Queer Theory

Queer theory is an interdisciplinary post-structural/postmodern perspective on gender and sexuality. Judith Butler's notion of the performance of gender or “gender trouble,” which she formulated in the early 1990s, is often considered the beginning of queer theory as a specific viewpoint. However, many scholars date queer theory to Michel Foucault's sociological study of the history of sexuality, published in the 1970s in France. In general, queer theorists challenge modernist notions of identity as coherent, stable, and natural, and subsequent categories and binaries such as gender/sex, masculinity/femininity, male/female, and heterosexuality/homosexuality, by positing the multiplicity, fluidity, and ambiguity of gender and sexuality. For most queer theorists, the term queer signifies something that is strange and sexual, as it has colloquially been understood. However, instead of also referring to something that is negative and used to abuse gays and lesbians, as has occurred in history, the term queer is considered positive by queer theorists. In this context, queer and the act of “queering” refer to productive strategies for the social acceptance and civil rights of people who do not fit into dominant perceptions of gender or sexuality or who in any way feel marginalized for their gender or sexuality. Moreover, academic definitions and uses of the term queer are intentionally slippery and still evolving. Toward this end, scholarship on queer theory usually seeks to identify and deconstruct contemporary cultural discourses that are more or less queer, ranging from medical definitions of homosexuality to mediated representations of transgender people. This scholarship often makes explicit connections to transgender studies, with which it has much in common.

Similar to other post-structural/postmodern perspectives, queer theory is a theoretical response to modernist bodies of knowledge such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structural linguistics. Given its focus on gender and sexuality, queer theory is also a theoretical and political response to first and second wave feminism and gay and lesbian studies, the latter of which grew out of the gay liberation movement that occurred in the 1970s in the United States. In addition, the epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) that occurred in the 1980s across Europe and in the United States contributed to the development of queer theory; for example, one group the disease significantly affected was men who had sex with men but who did not identify themselves as gay. The specific term “queer theory” is attributed to Teresa de Laurentis, who coined it in her introduction to a 1991 issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Queer theory parts ways with modernist philosophies; the latter center on essentialist binary logics suggesting that identities are fixed and classify people, and that these identities are the means by which to organize social change. Exemplifying this modernist approach is the call by early women's rights activists for women to be included in universal conceptions of what it means to be human, as well as the critique by second wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s of this universal concept of the human subject as being masculine. Both of these critiques rest on logics of placing men in a different category from, and in opposition, to women. Likewise, gay liberationist thinking and political action were (and still are) based in identity categories and binaries, such as homosexuality/heterosexuality and men/women, when its goal primarily concerns the attainment and defense of rights for gay men.

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