As a queer nonbinary person who is wrestling with whether or not to embrace post-structuralism, it’s been very interesting over the years to hear so many arguments from fans of queer theory against things like hate crimes legislation or even marriage equality. One of the more obvious arguments has been the fact that marriage equality is essentially just the legislation of homonormativity or the way a certain class of affluent, able, cis, white, gay men try very hard to be just like affluent, able, cis, white, straight men; forsaking the duties their privileged identities confer on them.

They argue that marriage is not something we should want to earn through sufficient assimilation, but rather something to reject as fundamental to the cisheteropatriarchal hegemony we are ostensibly interested in dismantling. It’s sort of the same argument against second-wave feminism and its “Equality for White Women” mantra, or against groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the NAMES project which fired all the activists at some point and became bootlicker shills for neoliberal capitalism and actively worked against the interests of the groups they originally identified as fighting for.

On the other hand, I’ve heard critical theorists and utopian intentionalists alike argue that post-structuralism itself is merely acting in service of neoclassicalism by infinitely dividing classes that could otherwise stand together to oppose the cisheteropatriarchal hegemony of neoclassicalism.