Sexual difference in/and the queer beyond of ethics

In her recent book, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, Lynne Huffer offers a daring call for a reconsideration of the rifts between feminist and queer theory in order to develop a "queer feminist ethics of eros" (Huffer 2013, 44). Arguing that sexual ethics lies at the fractured nexus between feminist and queer theory, Huffer seeks both to restore "a claim to an ethical queer feminism" and to transfigure ethics as "erotic living" (22). This project is clearly staged in the book's titular chapter, which provocatively brings together Michel Foucault's and Luce Irigaray's respective reformulations of sexual ethics with the so-called antisocial queer theory of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley. To my mind, one of the most invaluable contributions of Huffer's book is her queer reclamation of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference—a philosophy that many feminist and queer theorists alike have dismissed as irredeemably essentialist, conservative, heteronormative, and even homophobic, transphobic, and racist.1 For Huffer, however, "Irigaray's … absence from queer theory is evidence of a forgetting of her radical feminist practice as an always already queer method" (2013, 42). Taking off from Huffer's queer feminist rereading of Irigaray, I want to further queer ethics by exploring the relationship between ethics and sexual difference as it has been thought in European philosophy. First, I offer a critique of the conflation of queerness and "negativity" in antisocial queer theory and the abdication of ethical responsibility it ultimately entails. Following both Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, I then argue that sexual difference is wholly other (tout autre) to "the ethical" as it has been thought within phallogocentrism and, thus, I contend that justice demands a fidelity to this radical otherness of sexual difference. Queerness, I suggest, names precisely this "beyond" of the ethical—that is, sexual difference "itself"—and, thus, ironically, both queer and feminist theory must struggle for the heteros of sexual difference, beyond any distinction between she/he, hetero-/homosexual, friendship/love, or sex/eros.