Queer Hegemonies: Politics and Ideology in Contemporary Queer Debates

In this dissertation, I explore contemporary transformations of both sexual politics and queer theory from a politico-philosophical perspective. On the one hand, I analyze how progressive sexual politics have been recently articulated to the politico-economic project of neoliberalism and to new forms of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. Thus, the dissertation is situated within contemporary queer debates on “homonormativity” (Duggan 2003), “homonationalism” (Puar 2007), and “sexual imperialism” (Massad 2007). On the other hand, I focus on how queer theory has responded to these political transformations. I read both processes—the transformations of contemporary sexual politics and the transformations of the queer theoretical field—through the theory of hegemony that Stuart Hall appropriated from Antonio Gramsci and reactivated in Britain in the 1980s, in the context of Thatcherism (see Hall 1986; 1988). The central goal of the dissertation is to explore the ways in which the conceptual apparatus developed by Hall in that context can help us better understand today, thirty years later, both the transformations of progressive sexual politics and the transformations of the queer theoretical field. In the first chapter, I focus on Hall’s work. First, I discuss Hall’s politico-philosophical interventions: his reading of Gramsci, his theory of politics and ideology, his analyses of Thatcherism, and his critical dialogues with key contemporary interlocutors, especially Louis Althusser and Ernesto Laclau. Second, I zoom in on some key political moments of the construction of Thatcherite hegemony. Hence, in the next two chapters, I turn to contemporary queer debates. In the second chapter, I explore Lisa Duggan’s (2003) work on homonormativity: a gay politics ideologically aligned with the politico-economic project of neoliberalism. While the first part of this chapter is devoted to Duggan’s analysis, the rest of it reconstructs the transformations of queer theory in the face of this shift of the politico-ideological terrain. Here, I situate both a “Marxist renaissance” in queer theory (see Floyd 2009) and the emergence of queer of color critique (see Ferguson 2004). I read the relation between homonormativity and these two emerging theoretical formations through Hall’s theory of hegemony. Finally, in the third chapter, I turn to Jasbir K. Puar’s (2007) critique of homonationalism and Joseph A. Massad’s (2007) critique of sexual imperialism. First of all, I reconstruct their respective analyses as instances of queer diasporic critique (see Gopinath 2005). Hence, I pose a question of theoretical practice: while criticizing U.S. and European imperialism, to what extent are these diasporic critiques located in the global North able to articulate the concrete struggles around sexual politics emerging in the South? Each chapter ends with a political vignette that supplements the theoretical debates. In the conclusion, I draw on my analyses and on such vignettes in order to profile what I term, following Hall once again, a “queer Marxism without guarantees.”