THEORY: QUEER

Eve Sedgewick on closetedness

"Closeted-ness" itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence

Eve Sedgewick no homosocial desire

'Homosocial desire' is a kind of oxymoron.

Gloria Anzaldua on nothing but

'You are nothing but a woman' means you are defective. Its opposite is to be un macho.

Bonnie Zimmerman on naming names

'naming names', establishing a sense of historical continuity and community through the knowledge that incontrovertibly great women were also lesbians.

Berlant and Warner on sexual practices

A complex cluster of sexual practices gets confused in heterosexual culture, with the love plot of intimacy and familialism that signifies belonging to society in a deep and normal way. Community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling and kinship.

Bonnie Zimmerman on redefining politically

A problem arises when lesbian theorists redefine it politically, equating it with strength, independence and resistance to patriarchy.

Queer

A term of inclusivity

Bonnie Zimmerman on lesbian critics

Although not all lesbian critics are activists, most have been strongly influenced by the politics of lesbian feminism.

Eve Segdewick on assumptions

An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition

Foucault on cherubs

At the end, they all applauded these cherub-faced boys who, in front of adults, had skilfully woven the garlands of discourse and sex.

Bonnie Zimmerman on female imagination

Because feminism concerns itself with the removal of al limitations and impediments in the way of female imagination, and lesbian critics helps to expand our notions of what is possible for women, then all women would grown by adopting themselves to a lesbian vision.

Fausto-Sterling on intersex bodies

Biological sex is itself socially constructed. Society forces intersex bodies into a male / female binary that does not allow for difference.

Gloria Anzaldua on macho and mother

Coexisting with his sexist behaviour is a love for the mother which takes precedence over that of al others. Devoted son, macho pig.

Berlant and Warner on contexts

Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality.

Berlant and Warner on on omnipresent sex

Even if sex practice is not he object domain of queer studies, sex is everywhere present.

Judith Halberstam on female masculinity

Female masculinity disrupts contemporary cultural studies accounts of masculinity within which masculinity always boils down to the social, cultural and political effects of male embodiment and privilege.

Judith Butler on gender

Gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender

Butler on heterosexual matrix

Gender rendered 'culturally intelligible' through the 'heterosexual matrix'.

Berlant and Warner on heteronormativity

Heteronormativity is a fundamental motor of social organization

Berlant and Warner on hetero culture

Heterosexuality is not a thing. We speak of heterosexual culture rather than heterosexuality because that culture never has more than a provisional unity.

Bonnie Zimmerman on lesbian essence

I do believe there is a lesbian essence that may be located in all these specific historical existences, just like the structure of marriage or the family.

Bonnie Zimmerman on revolutionary model of sexuality

If lesbian literature expresses a revolutionary model of sexuality within structure and content, this is a danger to establish a characteristic lesbian vision or literary value system... in saying this is what defines a lesbian literature, we are easily tempted to read selectively, omitting what is foreign to our theories.

Through the Marxist technique of i---, queer theory turned the word queer on its head, making it a respectable critical term in academic discourse.

Interpellation

Bonnie Zimmerman on cultural violence

Lesbian critics may wish to avoid analysis of lesbian as Other because we no longer wish to dwell upon the cultural violence done against us.

Bonnie Zimmerman on periphery

Lesbian existence is on the periphery of patriarchy.

Judith Halberstam on male sexuality

Male sexuality is both difficult and deadly easy

Judith Halberstam on masculinity is dynamic

Masculinity is a dynamic between embodiment, identification, social privilege, racial and class formation, and desire, not the body. And female masculinity provides a far better and more representative moel for the workings of masculinity in a post-modern society.

Gloria Anzaldua on gay men

Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least have had the guts to break out of the bondage. Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity.

Berlant and Warner on national heterosexuality

National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviour, a space of pure citizenship.

Foucault on speaking of sex

One had to speak of sex; speak publicly and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the speaker maintained the distinction for himself.

Foucault on pleasure and power

Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another, they seek out, overlap and reinforce on another.

Jose Munoz on queer

Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an identity. Put another way, we are not yet queer

Foucault on administering sex

Sex was not something one simply judged, it was a thing one administered

Eve Sedgewick on polar position

Sexuality might be the very opposite of what we originally referred to as sex; it could occupy instead, even more than gender, the polar position of the relational, the social-symbolic, the constructed, the variable, the representational.

Foucault on sex's journey

Sexuality was transferred from Religion to Judicial to Science/Medical

Foucault on medical sexuality

Since sexuality was a medical medicalizable object, one had to try and detect- as lesion, a dysfunction is a symptom- in the deaths of the organism

Phallus

Social power of the penis

Bonnie Zimmerman on all female pairs

The author's tendency to interpret all pairs of female characters as aspects of the self sometimes serves to mask a relationship that a lesbian reader might interpret as bonding or love between women.

Judith Halberstam on gay men

The gay man, unlike his heterosexual counterpart, seems full domesticated... in short, the narrative presents the masculine fay male as the ideal mate for the sexual woman in every aspect except sexual capacity

Judith Halberstam on heterosexual conversion

The heterosexual conversion films depend heavily upon a gay male character who presents as both masculine and respectable in order to offer some kind of challenge to the male heterosexual lover.

Bonnie Zimmerman on genital sexuality

The historical relationship between genital sexuality and lesbianism remains unclear, and we cannot easily identify lesbianism outside a monogamous relationship.

Foucault on revenge on power

The implantation of multiple perversions is not a mockery of sexuality taking revenge on a power than has trust on it an excessively repressive law.

Judith Halberstam on lesbian phallus

The lesbian phallus intervenes in the relation between body parts and the body as a whole, which Lacan tends to essentialize.

Gloria Anzaldua on women and macho

The lost of a sense of dignity and respect in the macho breeds a false machismo which leads him to put down women and even brutalize them.

Foucault on on nameless English man

The nameless English man will serve better than his queen as the central figure for a sexua;ity whose main features war already taking shape with the Christian pastoral.

Berlant and Warner on queer world

The queer world is a space of entrances, exists, unsystamatized lines of acquaintance

Berlant and Warner on transformation of cultural forms

The transformation in the cultural forms of intimacy is related both to the history of the modern public sphere and to the modern discourse of sexuality as a fundamental human captivity

Kate Bornstein on definition of queer

The transvestite represents a 'category crisis [...] the failure of definitional distinctions, a borderline that becomes permeable

Marjorie Garber on transvestites

The transvestite represents a 'category crisis [...] the failure of definitional distinctions, a borderline that becomes permeable

Bonnie Zimmerman on politics

The very meaning of lesbianism is being expanded in literature, just as it is being redefined through politics.

Judith Halberstam on learning from female masculinities

There must be many men who learn their masculinities from visible female masculinities but who would never acknowledge such an exchange precisely because it would endanger their carefully guarded sense of authenticity.

Gloria Anzaldua on macho's doubts

Today's macho has doubts about his ability to feed poverty and low self-esteem. His machismo is an adaptation to oppression and poverty and low self esteem.

Gloria Anzaldua on the knees

We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures.

Berlant and Warner on intimacy and subjectivity

We are used to thinking about sexuality as a form of intimacy and subjectivity, and we have demonstrated just how limited that representation is.

Grosz on reduction to corporeality

Women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men

same-sex "doubles"

a more subtle, somewhat abstract, form of gay and lesbian signs consists of same-sex characters who look alike, act alike, or have parallel experiences

Gender performance

acting a gender part decided for us by society

heterocentrism

assumption, often unconscious, that heterosexuality is the universal norm by which everyone's experience can be understood

Terms like male and female are what Derrida calls f--- f--- s---, concepts whose definitions are not fixed but ever shifting.

free floating signifieds

Third wave feminism

gender is not real- it's a social codes

Homophobia

people are afraid of what they don't understand or harbouring feelings

transgressive sexuality

questions the rules of traditional heterosexuality and thus opens the door of imagination of transgressive sexualities of all kinds

Social constructionism

ruled by social groups predominantly in power- we decide who is in our biology

biological essentialism

segment of the population is naturally gay, just as the rest of the population is naturally heterosexual

Bonnie Zimmerman on cultural conditioning

the only natural form of sexual and emotional expression 'the perceptual screen produced by our cultural conditioning'

gay or lesbian "signs"

two types: characteristics that heterosexist culture stereotypically associates with gay men or lesbians (appearance and behavior of "feminine male characters or "masculine" female characters); coded signs created by the gay or lesbian subculture itself