who are friends w/Currah and thus am able to see all their rah-rah comments in the FB post where Currah posted a link to the NYRB article.
Some, but not all, members of WoLF do refer to themselves as radical feminists. Others refer to themselves as gender critical feminists or sex realist feminists.
Perhaps it would have been better if, in the end, you had. It might have prevented you from getting lost in the land you're in now:
Kara Dansky in her talk with Bridget Phetasy:
"It's very much a top-down, male-driven thing. There's billions of dollars behind it. There are very rich men who are benefiting from it. And there are some really creepy, fetishistic men who have a lot of power and a lot of money who are driving it. I think it's very wealthy, very fetishistic men who are driving this whole thing...
The one guy is named Martine Rothblatt...he's behind a large part of it... Rothblatt thinks he's going to turn us all into cloud people, that we're all going to exist in the cloud, and that we're not going to have any need for human bodies. And that's partly why they're going after women. In the words of Jennifer Bilek, she founded the 11th Hour Blog, they are colonizing our sex. These very wealthy men are colonizing our sex to make it disappear."
Cue to 42:00.
https://youtu.be/R9CNyZCrv_Q?si=se7u4xKMfX9QCZQw
It really brings back memories!
I lost my undergrad years to this. I was interested in women, but in 1998 or so at the University of MN Twin Cities, Women's Studies was in the late stages of being morphed into Gender Studies.
I'm so interested in Minneapolis! It's been at the vanguard of trans consistently since the 1960s. What's the deal?
I wish I knew! The people who come here from more rural areas, or the people who've lived here for a few generations, tend to be taciturn, predictable, conflict-averse people who want to do the right thing, especially if it involves looking the other way. They are sadly susceptible to empathy hijacking and also really believe in just "minding their own business." Historically we are heavily labor/left leaning politically and haven't got the memo that the Democrats no longer represent working class interests. We have a strange ethos of being utterly normal and yet putting up with a lot of weirdness and wearing it like a badge of honor. In my opinion, it would have been very easy in the 1960s and even still today it is easy for those with niche predilections to take over existing structures here because of the unassuming, mild-mannered, virtue-signaling nature of a lot of the established people here. I feel like lesbians here were targeted in the 90s. (I am straight, so this is just observations based on my social life.) I saw and felt the lesbian culture as I knew of it change from a very fun and creative group to a closed, suspicious, hurting and obsessively introspective group or groups. Oh, and another thing is our alternative health thing we have going on here. We had a big New Age (Aveda), natural foods co-op, and naturopathy, holistic medicine, massage and bodywork community, which logically would not be into unnecessary medical interventions, but again I think they fell for the empathy trap. It's like we can't resist a dare to embrace something weird. What is it with this denial of our own disgust instinct? I could go on and on with a litany of weird movements and groups we've absorbed or nurtured here over the years. But it's not even really that--it's that PLUS the very thick layer of dependable, salt-of-the-earth types who keep everything going, or have done up until recently.
Fascinating, thanks! Let me know if you hear of any local history books/articles that might hold clues.
Language Jones says the pronoun wars are really a proxy for relgion v. secularism, and I'd say that's a good place to start. He's done some videos about pronouns, but this one looks super interesting and I haven't seen it yet.
https://youtu.be/XDsAdg92fyQ?si=Ie5M7LqzX-qiisqb
I'll keep my ear out. :)
Sum up my long comment above by saying, we (Minneapolitans) are charmingly gullible. Case in point: my wasted tuition for a bachelor's in comp lit.
Just being TOO "Minnesota Nice" maybe?
You betcha.
Hello, comrade! My father pulled the plug on my funding as soon as my credits were done, J-term senior year. I was just getting into this stuff... lit crit and theory, and fun little Independent Studies on Sappho and Catullus, plus Virginia Woolf.
Oy! This (almost) makes me glad to be as old as I am. I am certainly ecstatic to have been long gone from academia before all this nonsense hit. Loved this: “Queer feminists did not pass Title IX. They did not research how to expand economic opportunity.” And I say amen. Thank you for unqueering the historical record bit by agonizing bit. For this alone, you should be awarded several gold medals 🥇 🥇 🥇
So true!
I cannot thank you enough for calling attention in your usual brilliant way to the nonsense propogated by Fish and Sedgwick in particular. In the late 80's, they were, in turn, invited to give prestigious and very lucrative lectures at Tulane University (in New Orleans, a city they were happy to be paid to visit) when I was in the English PhD program there. The junior faculty made the grad students feel as if we had to worship them or risk seeming anti-intellectual and uncool. Sedgwick's lecture was indeed a display of finding "gay inuendo in old books," as you put it so well. On that evening, she did just that to Henry James's novels, ha ha! The senior faculty seemed unimpressed, and my mentor, one of the senior profs, advised me to trust my intuition that they were not actually geniuses.
Craziness. Can't wait until the day people come to their senses, especially experts in the disciplines/movements they claimed to be part of.
Wow, thank you!
(I am sorry that you had to read all this awful murky writing, however...)
Great ending:
"Forget how sexual harassment laws affect women. What violence do they inflict on the discourse?
Queer feminists did not pass Title IX. They did not research how to expand economic opportunity. They never promised you they wouldn’t sexually harass gay guys. In fact, they gave you every indication that they would sexually harass gay guys. Their MO is to cross boundaries and subvert reality using language, i.e., to deceive, in a manner that is risque and ropes in handsome men whenever possible.""
"Queer feminists did not pass Title IX. They did not research how to expand economic opportunity."
Who passed Title IX?
Representative Edith Green
Representative Patsy Mink
Bernice Sandler
Senator Birch Bayh
https://feminist.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/TriumphsOfTitleIX-1-1.pdf
Both Patsy Mink and Bernice Sandler were associated with liberal feminism. Recently, I've noted that it is popular on several feminist substacks to dismiss liberal feminism as "feminism in name only" (FINO). I'm not sure where this comes from, but it shows ignorance.
Before Title IX, passed in 1972, most women couldn't even apply to medical, law school or engineering. Women were not eligible for most academic scholarships. Women's sports were either non-existent at most universities or were drastically underfunded.
When critical strategies overtake the arts, watch out – theory gravitationally collapses in on itself and not even light will escape. (I read some QT, including these guys, in the 90s because it was required. Fortunately my lit department was more classically rooted, so we weren't required to confuse theory with art.)
All academia has failure modes and problems, but science at least has to maintain some relationship with truth even if it can get caught in decades long pursuits such as strong theory with barely any testable hypotheses resulting.
I am curious how many people in such fields as queer theory know they are frauds but perpetuate the grift anyway. My surmise is once you set up a game like this which doesn't even have to make sense, you will select for narcissists.
It would be easy to turn things around, just encourage dissent and critical thinking in youth and they will happily tear down the vanities of the past, but everyone in academia is still so captured and implicated I guess to allow it to happen, as some of these fields need to die to be reborn.
Should be string theory above. Also, thanks for another fascinating essay!
"Sure, blame capitalists for mucking up your perfectly clear command to problematize fine distinctions in discursive protocols." :-D
I'm so happy I get to read this!!!!!!! So restorative. Today is a great day. <3
Glenna - I learn something new from you every day! Thank you for all of that! KathleenD
Dayum, gurl, this is a tour de force. I wrote my (not good) undergraduate thesis on Foucault (in my defense it was the mid-late 80s). In the early 90s I started grad school (political science) with every intention of being a political theorist. This essay stirs up so many memories from that era. Judith Butler's wife later joined our department, though that was several years after I had finished my coursework and passed my exams; by that point I was writing a dissertation on Chinese politics, not political theory. I feel fortunate to have escaped relatively unscathed; in my grad program and field, clear writing was/is appreciated.
As usual, lots of hilarious and astute observations. "Like a lot of queers, Ronell wears a gay skinsuit: short hair, designer glasses, and button down shirts. But you can tell she’s straight because in photos she’s baring her chest and covering her arms. Lesbian sex pests show off their biceps." lol.
I am, like, in my element. Sheesh! Such a good little thread going here!
Wendy Brown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Brown
From Wikipedia:
"States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995)"
"In this work Brown asks how a sense of woundedness can become the basis for individual and collective forms of identity. From outlawing hate speech to banning pornography, Brown argues, well-intentioned attempts at protection can legitimize the state while harming subjects by codifying their identities as helpless or in need of continuous governmental regulation. While breaking ground in political theory, this work also represents one of Brown's key interventions in feminist and queer theory. The book offers a novel account of legal and political power as constitutive of norms of sexuality and gender. Through the concept of "wounded attachments", Brown contends that psychic injury may accompany and sustain racial, ethnic, and gender categories, particularly in relation to state law and discursive formations. In this and other works Brown has criticized representatives of second wave feminism, such as Catharine MacKinnon, for re-inscribing the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury."
So, in other words, Brown thinks that victims of sexual violence should not ask for legal protection or laws to protect women from violence because she thinks this may perpetuate racial, ethnic and gender categories. I see.
Where has this analysis been? 35 books and countless blog posts into this topic - and I've finally found what I've been looking for. A deeper understanding of the origin story of this barking madness being passed off by literally all Western power structures as simply the - "new normal." Thank you Glenna.
Glenna this is so interesting and helpful. Thanks!
"Anti-porn “radical feminists” were the only people knowledgeable and rude enough to say “those crazy bitches aren’t feminists.”"
In Canada, Women in Focus:
https://www.memorybc.ca/vancouver-women-in-focus-society
opposed pornography as early as 1975. Gene Errington was speaking out about the impact of pornography in 1975:
https://vucavu.com/en/video-out-distribution/1975/gene-errington-lecture
They produced a widely viewed film, A Respectable Lie, in 1980:
https://vucavu.com/en/videoout/1980/pornography-a-respectable-lie
I don't think they broadly referred to themselves as radical feminists. The women who were involved with Women in Focus came from many different backgrounds and political orientations. Some were lesbians. Some were straight.
They also organized an art exhibit of erotic lesbian art, so as an organization, their views about pornography were complex. However, they don't appear to have been co-opted by queer activism.
More on Women in Focus:
"Women in Focus had “a mandate to emphasize women’s and artists’ issues among public policy makers on regional, national, and international levels.” As such, Women in Focus participated in and/or was a member in organizations such as: The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-Run Centres, the Independent Film and Video Alliance, the Canadian Museums Association, Amnesty International, the B.C. Museums Association, the British Columbia Federation of Women, Vancouver Artist’ League, Vancouver Cultural Alliance, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the B.C. Film Industry Association and the Coalition for the Right to View. The society also organized several film festivals in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, and attended festivals elsewhere, becoming part of an international network of feminist groups. Women in Focus was further involved in multiple projects and groups dealing with violence against women, pornography, child abuse, women’s labour laws, lesbian rights, racism, education, women in politics, and women in prison. They distributed a variety of educational materials on these subjects and maintained a significant print library of books, newsletters, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers."
"During the period covered by these records the society moved from the Women’s Office to #6-45 Kingsway, Vancouver, then to #204-456 West Broadway, Vancouver, and then to their final location at 849 Beatty Street, Vancouver. The office on Kingsway was next door to the office of Vancouver Rape Relief, and there was close community between the two groups, as well as with other local women’s groups. By 1990, Women in Focus’ film library had almost 200 titles and they were distributing tapes all over the world."
In 1992, Women in Focus ran into various leadership and financial difficulties and ceased to exist. Notably, during the conservative and corrupt Mulroney government period, federal Canada Council funding was withdrawn.
Wikipedia page for Women in Focus and some of their members:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Focus
Advocacy on the part of Women in Focus likely influenced the 1992 Obscenity Decision:
OBSCENITY: THE DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA IN R. v. BUTLER
https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/bp289-e.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Butler
Queer activism since the mid 1990s has largely tried to over write this feminist history in Vancouver. A vestige of Women in Focus feminism was and is Vancouver Women's Rape Relief. This organization has been repeatedly sued by queer activists for it's women only policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Rape_Relief_%26_Women%27s_Shelter
was Dalhousie's women's studies any good?
Yes, it has a good women’s studies program.
In the 1990s, it was known for its focus on women’s history (with a Canadian focus).
More recently, it has developed a sizeable focus on North American indigenous women’s studies.
Elaine Craig is a professor in the Dalhousie School of Law. She recently published two important books:
Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession (published in 2018)
Mainstreaming Porn: Sexual Integrity and the Law Online (published in 2024)
Oh, gawd, the 2S…
Thank god for Elaine Craig!
I do believe that queer lawfare is like the heart of the dragon we must sleigh.
I do not know what Elaine Craig's current position is on transgender ideology. She did write about it about 10 years ago, before transgender ideology took over so many institutions. Unfortunately, at that time, she argued against the gender binary and said that getting rid of it was a way to reduce gender based discrimination.
Here I disagree with her. I have a rather unique experience with gender discrimination. I'm straight, with mid length hair, tall and wear minimal makeup. As a woman engineer, I've noticed that it didn't matter whether I wore a skirt, whether I wore makeup or not, whether I wore a feminine style suit, a masculine style suit or wore jeans and T-shirt. I still frequently experienced sex based discrimination. Based on my voice and facial structure, people immediately identified me as female. So it was easy for me to figure out early in my career that I experienced discrimination not on how I presented myself, but simply on being female. It was inescapable.
I mention I am strait to illustrate that the discrimination I experienced wasn't because of my gender orientation.
Once I became a mother, if people knew that I was a mother, I got an extra dose of discrimination as an engineer.
In any case, I was always quite comfortable with being female, and often thought it foolish to think one could avoid discrimination as a women in engineering by trying to hide this through wearing less feminine clothing or adopting a masculine hairstyle.
Craig tries to argue that if we got rid of the gender binary, there would be less discrimination. The problem is that the gender binary is based on material reality and can't be gotten rid of through making people pretend it doesn't exist.
In any case, I do think that a lot of trans behavior is driven by pornography, so I'm thankful to Craig for her recent book on pornography.
I'm reading this series with great interest, because even though these internecine battles from decades ago may seem passé, they're the academic root whose tender shoots seem to inform so much of the out-there discourse we see in the LGBTQ world, and in the amorphous world of chronically online activism and social media.
It's just incredible how batshit crazy this clearly brilliant people could be. I've had to go back and reread several paragraphs just to be getting it. I even looked on Wikipedia to try to get a basic idea of what Sedgwick was talking about. The article has to be seen to be believed. What. The. Fuck. I'm more than open to transgression, to revelation of nuances and subtexts, but there is also such a thing called Insanity. If anything, her conservative critics undersold just how utterly bananas the whole thing is.