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Queer Theory
Queer Theory is one of the most contested and intellectually complex movements in contemporary sexual politics. Where did it come from, and what does it do? Is queer theory only for queers? If you have ever wanted to be a leather daddy, been puzzled by performativity, tried to measure bisexuality, or wondered whether Diana, Princess of Wales could be a gay icon, Queer Theory is required reading.
This vibrant anthology of groundbreaking work by influential scholars, activists, performers, and visual artists is essential for anyone with an interest in sexuality studies or gender activism. The 15 articles - including two specially commissioned contributions, as well as an engaging introduction - map, contextualise, and challenge queer theory's project both within and beyond the academy. Helpful critical summaries that link the selections, and suggestions for further reading, make this volume perfect for anyone approaching queer theory for the first time.
This vibrant anthology of groundbreaking work by influential scholars, activists, performers, and visual artists is essential for anyone with an interest in sexuality studies or gender activism. The 15 articles - including two specially commissioned contributions, as well as an engaging introduction - map, contextualise, and challenge queer theory's project both within and beyond the academy. Helpful critical summaries that link the selections, and suggestions for further reading, make this volume perfect for anyone approaching queer theory for the first time.
225 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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March 19, 2023
i kind of went back and forth on whether this would be a 2 or 3 star, but 2 is a little more on the negative side, and i have mostly neutral feelings about this book, so i guess 3 it is.
content/trigger warnings; homophobia, queerphobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, intersexism, sexism, misogyny, medical abuse, hiv/aids, death, explicit sexual content, ableism, racism, suicidal ideation,
generally, toward the end, i lost a bit of steam and the articles tended to drag and not keep my interest. and i noticed a lot of repetition in the topics discusses, which makes sense if you want a more cohesive collection, but if we’re broadly discussing queer theory, i think there’s room for a more diverse conversation.
there are some articles on or touching on genderfucking and sexual behavior crossing identity lines (such as gay men and lesbians having sex), which i love!!! i don’t have any patience for hard lines and gatekeeping. one article acknowledges that our current day language and conceptualization of queerness isn’t applicable throughout all time, which is an important point to me. my favorite article is probably the one about intersex folks. it details intersexism and how it’s rooted in queerphobia and explains that intersex is inherently queer. i really love the inclusion of this article and the things discussed in it because the community often leaves intersex folks behind and spends a lot of time trying to justify it.
there are some articles on or touching on choice/biology or constructionism/essentialism, which i don’t really have any interest in, because i find the entire debate pointless and each side seems to present their argument as the answer to the flaws in the other, when they both have potential downsides (meaning, queerphobes can and will use either argument against us). there’s a fictional short story in here that’s literally just a smut story about a woman in drag picking up a gay man. i already mentioned that i appreciate the exploration of sexual behavior crossing identity lines, but i don’t care for an explicit sex story with a lot of dirty talk and daddy kink, with weird incest vibes (the protagonist says her gay brother taught her how to suck dick and fuck ass, and the gay guy she picked up was turned on by it and told her to bring him with her next time) and a misogynistic line about the gay man’s dick “smelling like fish” after fucking the protagonist.
there’s an article about the aids crisis, and it’s always a bit of a mindfuck to read things written by queer folks during that time. but there are some things said that i don’t like. such as bisexual men being included in a list of “straights struck down by aids” and the general shitty treatment of closeted queer folks during this time; the author quite literally says he’s “sick of” closeted gays and has “less and less sympathy for men who are afraid their mommies will find out or afraid their bosses will find out or afraid their fellow doctors or professional associates will find out.” i understand where the author was coming from, but shaming, vilifying, and aiming your guns at your own community for not reacting to the aids crisis the way you want them to is fucked up and utterly unhelpful. especially as we know, large numbers in and of itself does not change what is not caused by lack of visibility or small community. and plus also, to act like the aid crisis rendered any reason to be closeted invalid is wild, because if anything, it only increased queer people’s fear of being out.
my least favorite article i think is the first one. which is just a critique of queer theory/queerness because it doesn’t center lesbian feminism/lesbianism. which feels like criticizing one thing for not being another thing. if the point of queer identity was to be lesbian identity, it wouldn’t be queer identity. if the point of queer theory was to be lesbian feminism, it wouldn’t be queer theory. and the thing is, the two can co-exist. we don’t all have to share conceptualizations of our identities or approaches to our feminism. as long as someone isn’t saying other approaches are wrong or that we all have to agree on one universal conceptualization, then what does it really matter? this author could’ve just challenged other people’s ideas with her own, as that’s what theorists and activists and feminists do, not to be hateful or The Right One, but for the sake of a dialogue and evolution in ideas, but she comes off like she’s Correct and everyone else is Wrong, especially considering the amount of snarky comments she inserts in place of actual thoughtful rebuking. there’s just a general “lesbian not queer” vibe.
there’s a comment about how if queerness is about non-normativity, then “wouldn’t that include paedophiles, incest perpetrators, hetero S/Mers, dissatisfied straights, and so forth?” and i just need people to stop positioning this grouping of sexual/gender minorities and people who cause harm (pedophiles and incest perpetrators) as a legitimate, logical, and good-faith conclusion that should be considered in our definition of queerness? (also, all kink is queer, hetero/straight queers exist, and i don’t even know what “dissatisfied straights” means.) yes, people in those groups, such as nambla, will argue they belong to the queer community and use any way of “proving” it they can, but does that mean we should alter and over specify the language we use in order to preemptively reject any association with people who it is clear we do not concern ourselves with? the only people who take claims of inclusion of pedophilia or incest or whatever other harmful thing in the queer community seriously are people who are already determined to hate us. going out of our way to regulate our language to preemptively dispute their queerphobia is a waste of our time, energy, and discourse.
the article also has a very binary view of sexuality, in that the author is constantly talking about “queer, as opposed to gay or lesbian” and “what are the implications involved in claiming ‘queerness’ when one is not gay or lesbian?” as if gays and lesbians are the only sexually oppressed group that makes up the community who would have a “right” to speak on queerness. queerness is always in scare quotes. a comment about how people owe it to others to come out. author is also a self-admitted hater of men and has written articles about why we should hate men and i just don’t subscribe to that, considering all the marginalized men who are negatively affected by that kind of rhetoric.
some quotes:
“There’s an even simpler way to put it. The notion that if we could prove that sexual orientation is biologically determined then homosexuals would be granted greater civil rights is terribly naive. For most intersexed conditions, the biological basis is pretty well understood, and yet intersexuals are stigmatized and punished by the enormously powerful mechanism of the medical establishment. Why should it be any different with gay men and lesbians?”
“Some sexologists tell me ‘Good science will provide answers, will right these wrongs.’ I think that’s bullshit. They need to read Ronald Bayer’s book Homosexuality and American Psychiatry on the history of how activism – not science – changed the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality!”
“Would you say that intersexed politics are ‘queer’? - Yes, absolutely. The value of the word ‘queer’ is that it talks about difference that’s stigmatized or transgressive without defining exactly what that difference is. That’s how it is different from ‘gay and lesbian’. When intersexed people say ‘my body is OK like this’ and ‘my identity is OK like this’, those are queer things to do and to think. Intersexed children’s bodies are queer because they elicit homophobic responses in parents and doctors.”
“Gayness that has more to do with abhorrence for the other sex than with an appreciation of your own sex degenerates into a rabid and destructive separatism.” !!!!!!!!!!!!
“Think of it as a fine example of lesbian/gay solidarity . . . just queers doing queer things together!”
“‘I am gay’ is only possible as a statement in a world in which sexuality is perceived as having an identity-determining capacity, and even then only gains weight and meaning in a context in which ‘I am straight’ (or something to that effect) is the generally approved social norm. That is not how people thought of themselves (or their ‘selves’) for most of human history, as difficult as it may be for some of us to understand that fact, since we are looking backwards through the lens of our own language and reference systems.”
“It is important to recognize that we cannot extrapolate from our own worldviews and think of them as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ across vast expanses of time. Nor can we even use them accurately across cultures today.”
“In the coming pages I will use ‘homosexual’ only in that manner, to describe acts not individuals. And even then I acknowledge fully that it is an anachronistic and problematic usage (which is why I put ‘homosexual’ in quotation marks in this chapter’s title). It is simply a convenient one that I will complicate as necessary.”
“It is important here to recognize that coalitions among individuals whose only commonality is an experience of oppression based on sexual activity are always fragile ones, especially when gender, race and class diversity is obscured temporarily by a political agenda that concentrates on sexual identity alone. The entrenched sexism of some gay men, the culturally encoded racism of some white lesbians and gays, the powerful classism of middle-class individuals of both sexes, and the many ways that religious and political beliefs beyond specific sexual identity issues fracture any sense of simple social identity mean that current gay and lesbian politics are certainly fractious and friction-filled.”
content/trigger warnings; homophobia, queerphobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, intersexism, sexism, misogyny, medical abuse, hiv/aids, death, explicit sexual content, ableism, racism, suicidal ideation,
generally, toward the end, i lost a bit of steam and the articles tended to drag and not keep my interest. and i noticed a lot of repetition in the topics discusses, which makes sense if you want a more cohesive collection, but if we’re broadly discussing queer theory, i think there’s room for a more diverse conversation.
there are some articles on or touching on genderfucking and sexual behavior crossing identity lines (such as gay men and lesbians having sex), which i love!!! i don’t have any patience for hard lines and gatekeeping. one article acknowledges that our current day language and conceptualization of queerness isn’t applicable throughout all time, which is an important point to me. my favorite article is probably the one about intersex folks. it details intersexism and how it’s rooted in queerphobia and explains that intersex is inherently queer. i really love the inclusion of this article and the things discussed in it because the community often leaves intersex folks behind and spends a lot of time trying to justify it.
there are some articles on or touching on choice/biology or constructionism/essentialism, which i don’t really have any interest in, because i find the entire debate pointless and each side seems to present their argument as the answer to the flaws in the other, when they both have potential downsides (meaning, queerphobes can and will use either argument against us). there’s a fictional short story in here that’s literally just a smut story about a woman in drag picking up a gay man. i already mentioned that i appreciate the exploration of sexual behavior crossing identity lines, but i don’t care for an explicit sex story with a lot of dirty talk and daddy kink, with weird incest vibes (the protagonist says her gay brother taught her how to suck dick and fuck ass, and the gay guy she picked up was turned on by it and told her to bring him with her next time) and a misogynistic line about the gay man’s dick “smelling like fish” after fucking the protagonist.
there’s an article about the aids crisis, and it’s always a bit of a mindfuck to read things written by queer folks during that time. but there are some things said that i don’t like. such as bisexual men being included in a list of “straights struck down by aids” and the general shitty treatment of closeted queer folks during this time; the author quite literally says he’s “sick of” closeted gays and has “less and less sympathy for men who are afraid their mommies will find out or afraid their bosses will find out or afraid their fellow doctors or professional associates will find out.” i understand where the author was coming from, but shaming, vilifying, and aiming your guns at your own community for not reacting to the aids crisis the way you want them to is fucked up and utterly unhelpful. especially as we know, large numbers in and of itself does not change what is not caused by lack of visibility or small community. and plus also, to act like the aid crisis rendered any reason to be closeted invalid is wild, because if anything, it only increased queer people’s fear of being out.
my least favorite article i think is the first one. which is just a critique of queer theory/queerness because it doesn’t center lesbian feminism/lesbianism. which feels like criticizing one thing for not being another thing. if the point of queer identity was to be lesbian identity, it wouldn’t be queer identity. if the point of queer theory was to be lesbian feminism, it wouldn’t be queer theory. and the thing is, the two can co-exist. we don’t all have to share conceptualizations of our identities or approaches to our feminism. as long as someone isn’t saying other approaches are wrong or that we all have to agree on one universal conceptualization, then what does it really matter? this author could’ve just challenged other people’s ideas with her own, as that’s what theorists and activists and feminists do, not to be hateful or The Right One, but for the sake of a dialogue and evolution in ideas, but she comes off like she’s Correct and everyone else is Wrong, especially considering the amount of snarky comments she inserts in place of actual thoughtful rebuking. there’s just a general “lesbian not queer” vibe.
there’s a comment about how if queerness is about non-normativity, then “wouldn’t that include paedophiles, incest perpetrators, hetero S/Mers, dissatisfied straights, and so forth?” and i just need people to stop positioning this grouping of sexual/gender minorities and people who cause harm (pedophiles and incest perpetrators) as a legitimate, logical, and good-faith conclusion that should be considered in our definition of queerness? (also, all kink is queer, hetero/straight queers exist, and i don’t even know what “dissatisfied straights” means.) yes, people in those groups, such as nambla, will argue they belong to the queer community and use any way of “proving” it they can, but does that mean we should alter and over specify the language we use in order to preemptively reject any association with people who it is clear we do not concern ourselves with? the only people who take claims of inclusion of pedophilia or incest or whatever other harmful thing in the queer community seriously are people who are already determined to hate us. going out of our way to regulate our language to preemptively dispute their queerphobia is a waste of our time, energy, and discourse.
the article also has a very binary view of sexuality, in that the author is constantly talking about “queer, as opposed to gay or lesbian” and “what are the implications involved in claiming ‘queerness’ when one is not gay or lesbian?” as if gays and lesbians are the only sexually oppressed group that makes up the community who would have a “right” to speak on queerness. queerness is always in scare quotes. a comment about how people owe it to others to come out. author is also a self-admitted hater of men and has written articles about why we should hate men and i just don’t subscribe to that, considering all the marginalized men who are negatively affected by that kind of rhetoric.
some quotes:
“There’s an even simpler way to put it. The notion that if we could prove that sexual orientation is biologically determined then homosexuals would be granted greater civil rights is terribly naive. For most intersexed conditions, the biological basis is pretty well understood, and yet intersexuals are stigmatized and punished by the enormously powerful mechanism of the medical establishment. Why should it be any different with gay men and lesbians?”
“Some sexologists tell me ‘Good science will provide answers, will right these wrongs.’ I think that’s bullshit. They need to read Ronald Bayer’s book Homosexuality and American Psychiatry on the history of how activism – not science – changed the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality!”
“Would you say that intersexed politics are ‘queer’? - Yes, absolutely. The value of the word ‘queer’ is that it talks about difference that’s stigmatized or transgressive without defining exactly what that difference is. That’s how it is different from ‘gay and lesbian’. When intersexed people say ‘my body is OK like this’ and ‘my identity is OK like this’, those are queer things to do and to think. Intersexed children’s bodies are queer because they elicit homophobic responses in parents and doctors.”
“Gayness that has more to do with abhorrence for the other sex than with an appreciation of your own sex degenerates into a rabid and destructive separatism.” !!!!!!!!!!!!
“Think of it as a fine example of lesbian/gay solidarity . . . just queers doing queer things together!”
“‘I am gay’ is only possible as a statement in a world in which sexuality is perceived as having an identity-determining capacity, and even then only gains weight and meaning in a context in which ‘I am straight’ (or something to that effect) is the generally approved social norm. That is not how people thought of themselves (or their ‘selves’) for most of human history, as difficult as it may be for some of us to understand that fact, since we are looking backwards through the lens of our own language and reference systems.”
“It is important to recognize that we cannot extrapolate from our own worldviews and think of them as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ across vast expanses of time. Nor can we even use them accurately across cultures today.”
“In the coming pages I will use ‘homosexual’ only in that manner, to describe acts not individuals. And even then I acknowledge fully that it is an anachronistic and problematic usage (which is why I put ‘homosexual’ in quotation marks in this chapter’s title). It is simply a convenient one that I will complicate as necessary.”
“It is important here to recognize that coalitions among individuals whose only commonality is an experience of oppression based on sexual activity are always fragile ones, especially when gender, race and class diversity is obscured temporarily by a political agenda that concentrates on sexual identity alone. The entrenched sexism of some gay men, the culturally encoded racism of some white lesbians and gays, the powerful classism of middle-class individuals of both sexes, and the many ways that religious and political beliefs beyond specific sexual identity issues fracture any sense of simple social identity mean that current gay and lesbian politics are certainly fractious and friction-filled.”
March 30, 2014
This is a great topical survey, introducing newcomers (such as myself) to queer theory via a wide variety of voices and styles. This collection includes a personal essay, a manifesto, several academic analyses, even a piece of erotic (non?)-fiction.
The more academic pieces are challenging and a bit difficult to dig into at times. Sometimes I suspect that critical scholars need to meet an invented-word/addended syllable quota. There is a lot of provocative, interesting food for thought in this collection.
The more academic pieces are challenging and a bit difficult to dig into at times. Sometimes I suspect that critical scholars need to meet an invented-word/addended syllable quota. There is a lot of provocative, interesting food for thought in this collection.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews