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). [21] Importantly, for Butler, because gender must be constantly reperformed, it can be intentionally or unintentionally troubled, revealing it as an ongoing project with no origin. Free shipping for many products! It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations-often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. same-sex marriage. (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? Queer theorists like Duggan and Puar are critical of assimilationist politics, but neither offers tangible suggestions for what a socially just and queer-inclusive world might look like. 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. First, a note on terminology. Working from classic texts of European and American writers . Epistemology of the Closet, published in 1990 in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, is a seminal work of queer studies by intellectual and activist Eve Sedgwick. References "Sedgwick is one of the smartest and wittiest critics writing. She went on to claim gay and lesbian sexualities should be understood and imagined as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses.[3] According to de Lauretis, and queer theorists more generally, lesbian and gay sexualities enact nonnormative intimate and social modes of relating; they put new things in the world, and those new things have transformative potential. David Halperin, a historian of classical Greek culture, provided volumes worth of historical evidence to support Foucaults more theoretical claims. Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following: It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, coining the terms "antihomophobic" and "homosocial." Show more Ratings Friends & Following A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. It is a starting point for first-year undergraduates (New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2014). Bornstein describes how she sees the future of gender. The editors are scholars and authors of Jewish studies, queer theory, and religious studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Sedgwick opens with some hard statistics on suicide rates, HIV/AIDS policy, homelessness rates, etc., that suggest that the world is hostile to queer people and concludes: "Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and 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. If thats Sedgwicks underlyinggoal then we see how it evolves and bolsters her teaching, her projects, her understanding of her own health and the survival of others around her. Munoz: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. This goal is worth quoting: I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged (5). Full video transcript available in the appendix. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical. 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! Lisa Duggan coined the term homonormativity to describe the activist work of groups like the HRC.[36]. He writes, The future is queernesss domain. Instead, we are all citing, at times contesting, at others complying with, existing ideas about gender and sexuality. According to Duggan, groups like the HRC represent the interests of white middle-class gay men whose privilege provides them cover to access social institutions and benefit from assimilation in ways unavailable or undesirable to other members of the LGBTQ+ community. In the last segment of her argument, Sedgwick meditates on political correctness and the origin of this term. 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. L. Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, in Stryker. [10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct. Importantly, Chambers-Letson does not see art and performance as able to fulfill the promise of revolutionary transformative change; instead, it is a site where possible worlds are imagined, but they must still be materially enacted.[44]. What is Carruthers referring to when she talks about telling more complete stories? Newton writes, The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that is, genital sex. La pareja, que recientemente cumpli ms de tres dcadas juntos, se film mientras llevaba a cabo una coreografa al ritmo de "Karma", la cancin de Taylor Swift que integra su ltimo lbum de estudio, Midnights, y que se rumorea que ser el prximo single de difusin del disco de la artista. Constructionists see identity as a sociocultural construct that changes. [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. Icon Books is licensed under a. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe viewing sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone, rather than focusing on homosexuals as a distinct group. [11] By demonstrating that heterosexuality, like homosexuality, is a modern invention, Katz seeks to strip the category of its normalizing power. Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. 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. Chapter 6: Prejudice and Discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, Sean G. Massey; Sarah R. Young; and Ann Merriwether, Thomas Lawrence Long; Christine Rodriguez; Marianne Snyder; and Ryan J. Watson, Chapter 8: LGBTQ+ Relationships and Families, Jennifer Miller; Maddison Lauren Simmons; Robert Bittner; Mycroft M. Roske; Cathy Corder; and Olivia Wood, Chapter 12: A Practical Guide for LGBTQ+ Studies, Appendix A: Judith Butler Video Transcription, Appendix B: Lukas Avendao: Reflections from muxeidad, Appendix C: In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm, Appendix D: What is a Fa'afafine Video Transcription, Appendix E: Queer Archaeology: Some Basics Video Transcription, Appendix G: Watch A Couple In Their 80s Get Married In Dallas County's First Same-Sex Ceremony Video Transcription, Appendix H: Care to the Trans- and Gender Non-Conforming Identified Patient Video Transcription. Is there a place for organizations like the HRC in queer politics? This idea, along with Muozs intersectionaltheorization of oppression and social transformation, resonates with many other queer theorists.[39]. You could not be signed in. 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. 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". The anthropologist David Valentine attributes the terms early emergence to activist communities in the United States and the United Kingdom, noting that it was seen as a way of organizing a politics of gender variance that differentiated it from homosexuality.[27]. Carruthers presents an intersectional analysis in the video. Uniformed Gender: Challenging the Social Constructs of a Subculture. Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that are produced by social structures of inequality. The U.S. militarys policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clintons administration. We cannot be and will not be denied that. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Foreword), Nancy K. Miller (Editor), Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Editor) 4.09. Furthermore, they argue that capitalism and militarism do harm and can only contingently benefit individual LGBTQ+ persons. Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins. What fears? Her purpose, moreover, in composing this article is to fight against the homogenizing effects of political correctness upon art and literature, which has threatened to ameliorate and obviate the multivalenced meaning of queerness. It does, however, have at its founding, and through the twists and turns of its development, an investment in radical social change tethered to a belief that, because gender, sexual, and other forms of social hierarchy are reproduced and regulated through discourse and social institutions, those institutions can and must be changed for the better. 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. Sedgwick's "Queer and Now": Queer Theory at its Mo More circles, More anxiety: An Exploration of Mich What is woman? InFemale Masculinity, Jack Halberstam continues the work of disentangling gender from genitals through a series of interpretive readings of literary, filmic, and historical representations (figure 1.6). [31] Feinberg experienced harassment and brutality at the hands of police, and the vivid descriptions of violence in the book illustrate the consequences of not embodying a socially sanctioned gender expression. Queer: A Graphic History, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele. Her research focuses on LGBTQ+ childrens literature and culture, digital culture, and sexual subcultures. Duggan and Puar are critical of activist initiatives that are based on inclusion into existing social institutions, because they see these institutions themselves as damaging. Just like his character in "Footloose," Kevin Bacon is taking a stand against a ban through dance. Jennifer Miller earned a PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. Lesbian and gay studies assumed clear subjects of analysislesbians and gayswho were studied as historical, cultural, or literary figures of significance to reclaim a forgotten past and create a sense of collective identity and continuity in the present. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. For Sedgwick, unlike Gothic literature that depicted the male hero as tenacious to the point of martyrdom, Victorian literature depicted the male hero as isolated, aloof, and defined by lack of desire. In this Lambda Literary Award finalist and Modern Language Associations Crompton-Noll Award winner for best essay in gay and lesbian studies, Stockton analyzes the embracing of shame among Black and queer people and the role of shame in fostering attraction, the arts, storytelling and recording of history, and camp (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). McRuer examines how dominant and marginal physical and sexual identities are constructed, and he demonstrates through popular culture, politics, and higher education how disabilities and queerness disrupt and transform those identities (New York: New York University Press, 2006). https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/app/uploads/sites/262/2022/03/Judith-Butler_-Your-Behavior-Creates-Your-Gender-Big-Think.mp4, https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/11/20/iconic-kate-bornstein-explains-gender-revolution, https://afropunk.com/2013/03/growing-up-queer-a-brief-lesson-on-hetero-and-homonormativity/, https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/app/uploads/sites/262/2022/03/Charlene-Carruthers-on-Black-Liberation-for-all-Black-People360p.mp4, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA, https://www.youtube.com/user/MyGenderation/videos, https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list, http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article04.html, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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. Gender Trouble was critiqued for ignoring the materiality of the body and real sex differences. Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that are produced by social structures of inequality. In this book he coins crip theory to describe the intersection of disability, gender, and sexuality and an interdisciplinary approach to critical disability theory, which encompasses queer theory. 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. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. 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. In other words, much as Newton observes about drag performances of femininity, anybody can put on a gender expression. Through this blog, I will be exploring issues of sex, gender, and embodiment through the lens of queer theory. Clearly a social constructionist, Butler emphasizes that she considers gender an important site of freedom and pleasure. 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. My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity, by Kate Bornstein. What connections between the two do you find? 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. Sedgwicks deconstructivist approach shows us that any social binary that defines subjects in society (especially the binary of heterosexual/homosexual) is not a relation of symmetry between two terms. It begins by elaborating on distinctions between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies before identifying important trends in queer theory. By evoking the images of the countless teenagers who commit suicide each year due to the manner in which society condemns their identity, the individuals for whom Christmas -a holiday itself constituted in the image of the family- is a time of exclusion from a grand sense of unity rather than a source of joy, and the people who struggle to hold onto life in the face of physically devastating illnesses while simultaneously having death wished upon them from members of society who regard them as filth, Sedgwick ensures her readers never lose sight of the tangible stakes of her argument (6) As the introduction comes to a close, her meditation on the anti-intellectualism of our age made me realize just how much her ideas affect my own life in ways I never had realized. performativity. An academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. In the second chapter, Sedgwick turns to the figure of Claggart, a gay policeman on a ship in Melvilles Billy Budd. The majority of entries will be based on literature and works of literary criticism I am currently reading for ENG 480: History of Western Literary Criticism, an English class I am taking at Michigan State University this fall. Email: lothian at iup dot edu. 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. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. Gay people know that sex-typed behavior can be achieved, contrary to what is popularly believed. Queer theory is flexible enough to account for differences of race, class, gender, and nation, although it does not always do so. In the late 1990s, several critics took the opportunity to reflect on the relations between feminism, lesbian studies and queer theory. Additionally, as of June 26, 2015, same-sex marriageis legal in the United States. He identifies major contributors to a canon of works that built up the theory. In Queer and Now Sedgwick manages to accomplish something none of the philosophers we have studied thus far have rigorously attempted. However, the aspect of this assertion I find truly alarming is the hint Sedgwick provides that this covertly hateful discourse is ingrained within and acting upon the universities of our nation, institutions which are supposed to serve as safe havens for all ideas with academic merit regardless of their political capital. [6] Of course, this very critical, very radical relationship to the normative appears in times before the late 1980s and in places other than the United States, but it is then and there that queer activism and queer theory are named and begin to be, however hesitantly, defined. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. [32] Bornstein writes, I identify as neither male nor female, and now that my lover is going through his gender change, it turns out Im neither straight nor gay.[33] She matter-of-factly expresses her feelings of shame at not fitting into normative gender identities and a corresponding sense of relief with intellectual work coming out in the 1990s that made it possible to understand gender as a social construct.[34]. 2006). What was Foucaults personal background, and how do you imagine it might have influenced his academic career? [22] This is likely reminiscent of Fausto-Sterlings provocation that there are five discernible sexes. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. Visit the website of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC; https://www.hrc.org/), and explore. Although inclusion in these institutions is contingent, precarious, and not evenly distributed among all members of the LGBTQ+ community, these two shifts in policy secured access and rights for some LGBTQ+ personsspecifically, white middle-class gay men for whom marriage equality has often been a primary political concern. 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. Gender always reveals the preference to heterosexual because the social institution makes gendershow more content Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Personal web page Butler names institutional powers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, and informal practices, like bullying, that try to keep us in our place. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid increase in lesbian and gay activism and scholarship. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.4 Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.5. Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. "Queer and Now." It explains why she so adamantly defends close readings, queer interpretations, formalist inquiry, and a deep plumbingof difficult texts. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, by Viviane K. Namaste. For Butler, gender is established as consistent and cohesive through its repeated performance. What examples of different kinds of behavior help you understand that difference? Her work aims to create young leaders in marginalized communities to fight for community interests and liberation. drag. It is also a very autobiographical and personal essay. Is it the homo/heterosexual binary that Sedgwick engages in such depth in Axiomatic? In other words, what becomes tied to heteronormativity is not femininity but masculinity, and homophobic dynamics are doubled by patriarchal relations of power. The word politics and its many variations have come to signify dishonesty and ruthless self-interest within our culture, immediately evoking a sense of distrust in many Americans. John DEmilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. I am curious to know what you understand the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be queer to be. The desire for radical social change that is central to the queer theoretical project is discussed further in the next section. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images. T. de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, in special issue, L. Duggan, Making It Perfectly Queer, in, J. DEmilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity, in, J. Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality,, G. Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes, Revisited,, S. Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies, in. She notes that although it became standard to refer to lesbiansandgays in the 1980s, the and obscured differences instead of revealing them. 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. Judith ButlersGender Trouble, originally published in 1990, introduces the term performativity to suggest that gender identity is not natural and does not emanate from an essential truth that can be located on or in the body (figure 1.5). 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). The marriage of two people of the same sex or gender in a civil or religious ceremony. 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. 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). Both Rubins work and Fausto-Sterlings early work leave a nature-nurture binary in place and suggest that sex correlates with nature and gender correlates with nurture. At roughly the same time, the term queer theory began to circulate and quickly gained momentum within academic circles. The influential transgender activist Riki Wilchins wrote this classic work to make queer theory and gender theory accessible to a nonacademic audience. First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. The group was founded by veterans from ACT UP, and the groups activism enacted and enabled queer theory. It works for legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, such as promoting legislation to prevent discrimination and hate crimes. Most often someone who identifies as a man who behaves in an exaggerated performance of femininity. Sedgwick's "Queer and Now": Queer Theory at its Most Tangible In "Queer and Now" Sedgwick manages to accomplish something none of the philosophers we have studied thus far have rigorously attempted. Her work aims to create young leaders in marginalized communities to fight for community interests and liberation. 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. A video from the School of Life series discusses Michel Foucault, a philosopher of history who explored different institutionsmedicine, crime and punishment, and homosexualitywith the goal of radically disrupting our understanding of them (https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU). Your email address will not be published. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol wowed President Joe Biden and the crowd at a White House state dinner on Wednesday night by breaking out into song. neoliberalism. When she presents her listing of what constitutes a family (6), she makes the argument that the bonds of blood, law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor should be disengaged from their lockstep of their uninanity on the system called the family, an idea that logically would benefit anyone regardless of sexual preference. Please check your email address / username and password and try again. Jack Halberstam. This is similar to Newtons observation of drag, particularly her suggestion that drag reveals gender as a performance. What are the key events that Ford identifies as defining the broad outlines of the history of the word. This site uses cookies. This is the position Sedgwick takes in her book when she claims that sexual definition is central to social organization and identity formation. [30] Feinbergs 1993 publication,Stone Butch Blues, is a fictionalized personal account of negotiating New York City as a butch lesbian in the 1970s. Office hours by appointment. Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. universalizing. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture.
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