Queering False Universalities. Why Research Should Re-Start From the Perspective of Minorities

Queer thought identifies structures of heteronormativity that constitute straight and cis privilege. From a queer perspective, to assure equal rights is not enough, as regimes and normativities cannot be neutral or universalistic but always support particular cultures and identities. Thus, even when formally neutral legal rights are assured, straight and cis privilege prevails when such legal change is not accompanied by cultural politics against heteronormativity. Queer politics, therefore, aims at fostering particularistic counter cultures. Only those can lead to the flourishing of non-heteronormative life; without them, the force of heteronormativity overrules queer life, as the critique of “homonormativity” points out. To content, then, that legal neutrality is universally good for everyone is thus a false universality. The paper suggests that political theory as a whole can learn from this queer hermeneutics against false universalities. False universalities that blend out privilege are a key fallacy in the contemporary critique against “identity politics”. For example, it is a false universality to answer Black Lives Matter by arguing that all lives should matter. As the appeal to false universalities is rather obvious in conservative and liberal critiques of identity politics, I will discuss it regarding a more subtle case: Nancy Fraser’s work on recognition and redistribution. I show that by interpreting queerness and deconstruction as aiming at the dissimilation of identity, Fraser’s critique, unintentionally, leads to the universalization of a cis-straight and white perspective. Queering universalities as a general method for contemporary political theory, then, entails identifying and critiquing false universalizations and to re-start research from the particular perspectives of minorities.