Taxonomically Queer?

Abstract

Can taxonomy—a scientific method critiqued for its utility within Western imperial projects of racial and species classification—be queered? This article mines the tensions between the hostility to taxonomy within critical theory and the taxonomical renaissance within contemporary queer, trans, and asexual vernacular systems of classification. Contemporary queer uses of taxonomy express a shared utopian vision of combinatorial queerness, in which sexual, gender, and relational liberation occur through a multiplying menu of increasingly fine-grained identity options. The article examines the untimely echoes between contemporary queer classification systems and German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld's 1910 taxonomy of “sexual intermediaries,” which forwards a combinatorially lush kaleidoscope of sexual and gendered possibilities that outflanks even contemporary developments. The goal is to simultaneously challenge the notion that sexology is contrary to queer projects and to consider the consequences of acknowledging sexology as a living inheritance of contemporary queer and trans culture. The conclusion asks how Native and racialized queers might resist the universalizing logics of taxonomy from within.