Queer Theory

Queer theory is a deconstructionist movement that interrogates the categorization of identity according to gender and sexuality and also challenges the notion that identities are liberatory, separatable, or essential aspects of human subjectivity. The use of the word queer is meant to defy the bigotry of homophobia by reinscribing a term traditionally used to derogate those engaging in nonheterosexual activity. The term queer suggests that queer theory is anomalous to the norm. Indeed, queer theory is best defined as a movement that is antinormative and antifoundationalist.

Queer theory arose primarily via critique of Western gay and lesbian movements that, during the 1960s and 1970s, used gender and homosexual identities as bases for politics and scholarship. Queer theorists argue that although gay and lesbian identity politics assumes that proclaiming a homosexual identity is a fundamental right of the liberal subject in Western democracies, identity claiming problematically buttresses the heterosexual/ homosexual binary. Queer theorists contend that proclaiming gay identities as an effort of inclusion, even in a struggle for civil rights, paradoxically ensnares subjects in a humanistic logic whereby conscious identity choice falsely signals freedom and liberty.

The development of queer theory during the late 1980s and early 1990s also responded to frustrations[Page 397] stemming from identity politics movements that failed to adequately address the intersections of identities and the question of how to prioritize one identity over another in the struggle for gender, sexual, class, or racial liberation. Therefore, queer theory must be placed along a continuum of feminist, gay and lesbian, and racial civil rights movements, although it essentially challenges the bases of these. Queer politics also accompanied the development of queer theory during the 1980s and 1990s, and early works in queer theory considered the political activism of groups such as Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, and ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). AIDS activism was a central component to these antiestablishment, antiassimilationist politics that sought to recenter the norm away from heterosexuality and straight-acting, assimilating gays.

Queer theorists suggest that identities, particularly sexual identities that are organized around the genders of sexual object choice such as straight (men desiring women, women desiring men), lesbian (women desiring women), and gay (men desiring men), do not reflect inner qualities of people and should not be a basis for any sort of liberatory politics. According to queer theory, sexual identities such as gay, lesbian, and straight are not universal, timeless, or equivalent. Through this argument, queer theorists advocate a genealogical approach to the study of sexuality and argue that sexual categories and the identities that follow them are historically and socially specific and rotate around a normative and dominant heterosexuality. They point to the historical development of terms such as homosexuality, which was invented as a primary classification of the human species and was promulgated during the 19th and 20th centuries through sexology, psychology, and medicine. Indeed, homosexuality was classified as a psychological pathology and an aberration of so-called normal (i.e., heterosexual) sexual development. For example, until 1973, homosexuality was cataloged as a mental sickness in the United States by the American Psychiatric Association. It was the multiple effects of this history that gay and lesbian identity politics has sought to dispel by claiming civil rights as sexual minorities.

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