Teresa de Lauretis, an academic who coined the phrase “queer theory” to describe a field of study that would “rethink the sexual in new ways,” only to watch with disappointment as the term evolved into what she called a “vacuous creature of the publishing industry,” died on Feb. 3 in San Francisco. She was 87.
Her death, at a hospital, was caused by a ruptured aorta, her son, Paul Loeffler, said.
The word “queer” has made a long journey. It originally denoted oddness and dubiousness. About a century ago, it became a slur for sexual behavior considered deviant.
It was appropriated by some of the people it was meant to insult. It made its way into the titles of books. It became the designated field of prestigious jobs at universities. Now it is a widely understood idiom for fluid, unorthodox or countercultural sexuality.
Professor de Lauretis (pronounced lauw-RAY-teece) never attained the fame of others associated with queer theory, like the academics and authors Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. But her invention of the term was a significant event.
“The moment that the scandalous formula ‘queer theory’ was uttered,” David Halperin, a prominent academic in the field, wrote in his 2003 essay “The Normalization of Queer Theory,” “it became the name of an already established school of theory, as if it constituted a set of specific doctrines, a singular, substantive perspective on the world.”
That aura, he added, brought about “the acquisition of academic respectability for queer work.” He credited Professor de Lauretis with “courage” for pairing queer, a “scurrilous term,” with “the academic holy word”: theory.
Queer theory’s debut was “Queer Theory: A Working Conference on Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” organized by Professor de Lauretis and held on Feb. 10 and 11, 1990, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught in an interdisciplinary department called history of consciousness. The conference’s title was used for a 1991 special issue of Differences, a feminist academic journal.
In an introductory essay for the issue, which Professor de Lauretis edited, she critiqued an existing academic field, gay and lesbian studies. In “white gay historiography,” she wrote, she saw women and lesbianism added on “as an afterthought.” But commentators on lesbianism, in developing a field of their own, often failed to draw on writing about gayness that would build “a common theoretical frame or shared discourse,” she said.
That is what queer theory would offer, Professor de Lauretis argued: “new forms of community” alongside a “resistance to cultural homogenization.”
The Santa Cruz moment became the field’s year zero. Texts now seen as essential in queer theory that were published in 1990 or earlier did not announce themselves as queer; those books included Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), Professor Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” (1990) and Professor Butler’s “Gender Trouble” (1990). But major books published after 1991 have used the term hundreds of times, among them the essay collection “Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory” (1993) and José Esteban Muñoz’s “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity” (2009).
Conservatives have denigrated the growth of queer studies as “weirdness” or worse. University traditionalists have argued that the field repudiates the proper goals of academia and focuses instead on “vindicating the grievances of some particular group,” as Stephen H. Balch, then the president of the National Association of Scholars, told The New York Times in 2006.
Skepticism has also come from more surprising quarters.
In a 2016 Times Magazine essay, the staff writer J Wortham celebrated “a profoundly exhilarating revolution” in sexual and gender identity but also asked, “When everyone can be queer, is anyone?”
In Professor Halperin’s 2003 essay, he praised queer theory while also observing an irony. “Despite its implicit (and false) portrayal of lesbian and gay studies as liberal, assimilationist and accommodating of the status quo,” he wrote, “queer theory has proven to be much more congenial to established institutions.”
Professor de Lauretis herself found cause for criticism. By 1994, as in an essay called “Habit Changes,” she was describing queer theory as vacuous and overhyped. She elaborated in a 2011 essay, “Queer Texts, Bad Habits and the Issue of a Future.”
Queerness, she argued, “while still carrying something of its historical connotations of sexual abnormality, quickly covers them up by presenting itself as gender-inclusive, democratic, multicultural and multispecies, and thus effectively shifts the ground away from the nitty-gritty of sexuality.”
She wrote more favorably about “the sexuality that was the crucial discovery of Freud,” which she described as “polymorphous” but also “perverse.”
“The dialogue I had hoped for,” she concluded, “did not take place.”
Teresa de Lauretis was born on Nov. 29, 1938, in Bologna, Italy. Her family lived in the smaller nearby city of Ravenna. Her father, Gustavo, was a women’s doctor who was killed by fascists during World War II because he was known for treating people in the partisan resistance. Her mother, Maria (Boroncelli) de Lauretis, was a schoolteacher.
While studying English literature at Bocconi University in Milan, she briefly dated Werner Martin, a German who was test driving Audi cars at a Formula 1 track nearby. She soon became pregnant. After giving birth, neither she nor her son had further contact with Mr. Martin, her son said.
On a research trip to London, Ms. de Lauretis met Donald Mead, an American. They married, and she and her son followed Mr. Mead to Denver.
The couple ran a bookstore and cafe for a couple of years before splitting up.
Equipped with only a little-known type of Italian advanced degree called a laurea, Ms. de Lauretis made her way in America. In 1966, she began teaching Italian at the University of California, Davis. Two years later, she got a job at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She switched her focus from English to Italian literature, focusing on the writer Italo Svevo, and developed specialties in semiotics, feminism and film.
In Milwaukee, she met a lawyer named David Loeffler. They married in the early 1970s, and he adopted her son. The couple separated in 1978 and eventually divorced. In later years, Professor de Lauretis identified as lesbian. She joined the faculty at Santa Cruz in 1985 and retired in 2008.
In addition to her son, Paul, she is survived by a brother, Piero.
Professor de Lauretis avoided discussing her personal life, yet her work often asked questions that were deeply personal.
In her essay “Habit Changes,” she described living in the “conceptual universe” of Freud even though he “could not imagine such a thing as lesbian desire.”
She solved this paradox by pointing out that, in Freud’s own time and place, his Jewishness qualified him as “primitive, degenerate and diseased.” Yet in his work, he convinced many people that what they had thought to be primitive, degenerate or diseased was actually “the very stuff civilization is made of.”
Professor de Lauretis saw that as an assignment. Like Freud, she wrote, people ought to remake the categories of the world around them “from the location of their own difference.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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