Queer Landscape

A distinguishing feature of Modern Western Culture is its privileging of sexuality in relation to constitutions of individual identity, truth and knowledge (Weeks: Sexuality: Foucault: Power/Knowledge). The development within Western Culture of the Modern Bourgeois subject has been accompanied by a radical differentiation of genital activity to one specification: the gender of object choice (Foucault: History of Sexuality). The product of such sexual specification has been a homosexual/heterosexual binarism; powerful because of its centrality to an understanding of modern culture, yet irresolvably unstable because of an oppositional positioning of nonsymmetrical terms (Sedgwick: Epistemology of the Closet). An inconstant nature, characteristic of the false binarism, provides a space to assess “secure” regimes of knowledge and their complicity in the homophobic program of male heterosexual ideology (Beaver: “Homosexual Signs”). The space from which such an assessment occurs could be called queer space — queer because of a required positioning of the individual outside the values of heterosexism (Watney: “Wet Holes / Wet Dreams”) — and those features revealed from this site could be called “Queer Landscape.” - Kevin Madill