Email: lothian at iup dot edu. Summary & Response -Sedgwick's "Queer and Now" - landreader A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, by Tan Hoang Nguyen. In the late 1990s, several critics took the opportunity to reflect on the relations between feminism, lesbian studies and queer theory. [13] It is a constructivist account of gender identity that connects the binary construction of gender (man or woman) to heterosexual kinship and by extension to womens oppression within heterosexual patriarchal cultures (figure 1.3). How would you respond to that challenge today? Although this interpretationis certainly supported by the text, I wonder if it really captures the nuance of what Sedgwick is trying to do. Office: Leonard 209B. Sedgwick argues that by the twentieth century, in Western culture, every person was assigned a sexual identity. However, the aspect of this assertion I find truly alarming is the hint Sedgwick provides that this covertly hateful discourse is ingrained within and acting upon the universities of our nation, institutions which are supposed to serve as safe havens for all ideas with academic merit regardless of their political capital. The film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (figure 1.1) coined the term at a University of California, Santa Cruz, conference about lesbian and gay sexualities in February 1990. Epistemology of the Closet, published in 1990 in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, is a seminal work of queer studies by intellectual and activist Eve Sedgwick. He suggests that creative work can expand imaginative possibilities and prompt new modes of being together in the world. Such a story is relevant for Sedgwicks investigations precisely because the stereotype of opacity and secrecy in homosexual identity and desire is heighted by Claggarts status as a policeman and by the background events of recent mutinies on other ships. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. 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. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity, by Paul Fry. Also like Rubin, her intellectual investments and theoretical findings were harbingers of things to come. It then attaches sexual backwardness and violent homophobia to Islamic nations. When Sedgwick arrived at Cornell in 1967, she had yet to make her mark on the literary world. The influential transgender activist Riki Wilchins wrote this classic work to make queer theory and gender theory accessible to a nonacademic audience. The "Mystic River" star posted a video on Sunday to TikTok in which he and his wife, actor Kyra Sedgwick, dance to Taylor Swift's "Karma" wearing matching T-shirts. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity on JSTOR 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 Gender Critical she addresses transphobic feminists (https://youtu.be/1pTPuoGjQsI). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Foreword), Nancy K. Miller (Editor), Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Editor) 4.09. 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. The work discussed in this chapter dissipates some of the power that coheres around the idea of natural gender and sexuality, an idea that has often been used to mark queer genders and sexualities as unnatural and by extension inferior to heterosexuality. Instead, queer theory and activism demand publicness, reject civility, and challenge the legitimacy, naturalness, and intrinsic value of institutionswhether marriage or the militarythat regulate gender and sexuality. A political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government. In Chapter 4, Sedgwick begins with a meditation on the ways Victorian and Gothic literature negotiated the values around heterosexual masculinity and integrated those social norms into narrative. This is our fight, and even if we are a small population, our fight is rooted in democratic values and human rights, the right to life and dignity. By David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz, WHATS QUEER ABOUT QUEER STUDIES NOW? What are the differences between essentialist and constructionist theories of identity? in context of AIDS) and the need for strong attachment to cultural objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or obliquesites where the meanings didnt line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love (5);the challenges and rawness of opening conversations and classes that focus on gay and lesbian studies in academia; critiquing the construction of monolithic categories where everything means the same thing i.e., family, sexuality, queer; a description of her own projects in process; her personal situation that includes both illness and existentialism brought on by breast cancer in her forties and real outrage from the outside directed ather work as an academic studying literature and sexuality; the politics and perversity of feminist and leftist intellectualism vs. an increasingly anti-intellectual right; the resentment directed at academics who work outside of thepurely bureacratic time =money = productivity oriented workforce and the privileges of academics to take pleasure in their work; and finally, confronting the fears that PC culture will result in some kind of doctrine or propaganda, instead of an awakening and acknowledgment of what has always been. The significance of this legal trial, says Sedgwick, is that it reveals that the secrecy and disclosure of ones homosexual orientation constituted a situation whereby remaining in the closet allowed for Acanforas employment and ability to earn a living while his coming out gave the Board of Education the legal means of barring Acanforas access to continue teaching in the classroomfor no other reason than his homosexuality becoming a piece of public knowledge. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is also the author of the influential Thats Revolting! "Universally cited as the text that ignited gay studies," according to Rolling Stone magazine, and as "in many ways the book that turned queer theory from a latent to a manifest discipline," the symposium features a series of short papers engaging with the text, its reception, and its relevance to the evolving field of queer studies. Vintage KANSAS Coliseum Sedgwick County Brass Buckle Limited - eBay Foucault Home Page [At CSUN] Her research focuses on LGBTQ+ childrens literature and culture, digital culture, and sexual subcultures. Continuing the analysis of the previous chapter, Victorian and Gothic literature marked another shift in what came to define the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Chapter 6: Prejudice and Discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, Sean G. Massey; Sarah R. Young; and Ann Merriwether, Thomas Lawrence Long; Christine Rodriguez; Marianne Snyder; and Ryan J. Watson, Chapter 8: LGBTQ+ Relationships and Families, Jennifer Miller; Maddison Lauren Simmons; Robert Bittner; Mycroft M. Roske; Cathy Corder; and Olivia Wood, Chapter 12: A Practical Guide for LGBTQ+ Studies, Appendix A: Judith Butler Video Transcription, Appendix B: Lukas Avendao: Reflections from muxeidad, Appendix C: In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm, Appendix D: What is a Fa'afafine Video Transcription, Appendix E: Queer Archaeology: Some Basics Video Transcription, Appendix G: Watch A Couple In Their 80s Get Married In Dallas County's First Same-Sex Ceremony Video Transcription, Appendix H: Care to the Trans- and Gender Non-Conforming Identified Patient Video Transcription. Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Sedgwick opens this chapter by recounting the legal case of an eighth grade science teacher named Acanfora who was removed from his teaching position once the school board found out that he had been part of a pro-homosexual student group during his college years. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, by Viviane K. Namaste. 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. 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. Queer critics of the HRC maintain that the organization has a limited vision of human rights, is procapitalist, and supports bills that fail to include transgender personsfor example, the proposed 2007 Employment Non-discrimination Act. In the second chapter, Sedgwick turns to the figure of Claggart, a gay policeman on a ship in Melvilles Billy Budd. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal physical and sexual identities are constructed, and he demonstrates through popular culture, politics, and higher education how disabilities and queerness disrupt and transform those identities (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. [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. intersectional. Describe the relationship among LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and LGBTQ+ studies. And oh yea, by the way, its all pretty queer. Gay people know that sex-typed behavior can be achieved, contrary to what is popularly believed. Labeling courses of study under the heading politically correct is an easy way to generate or amplify the distrust, suspicion, or ignorance many American have for these already marginalized viewpoints. The types of advocacy discussed in this article have, I contend, marginalized critical queerness in favour of a normative, discursively limited framework of 'gay' or 'LGBT' rights. We cannot be and will not be denied that. This does important political and intellectual work in troubling the idea of heterosexuality as normal and natural, a claim that has been used to marginalize homosexuals. All rights reserved. Summary. I will begin my summary with the editors' conclusion, where they offer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a final example of . Also, Namaste talks about the book and the struggles of transgender people in society in an interview (http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article04.html). What do we mean when we talk about intersectional analyses, and how have they contributed to queer theory? In exploring the definition of the designation queer and the various interpretations of political concerns of this classification, she gives readers a glimpse into the lives of those who struggle daily with the issues we have spoken about in class. Butler states that there is a difference between saying that gender is performed as opposed to saying gender is performative. Job discrimination, housing discrimination, street harassment, and access to identification documents are central to the politics of queers of color as well as women and lower-income members of the LGBTQ+ community. It is an ambitious essay divided into short sections that cover topics ranging from high suicide rates among gay, 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 Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. 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. A Case Study of Provincetown (Warmington), T S Redmonds Summary of Mel Y. Chens Toxic Animacies, Allen Synthesis One: Performance and Identity. While Claggart is tasked with the maintenance of order on the ship, it is these mutinies that add to Billys suspicion regarding Claggarts moral characterBillys first impression of Claggart is that he was impossible to read. Is there a place for organizations like the HRC in queer politics? This is the position Sedgwick takes in her book when she claims that sexual definition is central to social organization and identity formation. Other queer theorists, particularly queer of color theorists, are doing the important work of imagining politics and society radically differently. Judith Butler describes the social construction of gender, and the policing of gender, by social institutions in this video in the Big Think series. Rodrguez deconstructs the archetype of the gesturing emotional Latina femme to discuss how gestures and types of bodies inform sexual pleasures and practices, as well as racialized sexual and gender identities (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Susan Stryker. Additionally, both queer theory and activism introduced ways of thinking and acting through politics that went beyond normalizing demands for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in existing social institutions. She introduces the terms minoritizingand universalizingto describe competing and coexisting understandings of homosexuality that shape how we imagine sexuality. Taught by Alexis Lothian, This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. I have deliberately chosen to identify the ironic spectator as gay rather than queer, based on Butler's (1993) theorization of critical queerness. An independent documentary series, My Genderation explores gender variance in short films (https://www.youtube.com/user/MyGenderation/videos). Describe that difference in your own words. Additionally, these ideas, and the value hierarchies that adhere to them, are maintained only by their reproduction. [10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct. 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. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer. Axiom 1 - and I still smile at. For Foucault, power does not repress a preexisting sexual identity; it provides the conditions needed for sexual identities to multiply. Please check your email address / username and password and try again. A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. Summarize the personal, theoretical, and political differences of the homophile, gay liberation, radical feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and queer movements. Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academician specializing in literary criticism and feminist analysis; she is known as one of the architects of queer theory. Some would argue that lesbian and gay studies took an essentialist view of sexuality that assumed individuals possessed a fixed and innate sexual identity that was both universal and transhistorical.[7]. Additionally, as of June 26, 2015, same-sex marriageis legal in the United States. Geographer Michael Brown has criticized Sedgwick's 'closet' as a term for spatial metaphor. A look back at the undergraduate years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, '71, a founder of queer theory, reveals a unique glimpse of where that shock wave first began. About, Human Rights Campaign, accessed May 12, 2021, L. Duggan, The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism, in. Carruthers states that unless we move the margins into the center, none of us will be free. What does she mean by that statement? Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. During this interrogation, Billy finds himself speechless and in a moment of paralysis lashes out at Claggart and inadvertently kills him. Eve Sedgwicks Queer and Now, a synthesis of excerpts from several other pieces,was first published in 1993 and reprinted in the 2013 Queer Studies Reader. 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. The capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being. Which perspective views identity as fixed, or innate, and which perspective argues that identity is produced through social processes? Part V: Relationships, Families, and Youth, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. This chapter explores the development of queer theory from the 1990s to the present. Both activism and theory are historically and geographically contingent, tethered to time, space, and the material body in its specificity. In this sweeping history of sexuality, Foucault creates an influential theory of sexual-identity formation. Additionally, when she proceeds to list the elements that supposedly compose ones sexual identity circa 1991 (7), she deftly points out that this groupings attempts at unifying the differences inherent in different peoples sexual identities into a seamless and univocal whole (8) is an impossible task, but hope exists in the fact that the idea of queer opens up a world of endless possibilities and contradictions for defining and understanding ones self. In the third chapter, Sedgwick underscores the way in which homophobic anxieties have come to be embedded at the heart of heterosexual identity during the end of the 1800s and through the work of Wilde and Nietzsche. 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. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe viewing sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone, rather than focusing on homosexuals as a distinct group. Their scholarship gestures toward what a queerly transformed world might look like. Newton writes, The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that is, genital sex. (LogOut/ Allen Synthesis Two: Thoughts on Place, Space, and Change, Birth in the Closet-Synthesis #3 (Hummel), Hummel Synthesis #2:Re-vising the Suburbs: A Tale of Whoa, Synthesis #1: Freakin at the Freakers Ball: Halloween in the Castro, a Love Story, #3 Henry David Hwangs Queer Diaspora in M. Butterfly. Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. 2006). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical. An American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality, and a founder of Transgender Studies. This legal case reveals the double-bind structure of homosexual life: If one remained in the closet there was a danger of being found out, but coming out of the closet resulted in exposure to oppression. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/app/uploads/sites/262/2022/03/Judith-Butler_-Your-Behavior-Creates-Your-Gender-Big-Think.mp4, https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/11/20/iconic-kate-bornstein-explains-gender-revolution, https://afropunk.com/2013/03/growing-up-queer-a-brief-lesson-on-hetero-and-homonormativity/, https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/app/uploads/sites/262/2022/03/Charlene-Carruthers-on-Black-Liberation-for-all-Black-People360p.mp4, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA, https://www.youtube.com/user/MyGenderation/videos, https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list, http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article04.html, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 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. sexology. Please log in with your institutional or personal account if you should have access to this content through either of these. Judith ButlersGender Trouble, originally published in 1990, introduces the term performativity to suggest that gender identity is not natural and does not emanate from an essential truth that can be located on or in the body (figure 1.5). Queer Theory Reading List, from Brown University. The book bridges the gap between theory and practice by analyzing homoerotic relationships in literary and philosophical history, thereby calling social and political attention to a systemically marginalized group. Because queer theory focuses on the interruption, disruption, and decentering of whiteness and on patriarchy, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity, this is a must read (New York: New York University Press, 2017). She suggests that the deviancy and abjection previously associated with gay and lesbian sexualities is redirected to brown Muslim bodies and instrumentalized to justify the war on terror. Why or why not? Allen Synthesis Three: Where and What is Home? Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images. In Queer and Now Sedgwick manages to accomplish something none of the philosophers we have studied thus far have rigorously attempted. De Lauretis suggested gay and lesbian sexualities should be studied, not as deviations of heterosexuality, but on their own terms. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for ***Queer Eye For The Straight Guy*** Music From CD at the best online prices at eBay! By looking back at the text Queer Visibilities that largely focused on articulating some of the relationships between the urban and sexuality over a decade ago in Cape Town, this article suggests . Chapter-by-chapter summaries and multiple sections of expert analysis, The ultimate resource for assignments, engaging lessons, and lively book discussions. homophile movement. Queer Theory Musings: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby! She notes that although it became standard to refer to lesbiansandgays in the 1980s, the and obscured differences instead of revealing them. People hate politics. 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). 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). 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. sex-gender system. This goal is worth quoting: I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged (5). T. de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, in special issue, L. Duggan, Making It Perfectly Queer, in, J. DEmilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity, in, J. Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality,, G. Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,, A. Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes, Revisited,, S. Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies, in.
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