In the third chapter, Sedgwick underscores the way in which homophobic anxieties have come to be embedded at the heart of heterosexual identity during the end of the 1800s and through the work of Wilde and Nietzsche. Kate Bornstein is a famous author, playwright, performance artist, actress, and gender theorist. 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. Has someone you know had their gender presentation challenged or censored? His essay is included in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by M. Hames-Garca and E. J. Martnez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1945, which won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. Human Rights Campaign. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. The Normalization of Queer Theory, by David Halperin. The "Mystic River" star posted a video on Sunday to TikTok in which he and his wife, actor Kyra Sedgwick, dance to Taylor Swift's "Karma" wearing matching T-shirts. She was 58. De Lauretis claimed that differences were collapsed within lesbian and gay studies and the experience of white middle-class gay men was privileged. Other videos by the same essayist are at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. The queer feminist science scholar Anne Fausto-Sterlings early 1990s work on intersex categories contends that although social institutions are invested in maintaining a dyadic sex system, this system does not map onto nature (figure 1.4). During this interrogation, Billy finds himself speechless and in a moment of paralysis lashes out at Claggart and inadvertently kills him. On Writing Since Queer Theory, the reader is confronted, not only with a summary of their project, but also with a rather profound elucidation of the competing, disparate voices that claim to speak for and about the movement. universalizing. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid increase in lesbian and gay activism and scholarship. For Sedgwick, the connection of Melvilles story to homosexual life is that it is constitutive of heteronormative masculinity and heteronormative male-male relations. My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity, by Kate Bornstein. The minoritizing view sees homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. What evidence does each perspective use to support its argument? They build on what has come before, reflect on it, challenge it, seek to bend or break it, and only eventually, and only sometimes, become an identifiable entity with a name given to them. According to Nguyen, this reinvention of the term bottom has the potential to interrupt, disrupt, and transform sexual, gender, and racial norms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). A political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government. Eve Sedgwick, a literary theorist, continues the project of troubling both homosexuality and heterosexuality in her 1990 publicationEpistemology of the Closet, which is widely recognized as a foundational queer theory text (figure 1.2). [41] Even more, her vision of activism decenters queerness; she demands that multiple types of oppression, types that will not be experienced the same way or even at all by the entire LGBTQ+ community, must be acknowledged to imagine and enact a truly transformed, justice-oriented social world. Which perspective views identity as fixed, or innate, and which perspective argues that identity is produced through social processes? Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Fat Art/Thin Art (Duke, 1994); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990). In her introduction to the text, Sedgwick treats the topic of "homosexual panic" as a way of introducing the main themes of the book. Foucault Home Page [At CSUN] Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. Although Rubins work is very influential in feminist and queer theory, one of her basic assumptions, that sex is raw material and thus lacks the influence of social norms, has been challenged by other queer theorists. Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics, by Urvashi Vaid. Her work aims to create young leaders in marginalized communities to fight for community interests and liberation. Butler names institutional powers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, and informal practices, like bullying, that try to keep us in our place. However, whereas queer theory is sometimes guilty of the privileging of homosexual ways of differing from heterosexual norms, transgender studies challenges naturalized links between the material body, psychic structures, and gendered social roles. Queer critics of the HRC maintain that the organization has a limited vision of human rights, is procapitalist, and supports bills that fail to include transgender personsfor example, the proposed 2007 Employment Non-discrimination Act. The marriage of two people of the same sex or gender in a civil or religious ceremony. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity, by Paul Fry. What examples of different kinds of behavior help you understand that difference? Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. Additionally, as of June 26, 2015, same-sex marriageis legal in the United States. "Universally cited as the text that ignited gay studies," according to Rolling Stone magazine, and as "in many ways the book that turned queer theory from a latent to a manifest discipline," the symposium features a series of short papers engaging with the text, its reception, and its relevance to the evolving field of queer studies. 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. David Halperin traces the origin of the term queer theory to Teresa de Lauretis in 1990 in this 2003 article in the Journal of Homosexuality (volume 45, numbers 24; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory). This article outlines why there exist important opportunities to think through what research on African urban sexualitiesand specifically non-heteronormative sexualitiesmay mean moving forward. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.4 Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.5. According to Sedgwick, homosexual and heterosexual definition is central to the construction of the modern nation-state, because it informs modern modes of population management. Tan Hoang Nguyen reassesses male effeminacy and how it is racialized in cinema, art, and pornography. Then, in 1987, Larry Kramer, Vito Russo, and others founded the direct-action group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to demand that politicians, the medical community, drug manufacturers, and the public acknowledge the AIDS epidemic. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. People hate politics. And oh yea, by the way, its all pretty queer. In her introduction to the special issue, de Lauretis outlines the central features of queer theory, sketching the field in broad strokes that have held up remarkably well.[2]. In a follow-up publication, Butler argues that sex is a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system. Butler states that there is a difference between saying that gender is performed as opposed to saying gender is performative. L. Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, in Stryker. Sedgwick's optimism was far from nave; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which. Work like this and work published by other trans scholars demonstrates the importance of thinking gender and sexuality queerly. Bacon expounded on the topic in the caption, urging his fans to support the ACLU's Drag Defense Fund going after anti-drag bills being passed throughout the U.S. "Drag bans are bad karma. Academics and activists use the term to discuss attempts by LGBTQ+ persons to assimilate into institutions like marriage and the military that reproduce hierarchy and are associated with oppression. In exploring the definition of the designation queer and the various interpretations of political concerns of this classification, she gives readers a glimpse into the lives of those who struggle daily with the issues we have spoken about in class. By looking back at the text Queer Visibilities that largely focused on articulating some of the relationships between the urban and sexuality over a decade ago in Cape Town, this article suggests . It is an ambitious essaydivided into short sections that cover topics rangingfrom high suicide rates amonggay, lesbian, and queer adolescents; the relationship between rhetoric supporting the concealment and/or extinction of gay or queer identifying individuals and the policies of institutions and social systems; the threats directed at queer lives (esp. Full video transcript available in the appendix. The group was founded by veterans from ACT UP, and the groups activism enacted and enabled queer theory. [22] This is likely reminiscent of Fausto-Sterlings provocation that there are five discernible sexes. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. [30] Feinbergs 1993 publication,Stone Butch Blues, is a fictionalized personal account of negotiating New York City as a butch lesbian in the 1970s. Jos Esteban Muozs hope-affirming work claims the future for queers (figure 1.7). The play of her mind as it goes from Henry James to John Waters and Divine, from AIDS to Jane Austen and women's anal eroticism, is dazzling. (LogOut/ Assistant Professor of English, IUP. Summary. Rodrguez is also author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Hames-Garca is the first to identify two schools of queer theory: the separatist, which keeps race, class, and gender outside descriptions of sexuality, and the integrationist, which blurs these categories and may abandon the concept of identity altogether. Halberstam (Shoemaker). Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is also the author of the influential Thats Revolting! 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. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading . Academics and activists use the term to discuss attempts by LGBTQ+ persons to assimilate into institutions like marriage and the military that reproduce hierarchy and are associated with oppression. She introduces a Black queer feminist lens, which she describes as a lens through which people and groups see to bring their full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression.[40] Whereas libertarian, conservative, and even liberal lesbian and gay groups seek to diminish the importance of sexual (and other) differences, Carruthers suggests that bringing a Black queer feminist lens to political thought and praxis renounces the middle-class notion of the public sphere as a place where identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality. He writes, The future is queernesss domain. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. How does your history with the word relate to the broader history described by Ford in the video? This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. She suggests that the deviancy and abjection previously associated with gay and lesbian sexualities is redirected to brown Muslim bodies and instrumentalized to justify the war on terror. By David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz, WHATS QUEER ABOUT QUEER STUDIES NOW? Robert McRuer is one of the founders of queer disability studies and a major contributor to the fields of transnational queer theory and disability theory. What connections between the two do you find? Clearly a social constructionist, Butler emphasizes that she considers gender an important site of freedom and pleasure. Queer Theory Reading List, from Brown University. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). Please try again. What are the differences between essentialist and constructionist theories of identity? Do you see progress or instead a lack of spontaneity and imagination in the way the West has treated people with mental health issues, criminals, and homosexuals? It explains the problematic and complicated histories of library classification of queer texts and includes an excellent bibliography of queer theorists. However, according to Puar, This benevolence towards sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity, and bodily integrity.[37] Puar further argues that welcoming some queers into national life requires queerness to be projected onto other bodies. Also like Rubin, her intellectual investments and theoretical findings were harbingers of things to come. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for ***Queer Eye For The Straight Guy*** Music From CD at the best online prices at eBay! Halberstam argues that female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity.[24] In other words, women and especially lesbians who are masculine reveal masculinity as a construct, in much the same way that drag queen performances reveal femininity as a construct. The film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (figure 1.1) coined the term at a University of California, Santa Cruz, conference about lesbian and gay sexualities in February 1990. This 2005 article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (volume 31, number 1; https://doi.org/10.1086/432743) covers the history of queer theory and gives an overview of its origins. 1993. Instead, queer theory and activism demand publicness, reject civility, and challenge the legitimacy, naturalness, and intrinsic value of institutionswhether marriage or the militarythat regulate gender and sexuality. discourses. Queer Theory Revisited, by Michael Hames-Garca. Geographer Michael Brown has criticized Sedgwick's 'closet' as a term for spatial metaphor. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.[38] For Muoz, conditions of everyday life are simply not viable for queer people of color, which prompts many to imagine a transformed world. essentialist. At the end of the 14 . Figure 1.1. What do we mean when we talk about gender performativity and the implications of the constructionist turn? Queer Theory followed the emergence and popularity of Gay and Lesbian (now, LGBT or Queer) Studies in the academy. 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/). The gorgeous narrative work done by the Foucauldian paranoid, transforming the simultaneous chaoses of institutions into a consecutive, drop-dead-elegantdiagramofspirallingescapesandrecaptures,isalsothe paranoid subjects proer of himself and his cognitive talent, now ready for anything itcan present in the way of blandishment or violence, to an For him, experiencing performance allows audiences to rehearse new ways of seeing and being in the world together, which is why he emphasizes the importance of art and music. All rights reserved. Chapter-by-chapter summaries and multiple sections of expert analysis, The ultimate resource for assignments, engaging lessons, and lively book discussions. 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. Many queer theorists and activists are concerned that emphasizing single issues (marriage or the military) and centering LGBTQ+ politics on inclusion into existing institutions diminishes the radical potential of queer thought and action. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. I am reminded of lesbians in the 1950s and '60s hiding lesbian pulp fiction under their mattresses, skipping over the homophobia to marvel at the idea that women like them existed somewhere out there (Greenwich Village . 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. This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Other queer theorists, particularly queer of color theorists, are doing the important work of imagining politics and society radically differently. Foucault, Halperin, DEmilio, and Katz contribute to a critical understanding of the social construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Its a pretty amazing mission statement one that accounts for the individuality and personal history of active resistance and struggle, one that is less invested in sayingwe need to do this because X, but more like we owe it to ourselves to give ourselves and others the choices we always knew where there but seemed out of reach somewhow, we need to make our stories and selves known and heard, we need to refuse being repressed and silenced, we need to do what we can to assert ourselves and fight those powers that would have us destroyed or erased. Sexuality, Race and Space: Queer Literary and Cultural Theory, Week 3: Theorizing Queer through Transnational Women of Color Feminisms, Berlant and Warner Sex in Public (Shoemaker), Judith Butlers Critically Queer (Jacoby), Summary of The Introduction to Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? In her introduction to the text, Sedgwick treats the topic of homosexual panic as a way of introducing the main themes of the book. She tells us what her current life is like as someone fighting cancer and as an academic working in a field that has an overt political goal. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.7. "Queer and Now", Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Most often someone who identifies as a man who behaves in an exaggerated performance of femininity. Continuing the analysis of the previous chapter, Victorian and Gothic literature marked another shift in what came to define the heterosexual/homosexual binary. She argues that sex exists as a spectrum between female and male with a minimum of five distinct categories. Her works reflect an interest in queer performativity, experimental critical writing, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Required fields are marked *. Heterosexual men are compelled to continuously police their desires and the desires of others even to the extent of unfounded suspicion that verges on madness, as depicted in Billys murder of Claggart. Is it the homo/heterosexual binary that Sedgwick engages in such depth in Axiomatic? 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. While Claggart is tasked with the maintenance of order on the ship, it is these mutinies that add to Billys suspicion regarding Claggarts moral characterBillys first impression of Claggart is that he was impossible to read. Through this blog, I will be exploring issues of sex, gender, and embodiment through the lens of queer theory. Search for other works by this author on: This content is made freely available by the publisher. minoritizing. "Queer and Now." Also known as Judith Halberstam, a gender and queer theorist and author, perhaps best known for work on tomboys and female masculinity. Such a story is relevant for Sedgwicks investigations precisely because the stereotype of opacity and secrecy in homosexual identity and desire is heighted by Claggarts status as a policeman and by the background events of recent mutinies on other ships. The universalizing view, in contrast, sees sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone. Bornstein describes how she sees the future of gender. Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay, by Sharon Marcus. Brown has also questioned the limits of 'the closet' as "a mechanism for understanding the dynamics of queer visibilities in national contexts where the homo/hetero binary is not the primary means of understanding sexualities". This frequently cited essay challenges queer theorists to apply the theory to address the oppression, policing, and marginalization of people of color, the poor, and the colonized. His bookDisidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics(1999) uses performance studies to investigate the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color. How would you respond to that challenge today? A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe the view of homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. It is a much newer theory, in that it was established in the 1990s, and contests many of the set ideas of the more established fields it comes from by challenging the notion of . From a historiographical perspective, Sedgwicks piece is seminal and inspiring. Carruthers states that unless we move the margins into the center, none of us will be free. What does she mean by that statement? 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. [9] Halperin argues that using modern identity frameworks to understand culturally and historically specific expressions of desire is poor scholarship. (LogOut/ For Foucault, Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. The struggle for queer liberation, not limited to marriage equality, is a fight that the majority population would not fight for us and with us. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Class meets Monday-Thursday 3.30-5.40pm in McIlhenny 205. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, by Tan Hoang Nguyen. Sedgwick ends her introduction on the note that , It is possible, and quite likely, that this portion of this article hit home for me because I am currently reading Homers. He identifies major contributors to a canon of works that built up the theory. What issues and whose interests does the HRC most seem to represent? performativity. John DEmilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Vintage KANSAS Coliseum Sedgwick County Brass Buckle Limited Edition 1978 at the best online prices at eBay! 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. Though I am not nave enough to have come into this class with no understanding of the political roots of Queer Theory, when working through dense and highly theoretical language it is remarkably easy to forget these issues affect all peoples daily lives, and impact many individuals in dramatic and heartbreaking ways. In After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, Joshua Chambers-Letson explores the affect music and art can have on audiences in an attempt to theorize the conditions necessary to envision collective change. [4] In addition to sexuality, de Lauretis hoped queer theory would identify and trouble other constructed silencesfor instance, those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. By refusing to accept that there is a right way to be transgender and encouraging coalition building under the newly flexible term transgender, Feinberg hoped transgender persons could build a transformative activism-oriented community. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. This is our fight, and even if we are a small population, our fight is rooted in democratic values and human rights, the right to life and dignity. The significance of this legal trial, says Sedgwick, is that it reveals that the secrecy and disclosure of ones homosexual orientation constituted a situation whereby remaining in the closet allowed for Acanforas employment and ability to earn a living while his coming out gave the Board of Education the legal means of barring Acanforas access to continue teaching in the classroomfor no other reason than his homosexuality becoming a piece of public knowledge.

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