Queer Theory
Gender Studies and Queer Theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations. It is heavily informed by feminist perspectives, but believes it is too limiting to talk about male v. female and instead view gender as fluid and not extreme. Whatever you think you know about gender roles, what it means to be gay or straight, and so on, can be destabilized.
Part of Queer Theory is a reaction to a school of 1970s feminism
When we are allowed to talk about sex and gender outside of what is "normal" and "abnormal", all people become strange together.
KEY WORDS AND IDEAS
Part of Queer Theory is a reaction to a school of 1970s feminism
- Queer theorists were not happy about all of the male-female categorical thinking
- Why must all men and women have essential traits?
- Performances are learned by watching other guys and girls do "girlie" and "manly" things.
- Queer Theory loves destabilizing popular culture narrative - taking the character out of place, the word out of place, the sentence out of place, saying, nothing is what it seems
When we are allowed to talk about sex and gender outside of what is "normal" and "abnormal", all people become strange together.
- All people become people deserving of the same basic human rights and respect
- It goes to the heart of a person's identity - who am I really?
KEY WORDS AND IDEAS
- Phallus - the social power of the penis
- Gender Performance - there are things boys are "supposed" to be, say, and do in a culture, and things that girls are "supposed" to be, say, and do in a culture
- Heteronormative - Mr. and Mrs. Jones-type families. Mom, dad, a baby and a dog and a white picket fence and a mortgage on a house in the suburbs with nice neighbors and a nice lawn with pretty flowers, etc., etc...
- Social Constructionism - the idea that things we often think are essential about people are actually not essential at all
- Homophobia - the hatred of gay people for being gay
- Abnormal - whatever you are that most people are not. Whatever you're not that most people are
- Queer - a word for everybody in between
- Gay - happy; attracted to the same sex
- Third-Wave Feminism - asserts that gender is not real