Queer theory Essay

The concept of inner pr transactionice, what is friendlyly accepted, what is natural, what is prescribed by religion, what is deemed deviant has been a stage of social analysis, controversy, govern custodytal debate and a measure of humans progress.For what was considered the least talked ab let out eject in nightspot, sex activity was in umpteen an early(a)(prenominal) ways what unsexd the exclusive, their society, culture and the legal and moral laws that presided indoors it. The controllers of agent were white, middle class, hetero inner manpower. If one of the white, middle to upper class men were found to be practising homo intimate activity they were gaoled and deemed to be under the influence of daystar him egotism. Homo sexual activity was in many ways to the hegemonic masculinity an abdication of the throne, stepping gobble up from the privileged class and taking the form of the lower forms of life women and the lesser take to the woodss.Lesbianism was ei ther mentation to not exist at both or was not plan of as a problem because they were not intemperate (in any substantial way) the existence of a stable, masculinized order. Oppression came in the form of the hegemonic masculinity passing laws to outlaw homo sex and pronouncing that homo gender was in situation a medical condition and could be treated. Yet despite the many laws passed, all the psychotherapy and electrocution the homosexual was still very overmuch alive.Then came the Stonewall riots, gay and lesbian and feminist movements who swept well-nigh the land, the liberation swept into the academic world and new thoughts surround sexual activity were being produced at rapid rates.These thoughts of sexuality ar in a constant state of change, deconstructing and reinventing. erratic conjecture has emerged from this spiral of thought and has wedged not only on the academic world only when in the form of popular culture, where it expects to challenge and in many way s progress sexual liberation. foreclose system Its precursors and Theorists.Sexual desire has been for centuries thought of as being part of our naturalmakeup, as if it were embedded within our very being. This idea of sexuality being a natural ride was shargond by many leading figures in the academic world Charles Darwin, anthropologist Malinowski, the philosopher Marcuse and Freud saw sexuality within human psychology.These ideas were challenged in the form of Post-structuralism, a lot associated with the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, which dominants the structure and brain of amaze possibility.Post-structuralism refers to a manner of rendering selves and the social which breaks with traditional epistemologiesPost-structuralism argues that subjects are the autonomous creators themselves or their social worlds. Subjects are embedded in a complex network of social transaction. These relations thus determine which subjects can appear where, and in what capaci ty.Post-structuralism contends that a decoct on the individual as an autonomous agent needs to be deconstructed, contested and troubled.It is engaged in denaturalising dominant understandings of sexual individualism. In emphasising that sexuality is not an essentially personal attribute but an available heathen category.Michel Foucault in his much acclaimed annals of Sexuality, Volume I changed the way everyone thought most sexuality and challenged the idea of the natural.Foucault argued that society did not repress sexuality, which only does not exist as an entity in nature. Rather, social discussions constituted sexuality as a cultural form, in the historical transition to modernity.Jacques Derrida offers a roughwhat different approach by means of his ways of thinking surrounding how meanings are established.Supplement suggests that meanings are organised through with(predicate) difference, in a dynamic play of presence and absence.A Derridean perspective would argue that good faith needs homosexuality for its deliver definition.Feminist speculation contributed greatly to many of the ideas behind cigarette scheme.Feminist theorists looked at gender as a system of signs, or signifiers, assigned to sexually dimorphic bodies, which served to particularize the social roles and meanings those bodies could have. Feminist hypothesis thus argued that gender was a social construct, something designed and implemented and perpetuated by social organisations and structures, rather than something merely square, something internal to the ways bodies worked on a biological level. In so doing, feminist surmisal made two very important contributions.The prototypal is that feminist theory separated the social from the biological, insisting that we see a difference between what is the increase of human ideas, therefore something mutable and changeable, and what is the product of biology, hence something (relatively) stable and unchangeable. The second contribution is related to the for the first time by separating the social and the biological, the constructed and the innate, feminist theory insisted that gender was not something essential to an individuals identity.As a term erratic theory was first used by Teresa de Lauretis in her introduction to the Lesbian and Gay Sexualities issue of differences in the summer of 1991 in which to encompass the large circulation of Gay, Lesbian and sissified writings.To describe the conceptual and speculative work involved in discourse pro-duction, and . . . the necessary critical work of deconstructing our own discoursesand their constructed silences. The object of poll in bizarre theory is the social articulation of same-sex eroticism and why, in new-fangled centuries inWestern-dominated cultures, this human interaction has been articulated as queer, as lamentable Other.Judith Butler in her widely cited book Gender Trouble contributes to gender and ideas of sexuality. How gender oper ates as a regulatory construct that privileges heterosexuality and how the deconstructionism of averageative models of gender legitimates lesbian and gay subject positions. dumbfound possibility Gender, Identity, Were lurk and Were Here mar theory and queen politics is often hard to comprehend, and harder to define since part of its foot is intentionally having no set definition. Queer theory is surrounded by contradictions, difficulties, opposing thoughts and political debate.Queer theorists have different ideas on what is Queer and what is not Queer and some Queer theorists believe there is no set doctrine in which to be Queer because that would adhere to the norms of heteronormativity. Examining different Queer thoughts can serve up aid our own formulation of what is Queer and what Queer theory is to the individual and how it can help develop understandings around sexuality, gender, history, societies, cultures and heteronormativity.Queer Theory assumes that sexual identities are a function of representations. It assumes that representations pre-exist and define, as well as complicate and disrupt sexual identities. That people discover their identities by working with (and against) the identities the culture represents as possibilities.Queer theory drawing very much from the theory of performativity, where sexual identity is marked on the body and is in a constant form of embodiment.Where selfhood is a constructed idea, something not naturally produced by bodies or by birth. Selfhood, in poststructuralist theory, becomes subjecthood or subjectivity. The switch in terms is a recognition that, first of all, human identity is shaped by language, by becoming a subject in language. The shift from self to subject also marks the idea that subjects are the product of signs, or signifiers, which make up our ideas of identity. Selves are stable and essential subjects are constructed, hence provisional, shifting, changing, forever and a day able to be redefined or reconstructed. Selves, in this sense, are desire signifiers within a rigid system, whose meanings are fixed subjects, by contrast, are like signifiers in a system with more play, more numerousness of meaning.Queer theory mete outs on this idea and opts for denaturalisation, where the individual canchallenge the familiar distinction between recipe and pathological, straight and gay, masculine men and feminine women.Queer theory surrounds itself with ideas about sexuality as an innate or essentialist category and the opening to reformulation and the bending of the idea of gender roles as essential, and as determined by sex (males are masculine, females are feminine) through their unique combinations of what used to be called masculine and feminine styles.Queer theory allows us to examine Western culture and problematize its approach to attributing everyone to not only certain behaviours but identitys and its tendency to label, box and categorise.As said by Sedgwick in Epistemo logy of the ClosetA society which insists that each individual, good as he or she possesses a gender also must necessarily hire one or the other category of sexual orientation.Queer theorists desire to break down traditional dichotomies surrounding gender and as novelist capital of Minnesota Bellow observes, The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable.For the new radical theorists, the enemy is no longer a persuasion class, a hegemonic race, or even a dominant gender. Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself. Oppression lies in the very idea of the normal, the order that divides humanity into two sexes. Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender-free world.Queer theory results in an lying-in to speak from and to the differences and silences that have been suppressed by the homo-hetero binary, an effort to unpack the monolithic identities lesbian and gay including the intricate wa ys lesbian and gay sexualities are inflected by heterosexuality, race, gender and ethnicity.Queer theory also seeks to not only break down gender roles, sexual order and dichotomies but break down the very thoughts around sexuality in regard to biology and reproduction. Much of out culture tends to define sexuality in terms of animal instincts, sexual responses are intimately purely biological we respond sexually to what is coded in our genes and hormones, and this is almost always defined in terms of reproductive behaviour.Queer theorists problematize this by pointing out that human sexuality differs immensely from that of the animals and that females do not enter a period in which they are in heat and males are not solely programmed to seek out those females who are in heat. world also have an enormous repertoire of sexual behaviours and activities, only some of which are affaired to reproduction.Queer theorists ask that we dismiss sexuality in linkage to reproduction and more so that sexuality is a sprawling effect with never ending intricacies, possibilities and pathways.Queer theorists also challenge the ideas of sexuality in terms of moral and social judgement and how this links in with identity, that is-morality, in terms of right and wrong behaviours.Western cultural ideas about sexuality come from lots of places from science, from religion, from politics, and from economics. These ideas about sexuality often take the form of dichtomic moral statements about what forms of sexuality are right, or good, or moral, and which are wrong, bad, and immoral. These categories have shifted over time, which is another way of arguing that definitions of sexuality are not essential or timeless or innate, but rather are social constructs, things that can change and be manipulated.Queer theorists note how powerful the links are between sexual activities and notions of morality. And the link comes, in part, from defining sexuality as part of identity, rather than unspoilt as an activity which one might engage in. Hence, if you have venereal sexual contact with someone of the same sex, you are not just having homosexual sex, you ARE a homosexual. And that identity then is linked to a moral judgment about both homosexual acts and homosexual identities.Queer theorists note that plot of ground someone who engages in a homosexual act does not consider themselves homosexual but if another becomes privileged to this discipline then that person may inflect the term homosexual on that person hence defining an identity for this person. Queer on the other handmarks a suspension of identity as something fixed, uniform and natural.Queer theory Contributions to social analysis.Part of Queer theory is establish around the recognition of the role of interpretation in understanding all aspects of human life. That is, queer theory assumes that events, attitudes, relationships, etc., are never self-evident or self-interpreting but always require some grid of interpretation or key to decode and make sense of them.Queer theorists state that while every is subject to subjectivity, the ultimo and how the self views and interprets the past is filled with glitches and we decode the past through a lens that it set to examine the past throughthe norm, which thus distorts the past and continues and perpetuates those norms.As Michael Warner explains itAlmost everything that would be called queer theory is about ways in which textseither literary productions or mass culture or languageshape sexuality.Queer theorists are thus devoted to rereading past events, texts, and social theories, specially those related to sexuality with the lens set to disrupt, de-straight or de-norm.Queer theory has made interesting contributions to sociology, and though many sociologists are wary and disbelieving of Queer theory some have taken Queer theory and used it constructively in social analysis. Sociology influenced by Queer theory is a move to a model of difference that provokes new insights into the invariable reproduction of heteronormativity hegemony.Sociologists have been challenged to sharpen their analytical lenses, to grow sensitised to the sprawling production of sexual identities, and to be mindful of the force of heteronormativity as a fundamental organising principle throughout the social order.The impact of queer theory can also be seen in studies of the institutional regulation and commission of sexualities, and in peoples responses to that regulation by media, religion, kinship institutions, and political organisations.Sociologists have used Queer theory in application of the globalised media, in particular in the explosion of reality television such as Big Brother and talk shows such as Ricki Lake who provide a slice of what and how sexuality and sexualities operate within society. They not only study the behaviour of the people within this media discourse but a cosmos (church groups, politicians, psychologists) r eaction to their behaviour.Sociologists have used Queer theory in an mental testing of power and authority in the intersections between class and or race and sexuality. Scholars have examined how those in power use languages of sexuality to naturalise oppressiveness based on race, class, and gender, such as in racist understandings of inexorable women as sexually insatiable, Asian women as sexually exotic, black men as sexually predatory, and white women as sexually innocent. These assumptions, whether spoken or unspoken, have influenced policies as broad as colonisation, marriage and welfare law, health care and education and not to mention less institutionalised practices.The importance of Queer theory and its contributions to social analysis and a general understanding how the world has and continues to function is never ending in possibilities. Queer theory can continue its deconstruction and reinvention over time because sexuality is always changing. A continued effort of so cial analysis through a Queer lens can only help scupper the many intricacies of sexuality. Its potential to escape criticisms of Eurocentric bias and utilise its position that its available to everyone can help increase an understanding of Western understandings of race, culture, ethnicity in regard to sexuality.Queer theory is in a constant state of change and challenge, it can only continue to broaden itself and academics into new thought-provoking realms.BibliographyBooksConnell, R.W. Gender. Polity insistence Cambridge. 2002.Jagose, Annamarie. Queer theory an introduction. new-sprung(prenominal) Yorks New York University Press, 1996.Kirsch, Max H. Queer Theory and Social Change. Routledge Press Great Britain. 2000.Ringer, Jeffrey. Queer words, queer images communication and the construction of homosexuality. 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