Quare vs. Queer Theory: What E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Knew That the Academy Forgot

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.How E. Patrick Johnson took the most celebrated theory of identity in the academy and asked it the one question it kept refusing to answer — whose body are we actually talking about?“Queer theory already covers all of that — once you accept that gender is performed and sexuality is constructed, race and class fall into place on their own.” That is the most generous version of the argument I want to complicate, and I am stating it honestly before I take it apart, because the people who hold it are not arguing in bad faith; they are working from a framework that genuinely revolutionized how a generation talks about identity, and they have simply mistaken a powerful theory for a complete one. Research over MeSearch: I am not relitigating this from feeling. I am tracing where a body of scholarship went, who it left sitting in the waiting room, and what one performance scholar from western North Carolina decided to do about it.When I first encountered this material I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, reading Judith Butler and Michel Foucault alongside a much wider field of queer scholars who were, all at once, refusing the premise that our sexual and gendered identities are fixed, stable, or expressive of some inner essence we were born clutching. Queer theory’s most durable contribution is the concept of performativity, the argument advanced most influentially by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not a truth we possess but an effect we produce, brought into being through the repeated citation of acts, gestures, and styles until the performance hardens into something that reads as nature. Apply Butler here. When we tell a man that he is acting like a woman, or tell a straight person that he is acting gay, we confirm Butler’s point inside the grammar of the insult itself, because we are treating gender and sexuality as scripts that can be performed against the body rather than as essences the body simply contains. That is the gift, and I want to name it as a gift, because what follows is a critique with teeth, not a dismissal.The Critique With TeethHere is the load-bearing claim: queer theory’s universalism is a position, not a neutral vantage point, and the view from nowhere is always, on inspection, a view from somewhere. When a theory announces that it speaks for all bodies while quietly modeling itself on one kind of body, it has not transcended particularity; it has universalized a particular and then forgotten it did so. This is the structural problem that quare theory names. Quare theory is a structural critique of queer studies and its tendency to drift toward white normativity — to universalize a white ideology of embodiment, or more precisely, of disembodiment, where the body in question can afford to be abstract because it has never been hunted, priced, or worked to the bone.The charge is specific. Mainstream queer theory’s universalism too often fails to analyze the particular logics of anti-Blackness, of settler colonialism, of class and race as material conditions rather than discursive flourishes. Apply Crenshaw here: a framework that treats identity one axis at a time will always lose the person standing at the intersection, and the person most reliably lost is the Black, the poor, the Southern, the working subject whose oppression refuses to be sorted into a single tidy category. The Combahee River Collective said it plainly in 1977 — the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and a politics that abstracts away from material life is a politics built for people who have the luxury of abstraction. Having the luxury to treat the body as merely theoretical is itself a sign of which body you have.Sprinkling Historical ContextSee, to really get Quare Theory—and I mean really get it, not just academically cosign it—you gotta understand where Queer Theory came from first. Because history ain’t neutral. And the academy damn sure ain’t neutral.Queer Theory pops off in the early 1990s. You got Judith Butler dropping Gender Trouble in 1990. You got Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with Epistemology of the Closet also 1990. Michel Foucault’s work—especially The History of Sexuality from 1976—gets resurrected and canonized. And look, I ain’t throwing shade on the contributions. Foucault taught us that sexuality isn’t some natural drive but a historical construct produced through discourse. Butler taught us that gender isn’t an essence but a citation of practice. That’s important work. That’s foundational work. I personally appreciated old Judy’s defining gender performativity when I was in grad school.But here’s the thing nobody wanna say out loud: that foundation was poured on white middle-class soil.Let me take you back further. While Foucault was writing in France, Black queer folks in the United States were building entirely different intellectual traditions—they just wasn’t getting PhDs for it. The Combahee River Collective formed in 1974. That’s a group of Black lesbian feminists—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier—who wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement. And in that statement, they said something that Queer Theory wouldn’t catch up to for almost twenty years. They said: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”Interlocking. Not additive. Not “oh and also race.” Interlocking. That’s intersectionality before Crenshaw named it in 1989. That’s Quare Theory before Johnson wrote it in 2001. But because they were Black women writing from a collective—not a tenured position—the academy treated them as activists, not theorists. You feel me?Then you got Bayard Rustin. Architect of the 1963 March on Washington. One of the most brilliant strategists of the Civil Rights Movement. Openly gay. And what happened? He got pushed to the background. Erased from the official narratives. A. Philip Randolph had to protect him, but even then, Rustin was told to stay quiet about his sexuality because it would be “used against the movement.” That’s the material cost of queer existence in Black spaces. And mainstream Queer Theory, for all its talk about subversion, didn’t have a framework for that betrayal—because that betrayal involves both anti-Blackness and homophobia and respectability politics. You need an intersectional blade to cut that knot.Now let me bring it to the 1990s. While Butler and Sedgwick were becoming stars, Black queer scholars were fighting just to be in the room. Cathy J. Cohen wrote The Boundaries of Blackness in 1999—about how AIDS was racialized and classed—and she was critiquing both white queer theory and Black nationalism. Phillip Brian Harper wrote Are We Not Men? in 1996, asking why Black masculinity studies ignored gay men. And E. Patrick Johnson—a gay Black man from Hickory, North Carolina, not New York or San Francisco—he noticed something. He noticed that the queer theory he was reading in his PhD program talked about “the body” all day long. But it rarely talked about bodies. Bodies that are raced. Bodies that are classed. Bodies that are bruised. Bodies that are hungry. Bodies that are from below the Mason-Dixon line, where “acting gay” can get you killed differently than it gets you killed in Chelsea.So in 2001, Johnson drops “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. And the title itself is a performance. “Quare” is Black Southern vernacular—pronounced like “kwahr” not “kweer”—and it carries multiple meanings. It means strange or odd, like queer. But it also means something more specific in Black Southern speech: quare can mean “pretentious” or “flashy in a way that invites trouble.” It can mean a person who is aggressively different, not just differently desiring. And Johnson says: that’s the difference. Queer theory is about destabilizing categories. Quare theory is about survival within categories of race and class that won’t let you go.He argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions about mobility—the assumption that you can subvert, that you can perform your way out of constraint. But try performing your way out of a sharecropper’s debt. Try citing your way out of a police stop in Mississippi. The performance doesn’t land the same way. And Johnson offers quare as a performance rooted in the Black Southern vernacular—a direct challenge to queer theory’s erasure of race and class. Because once you get below that Mason-Dixon line, it go a little different down here.Let me tell you a funny story. I used to be a college policy debater. And when I first came across quare theory—I was talking to somebody from the Midwest, my good sister Toya G.—and I said, “Hey, I came across quare theory.” And she was like, “You gonna be singing?” I was trying to say quare, you feel me? But it was through this Southern vernacular. That right there is good context for where I’m going with this. Even the pronunciation is a political act. The academy wanted to spell it “queer.” Johnson said nah, we spelling it like we say it. That’s epistemological warfare. Finna get in my linguistic bag, man.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Implication for EducationLet me be clear though: I’m not advocating for a complete disregard of the scholarship or the academy research around queer theory. I’m giving you a critique with some teeth though. Education is elevation, and I hope this little video was able to sprinkle a little literacy in how we think about different identities, especially when it comes to the intersection of race and sexuality. Shout out to everybody in the academy doing their thing around queer theory and quare theory, making sure you’re accounting for the lived experiences of the people, man.But here’s the specific implication for education—and I mean K-12, higher ed, community workshops, even your little Instagram classroom.Problem One: The Add-On ApproachMost gender and sexuality education treats race like a seasoning. You teach the “core” queer theory—Butler, Foucault, performativity—and then maybe, maybe, you add a footnote about Black queer people. A week on “intersectionality” if you’re feeling generous. But that’s not integration. That’s liberal guilt on a syllabus. Johnson’s critique is structural: when you build the entire theoretical framework on white middle-class assumptions, you can’t just sprinkle Black voices on top. You have to rebuild the foundation. Quare theory isn’t queer theory plus race. Quare theory is a different epistemology. It’s a different way of knowing that starts with a grandmother’s mouth, not a Parisian archive.Problem Two: The Disembodied ClassroomQueer theory taught us that gender and sexuality are performative. Cool. But how do you teach performativity without bodies? Most classrooms—even college classrooms—teach this stuff as text. You read Butler. You discuss. You write a paper. But you never actually perform. You never sit in a circle and ask: what does it feel like when someone says “you acting like a b***h”? What does it feel like when a straight person says “you acting gay”? That’s not abstract. That’s flesh memory. Johnson’s background in performance studies allows him to swap Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance—the actual doing, the actual inflection. Education without embodiment is just white suburbia talking to itself from the Ivy Tower.Let me give you an example. I teach a workshop sometimes where I ask folks to recall a moment they were told to “act right.” Act like a lady. Act like a man. Don’t act so Black. Don’t act so gay. And the stories that come out—those are not citations of practice. Those are scars. Those are survival strategies. Those are the moments where performativity meets the concrete wall of race and class. You can’t get that from reading a PDF. You have to sit in the discomfort of the body. That’s what Johnson is demanding.Problem Three: The Whiteness of “Subversion”Here’s where I get real with you. Queer theory celebrates subversion. It loves the drag ball, the camp performance, the ironic reversal. And look, I love a good ballroom scene too. But subversion is a luxury. Subversion from the safety of a university—from the academy, from the Ivy Tower, from a white suburb, from an urban nightclub—that’s a very specific kind of subversion. It assumes you have somewhere to go back to. It assumes you won’t get evicted, expelled, or excommunicated.Johnson noticed that the queer theory he was reading always positioned subversion in spaces that are not situated within classed or racialized bodies. That’s a problem for education because it teaches students that subversion is always good, always liberatory. But ask a Black genderqueer teenager in rural Alabama: is it subversive to wear a skirt to school? Or is it deadly? The answer is both, but queer theory doesn’t have a framework for the “deadly” part. Quare theory does. Quare theory holds the contradiction: you can be both subversive and vulnerable. You can be both proud and scared. And education that doesn’t teach that contradiction is lying to young people.What Actually Needs to HappenSo here’s my specific ask for educators, curriculum designers, and anybody with a whiteboard.One: Stop teaching Butler without Johnson. If you assign Gender Trouble, you also assign “Quare” Studies. Not as a bonus. Not as a “diversity reading.” As a corrective. Because Butler’s performativity, for all its brilliance, is untethered without Johnson’s flesh.Two: Teach vernacular as theory. Epistemology is a fancy word for knowledge production: how do you know what you know? And a lot of what Black queer folks know comes from a grandmother’s mouth, from the church, from the beauty shop, from the porch. That knowledge is valid. That knowledge is rigorous. And it’s been marked by this world as ahistorical, as anti-intellectual, as “not real theory.” That’s racism wearing academic clothes. You gotta call it out.Three: Bring the body back. Don’t just read about performativity—do it. Have students reflect on their own repeated social acts. Have them write about a time they were told they were “acting” outside their identity. Have them sit with the discomfort of being seen. That’s not touchy-feely. That’s rigorous performance studies.Four: Talk about class explicitly. Queer theory loves gender. It tolerates sexuality. It nods at race. But class? Class is almost invisible. Johnson doesn’t let that slide. He talks about hungry bodies. Bruised bodies. Bodies that work two jobs and still can’t afford the “urban nightclub” where queer theory says subversion happens. You cannot teach queerness without teaching economic precarity. Full stop.Five: Create assignments that center lived experience, not just citation. Instead of “compare Butler and Foucault,” try: “Describe a moment you performed gender or sexuality differently than you ‘normally’ do. What did it cost you? What did it give you? Now, use Johnson’s quare framework to analyze that moment.” That’s real education. That’s elevationEverything He Learned From His GrandmotherThe founding essay of this critique belongs to E. Patrick Johnson, a performance studies scholar and a gay Black man raised in Hickory, North Carolina, who published it in 2001 in Text and Performance Quarterly under a title that announces its entire method: “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Johnson argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions, and in their place he offers quare — a rearticulation of queer theory grounded in an intersectional framework and rooted in the Black Southern vernacular that directly challenges queer theory’s erasure of race and class. The word itself is the argument. “Quare” is how his grandmother pronounced “queer” in her African American Southern dialect, and Johnson keeps the pronunciation on purpose, because the difference in sound carries a difference in knowledge.I came to this through my own Southern ear. I was a college policy debater, and when I first mentioned that I had come across “quare” theory to my good sister Toya G, who is from the Midwest, she thought I meant “choir” — she asked if I was about to start singing. The vernacular did the work before the theory could. That small mishearing is, in fact, the whole point: quare is a Southern Black epistemological claim. Epistemology is just the formal word for knowledge production — how you know what you know — and Johnson is insisting that knowledge can come from a grandmother’s mouth, in a vernacular and a rhetoric that the academy routinely marks as ahistorical, apolitical, and unintellectual precisely because it does not arrive in the proper accent. Once you get below the Mason-Dixon line, it goes a little differently down here, and Johnson refuses to apologize for that.From Performativity to PerformanceLet me be clear that I am not advocating for the wholesale disregard of queer scholarship. In graduate school I appreciated Butler’s definition of gender performativity as much as anyone, because queer theory gave us the language and the institutional space to academically doubt the categories we had been handed. The disagreement is not whether the body performs. The disagreement is which body, and at what cost. Johnson’s training in performance studies allows him to make a precise substitution: he trades Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance — the actual doing, the actual inflection, the live event in a real and particular body. Performativity can be discussed from a seminar room. Performance cannot be separated from the flesh doing it.And the flesh is where queer theory kept flinching. Johnson observes that queer theory loved to talk about “the body” while rarely talking about the bodies that are raced, that are classed, that are bruised, that are hungry. It celebrated subversion, but usually from a position of safety — the university, the ivory tower, the white suburb, the curated nightclub — almost never from inside the class-marked and racialized body that pays the actual price for transgression. Apply Spillers here: her distinction between the body and the flesh, the flesh being that which is seized and marked before any liberal grammar of personhood arrives, tells you exactly what abstraction conveniently forgets. This is why Johnson advances quare as a “theory in the flesh,” a term he borrows from Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981), where theory is the politic that gets born out of necessity when skin color, the ground you grew up on, and desire all fuse into a single lived reality you cannot think your way out of.The AskSo return to the opening claim — that queer theory already covers race and class, that abstraction takes care of the rest. By insisting on quare, by keeping his grandmother’s pronunciation and refusing to launder the Southern Black voice into a more respectable register, Johnson makes the whiteness of the original universalism visible, and once it is visible it stops being a neutral default and becomes one position among others that must answer for itself. That is the move, and it converts a critique into an obligation. Two things can be true: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at the same time. The work, for everyone still doing this in the academy and outside of it, is to hold gender and sexuality together with race and class and region and the material weight of the body, to center the lived outcomes of Black queer people over the symbolic comfort of saying everyone is included, and to credit the grandmother as a theorist. Make sure your analysis can account for the bruised and the hungry, or admit that it was never universal to begin with. Education is elevation. Happy Pride.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERI'm fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 Key Takeaways* Queer theory’s central contribution is performativity — Butler’s argument that gender is produced through the repetition of acts, not possessed as an inner essence.* Quare theory, founded by E. Patrick Johnson in 2001, is a structural critique: queer theory’s universalism quietly models a white, disembodied subject and fails to analyze anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and class as material conditions.* “Quare” preserves the Black Southern vernacular pronunciation of “queer” as a deliberate epistemological claim — knowledge legitimately comes from a grandmother’s mouth, not only the seminar room.* Johnson’s performance studies training lets him trade Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance and a “theory in the flesh” borrowed from Moraga and Anzaldúa, returning the analysis to bodies that are raced, classed, bruised, and hungry.* This is a critique with teeth, not a rejection: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at once, and the work is to hold gender and sexuality together with race, class, and region while centering Black queer material outcomes.Annotated BibliographyJohnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25. The founding essay. Proposes quare studies as a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory that can hold racialized sexual knowledge, treating race and class as material rather than merely discursive. Defines quare as a “theory in the flesh” and channels Barbara Smith’s call to account for race. This is the load-bearing source for the entire piece.Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. The anthology that institutionalized Black queer studies as a field and reprinted the quare essay (pp. 124–157). Use it to show this was not a one-off provocation but the opening of a sustained intellectual tradition.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. The source of gender performativity — gender as a stylized repetition of acts with no stable doer behind the deed. Operationalize it as the gift quare theory builds on and critiques, not the enemy.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Establishes sexuality as discursively produced through relations of power and knowledge rather than as a natural given. Background for queer theory’s anti-essentialism; cite to mark what the field inherited before quare reworked it.Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Origin of “theory in the flesh” — a politic born of necessity when skin, land, and desire fuse into lived reality. Johnson borrows the phrase directly; cite to show the women-of-color feminist lineage queer theory often skips.Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. Intersectionality. Deploy it to explain why single-axis frameworks lose the subject standing at the crossing of race, class, gender, and sexuality.The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. Names the major systems of oppression as interlocking and roots politics in material conditions. Use to ground the claim that abstraction is a luxury distributed unequally.Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. The body/flesh distinction — flesh as that which is seized and marked before liberal personhood arrives. Operationalize to specify what “theory in the flesh” is actually pointing at.Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1979. In Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984. There is no liberation in isolation; community is the condition of freedom. Use to support quare theory’s insistence that the individual academic subversion is insufficient.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press, 2021. The framework of misogynoir — the specific anti-Black misogyny aimed at Black women. Keep it in the toolkit so the intersectional analysis names gender within Blackness rather than treating Blackness as ungendered. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe