The Politics of Invisibility

Abstract

Rather than offering a traditional interpretation of what constitutes a spatial queer politics, which Brown and Knopp (2006) describe as "claiming space," this dissertation seeks instead to explore a Foucauldian politics of disappearing, of incoherency, and illegibility. I call this the politics of invisibility, describing a queer politics that questions visibility at every avenue and that is extremely critical of the ways that queer bodies are often made less complex, indeed less visible, when "gays and lesbians" are incorporated more and more into the mainstream. The work does this through three different papers. First, it lays down the theory of the politics of invisibility through a Foucauldian analysis of the changing nature of heteronormativity since queer theory's origin in the early 1990's. Second, it asks whether new directions in mapping gays and lesbians based on problematic census data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses should be reconsidered in light of this changing heteronormativity. Third, it explores the radical potential of a gay male subculture that is striving to become more visible and by doing so ruptures the taken-for-granted no-tions of how traditional forms of masculinity should be interpreted in a queer theoretical framework.