Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women’s studies. 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. In the CSS Gender Studies examination, questions have often been given about queer theory. So, Here I am going to explain this queer theory completely.
Although this use of queer marks a process of re-signification 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 non-normative 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 modem 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.
This last sense is taken up by queer studies, which use the term to draw attention to various incoherencies in the supposedly stable and causal relations between sex, gender, and sexual desire.
What is Queer Theory?
It is a set of ideas based on the fact that identities are not fixed and do not determine who we are. It suggests that it is meaningless to talk in general about
‘women’ or any other group, as identities consist of many different elements. It is wrong to think that people can be seen collectively on the basis of one shared characteristic such as men, gays, and lesbians.
The queer theory proposes that we should deliberately challenge all notions of fixed identity, in unconventional ways. It denies that heterosexuality is normal or ‘natural’. Embodied in popular culture by Madonna.
Criticism of Querr Theory
- For most people, their sexual identity isn’t fluid, it’s constant.
- The queer theory focuses on cultural texts3 (rather than real life) where it is easier to find sexual or gender ambiguities.
- Discrimination at home and at work, for everyday gay people, is forgotten about in this approach as it reduces everyone to the same fluid identity.
- By celebrating differences, queer politics makes the ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ identity all too important. Other identities such as heterosexuality or asexuality are ignored.
- Queer theory celebrates pleasure and therefore puts too much emphasis on sex.
Origins of Queer Theory
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 Sexualities.” In explaining her use of the term, de Lauretis indicates that she means it to indicate at least three interrelated critical projects. A refusal of heterosexuality as the benchmark for all sexual formations, an attentiveness to gender capable of interrogating the frequent assumption that lesbian and gay studies are a single, homogeneous object; and an insistence on the multiple ways in which race crucially shapes sexual subjectivities.
De Lauretis suggests that the threefold critique she imagines might be drawn together under the rubric of queer theory making it possible “to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual” (de Lauretis, p. iv).
It is important to remember the speculative framing of de Lauretis’s coining of the term since the rapid institutionalization of queer theory has tended to conceal the fact that insofar as it espouses no systematic set of principles, has no foundational logic or consistent character queer theory is not really a theory at all.
While it might seem paradoxical in a dictionary entry to insist on this resistance to definition, queer theory’s refusal to specify itself has been widely recognized as one of its tactical strengths. Resisting defining itself in relation to any specific material content, a queer theory might be thought of less as a thing than a definitional field or network, “a zone of possibilities in which the embodiment of the subject might be experienced otherwise”.
Since queer’s opposition to the normative is its one consistent characteristic, it has the potential to invent itself endlessly, reformulating whatever knowledge currently constitutes prescribed understandings of sexuality.
It remains important to narrate the emergence of queer theory in terms of various critical and cultural contexts, including feminism, radical movements of color, the lesbian and gay movements, various sexual subcultural practices such as sadomasochism and butch-femme stylings, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and AIDS activism.
Aids and Queer Theory
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 disease and to develop and deliver safer-sex education programs to a dispersed population with no common sexual identity.
In the context of AIDS activism, many commonsense understandings of knowledge, power, identity, and community were radically reworked in ways that coincided with queer theory’s denaturalization of sexuality.
Advances in safer-sex education initiated a shift from thinking about risk populations to risk practices, reconceiving sexuality less in terms of sexual identities than sexual acts and allowing for meaningful discrepancies between sexual being and sexual doing.
Likewise, the ad hoc, direct-action, and decentralized character of AIDS activism were marked by coalitional rather than separatist politics that enabled consideration of identity in terms of affinity rather than essence.
So, too, the urgent negotiations over epidemiology, public health, and scientific research implicit in contesting dominant representations of AIDS demonstrated that sexuality is an important nodal point in networks of power and its resistance.
Limits of Identity
The self-evidence of identity has been profoundly questioned in post-structural thought with its decentering of the Cartesian subject, the rational and autonomous individual, its emphasis on the plurality of interpretation, and its insistence that there is no outside to the discursive structures that produce cultural meaning.
Michel Foucault is a key poststructuralist. He observes that sexuality is not an essentially personal attribute but an available cultural category and, second, that it is the effect of power rather than its preexisting object.
Gayle Rubin acknowledges that gender relations have been an important context for the articulation of the sexual system, she argues that sex and gender are not synonymous, and hence the rubric of gender cannot account for sexuality in its entirety.
Queer Futures
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: “Queer may soon lose all affectivity as a word, a marker, or a threat (it may already have done so)”; “Queer politics may, by now, have outlived its political usefulness”.
This sense of queer theory’s built-in obsolescence might be read as evidence less of queer theory’s inevitable, decline than its transitory and always transformational potential. Indeed suspicion about the ongoing use of queer theory is a better measure of its viability than widespread institutionalization and normalization.
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