Queer Theory

As an anti-essentialist theory of sexuality, queer theory questions and unravels normative categories of gender and sexuality through its critical practices. Its theoretical articulation owes much to the 1980s third-wave feminist reworking of the concepts of sex and gender in the light of poststructuralist social theories of history, power, and discourse as well as postmodern philosophy. As lesbian and gay studies became queer studies under the influence of queer theory, lesbian and gay activism similarly went queer in order to address noted pitfalls with the earlier formulation of homosexuals as a social movement. Queer theory has informed and continues to guide activism around the politics of sexuality through a variety of cultural practices.

Teresa de Lauretis brought the rubric queer theory into academic discourse in her introduction to the published proceedings of a 1990 conference, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” held at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The original intent—to find a theoretical way out of the dilemma between liberal pluralism, on the one hand, and deviance, on the other—has remained queer theory's conceptual core. De Lauretis, for her part, abandoned the term nearly 3 years later, claiming that it had been reappropriated by the very institutions that it was meant to challenge. Academic presses, for example, exploited queer theory as a highly lucrative marketing tool during the 1990s. Nevertheless, much important work has been done in queer theory, as it has evolved and diversified since its inception.

In naming queer theory, its practitioners appropriated queer against its long-standing pejorative grain, which lent it an emphatic edge. Many writers have commented on the etymology of the term queer, especially in relation to its appropriation as an academic term. Thanks to queer theory and its associated practices, queer today has technical senses as an adjective, a verb, and even a noun. Queer theory has in turn spawned queer readings, in which a reading is often a critical interpretation of some text, cultural artifact, or performance in which presupposed stable categories of gender and sexuality are opened up and contested. To queer something is to give it a new queer interpretation or critique. Moreover, some people prefer to call themselves queers, rather than a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, or inter-sexed (LGBTTI) person, while others object to the term, finding it demeaning. To be a queer, as in a queer person, may also fit into the framework of queer theory. Inasmuch as the person identifies with queer subjectivity, as unstable and fleeting, she respects similarly the flow of sexualities and multiple allegiances and identities produced in life, in contrast to the stability that identities such as straight, gay, or lesbian purport to have. Lastly, queer is sometimes used as an umbrella term that covers the whole span or some combination of LGBTTI; but this usage is largely for convenience and rarely engages any specific tenets of queer theory.

The main tenets of queer theory arose out of a number of distinct theoretical sources within the particular sociopolitical context of the late-1980s United States. In brief, queer theory was a response to the challenges posed to lesbian and gay liberation movements by AIDS, the culture wars, and identity politics. Third-wave feminism takes a radical anti-essentialist position to sexual identity. Gender becomes, for third-wave theorists, a regulatory fiction that needs to be denaturalized and uncovered as such. Borrowing from poststructuralist theories, queer theory recasts gender as fundamentally performative within language and undetermined by biological sex. This new concept of gender broke with the strong biological essentialism of second-wave liberal feminism, which was sex defined in terms of the biological body, and appeared during the heated debates internal and external to feminism over pornography, censorship, sadomasochism, bondage, bisexuality, race, class, lesbianism, and prostitution, among others. Researchers in the history and social formation of sexuality, typically gay men, collaborated with lesbian and bisexual women working within feminist thought, as in de Lauretis's 1990 conference mentioned above. Thus, queer theory became an attempt to resituate and perhaps resolve the several conceptual and practical impasses in feminist thought on sex/gender and identity and correlated problems in lesbian and gay studies, which until then were [Page 1189]understood within the frame of a biological definition of sex.

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