Queer

In the book “Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory”, Lynne Huffer teases out exciting new aspects of Foucault thoughts. She then rethinks and rewrites the theorists ethical work after these discoveries. In this book Huffer writes that Foucault recasts the Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviant, calling out the complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality (Huffer, 2009). Sampling from unpublished…

Sex Education and Queerness Since its introduction into the educational system, sex education has always been a topic of debate. What should be taught? When? By whom? Parents, schools, and the government have frequently been at odds with each other, disagreeing on what information is appropriate for what students, and when. Religious and cultural values have become a part of the conversation, as well as scientific studies looking at what sorts of curricula are effective and the effects…

gender roles of the dominating society around us, and in doing so propel gender roles continuation. However, continuing to perform in particular ways to suit gender roles affects not only its continuance in society but as well as the queer community. It affects the queer…

and queer men, who must live off of what little possessions they have due to the inequalities of the society they live in. In Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone details the possibility of a feminist revolution in the modern era which frees women from the natural and societal inequalities that they experience. In both texts, the effects of inequality in society are discussed. However, Mitchell and Asta detail the effects of inequality with respect to ‘faggots’ and queer men,…

deconstruct the discourses that not only allow for this to occur, but shape the way this sex is approached and interpreted. To do that, there is some background knowledge needed. Queer readings are essential to the basis of Ward’s study, and queer theory sits at the heart of her argument. To better understand that way queer theory is structured, it’s important to note the differences between the heterosexual imaginary, heteronormativity, heterogenders, and supplementarity.…

roguishly and playfully evades the reproduction of the discursive and dichotomous regimes of identity that have long informed western ontology, by paradoxically renegotiating their meaning and bringing into view the weight they cast on the gender queer body, that is rendered incoherent by such…

20th century. Once homosexuals became more studied in sociology, sociologists painted them as “strange” and an exotic “other”. As the gay movement progressed into the 1970s, there was a backlash against homosexuality. Then came the rise of queer theory. Queer theory, “wishes to challenge the regime of sexuality itself – that is, the knowledges that construct the self as sexual and that assume heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories marking the truth of sexual slaves” (Seidman, 1994, p.…

Societal Projection of One Joto’s Quest for Identity “In Search of My Queer Aztlán” by Luis H. Román Garcia is a beautiful and vulnerable piece of autoethnography: a mix of introspective, narrative, and academic writing that ties his personal experience to the larger social issue of homophobia in Chicano culture. Garcia defines and narrates his own struggle with the concepts of home, school, and sexuality due to his queer Chicano identity. These written experiences introduce the reader to the…

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” The White Night Riots of 1979 was the language of thousands of queer people whose voices had been unheard. A prominent figure of the San Francisco queer community was assassinated, and his murderer was sentenced to a lesser charge; people were angry and took to the San Francisco City Hall to express their feelings in the form of a riot. A riot was the only way these people thought they would be heard after having a…

In Robert McRuer’s “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” he introduces the theory of compulsory able-bodiedness into the discussion of Adrienne Rich’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality. Just as society enforces the notion of heterosexuality being the natural and normal sexuality, McRuer argues that in society, able-bodiedness is not only the normal, it is more natural than heterosexuality. Additionally, he writes that the system of compulsory able-bodiedness works in…