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A final context of scholarship, queer theory, has emerged in recent years from earlier scholarship on sexuality. This perspective encompasses theories by and about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered people (see Wiegman 1994, 17n. 1). Taking its inspiration, its direction, and much of its content from the writings of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, queer theory argues that categories of sexual identity and understandings of sexuality are not timeless or naturally occurring. Instead, they are social constructions, created and maintained through mechanisms of power and varying across different social, historical, and political contexts. Denying a view of sexual drives and scripts as innate or even as clearly classifiable, queer theory reveals the instabilities underlying the seemingly rigid and unchanging categories of sexuality. Its technique is sometimes referred to as “queering” existing categories, an act of challenging and destabilizing, or “making strange,” the fundamental assumptions that uphold such classifications.

In place of stability and permanence, queer theory offers a view of sexual identity categories as socially constructed and rigorously policed. Queer theorists attempt to undermine or “deconstruct” the hierarchical arrangements that reduce complex, multiple differences to simplistic binary oppositions (Butler 1993; de Lauretis 1993; Sedgwick 1990; Wittig 1993). Yet, rather than proposing additional categories, queer theorists question the feasibility of identity categories per se, challenging claims of a shared identity within groups classified by sexual orientation (“gays,” “lesbians,” etc.). Instead, they identify the classification of people based on sexual orientation as a recent and historically specific phenomenon, designed to serve the interests of those in power by creating deviant and marginalized categories of people rather than simply types of behaviors. With this rationale, some queer theorists challenge the personal and political utility of coming out, which represents in their view a misguided acceptance and embracing of the labels imposed on us by an oppressive dominant culture (Butler 1993).

In contrast to a politics that embraces identity categories, queer theory criticizes the easy acceptance of such labels. It contends that identity categories do not dwell within individuals but instead are culturally constructed and assigned to us. Because our identities are constructed in and through powerful social institutions, we internalize these categories as part of our fundamental sense of self. Thus, despite their external origins, such classifications come to feel as though they emanate from deep within us. Such a view rejects the assumption that categories of identity are “natural” or “innate,” that is, that they exist prior to or outside of language and other relations of power. It argues instead that such categories are not real or internal but display an “apparent ‘interiority’ and ‘reality’” that is actually “an illusion produced by our internalization of what is, in fact, a highly politicized and public discourse” (Bennett 1993, 96). Far from reflecting our inner selves, such categories compel us, with varying degrees of success, to conform to their boundaries. When we acquiesce, the categories appear unshakable. When we refuse, we reveal their instability. Within this view, the ways in which we conceive of individual subjects and stratify those subjects by gender, race, class, and sexuality are historically and discursively constructed, maintained entirely through language and other power relations. These relations construct and enforce the appearance of continuous, stable identities. They police the boundaries of those identities and arrange them hierarchically.

The notion that language and reality construct each other, that what we think of as “reality” is itself constructed through language, is grounded in the sociological tradition of social constructionism. Social constructionism argues that what we may accept as given or natural “facts” are actually constructed and reinforced by the very language and behaviors through which they are expressed. From this perspective, the struggle to integrate various categories of identity is illusory, misleading, and dangerous insofar as it represents the acceptance and internalization of externally imposed labels. Categories of difference, or identities, are seen as sources of oppression that we must vigorously reject, not embrace. Whereas a politics of identity advocates the construction or assembly of identity against the forces that impose fragmentation from without, this contrasting view urges the continual rejection of apparently uniform and stable categories. It decries the “regulatory imperatives” that stealthily inhabit consciousness, imposing an illusory sense of difference that exerts control not only from without but also from within (Butler 1993, 309).

This challenge to categories of difference reminds us that what is politically strategic in the short run may have negative consequences in the long run, as any external labels we accept can still be manipulated by others and used against us. This perspective also cautions against mistaking strategy for “truth” when we allow legal concepts to replace our own lesbian self-definitions (Robson 1992).¹⁷ We must be wary of the dangers of naturalizing myths that disguise social constructions as biological givens; they can mislead us into viewing categories of difference as historically invariable and our second-class status as therefore unchangeable. Such accounts uphold oppression by reaffirming heterosexuality’s primacy and naturalness and by leaving the notion of fixed sexual categories intact. As long as we continue to organize people into two “opposite” categories of heterosexuals and homosexuals, the latter will always remain subordinate “Others,” the lower rung in a hierarchical relationship.

From this perspective, acceptance, much less celebration, of externally imposed categories as authentic differences reinforces rather than undoes identity-based oppression. Where a politics of identity resists oppression by reclaiming marginalized identities, queer theory pursues the same objective by rejecting identity categories altogether. It identifies heterosexuality and homosexuality as equally constructed (as opposed to “natural,” or biologically rooted in individuals), each dependent on the other and on structures of power and language for its meaning. In this view, no individual or group is either “inside” or “outside” systems of power. Instead, all identities and their meanings are constituted through the very operation of such systems, all equally subject to regulation and, potentially, transformation.¹⁸

The case studies I present here represent historical instances in which various sides struggle for authority over the meanings of contested language and images. Such moments provide rare opportunities to watch the process of meaning making at work. These examples, like other “contests for the production of sexual meanings … provide important opportunities to challenge, if not renegotiate, the public limits on how human (erotic) pleasures can be both embodied and represented” (E. Cohen 1993, 212). The debates on the Senate floor and in the courtroom may be examined as the sites of precisely these kinds of contests. In these battles, the victor is determined by more than the outcome of the confirmation vote or the judge’s decision, and the stakes are higher than one woman’s political or military career. If coming out is always a risky proposition, then political and legal discussions of lesbian and gay issues offer no guarantee “that the instrumental uses of ‘identity’ do not become regulatory imperatives” (Butler 1993, 309).

In fact, establishing one woman as the only visible lesbian in the upper echelon of government and another as the only visible lesbian in the upper levels of the military has caused these high-profile individuals to attain in the public eye a representative status for all lesbians. The entire question, so highly controversial in the lesbian and gay movement, of “which version of lesbian or gay ought to be rendered visible” (Butler 1993, 311) is sidestepped by the presence of such a highly placed politician and a National Guard colonel. Moreover, the movement’s true diversity—the differences of race, class, and other characteristics among lesbians and gay men—is replaced by a homogenizing image of white, professional lesbians. These particular representations become the ground on which gay and lesbian activists must do battle, whether or not they have or would have chosen it.

It is possible to see in the Achtenberg and Cammermeyer debates a microcosm of the anti-gay and “pro-gay” arguments and to analyze both the value and the limitations of these arguments for achieving their respective political goals.¹⁹ Such issues as whether homosexuality is a choice or is biologically given, the separation of public and private realms, the historical and contemporary discourses of perversion, the threat lesbianism poses to male dominance and ideals of masculinity, and the controversy over “family values” are all addressed in these discussions. Each issue provides a link between political or military competence and the discourse of sexuality. Such pairings have become increasingly familiar in the political climate of the 1990s, most notably since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings and the advent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Centrally, and underlying these other disputes, rests the issue of whether homosexuality refers primarily to a category of human beings or to a particular sort of behavior. The ways in which this question is addressed, on the Senate floor and in the courtroom, both reflect and create a narrow, limited, and limiting conception of homosexuality in general and lesbianism in particular. Bringing to bear the understandings gleaned from a variety of theoretical contexts allows us to examine such representations and to analyze their advantages and drawbacks for the project of lesbian and gay liberation.

Informed by the literature of feminist, lesbian, gay, and queer studies, this book investigates how struggles over the meanings of lesbian identity manifest themselves within particular, concrete battles. It examines, as well, how lesbian specificity may be sacrificed within the broader struggle for gay and lesbian rights. My analysis draws on the stories of two women who, despite their very different backgrounds and objectives, shared a willingness to stand up for their beliefs and a refusal to hide or deny who they were. Their freedom to differ was met with hostile opposition, from Congress and from the military. It is as a result of their integrity and courage in facing these challenges that their personal stories became visible to a nation.