ABSTRACT
The Queer movement has been, and continues to be, strenuously opposed. Its critics attack what they see as its assimilationist effects, its blurring of identity and image, and its consequent weakening, through dispersal, of homosexuality’s potential to confront and disturb. They argue that queer’s challenge to dominant ideology, through its denaturalization of heterosexuality and stress on the constructedness of all sexual categories, does little to undermine the power of that ideology-indeed, that such strategy demobilizes and weakens opposition to heterosexual hegemony by effectively erasing the subject or source of resistance. Moreover, they decry what they see as the ever-widening gulf between signifi er and signifi ed: Leo Bersani’s claim, for instance, that “the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us . . . don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative” (Homos 4) seems to contain the suggestion that much of the talk that goes by the name of queer theory is mere
sterile intellectual quibbling and academic pedantry.1 It is thus a thoughtprovoking irony in the debate between supporters and detractors of the Queer movement that both sides accuse the other of blindly upholding and maintaining the dominant heterosexual order and system of oppression they wish to undermine.
