Queer Theory
•One of the main critiques of other theories that queer theory has its biological essentialism with sex, sexuality and gender.
•Queer theory states that you are born without sex or gender in relation to society i.e, male and female which are the traits of socialization.
•It believes on eliminating labels like homo, hetero, trans, bi etc and where you are free to decide your loves and your relationships, where nobody cares what you are but who you are. Where we all relate sexuality as free people.
•Queer theory problematizes the manner that we have been taught to think about sexual orientation
•It rejects the dichotomization of sexual orientation into two mutual exclusive outcomes, homosexual and heterosexual.
•This perspective highlights the need of flexible and fluid conceptualization of sexuality – one that allows for freedom, change and negotiation.
•The current scheme classifies individuals either as homosexual or heterosexual and is mirrored in other oppressive schemes in culture (black and white, male and female).
Judith Butler has to say about Gender Performity
It is the idea that gender is not inheritably natural not something we simply can say is true of ourselves rather gender is formed as a result of series of efforts put out into the world and then how those efforts are read.
What does it mean that gender is performative ?
Gender is performed
According to Judith butler when we say gender is performed we usually mean we have taken on a role, we are acting in some way and that our acting or role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender we present to the world.
Gender is performative
For something to be performative according to Judith Butler mean that it produces a series of effort. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a women.
We act as if being of a man or that being of a women is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced and reproduced all the time.
So to say gender is performative is to say that nobody is really a gender from the start.
How should this notion of gender performativity changes the way we look at gender
Think about how difficult it is for sissy boys or for tomboys to function socially without being bullied or without being harassed or without being teased or sometimes without suffocating threats of violence or without their parents intervening to say may be you need a psychiatrist or why can’t you be normal.
So, there are institutional power like psychiatric normalization and there are informal kinds of practices like bullying which try to keep us in our gendered place.
Eve Sedgwick
Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argued against American society’s monolithic definition of sexuality – against its reduction to a single factor : the sex of one’s desired partner.
Sedgwick identified some other ways in which people’s sexualities were different, such as:
•Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some people, a small share of others’.
•Some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little.
•Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none.
•Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or don’t even want to do.
•Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable.
•Some people, homo- hetero- and bisexual, experience their sexuality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender differentials. Others of each sexuality do not
•In the end queer theory strives to question the ways society perceives and experience sex, gender and sexuality, opening the door to new scholarly understanding.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk