queer and now sedgwick summary

Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.2. On Writing Since Queer Theory, the reader is confronted, not only with a summary of their project, but also with a rather profound elucidation of the competing, disparate voices that claim to speak for and about the movement. Geographer Michael Brown has criticized Sedgwick's 'closet' as a term for spatial metaphor. According to Sedgwick, both Wilde and Nietzsche undertake a revaluation of the status of heterosexual masculinity in light of the German and English attitudes toward Ancient Greek art. Many queer theorists and activists are concerned that emphasizing single issues (marriage or the military) and centering LGBTQ+ politics on inclusion into existing institutions diminishes the radical potential of queer thought and action. Her work aims to create young leaders in marginalized communities to fight for community interests and liberation. Here it is important to distinguish between sexual identities and sexual practices. minoritizing. Which perspective views identity as fixed, or innate, and which perspective argues that identity is produced through social processes? Restate, in your own words, what Kate Bornstein means when she talks about gender in four dimensions. This living list of queer scholarship includes many important intersectional texts (https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list). 1) What is our reaction to Sedgwicks lists concerning the family and sexual identity (6-7)? It is a much newer theory, in that it was established in the 1990s, and contests many of the set ideas of the more established fields it comes from by challenging the notion of . In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature. The universalizing view, in contrast, sees sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone. ContraPoints is an irreverent video essayist who explores gender identity and queer theory while using her extensive background in academic philosophy. Halberstam convincingly claims, Masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects.[25] Like many queer theorists engaging gender, Halberstam deemphasizes genitals, refocusing on gender expressions. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.7. It is an ambitious essaydivided into short sections that cover topics rangingfrom high suicide rates amonggay, lesbian, and queer adolescents; the relationship between rhetoric supporting the concealment and/or extinction of gay or queer identifying individuals and the policies of institutions and social systems; the threats directed at queer lives (esp. Sedgwicks deconstructivist approach shows us that any social binary that defines subjects in society (especially the binary of heterosexual/homosexual) is not a relation of symmetry between two terms. Jos Esteban Muozs hope-affirming work claims the future for queers (figure 1.7). However, queer activism and scholarship reject mainstream liberal ideals of privacy, the goal of formal equality under the law, and the desirability of assimilation into existing social institutions. [4] In addition to sexuality, de Lauretis hoped queer theory would identify and trouble other constructed silencesfor instance, those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol wowed President Joe Biden and the crowd at a White House state dinner on Wednesday night by breaking out into song. (T. Kirk), Kranidis-The Relevance of Race for Study of Sexuality, In a Queer Time and Place/Brandon Archive (Warmington), T. Kirk Whats That Smell? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. Your email address will not be published. According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. John DEmilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. About, Human Rights Campaign, accessed May 12, 2021, L. Duggan, The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism, in. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.[8] By rejecting the idea that something called sexuality exists in all of us, waiting to be liberated, Foucaults work challenged not only how sexuality was understood in popular and scholarly discourses but also how power was understood. A video from the School of Life series discusses Michel Foucault, a philosopher of history who explored different institutionsmedicine, crime and punishment, and homosexualitywith the goal of radically disrupting our understanding of them (https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU). Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Summary This chapter offers a Foucauldian genealogy of queer theory, which does not stabilize origins, but rather probes incommensurabilities within the field, centers the element of chance that allowed certain theories to become central, and allows for the formation of new roots to the side of those canonized for "founding" a field. How would you respond to that challenge today? Sexuality, Race and Space: Queer Literary and Cultural Theory, Week 3: Theorizing Queer through Transnational Women of Color Feminisms, Berlant and Warner Sex in Public (Shoemaker), Judith Butlers Critically Queer (Jacoby), Summary of The Introduction to Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? According to Nguyen, this reinvention of the term bottom has the potential to interrupt, disrupt, and transform sexual, gender, and racial norms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Again, her argument against attempting to list ones familial identity and relationships to others is particularly useful. Halberstam (Shoemaker). The Normalization of Queer Theory, by David Halperin. [10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct. Lesbian and gay studies assumed clear subjects of analysislesbians and gayswho were studied as historical, cultural, or literary figures of significance to reclaim a forgotten past and create a sense of collective identity and continuity in the present. Did Foucault want us to become nostalgic, or did he want us to learn from the past about better ways of doing things now? In other words, much as Newton observes about drag performances of femininity, anybody can put on a gender expression. Summary. David Halperin traces the origin of the term queer theory to Teresa de Lauretis in 1990 in this 2003 article in the Journal of Homosexuality (volume 45, numbers 24; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory). Like Muoz, Carruthers emphasizes the importance of the Black imagination, specifically the ability to imagine alternative economics, alternative family structures, or something else entirely.[42] This work cannot be accomplished if groups like the HRC, which has a clear procapitalist agenda, shape public discourse about LGBTQ+ issues. Susan Stryker. Why? Bacon expounded on the topic in the caption, urging his fans to support the ACLU's Drag Defense Fund going after anti-drag bills being passed throughout the U.S. "Drag bans are bad karma. Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. Many express criticism that groups like the HRC have become representative voices of the LGBTQ+ community and are failing to represent its most vulnerable members. I have deliberately chosen to identify the ironic spectator as gay rather than queer, based on Butler's (1993) theorization of critical queerness. Foucault Home Page [At CSUN] ACT UP New York (website), accessed March 8, 2021. In Melvilles novella, the story is set against a backdrop of recent mutinies against several ships in the British navy. Additionally, as of June 26, 2015, same-sex marriageis legal in the United States. Academics and activists use the term to discuss attempts by LGBTQ+ persons to assimilate into institutions like marriage and the military that reproduce hierarchy and are associated with oppression. Introduction It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton. Both activism and theory are historically and geographically contingent, tethered to time, space, and the material body in its specificity. Queer Theory Musings: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby! Hames-Garca is the first to identify two schools of queer theory: the separatist, which keeps race, class, and gender outside descriptions of sexuality, and the integrationist, which blurs these categories and may abandon the concept of identity altogether. The play of her mind as it goes from Henry James to John Waters and Divine, from AIDS to Jane Austen and women's anal eroticism, is dazzling. In this lecture at Yale University, the professor Paul Fry introduces Judith Butlers and Michel Foucaults works on sexuality and gender (https://youtu.be/7bkFlJfxyF0). Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. Queer theory is flexible enough to account for differences of race, class, gender, and nation, although it does not always do so. Want to create or adapt books like this? The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. She notes that although it became standard to refer to lesbiansandgays in the 1980s, the and obscured differences instead of revealing them. However, whereas queer theory is sometimes guilty of the privileging of homosexual ways of differing from heterosexual norms, transgender studies challenges naturalized links between the material body, psychic structures, and gendered social roles. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins. Carruthers states that unless we move the margins into the center, none of us will be free. What does she mean by that statement? Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. Although inclusion in these institutions is contingent, precarious, and not evenly distributed among all members of the LGBTQ+ community, these two shifts in policy secured access and rights for some LGBTQ+ personsspecifically, white middle-class gay men for whom marriage equality has often been a primary political concern. Tongson Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Summary/Susan Petrole, The Combahee River Collective Statement Summary (Powers), TS Redmonds Summary of Audre Lordes Zami, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Susan Petrole), Lorde Summary- Uses of the Erotic (Hummel), Alexander Pedagogies of Crossing (Shoemaker), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Culture (Warmington), Green, Pink, and Lavender Gaard (Shoemaker), Cape Queer? In her introduction to the special issue, de Lauretis outlines the central features of queer theory, sketching the field in broad strokes that have held up remarkably well.[2]. Gay people know that sex-typed behavior can be achieved, contrary to what is popularly believed. This can be seen in the early homophile movement, which refers to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century homosexual rights activism that emerged in tandem and entwined with sexology and anti-sodomy laws. discourses. When Sedgwick arrived at Cornell in 1967, she had yet to make her mark on the literary world. For instance, the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubins essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex sought to identify the origin of womens oppression across cultures. First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. According to Rubin, One begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and fashions domesticated women as products.[14] Rubin writes, As a preliminary definition, a sex-gender system is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.[15]. Tan Hoang Nguyen reassesses male effeminacy and how it is racialized in cinema, art, and pornography. The story of queer theorys emergence is entwined with queer activism. A phrase coined by Gayle Rubin to describe the social apparatus that oppresses women. It does, however, have at its founding, and through the twists and turns of its development, an investment in radical social change tethered to a belief that, because gender, sexual, and other forms of social hierarchy are reproduced and regulated through discourse and social institutions, those institutions can and must be changed for the better. A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. However, perhaps her discussion of her struggle with breast cancer and how it affects her gender and sexual identity, a necessary and poignant tale in itself, may have been better developed and resonated in a separate memoir-centered piece in Tendencies. Also like Rubin, her intellectual investments and theoretical findings were harbingers of things to come. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. It explains why she is at war against western civilization whichinsists on demonizing her and doing its damnedest to silence her, and why she is maddened by anti-PC movements and the politics of resentment fueled by anti-intellectualism of the right that is directed at academics. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable This part in itself essentially functions for me as a de facto Queer Manifesto, one with which I frontload my rereading of the entire piece, so that I immediately feel the polemic force of Sedgwicks anti-PC-America argument. Just like his character in "Footloose," Kevin Bacon is taking a stand against a ban through dance. And if you disagree with this idea, explain why you do not see an important difference between the two. Halberstam argues that female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity.[24] In other words, women and especially lesbians who are masculine reveal masculinity as a construct, in much the same way that drag queen performances reveal femininity as a construct. Newton uses the term drag queen to describe a homosexual male who often, or habitually, dresses in female attire.[19] Newton separated the sexed body from the gender expressed on it, suggesting that there is no natural link between the two, as discussed in the previous section, but in 1972 the link between sex and gender remained tightly clamped. It is also a very autobiographical and personal essay. Following the Stonewall rebellion, lesbian and gay liberation groups started to fight for equal rights, and some scholars started to study the history and culture of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Free shipping for many products! Published by Duke University Press 1983 Queer and Now From the book Tendencies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822381860-002 Cite this 2 You currently have no access to view or download this content. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet claims that "many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture are structuresindeed, fracturedby a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition" (Sedgwick 2008, 1). This chapter explores the development of queer theory from the 1990s to the present. According to Sedgwick, homosexual and heterosexual definition is central to the construction of the modern nation-state, because it informs modern modes of population management. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. The groups motto was, and remains, Silence = Death.[1] An offshoot of ACT UP, Queer Nation, was founded in 1990 to fight the escalating violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Additionally, like Carruthers, Chambers-Letson decenters the queer sexual subject and queer theory to explore intersectional possibilities for speculative world making and practical activism. For Sedgwick, the connection of Melvilles story to homosexual life is that it is constitutive of heteronormative masculinity and heteronormative male-male relations. Their scholarship gestures toward what a queerly transformed world might look like. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Queer theory as an academic tool came about in part from gender and sexuality studies that in turn had their origins from lesbians and gay studies and feminist theory. Although this interpretationis certainly supported by the text, I wonder if it really captures the nuance of what Sedgwick is trying to do. Queer Nation was the first national activist group to employ the term queer in its name. A phrase coined by Gayle Rubin to describe the social apparatus that oppresses women. They know that the possession of one type of genital equipment by no means guarantees the naturally appropriate behavior.[20]. Identify key approaches and debates within the field of queer theory. [6] Of course, this very critical, very radical relationship to the normative appears in times before the late 1980s and in places other than the United States, but it is then and there that queer activism and queer theory are named and begin to be, however hesitantly, defined. In understanding Sedgwicks compositional approach to this article, I wonder if she was actually working on three separate works that are coalescing into a free associative whole for her. Her updated version of the classic My Gender Workbook (1997) is an accessible, humorous, and interactive introduction to contemporary gender theory, as well as the intersection of gender, sexuality, and power (New York: Routledge, 2013). performativity. Rodrguez is also author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003). At the end of the 14 . Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's 'Queer and Now' essay in Tendencies. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations-often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. The recent inclusion of cultural capital into the English Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (2019) caused a ripple of discontent within some educational circles, with some suggesting it is indi. Other queer theorists, particularly queer of color theorists, are doing the important work of imagining politics and society radically differently. Describe that difference in your own words. Heterosexual men are compelled to continuously police their desires and the desires of others even to the extent of unfounded suspicion that verges on madness, as depicted in Billys murder of Claggart. Queer Theory Reading List, from Brown University. Where identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality. "Queer and Now." Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following: It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. 12 Queer Patience: Sedgwick's Identity Narratives KARIN SELLBERG 189 13 Weaver's Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects (Sedgwick, Emerson, James) MICHAEL D. SNEDIKER 203 . Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. From its earliest iterations, queer theory challenged norms that reproduced inequalities and, at its best, sought to understand how sexuality intersected with gender, race, class, and other social identities to maintain social hierarchies. Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Fat Art/Thin Art (Duke, 1994); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990). In a follow-up publication, Butler argues that sex is a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid increase in lesbian and gay activism and scholarship. Uniformed Gender: Challenging the Social Constructs of a Subculture. essentialist. [17] Fausto-Sterling has since conceded Kesslers point. Halperin is cofounder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. She introduces a Black queer feminist lens, which she describes as a lens through which people and groups see to bring their full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression.[40] Whereas libertarian, conservative, and even liberal lesbian and gay groups seek to diminish the importance of sexual (and other) differences, Carruthers suggests that bringing a Black queer feminist lens to political thought and praxis renounces the middle-class notion of the public sphere as a place where identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality.

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