A Short Lesson in Queer Theory

One of the things that Lawrence disliked Whitman for was the latter's obsession with the notion of One Identity. That is to say, Whitman's compulsion to embrace everyone and weave everything into himself until, at last, the entire universe had been absorbed and personalised and made Walt Whitmanesque.

Whitman's great mistake was confusing his watchword Sympathy with the Christian Love-ideal. Thus, rather than respect the pathos of distance between things and celebrate otherness and plurality, Whitman calls for universal merger. Instead of feeling with, he tries to feel for and, in this way, compassion gives way to egoism. 

Broadly speaking, I agree with Lawrence's reading of Whitman and think we should remain alert to the danger presented by the will-to-merger. But, having said that, one of the joys of queerness is that it enables one to cruise and drift transpositionally between  fixed subject-formations, so that one might indeed become-Eskimo or become-woman: not in an historical or ethno-biological sense, obviously, but as a question of style.

I'm really not interested in assimilating anyone's soul. And I'm not asserting, like Whitman, that I am X, Y, or Z. Rather, I'm saying: I am not I and that X, Y, or Z are never truly themselves either. Thus we should not fetishize, eulogize, or ontologize notions of self or identity; be they based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. 

This, of course, brings me into clear opposition with Lawrence, as well as Whitman. But that's okay. For if Lawrence once meant so much to me, these days I can't help feeling his will-to-integrity is as suspect as Whitman's will-to-merger. For me, utopia begins when we stop talking about souls and refuse to be bound by stupid binaries.