Review of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) [At Gay Book Reviews] One of the most influential books on queer theory. 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. What connections between the two do you find? 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). (LogOut/ Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.3. 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. 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. It explains why she so adamantly defends close readings, queer interpretations, formalist inquiry, and a deep plumbingof difficult texts. 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. Urvashi Vaid is a frequently cited attorney and leader of LGBTQ+ social justice movements. By refusing to accept that there is a right way to be transgender and encouraging coalition building under the newly flexible term transgender, Feinberg hoped transgender persons could build a transformative activism-oriented community. In this book he coins crip theory to describe the intersection of disability, gender, and sexuality and an interdisciplinary approach to critical disability theory, which encompasses queer theory. [31] Feinberg experienced harassment and brutality at the hands of police, and the vivid descriptions of violence in the book illustrate the consequences of not embodying a socially sanctioned gender expression. Designating theoretical perspectives which contradict their own beliefs under this terminology is brilliant to say the least. Nguyen challenges the concept of bottom as passive and shameful, transforming it into a sexual position, a social alliance, a romantic bond, and an art form. She was one of the first people to publicly identify as transgender, then later as nonbinary and gender nonconforming. What are the differences between essentialist and constructionist theories of identity? Queer: A Graphic History, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele. In this sweeping history of sexuality, Foucault creates an influential theory of sexual-identity formation. Foucault, Halperin, DEmilio, and Katz contribute to a critical understanding of the social construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought Resources. 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). Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that are produced by social structures of inequality. 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. Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Wildes characters and the homosocial bonds that undergird much of Nietzsches writing both serve as testaments to the fact that the Romantic ideal of heterosexual masculinity allowed for a greater degree of traditionally feminine/homosexual behavior (sentimentality) while reestablishing the boundary between heterosexual and homosexual by virtue of the heterosexuals distance from desire itself within their public and private lives. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization. Queer Theory Revisited, by Michael Hames-Garca. In the article, Allen states that one purpose of this post is to create a conversation about the complexities of the contradictions many peoples identities present to preconceived societal ideas. Have you ever felt that your identity challenged accepted social norms? For instance, the social psychologist Suzanne Kessler was critical of Fausto-Sterlings attachment to reading genitals for the truth of sex, insisting that the performance of gender on the body rather than on genitalia was more often used to gender bodies. Queer Nation was the first national activist group to employ the term queer in its name. 1993. assimilationist. Continuing the analysis of the previous chapter, Victorian and Gothic literature marked another shift in what came to define the heterosexual/homosexual binary. 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. Part V: Relationships, Families, and Youth, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. Susan Strykerprovides an even more specific periodization, finding that the term transgender emerged in the 1980s but didnt take on its current meaning until 1992 when Leslie Feinberg publishedTransgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Between Men" at Thirty: Queer Studies Then and Now Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. He argues that medical discourse, particularly the field of sexology, which applies scientific principles to the study of sexuality, intersected with legal discourse to simultaneously create the need and the means to identify and produce knowledge about sexual identity, particularly the homosexual. Power in this instance belonged to medical and legal authorities. 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. The group was founded by veterans from ACT UP, and the groups activism enacted and enabled queer theory. 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. At the end of the 14 . Internet History Sourcebooks Project 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! People hate politics. His bookDisidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics(1999) uses performance studies to investigate the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color. According to Duggan, groups like the HRC represent the interests of white middle-class gay men whose privilege provides them cover to access social institutions and benefit from assimilation in ways unavailable or undesirable to other members of the LGBTQ+ community. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol sings "American Pie" by Don McLean alongside U.S. President Joe Biden during a state dinner at the White House on Wednesday. Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. 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. 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. John DEmilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. Please log in with your institutional or personal account if you should have access to this content through either of these. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture. She was 58. Sedgwick focuses on Claggarts relation to Billy and the ship captain, Vere, in order to interrogate the relation of suspicion and hostility that characterizes Billys disposition toward Claggart. 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. As the essays in what is now Reading Sedgwick have gone through their final revisions, they honor the occasion of Eve's life and work by moving the . 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. The U.S. militarys policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clintons administration. First, a note on terminology. You do not currently have access to this chapter. [16] Like Rubin, Fausto-Sterlings early provocation about sex categories sees sex as biological, natural, and unchangeable; it is raw material that culture transforms into gender. His essay is included in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by M. Hames-Garca and E. J. Martnez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1945, which won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. 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. You could not be signed in. 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. Newton writes, The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that is, genital sex. [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). 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. The text is a progression of the analysis in Sedgwick's previous work on homosocial relationships, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 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. Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, and Queering - Academia.edu I will begin my summary with the editors' conclusion, where they offer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a final example of . A Case Study of Provincetown (Warmington), T S Redmonds Summary of Mel Y. Chens Toxic Animacies, Allen Synthesis One: Performance and Identity. Summarize the personal, theoretical, and political differences of the homophile, gay liberation, radical feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and queer movements. 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. This article outlines why there exist important opportunities to think through what research on African urban sexualitiesand specifically non-heteronormative sexualitiesmay mean moving forward. Change). An American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality, and a founder of Transgender Studies. Social constructionism also influenced understandings of gender. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins. In other words, much as Newton observes about drag performances of femininity, anybody can put on a gender expression. On page 8 of Queer and Now, I appreciate when Sedgwick opens the definition of queer to virtually endless permutations that not only incorporate but also contradict, overlap, and redefine any reductive homo/heterosexual binaries that have been filtered through a heteronormative societal lens. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. 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]. An academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. Chapter 1: Thirty Years of Queer Theory - Introduction to LGBTQ+ The desire for radical social change that is central to the queer theoretical project is discussed further in the next section. Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. 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. 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. Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that are produced by social structures of inequality. Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. The story of queer theorys emergence is entwined with queer activism. Tan Hoang Nguyen reassesses male effeminacy and how it is racialized in cinema, art, and pornography. 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. Alongside this phenomenon, Sedgwick also provides the methodology that informs her study: deconstruction. In fact, Judith Butler, who is often identified as an early and formative player in the creation of queer theory, cites both theorists as influential to her work on performativity. Your email address will not be published. She argues that sex exists as a spectrum between female and male with a minimum of five distinct categories. For Butler, gender is established as consistent and cohesive through its repeated performance. 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 . Free shipping for many products! Most often someone who identifies as a man who behaves in an exaggerated performance of femininity. According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. Munoz: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004) and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? This is the position Sedgwick takes in her book when she claims that sexual definition is central to social organization and identity formation. The key insight from this chapter is that the way in which Prousts narrator describes Charlus and Albertine as different in every relevant way except one: regardless of the suspicion surrounding Charluss true sex and Albertines sexuality, both figures are cast as inhabiting a feminine position relative to the world of the text as a whole. 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 Although Rubins work is very influential in feminist and queer theory, one of her basic assumptions, that sex is raw material and thus lacks the influence of social norms, has been challenged by other queer theorists. A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of . Kevin Bacon & Kyra Sedgwick Call U.S. Drag Bans 'Bad Karma - MSN What was Foucaults personal background, and how do you imagine it might have influenced his academic career? Activist demands that have been most palatable to cisgender heterosexuals are those that foreground the right to privacy, individual autonomy, and equal access to social institutions like marriage and the military. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Get help and learn more about the design. 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. [26] Transgender studies emerged in activist and academic circles around the same time as queer activism and theory. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. 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. 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. During this interrogation, Billy finds himself speechless and in a moment of paralysis lashes out at Claggart and inadvertently kills him. Another example is Kate Bornstein, whose 1995 publication,Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, humorously and accessibly describes her experiences with gender and sexuality. This frequently cited essay challenges queer theorists to apply the theory to address the oppression, policing, and marginalization of people of color, the poor, and the colonized. 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). neoliberalism. Sedgwick argues that by the twentieth century, in Western culture, every person was assigned a sexual identity. Allen Synthesis Three: Where and What is Home? Queer and Then? - The Chronicle of Higher Education Jennifer Miller earned a PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. I am reminded of lesbians in the 1950s and '60s hiding lesbian pulp fiction under their mattresses, skipping over the homophobia to marvel at the idea that women like them existed somewhere out there (Greenwich Village . 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. Background - Queer Theory - LibGuides at University of Illinois at Summary. South Korean President Stuns Biden By Singing 'American Pie' | HuffPost Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler showed me the transformative This chapter explores the development of queer theory from the 1990s to the present. Robert McRuer is one of the founders of queer disability studies and a major contributor to the fields of transnational queer theory and disability theory. For him, experiencing performance allows audiences to rehearse new ways of seeing and being in the world together, which is why he emphasizes the importance of art and music. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Pioneer of Gay Studies and a Literary Theorist This book won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize presented by the Gay Lesbian Queer Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Studies Award. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's 'Queer and Now' essay in Tendencies. In Chapter 5, Sedgwick orients the reader toward the other side of the spectrum and focuses her reading of Prousts work on the two queer characters in the novel In Search of Lost Time. Over the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. 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. Most often someone who identifies as a man who behaves in an exaggerated performance of femininity. 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 scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. 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. 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. Websites: Queer Frontiers [At USC] An important "Queer Theory" site. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation. public sphere. 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. 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. Sedgwick argues that it is a crisis "indicatively male, dating . As a result, meanings and values change across space and time. same-sex marriage. drag queen. Like Rubin, Newton was writing before the 1990 birth of queer theory. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton. What are the similarities and differences between transgender studies and queer studies? When she presents her listing of what constitutes a family (6), she makes the argument that the bonds of blood, law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor should be disengaged from their lockstep of their uninanity on the system called the family, an idea that logically would benefit anyone regardless of sexual preference.

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