Queer Theory - Origins Of Queer Theory, Aids And Queer Theory, Limits Of Identity, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin
term sexual lesbian style
Since the early 1990s, the term queer has been strategically taken up to signify a wide-ranging and unmethodical resistance to normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality. Although this use of queer marks a process of resignification as new meanings and values are associated with what was once a term of homophobic abuse, there is always an important sense in which queer maintains, even in changed illocutionary circumstances, its original charge of shame. Despite such a short history, the accelerated rise of queer as a critical term demonstrates the significant impact it has had on understandings of the cultural formations of gendered and sexual identities and practices, both in activist and academic circles.
The term queer is necessarily indeterminate, taking on different—and sometimes contradictory—meanings in different articulations. Sometimes queer is synonymous with lesbian and gay, for which it becomes a convenient shorthand. At other times, it refers to a generational or even fashion-led distinction between old-style lesbians and gays and new-style sexual outlaws. Yet again, it can signify a coalition of nonnormative sexual identities—most often conceptually rather than materially realized—which might include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. In other deployments, queer denotes not an identity as such but the taking of a critical distance from the identity-based categories of modern sexuality—in particular a distance from the identity politics central to traditional understandings of the lesbian and gay communities: "instead of theorizing queer in terms of its opposition to identity politics, it is more accurate to represent it as ceaselessly interrogating both the preconditions of identity and its effects" (Jagose, pp. 131–132). This last sense is taken up by queer studies, which uses the term to draw attention to various incoherencies in the supposedly stable and causal relations between sex, gender, and sexual desire.
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Perhaps the most prominent—certainly the most respectable-sounding—use of queer can be seen in its frequent coupling with theory. Teresa de Lauretis, an academic and critical theorist, has been credited with coining the phrase queer theory. In 1991 she edited a special issue of the feminist cultural studies journal differences entitled "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualitie…
For instance, strategies devised in relation to AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s reformulated many axiomatic understandings of sexuality in ways that were significant for the parallel development of queer theory. In the face of homophobic governmental responses to the health crisis (particularly in North America), activists worked to contest dominant representations of HIV/AIDS as a gay diseas…
Another way in which political activism has historically informed queer theory can be seen in the influential critiques of the identity politics that customarily underpin traditional leftist social movements. In this respect, the queer critique of lesbian and gay identity politics takes place in a wider frame that also includes, for example, postcolonial problematizations of "race" a…
Given his interest in the history of sexuality and his radical denaturalization of dominant understandings of sexual identity, Michel Foucault is a key poststructuralist influence on the development of queer theory. Foucault's understanding that sexuality is a discursive production, rather than an essential human attribute, is part of his larger conceptualization of power as less repressive…
Foucault's constructivist understanding that sexuality is an effect of the discursive operations of power underwrites Gayle Rubin's important essay "Thinking Sex." Often identified as one of queer theory's foundational texts, Rubin's essay follows Foucault's rejection of libidinal or biological explanations of sexuality in order to think about the w…
Rubin's call for an analytic distinction to be made between gender and sexuality proved productive for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose groundbreaking Epistemology of the Closet combined feminist with antihomophobic methodologies: "In twentieth-century Western culture gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as being as distinct from one another …
The theorist most prominently associated with analyzing the normative effects of dominant understandings of sex and gender is Judith Butler. Drawing explicitly on Foucault but with an attention to the workings of gender almost entirely absent from his work, Butler argues that gender, like sexuality, is not an essential truth derived from the body's materiality but rather a regulatory fictio…
Although queer theory is prominently organized around sexuality, its critical pursuit of nonnormativity means that it is potentially attentive to any order of difference that participates
in the regimes of sexual normalization and deviance. Rather than separating sexuality from other axes of social difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, and so on—queer theory has in…
The suspicion that normative models of identity will never be adequate to the representational work demanded of them provides the conditions of intelligibility not only for thinking about the emergence of queer theory from the identity-based models of the feminist and lesbian-gay movements but also for understanding twenty-first century and frequent announcements of the death of queer theory, most…
In organizing itself around the resurrected vitality of queer, queer theory has staked its paradoxical claim on something that is at once all future and no future. For every scholar who represents the critical impulse of queer as future-directed and open-ended, there is another who represents it as washed up and already exhausted: "In the short shelf-life American marketplace of images, may…
Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 110, no. 3 (May 1995): 343–349. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993. ——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routl…
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