What is Queer Theory

Journal of University of Human Development, 2015

One of the post-modernist approaches to literary criticism is the queer criticism which has not been evaluated properly. Queer criticism can refer to any piece of literary criticism that interprets a text from a non-straight perspective. Therefore, it includes both lesbian and gay criticism. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to trace the social and political reasons behind the emergence of Queer criticism in the late twentieth century till it acquired momentum in the twenty-first century. After trying to define the terms related to the Queer criticism, the paper tries to examine the poetics of queer (gay and lesbian) literary works and to point out the main characteristic features of this critical approach by identifying the criteria and the textual evidence by which a literary work is labeled queer. It, also tries to shed light on the common features between queer criticism and feminism, on the one hand, and queer criticism and the deconstructuralist approach on the other hand. ...

Chapter co-authored with Sonya Andermahr. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th edition, ed Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf), 1997

Introduction Lesbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe. Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist persecution and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The movement utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repressive character of mainstream heterosexual society. Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘hetero-sexism’ to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological condition, ‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power relation, and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism: the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s.

‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’ (DAVID HALPERIN). Queer Theory in approaching literature

2015

Adolescence is a difficult time, filled with uncertainty about physical appearance, identity, sexual maturation, and the ability to 'fit-in' to a desirable community. For Calliope Stephanides, this time is especially difficult. Cal's a hermaphrodite, living in a world that has room for only two classifications of people: 'normal' and 'not.' An exploration of observable binaries in Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, Middlesex explores the formation of Cal(lie)'s identity through classical notions of identity construction and suggests the unlikelihood of his ever being able to achieve a complete understanding of self. 'To be or not to be, that is the question' (Shakespeare 995). Shakespeare's Hamletcontemplates the continuance of life in the wake of incredible difficulties. But what it means 'to be' has long been questioned in the philosophical ideas relating to man's existence. In Plato's text Theaetetus, Socrates explains: &#39...

Kvinder, Køn & Forskning

2015

Cet article se propose d’analyser l’expression des sexualites non normatives dans une selection de nouvelles modernistes anglophones. L’etude part du concept de « scenarios » sexuels (sexual scripts), emprunte aux sciences sociales, qui est adapte par le biais d’instruments theoriques recents centres sur les axes litteraires et critiques. On trouve un apport interessant dans les ecrits inspires par le recent « tournant affectif » (affective turn) des etudes LGBT, en particulier dans Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History d’Heather Love, qui propose une relecture de textes litteraires publies avant l’ere de l’emancipation sexuelle. Love examine ce qu’elle appelle, avec un terme emprunte a Anne Cvetkovich, « des ‘archives de l’affect’ cruciales, un recit des dommages corporels et psychiques de l’homophobie ». Cet article a pour objet de confirmer les arguments de Love sur un plan culturel plus large, en etudiant trois nouvelles tirees du Penguin Book of Lesbian Short...

Kritika i humanizam, 2004

The paper focuses on, to begin with, the normative problem of the construction and studying of homosexuality and its subjects. Secondly, through a brief overview of homosexuality's construction and pathologizing, to be shown how it was possible to be defined the state of sexuality's normal subject. Thirdly, how the sexuality's normal subject and its other have been both constructed. From then on I am trying to show how homosexuality's defining situates its subjects in a position of oppression, study and medicalization. As a consequence of 20th century sexual liberation and gay liberationism and the influence of Foucault's theory of sexuality - by adopting “the thesis of repression” as a mere theory of power - the re-writing of sexual identities seems to be redundant, since repression has been substantialized as much as the very subject of sexuality. Hence all the derivative problems over the establishment of new concepts and categories - all they appear to be as (self) repressing as the outdated psychiatry theories. In brief, the study and the re-definition of homosexuality begin to postpone themselves through intra-academic quarrels over method, concept, object, history. The controversies between gay and lesbian studies and queer theory are considered, and the introduction of a new identity concept - queer, through which it is not only homosexuality's subject that is deconstructed, demedicalized, and de-categorized, but also the ones of the sex-gender dichotomy, as well as all the sexual identities - as a refusal from sexualities' defining, and as possible sexualities.

Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory, 2000