"I think identity politics were a huge wrong turn. I have no problem with psychoanalysis -- except when badly done or used to enforce submission to "normative" practices --"
Agreed. Badly done psychoanalysis is any psychoanalysis done to enforce [hetero]normativity. The work of J. Lacan is perhaps the most thorough-going critique of the type of therapy which does this, known as "ego psychology."
Joanna Bujes continues:
"...but I am puzzled why in rejecting identification as a mode of being one feels the need for the label of "queer". Why do I have to be anything or call myself anything in order to critique a political strategy?"
Well, why did Marx believe that critique of capitalism had to be done from the proletariat position? I think two (related) answers: (1) practical: the proletariat was the only group for whom a criticism of capitalism would be the basis for beginning a new type of social organization (i.e. it was the strongest group with a vested interest against capitalism) (2) theoretical: the proletariat was 'the truth' of the capitalist system; that is, only the proletariat, as the group whose existence consistently shows the lie of capitalist ideology, can reach beyond that ideology.
In perhaps the same way, only a theory which is both explicitly anti-identitarian as well as queer offers a way out of heteronormativity. Queer existence shows the lie of heteronormativity as well as showing the possibility for an alternative. Mike