What is so bad about the “reductive”? In queer and other scholarship, reductionism signals simplistic homogeneity, fixity, and limitation, which are ideas often taken to be self-evidently problematic. Addressing a range of theoretical material, especially the work of Leo Bersani, this essay attributes the taken-for-granted status of reductionism to queer theory's structuring opposition to ideas associated with sameness—among them normativity, reproduction, and the status quo. However, the essay suggests that the writing of John Rechy can help us reflect on why queer scholarship should be organized in this way. Rechy frequently presents a close relation between forms of reduction and the gay lives and worlds that are a significant focus of his work. Moreover, critics have imagined this gay-oriented work itself to be “reductive.” Rechy is therefore the occasion to ask, counterintuitively, if queer scholarship's aversion to reductionism as mistakenly limiting and homogenizing recapitulates the devaluing of homosexuality in the modern West as a misguided attachment to sameness.

This essay picks up the figure of the street-walker, not, as has been done, as an emblem for transformative modes of subjectivity, open to proliferating difference, but as the manifestation of stubborn sameness. Through this, it seeks to question the heteronormative ideologies underwriting a perceived privileging of difference in James studies and queer studies. James’s established importance to queer work makes him an important figure of sameness and this rhetorical force is used to engage and critique recent queer theory (principally Lee Edelman’s No Future ) by re-engaging the queerness attached by extant criticism to Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima .