Strategic Subjects: The Sexual Binary, Transgression and the Ethics of Strategic Essentialism

For more than ten years the collective set of critical post-structuralist positions labelled 'queer theory' has been deployed to show that sexual identity—and particularly hetero and homo sexual subjectivities—are produced through discursive knowledges; contingent and historical. Such work has usefully opened paths for the examination of racial, ethnic and gendered tensions within the ethnic-minority grouping that is the lesbian/gay (or 'queer') community. What might be considered the largest contribution of queer theory to the field of lesbian/gay politics has been the ways in which it can be deployed for the examination of lesbian/gay (and 'straight') subjects as they are subjectively performed <i>in accord</i> with various discourses of sexuality and subjectivity, thus prompting examinations of how these discourses are governed by the cultural construct hetero/homo binary. Nevertheless, much of this work is ignored in the <i>praxis</i> of lesbian/gay politics which continues to assert and reassert the hetero/homo binary as 'sexual truth'.