In a video in the InQueery series by them, Tyler Ford explains the history behind the word queer (https://youtu.be/UpE0u9Dx_24). Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's 'Queer and Now' essay in Tendencies. Sedgwick focuses on Claggarts relation to Billy and the ship captain, Vere, in order to interrogate the relation of suspicion and hostility that characterizes Billys disposition toward Claggart. The marriage of two people of the same sex or gender in a civil or religious ceremony. Foucault, Halperin, DEmilio, and Katz contribute to a critical understanding of the social construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Sedgwick opens this chapter by recounting the legal case of an eighth grade science teacher named Acanfora who was removed from his teaching position once the school board found out that he had been part of a pro-homosexual student group during his college years. In more practical terms, this means that the act of identifying homosexuality and homosexual life as other has subordinated it to and coerced it into navigating a world that has been organized to favor heterosexual individuals. [11] By demonstrating that heterosexuality, like homosexuality, is a modern invention, Katz seeks to strip the category of its normalizing power. 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. Continuing the analysis of the previous chapter, Victorian and Gothic literature marked another shift in what came to define the heterosexual/homosexual binary. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization. Uniformed Gender: Challenging the Social Constructs of a Subculture. What evidence does each perspective use to support its argument? 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). [12] For Sedgwick, the history of homosexuality is not a minority historyit is the history of modern Western culture. Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics, by Urvashi Vaid. This idea, along with Muozs intersectionaltheorization of oppression and social transformation, resonates with many other queer theorists.[39]. homonormativity. Allen Synthesis Two: Thoughts on Place, Space, and Change, Birth in the Closet-Synthesis #3 (Hummel), Hummel Synthesis #2:Re-vising the Suburbs: A Tale of Whoa, Synthesis #1: Freakin at the Freakers Ball: Halloween in the Castro, a Love Story, #3 Henry David Hwangs Queer Diaspora in M. Butterfly. 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. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. Dont Ask, Dont Tell. The desire for radical social change that is central to the queer theoretical project is discussed further in the next section. Jos Esteban Muoz. Fausto-Sterling introduces the terms herms, ferms, and merms to categorize anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal differences that fall outside a male-female sex dyad. Queer theory is flexible enough to account for differences of race, class, gender, and nation, although it does not always do so. You do not currently have access to this chapter. This site uses cookies. 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. Detailed in a text by the same name published in 1990, the phrase refers to the ways contemporary Western thought and culture is fundamentally shaped by the category of homo/heterosexuality. In the introduction, Sedgwick presents axioms - "assumptions and conclusions from a long-term project of anti-homophobic analysis" - that inform her book's project. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading . 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. However, as a consequence, new lines and divisions were drawn between heterosexual and homosexual life, and heterosexuality was able to secure its non-homosexual status through measured displays of affection or sentimentality. What issues and whose interests does the HRC most seem to represent? universalizing. An academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Gallop, Jane at the best online prices at eBay! 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. 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. "Sedgwick is one of the smartest and wittiest critics writing. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins. sex-gender system. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity, by Paul Fry. Icon Books is licensed under a. Charlene Carruthers (figure 1.8) describes the Black queer feminist lens in this video. [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]. Judith Halberstam, Whats That Smell? This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.2. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is also the author of the influential Thats Revolting! 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. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. 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.". [10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct. Queer Theory Reading List, from Brown University. De Lauretis suggested gay and lesbian sexualities should be studied, not as deviations of heterosexuality, but on their own terms. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. She is an independent scholar and high school teacher. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. The U.S. militarys policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clintons administration. Clearly a social constructionist, Butler emphasizes that she considers gender an important site of freedom and pleasure. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. 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. Butler names institutional powers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, and informal practices, like bullying, that try to keep us in our place. "Sedgwick is one of the smartest and wittiest critics writing. Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images. A phrase coined by Gayle Rubin to describe the social apparatus that oppresses women. Gender always reveals the preference to heterosexual because the social institution makes gendershow more content In Queer and Now Sedgwick manages to accomplish something none of the philosophers we have studied thus far have rigorously attempted. [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. InCruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muoz explores the critical imagination, which he refers to as transformative thought that can prompt and shape social change. Sedgwick argues that by the twentieth century, in Western culture, every person was assigned a sexual identity. Sedgwick argues that this reparative reading has been a strategy of queer and other marginalized groups for millennia. 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]. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. 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 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). 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? Was there any way for the person to resist that challenge? David Halperin, a historian of classical Greek culture, provided volumes worth of historical evidence to support Foucaults more theoretical claims. Work like this and work published by other trans scholars demonstrates the importance of thinking gender and sexuality queerly. Additionally, both queer theory and activism introduced ways of thinking and acting through politics that went beyond normalizing demands for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in existing social institutions. The text is a progression of the analysis in Sedgwicks previous work on homosocial relationships, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. A look back at the undergraduate years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, '71, a founder of queer theory, reveals a unique glimpse of where that shock wave first began. Yes, Dr. Lothian, thats how Im defining the term as I come to understand it! 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. 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. Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought Resources. And if you disagree with this idea, explain why you do not see an important difference between the two. 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. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Class meets Monday-Thursday 3.30-5.40pm in McIlhenny 205. Butler states that there is a difference between saying that gender is performed as opposed to saying gender is performative. In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature. Free shipping for many products! Kate Bornstein is a famous author, playwright, performance artist, actress, and gender theorist. Abstract Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept, the epistemology of the closet, is a foundational contribution to the field of queer theory. For Butler, gender is established as consistent and cohesive through its repeated performance. Designating theoretical perspectives which contradict their own beliefs under this terminology is brilliant to say the least. For example, she says, You cannot talk about racial justice without talking about economic justice. Describe and define more fully Carrutherss intersectional analysis, and be sure to cite specific statements she makes in the video as evidence. Your email address will not be published. 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. John DEmilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. Why or why not? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). Part V: Relationships, Families, and Youth, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. Constructionists see identity as a sociocultural construct that changes. Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. 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. 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. In a follow-up publication, Butler argues that sex is a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer. Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay, by Sharon Marcus. 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. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet claims that "many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture are structuresindeed, fracturedby a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition" (Sedgwick 2008, 1). sexology. This is similar to Newtons observation of drag, particularly her suggestion that drag reveals gender as a performance. Sedgwick, Eve. 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. 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. A phrase coined by Gayle Rubin to describe the social apparatus that oppresses women. You could not be signed in. It works for legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, such as promoting legislation to prevent discrimination and hate crimes. The story of queer theorys emergence is entwined with queer activism. A gender and queer theorist and author, perhaps best known for work on tomboys and female masculinity. 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). She introduces the terms minoritizingand universalizingto describe competing and coexisting understandings of homosexuality that shape how we imagine sexuality. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. 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. discourses. Rubin uses the phrase sex-gender system to describe the process by which social relations produce women as oppressed beings. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. 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. He writes, The future is queernesss domain. 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 . Munoz: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Full video transcript available in the appendix. She argues that sex exists as a spectrum between female and male with a minimum of five distinct categories. 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. intersex. The capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being. same-sex marriage. Office: Leonard 209B. ACT UP New York (website), accessed March 8, 2021. 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. Butler responded to critique by arguing that, although discourse does not produce material sex differences, it organizes these differences, gives them meaning, and renders them legible.[23]. Jack Halberstam. Through this blog, I will be exploring issues of sex, gender, and embodiment through the lens of queer theory. 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. 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]. Similar to Muoz and Carruthers, he argues that radical transformation is the only way forward for queers of color. 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. They know that the possession of one type of genital equipment by no means guarantees the naturally appropriate behavior.[20]. Taught by Alexis Lothian, 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 Case Study of Provincetown (Warmington), T S Redmonds Summary of Mel Y. Chens Toxic Animacies, Allen Synthesis One: Performance and Identity. [26] Transgender studies emerged in activist and academic circles around the same time as queer activism and theory. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe the view of homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.7. Kevin Bacon y Kyra Sedgwick realizaron un baile en TikTok que fue furor . People hate politics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. 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). In other words, what becomes tied to heteronormativity is not femininity but masculinity, and homophobic dynamics are doubled by patriarchal relations of power. [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. And oh yea, by the way, its all pretty queer. In the last segment of her argument, Sedgwick meditates on political correctness and the origin of this term. 1993. De Lauretis claimed that differences were collapsed within lesbian and gay studies and the experience of white middle-class gay men was privileged. From a historiographical perspective, Sedgwicks piece is seminal and inspiring. Ferguson demonstrates that predominantly white sociologists have used works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and other African American writers to construct theories about Black sexualities and therefore Black people (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). I have deliberately chosen to identify the ironic spectator as gay rather than queer, based on Butler's (1993) theorization of critical queerness. 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. 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. Rodrguez deconstructs the archetype of the gesturing emotional Latina femme to discuss how gestures and types of bodies inform sexual pleasures and practices, as well as racialized sexual and gender identities (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. Furthermore, they argue that capitalism and militarism do harm and can only contingently benefit individual LGBTQ+ persons. This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. For instance, a primary benefit of marriage is access to health insurance, but one partner must have health insurance for marriage to help a couple in this way. 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). By David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz, WHATS QUEER ABOUT QUEER STUDIES NOW? It explains why she is at war against western civilization whichinsists on demonizing her and doing its damnedest to silence her, and why she is maddened by anti-PC movements and the politics of resentment fueled by anti-intellectualism of the right that is directed at academics. The book includes essays written by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Her research focuses on LGBTQ+ childrens literature and culture, digital culture, and sexual subcultures. Just like his character in "Footloose," Kevin Bacon is taking a stand against a ban through dance. This article outlines why there exist important opportunities to think through what research on African urban sexualitiesand specifically non-heteronormative sexualitiesmay mean moving forward. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. [22] This is likely reminiscent of Fausto-Sterlings provocation that there are five discernible sexes. A hypothesis worth makingexplicit: that there are important senses in which "queer" can signify onlywhen attached to the first person. In fact, de Lauretis used the term queer to create critical distance from lesbian and gay studies. 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. And ultimately, it is a way to shout out loud that those things we have always just accepted all the moving parts that come to define family, sexuality, or queer those are things we havent had a full conversation about yet, and part of what we havent acknowledged is the expansiveness of categories, of all the parts that determine sexuality, but also race, also gender, also nationality, also age, and religion and class. Queer theory, which Ms. Sedgwick developed along with Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkley, is a prism through which scholars examine literary texts. It explains why she so adamantly defends close readings, queer interpretations, formalist inquiry, and a deep plumbingof difficult texts. Published only a few years after Duggans work on homonormativity and neoliberalism, Jasbir PuarsTerrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times confirms that some queer subjects have been incorporated into U.S. national life as valued citizens. I also am intrigued by her challenging us to articulate our position toward the word queer in relationship to how we apply the term in the first (9) or second or third-person (11).
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