YD Week 7

To me, antisocial thesis in queer theory is the, at least partial embracing of homophobic views of homosexuality in order to contend and undermine the socially constructed heterosexual view of self. That is not to say to agree with homophobic view of homosexuality, but to use the views against themselves. As Tim Dean put it in “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” “The burden of ‘antisocial thesis in queer theory,’…is not that lesbians and gay men are unsociable but that some aspect of homosexuality threatens the social and that it might be strategic politically to exploit that threat. Homosexuality can be viewed as threatening because, insofar as we fail to reproduce the family in a recognizable form, queers fail to reproduce the social.” In order for homosexuality to be threatening, there has to be an intrinsic homophobic stance taken as a starting point to completely demolish homophobic views. Furthermore, the concept of utopia stands out to me as particularly moving. As Juana María Rodríguez put it in “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies,” “The work of utopia must always be both a casting of possibilities and a tireless critique of the present.” By viewing queer theory in an antisocial frame, antisocial in the sense that the concept of queerness combats the heterosexual patriarchal hierarchy, and by imagining a utopia in which these hierarchies cease to exist, the conditions of the present can be critiqued from the theoretical framework of a “perfect” world. As a utopian society does not exist, all theorizing from the utopian viewpoint must be fantasy. As Rodríguez put it, “Fantasy offers a venue for exploration and pleasure that is available to anyone who dares.” By also looking at sexual fantasies rather than sexual practices, sexual possibilities rather than sexual realities can be taken into account in the queer narrative.