[5] She wanted to break with the past and transform the future by developing new ways of conceptualizing sexual identities in the present of the 1990s. In other words, heterosexuality secured its non-homosexual status precisely by rejecting occasions for desire, relation, or attachment to take hold. This can have its usesfor instance, in creating a discernible community able to make demands of the state, as seen in the homophile movement as well as in current gay (and lesbian) rights activism. [9] Halperin argues that using modern identity frameworks to understand culturally and historically specific expressions of desire is poor scholarship. However, perhaps her discussion of her struggle with breast cancer and how it affects her gender and sexual identity, a necessary and poignant tale in itself, may have been better developed and resonated in a separate memoir-centered piece in Tendencies. minoritizing. ContraPoints is an irreverent video essayist who explores gender identity and queer theory while using her extensive background in academic philosophy. And if youre afraid that going PC is going to bring some kind of doctrine to you or warp what you believe in, youre already stuck in a position of not realizing how queeryou and everything else has always-alreadybeen. You could not be signed in. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. This living list of queer scholarship includes many important intersectional texts (https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list). Gender is definitionally built into homosexuality, but sexuality represents beyond gender and reproduction. [16] Like Rubin, Fausto-Sterlings early provocation about sex categories sees sex as biological, natural, and unchangeable; it is raw material that culture transforms into gender. For queers invested in transformative justice-oriented politics, the assimilationiststrategies employed by liberal LGBTQ+ organizations typified by the HRC stand in the way of meaningful social change. Yes, Dr. Lothian, thats how Im defining the term as I come to understand it! Foucaults work influenced a new wave of historians committed to studying the construction of modern homosexuality. De Lauretis suggested gay and lesbian sexualities should be studied, not as deviations of heterosexuality, but on their own terms. It seems to me that she is carving out a way to put everything on the table, to say, ok heres what were up against, heres what Im up against, heres what I can do, heres what I am doing, heres what we need to do, heres what we need fewer people to do, heres what people have always been doing. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. Sexual practices have existed in multiple forms across time and space, but only in particular moments do practices congeal into identities that can be named and managed. The reception of Ancient Greek art during the Romantic period, says Sedgwick, was significant insofar as it served as the occasion for a general societal acceptance of unphobic enjoyment of the male figure. References According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. universalizing. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton. neoliberalism. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity, by Paul Fry. From its earliest iterations, queer theory challenged norms that reproduced inequalities and, at its best, sought to understand how sexuality intersected with gender, race, class, and other social identities to maintain social hierarchies. The capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.[8] By rejecting the idea that something called sexuality exists in all of us, waiting to be liberated, Foucaults work challenged not only how sexuality was understood in popular and scholarly discourses but also how power was understood. Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought Resources. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. Jennifer Miller earned a PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. We cannot be and will not be denied that. Because queer theory focuses on the interruption, disruption, and decentering of whiteness and on patriarchy, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity, this is a must read (New York: New York University Press, 2017). According to Sedgwick, both Wilde and Nietzsche undertake a revaluation of the status of heterosexual masculinity in light of the German and English attitudes toward Ancient Greek art. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks article, Queer and Now, collected in her book Tendencies (Routledge 1994), challenges the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be queer, i.e., not part of a binaried heteronormative coupling in early 1990s America. Refers to the performance of femininity or masculinity, and is most frequently used to describe the performance of gender expressions that differ from those associated with the performers natal sex assignment. [12] For Sedgwick, the history of homosexuality is not a minority historyit is the history of modern Western culture. discourses. A strategy or one who enacts such strategy to gain access to, or assimilate into, existing social structures, like monogamous marriage or serving in the U.S. military. Part V: Relationships, Families, and Youth, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. On page 8 of Queer and Now, I appreciate when Sedgwick opens the definition of queer to virtually endless permutations that not only incorporate but also contradict, overlap, and redefine any reductive homo/heterosexual binaries that have been filtered through a heteronormative societal lens. She is an independent scholar and high school teacher. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical. His project explores the ways minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of being in the world.[43]. De Lauretis claimed that differences were collapsed within lesbian and gay studies and the experience of white middle-class gay men was privileged. This book won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize presented by the Gay Lesbian Queer Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Studies Award. Summary. In other words, what becomes tied to heteronormativity is not femininity but masculinity, and homophobic dynamics are doubled by patriarchal relations of power. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.3. Lesbian and gay studies courses began to appear in the 1970s, and programs slowly emerged in the 1980s. Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. He suggests that creative work can expand imaginative possibilities and prompt new modes of being together in the world. Additionally, when she proceeds to list the elements that supposedly compose ones sexual identity circa 1991 (7), she deftly points out that this groupings attempts at unifying the differences inherent in different peoples sexual identities into a seamless and univocal whole (8) is an impossible task, but hope exists in the fact that the idea of queer opens up a world of endless possibilities and contradictions for defining and understanding ones self. What do we mean when we talk about intersectional analyses, and how have they contributed to queer theory? When Sedgwick arrived at Cornell in 1967, she had yet to make her mark on the literary world. He writes, The future is queernesss domain. In the last segment of her argument, Sedgwick meditates on political correctness and the origin of this term. Icon Books is licensed under a. Your email address will not be published. Meg-John Barker, an academic and activist, teamed up with the cartoonist Jules Scheele in this nonfiction graphic novel to illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action (London: Icon Books, 2016). Following the Stonewall rebellion, lesbian and gay liberation groups started to fight for equal rights, and some scholars started to study the history and culture of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. In an article for Afropunk, Growing Up Queer: A Brief Lesson on Hetero- and Homonormativity, Justin Allen talks about the social consequences of heteronormativity (https://afropunk.com/2013/03/growing-up-queer-a-brief-lesson-on-hetero-and-homonormativity/). Lisa Duggan coined the term homonormativity to describe the activist work of groups like the HRC.[36]. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.7. "Queer" seems to hinge much more radically andexplicitly on a person's undertaking particular, performative acts ofexperimental self-perception and filiation. Over the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. (T. Kirk), Kranidis-The Relevance of Race for Study of Sexuality, In a Queer Time and Place/Brandon Archive (Warmington), T. Kirk Whats That Smell? What was Foucaults personal background, and how do you imagine it might have influenced his academic career? Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. The story of queer theorys emergence is entwined with queer activism. The recent inclusion of cultural capital into the English Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (2019) caused a ripple of discontent within some educational circles, with some suggesting it is indi. Through this blog, I will be exploring issues of sex, gender, and embodiment through the lens of queer theory. Those identified as homosexual in medical discourse appropriated the discourse to revise what the category might mean, identify one another, build a community, and make political demands. To assert that identities are sociocultural constructs assumes that in different times and places different meanings and values dominate and influence identity. Malik Gaines expands on Butlers theory of performativity by depicting how artists, musicians, playwrights, and actors perform race, Black political ideas, and resistance politics to disrupt mainstream views of race, gender, and sexuality. Eve Sedgwicks Queer and Now, a synthesis of excerpts from several other pieces,was first published in 1993 and reprinted in the 2013 Queer Studies Reader. As the essays in what is now Reading Sedgwick have gone through their final revisions, they honor the occasion of Eve's life and work by moving the . In Chapter 5, Sedgwick orients the reader toward the other side of the spectrum and focuses her reading of Prousts work on the two queer characters in the novel In Search of Lost Time. homophile movement. Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Uniformed Gender: Challenging the Social Constructs of a Subculture. Dont Ask, Dont Tell. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic.

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