Literary Theory
Key Terms
Heteronormativity- denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.
Performative- characterised by the performance of a social or cultural role.
intersectionality - the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.
Key People
Judith Butler
Hélène Cixous
Lee Edelman
Michel Foucault
Julia Kristeva
Luce Irigaray
Laura Mulvey
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Key Works
Gender Trouble by
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler's Gender Troubleis as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.
ISBN: 0415389550Publication Date: 2006-05-12
Epistemology of the Closet by
What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.
ISBN: 0520078748Publication Date: 1990-10-16
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader by
Bringing together forty-two groundbreaking essays--many of them already classics--The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader provides a much-needed introduction to the contemporary state of lesbian/gay studies, extensively illustrating the range, scope, diversity, appeal, and power of the work currently being done in the field. Featuring essays by such prominent scholars as Judith Butler, John D'Emilio, Kobena Mercer, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader explores a multitude of sexual, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic experiences.
ISBN: 9781136751172Publication Date: 2012
The Laugh of the Medusa by
Cixous issues an ultimatum: that women can either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate. She describes a writing style, écriture féminine, that she says attempts to move outside of the conversational rules found in patriarchal systems. She argues that Écriture feminine allows women to address their needs by building strong self-narratives and identity.
ISBN: Signs, 1, (4)Publication Date: 1976
Feminism
Overview
Gender and Queer theory have been influenced by feminist theory and post-structuralism and investigates all gender and sexual categories and identities. At the heart of this is the notion of gender and sexuality as social constructions, which means that repeated social performative actions of gender and sexual identity, including those reinforced within texts, produce a social reality rather than reflect social reality. In essence gender and sexuality and both constructed through social action, rather than being biologically defined. Moreover, there is no ‘standard’ in which sexual or gender identity should be judged against.
Gender theorists may focus on groups that fit into traditional binary definitions such as masculine/feminine, heterosexuality/ homosexuality, while queer theorists may work with terms that can be ill-defined and not fit into traditional binary opposites, for example, they may investigate transgender, bisexual and other such broad terms. Furthermore, queer theory see sexual and gender identity as fluid and negotiated, meaning that clear boundaries and definitions between gender and sexuality are in a constant state of flux. This means not only do the understanding of these terms change over time, different groups may use queer terms differently from one another, defying any attempt at producing clear terms of reference for queer theory. Another way of understanding Queer theory is to see it as looking at the liminal space of sexual and gender identities where individuals and groups cross boundaries, or even where boundaries may shift.
What Gender and Queer Critiques do
Consider the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with other categories of social status and identity, for example, race.
Challenges the myth of heterosexuality as the ‘proper’ or ‘desired’ outcome of sexual and gender identity.
Investigates how queer social practises and performances challenge heteronormativity.
Explore how specific sexual expressions may be privileged over others in texts.
Challenges the belief that gender identity and sexual identity and intrinsically intertwined.
Explores the relationship between power and sexuality.
Explore the discursive practices of sexuality and gender identity.
What Questions to Gender and Queer Critiques ask
What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?
What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?
What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both?
What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?
What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are apparently homosexual?
What does the work reveal about the socially, politically, psychologically operations that may be homophobic?
How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?
General Web Links
- Queer Theory Since the early 1990s, the term queer has been strategically taken up to signify a wide-ranging and unmethodical resistance to normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality.
- Queer Theory Reading List Vision: To be a Center for collective liberation by creating space for intersectional communities and critical discourse.
- Oxford Reference : Queer Theory A critical discourse developed in the 1990s in order to deconstruct (or ‘to queer’) sexuality and gender in the wake of gay identity politics, which had tended to rely on strategic essentialism.