Thinking Activity:Queer Theory

Queer Theory

👉Definition

Queer theory is a term that emerged in the late 1980s for a body of criticism on issues of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity that came out of gay and lesbian scholarship in such fields as literary criticism, politics, sociology, and history. Queer theory rejects essentialism in favor of social construction; it breaks down binary oppositions such as “gay” or “straight”; while it follows those postmodernists who declared the death of the self, it simultaneously attempts to rehabilitate a subjectivity that allows for sexual and political agency. Some of the most significant authors associated with queer theory include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Wayne Koestenbaum."

              - From the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, in Credo Reference

👉Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Queer Theory followed the emergence and popularity of Gay and Lesbian (now, LGBT or Queer) Studies in the academy. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable identities, Queer Theory problematizes and challenges rigid identity categories, norms of sexuality and gender and the oppression and violence that such hegemonic norms justify. Queer Theory destabilizes sexual and gender identities allowing and encouraging multiple, unfettered interpretations of cultural phenomena. It predicates that all sexual behaviors and gender expressions, all concepts linking such to prescribed, associated identities, and their categorization into “normal” or “deviant” sexualities or gender, are constructed socially and generate modes of social meaning. Queer theory follows and expands upon feminist theory by refusing the belief that sexuality and gender identity are essentialist categories determined by biology that can thus be empirically judged by fixed standards of morality and “truth.” 

👉Seminal Writers and their works

•  Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), described the categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behavior that he or she proceeds to enact.
• “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 1977, reprinted in Within the Circle: 
• An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, 1994;
•  and Ann Allen Stickley, “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” in Conditions: Five Two, 1979.

👉Examples 

Orlano by Virginia Woolf

“Much preferring my own sex, as I do,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter to a friend in the 1920s, “[I] intend to cultivate women’s society entirely in the future. Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent dusk.” As her exquisite love letters to and from Vita Sackville-West tell us, Woolf made good on her intention — but nowhere does her lesbian sensibility come more vibrantly alive than in her novel Orlando: A Biography.

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando is a masterpiece of modernist queer fiction. Chronicling the life of the titular protagonist, who changes sex from male to female and lives for over 400 years, the novel is both a satire of English historiography and a love letter to Woolf's partner, friend and muse, Vita Sackville-West

Both women were married to respectable men of financial means – Virginia to the publisher and author Leonard Woolf, Vita to the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson. Though both had open marriages, which allowed them to conduct relationships with both men and women of the unconventional, forward-thinking Bloomsbury Set, such affairs had to be conducted behind the veneer of respectable marriage, and the relationships couldn't be made public.