Queer Theory

Development and Issues

One of the preliminary challenges of queer theory focuses on the nature of sexual identity developed through the terms lesbian and gay. Although the origins of these terms, and the politics out of which they emerged, drew on social construction theories of sexuality, highlighting the contingent and political qualities of sexual identity, lesbian and gay have come to represent fixed and essential categories that name individual and collective sexual personalities. Queer theory seeks to highlight sexual identity as a historically and politically contingent category of human subjectivity.

Another queer challenge focuses on the idea that lesbian and gay are terms that refer to sexual minorities. This issue is also closely associated with the queer critique of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that both advocate tolerance and acceptance of sexual minorities as part of a pluralistic idea of the wider community (often described as a rainbow alliance). Queer writing is sharply critical of the way the phrase sexual minorities depends on crude analogies with racial and ethnic models of individual and collective identity and community.

Scholars also express concern about the apolitical and ahistorical assumptions for identity made in the minority model. Queer scholarship questions the way the minority model works with an assumption that identity is singular. Can sexual minority or even sexual minorities capture the diversity of all of those who make up such a community or adequately name the complexity of factors that influence and inform an individual's experience of identity?

The minority model works with an assumption that the sexual, racial, and ethnic are separate, distinctive, complete dimensions of individual and collective identities. These issues also affect themes of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, which work with the assumptions of identity and community found in these minority models. The metaphor of the rainbow does not [Page 1256]capture the overlapping, hybrid, intersecting qualities of individual and community life. Queer also offers a challenge to the themes of tolerance, equality, difference, and diversity found in this context. The terms under which tolerance of lesbians and gays has emerged—their equality, difference, and diversity—have been recognized within the pluralist models of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and are informed by the presumption of heterosexuality, which is and remains the norm.

Queer Theory's Critique

Queer theory offers a critique of the social realm of sexuality using a multidisciplinary set of tools drawing on poststructuralist, French, and U.S. feminists; post-Marxist political theory; and cultural, film, and literary studies. Much of queer scholarship has an arts and humanities focus rather than a social science location, though one of the objectives of queer scholars may well be to challenge such disciplinary divisions.

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