ABSTRACT
In what has come to be seen as one of the earliest announcements of the project of queer theory, Diana Fuss declared its ‘urgent’ work to be ‘call[ing] into question the stability and ineradicability of the hetero/homosexual hierarchy, suggesting that new (and old) sexual possibilities are no longer thinkable in terms of a simple inside/outside dialectic’ (1991, 1). The move enacted by queer theory from the focus of lesbian and gay studies on ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ identities, actors and movements, to a broader concern with the constitution, and fracturing, of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, forms the backdrop to this chapter. My exploration of the organisation of contemporary personal life is not specifically concerned with those who carry the identities of ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’, although the research I report included lesbians and gay men amongst its sample. Rather the chapter enacts a queer analysis of personal life in the sense that it explores how the salience of the heterosexual/homosexual binary is being transformed at the start of the twenty-first century. It also reports the finding of queer social processes: its central argument is that there is a process of queering underway – a destabilisation of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, and a challenging of heteronormativity – amongst those who are living at the cutting edge of changes in the organisation of personal life. The chapter, therefore, makes a sociological intervention in the field of queer studies, which, in its orientation to the cultural, the textual and the historical, has tended to lack analysis of social change and contemporary social formations.
