Queer Theory Quotes

The main thing that queer theory does is to help us queer things, to estrange them, and to look at issues like power and social dynamics that underlie our assumptions about the world.

I find myself making excuses for this kind of bullying behavior. Not everyone has been to college, learned trans 101, studied queer theory... But this is unfair to myself and other trans people. I've come to realize that understanding me isn't a matter of being an intellectual. Likewise, one doesn't have to be a radical to respect my feelings. Decent people consider how their comments affect others.

I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.

To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.

[Queer theory is] the bastard child of the gay and lesbian movement and postmodern literary theory, which like other unwed mothers has been very loath to acknowledge the father.

These days, especially within queer theory’s hallowed halls, sexual “fluidity” has become something of a talisman for personal authenticity.

If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.

If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.

African "homosexualities" can never be comfortably slotted within identity politics carved out of Western "gay" and "lesbian" liberation struggles, and display queer and even post-queer characteristics.

Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society”. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.

Androgyny doesn't look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purpose of legibility feels futile... As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness

Queer theory” is an academic term which, as queer theorist Annamarie Jagose has explained, is committed to “demonstrating the impossibility of any natural sexuality.” In other words, it challenges the idea that any sexuality, but most notably heterosexuality, is somehow better or more natural than any other.

Our definition of queer is that which fundamentally transforms our state of being and the possibilities for life. That which is queer is that which does not reproduce the status quo.

At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

... but working through racism or sexism in a student consciousness-raising group, at a book club, or on social media is therapy for depoliticized subjects. Therapy is not something to be opposed; but, on its own, it brings about neither reforms nor revolutions.

Finally, the attempt to make all analyses of gender intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity (and not in economics) and to incorporate elements of critical race Theory and queer Theory, results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it difficult—if not impossible—to reach any conclusions other than the oversimplification that straight white men are unfairly privileged and need to repent and get out of everyone else’s way.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.

If we expect translation to reproduce the totality of the semantics and affective uses of the original text, then we believe that translation must be loyal to the seminal language system, rather than letting the discourse travel and undertake the adventure of discovering - or creating - a new set of meaning according to the politics of the translation itself. Rigid loyalty to the original in the translated version was, in effect, the intentionality of the translation of the doctrines and precepts that constituted the colonial discourse.

It's difficult to make the argument that one female fist inserted into one male ass--or, for that matter, dozens or even hundreds of fists inserted into as many asses--can really make a difference for, say, lesbian mothers fighting for custody of their children. -Katherine Raymond

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.

And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.

It is almost inconceivable that so many filmmakers could think of nothing -- be inspired by nothing -- nothing, nothing, nothing -- but the politics of representation, 'performitivity', gender, race, queer theory etc. There must be other subjects, in the world outside or in their inner lives, which belong on the silver (or digital) screen. This degree of conformity is unsettling. It should alarm cultural elites rather than comfort them. Yet the art world's ideological atmosphere is so thick and pervasive that those inside of it don't even realise it as the air they breathe." "Forgive me, I forgot to mention the other permissible topic: 'consumptive capitalism', that oppressive economic system which creates vast sums of taxable wealth, which in turn allows the UK government to fund even this nonsense.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of queer politics was its claim not only to transcend the homo/hetero boundary but to do so in such a way as to challenge the sexual regulation and repression of heterosexual desire, above all female desire. Queer politics, it was claimed, had a lot to teach those accustomed to the narrow confines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ heterosexual roles in relationships. The re-working of notions of monogamy and the send-up of marriage through queer weddings, the greater sexual adventurism, the rejection of the concept of gay men and lesbians as ‘victims’ in favour of assertiveness and redefinition, and the emphasis on the creation of more egalitarian relationships in the domestic, sexual and social spheres, were all cited as examples of how queer could contribute to a new sexual agenda of empowerment.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book.

But, as Haraway reminds us, there is no untouched, ‘wild’ nature to which we can ever return: ‘there is no garden and never has been’…Nevertheless, in their concern with nature and nonhuman ‘earth others,’ many ecofeminists such as Plumwood or queer ecofeminists such as Catriona Sandilands share Haraway’s desire to disrupt the nature/culture dualism…Haraway is thus in accord with much ecofeminist theory when she argues that ‘we must find another relationship to nature beside reification and possession…Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

Conditions in the wider political economy simultaneously shape Black women's subordination and foster activism. On some level, people who are oppressed usually know it. For African-American women, the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender provides the stimulus for crafting and passing on the subjugated knowledge of Black women's critical social theory. As a historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory - it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like - but the purpose of Black women's collective thought is distinctly different. Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of U.S. Black women and other historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice. In the United States, for example, African-American social and political thought analyzes institutionalized racism, not to help it work more efficiently, but to resist it. Feminism advocates women's emancipation and empowerment, Marxist social thought aims for a more equitable society, while queer theory opposes heterosexism.

No longer a natural basis for solidarity, gender is refigured by Buder as a cultural fiction, a performative effect of reiterative acts: 'Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (ibid.:33). Consequently, there is nothing authentic about gender, no 'core' that produces the reassuring signs of gender. The reason 'there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender' is 'that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results'.

The spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma ... than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.

In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind. Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups. A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.

Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now in the best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus, for they used to explore London and bring back bags full of treasures from the Caledonian market – Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps.

If Marner, through the allegedly compassionate intervention of Eliot and Eppie combined, becomes, in his meek and modest way, a pillar of the social order instead of the implicit counterinstance adduced in the text as a pillar of salt, it is only because the threat of that salt, with which Eliot has no beef, cures him.

Phenomenology became the grounds for variants of standpoint epistemology: if a phenomenon seems real, then it is real enough. A Marxist vision of standpoint epistemology, on the other hand, does not privilege individual perception as the arbiter of reality.

Practically every radical cause in America today shows the influence of this postmodernist assault. From radical feminism to racial and sexual politics, postmodern leftists blend their unique brand of cultural criticism with the political objectives of these movements. In their intellectual laboratories -- the cultural studies and humanities programs at American universities -- they apply theories of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructualism to achieving the political objectives of the New Left. The results are a cornucopia of identity theories promising perfect diversity. They include radical multiculturalism, critical race theory, African-American criticism, feminist theory, gender and transgender theories, gay and "queer" theories, Latino studies, media "criticism", postcolonial studies, and indigenous cultural studies, to mention only a few. The latest identity cause to add to the list is the "neurodiversity" movement in which, as its supporters put it, autism, "ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted". All adversity, even that which is biologically inherited, can be wiped away by simply adjusting one's attitudes.

The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn't true. Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative -a sweeping explanation of how things work- and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.

Alas, this brings us to a closer understanding of critical theory. What is often termed (for better or worse) “cultural Marxism,” or Marxism operating on the cultural front, is more often or formally referred to in the academy as “critical theory.”629 Today, in the twenty-first century, much of the more culturally inclined Marxism flies under that banner. There are entire academic departments at universities dedicated to critical theory. Tellingly, most of these academic proponents of Marxism are not economics or political science professors, or historians, most of whom know better, but faculty from English departments. Only in our intellectually bankrupt universities could these vapid viewpoints get a following let alone a hearing. There seems to be an ever-widening panoply of these Marxists. The numbers evolve as the Marxism itself evolves. Today, there are even gender Marxists in the academy. There are, for instance, self-described “queer theorists” and academicians engaged in “intersectionality” who are Marxists focused on cultural work. Above all, these Marxists are about culture. Culture, culture, culture.

The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as -radical skepticism-. It says, -all knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way-. Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment.

Progress ocurred fastest of all in the 1960 and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all ocurred before postmodernism became influential. Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies -in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress ocurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism.

Almost every social significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.

We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, it spread, leaping the species gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious.

But you don’t need all that theory to get there. You just need to realize that people shouldn’t be pushed from birth into these two funny little boxes called boy and girl, or punished when they don’t fit neatly into them.

Queer, as an identity label, differs from its use in the second strand of queer data, which examines the queering of research methods.

Visibility is a trap’... If the burden of proof is higher for LGBTQ people than the general public, and it remains unclear whether the collection of evidence actually initiates meaningful change, the utility of a data-based response to fighting injustice is called into question.

Hacking described his research interest ‘in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications.’ Hacking labeled the subjects of these studies ‘moving targets’ because researchers’ investigatory efforts change them in ways so ‘they are not quite the same kind of people as before.

A queer approach to data collection showcases the back-and-forth between participants and researchers.

Considering the Scottish census through these theoretical lenses, where the census is not a neutral representation of a reality but a tool to construct a governable population, raises questions as to whether the census is an exercise in knowledge construction or a tool to bolster the state’s capacity to manage its population. These two objectives are not exclusive: improved knowledge likely facilitates the design of more efficient ways to coerce, control and discipline people who live within a state's jurisdiction. However, if the construction of knowledge is no longer the primary purpose of a census, this throws into doubt then need for a census to collect accurate information that authentically represents the lives and experiences of the people about whom the data relates.

The cleaning of data can remove its queerness: paper surveys where respondents score out the response options ‘female’ and ‘male’ and write their own answer, interview recordings were participants flip the focus and ask questions of the researcher, census returns where LGBTQ couples identify themselves as ‘married’ even when governments do not recognize same sex marriage. These examples demonstrate how collection methods can fail to restrict how participants share data about their lives and experiences. … cleaning, which involves the removal of data that breaks established rules

Heightened data competence can therefore ensure data is used to improve the lives and experiences of LGBTQ people rather than only serve the interests of, what Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein described as, the three S's: science (universities), surveillance (governments), and selling (corporations).

Critical theories addressing issues of race (critical race theory), gender (feminism), gender identity and sexual expression (queer theory), and disability (critical disability theory) are aimed at identifying interpersonal, social, cultural, and political mechanisms that support inequality, marginalization, or exclusion in order to change them. Critical race theory (CRT) in particular is making its way into social work education (Abrams and Moio 2009; Ortiz and Jani 2010). Ortiz and Jani emphasize that the assumptions behind CRT are that race is a social construction that has profound effects on all aspects of life. Kendi (2019) asserts that the concept of race was developed specifically to justify race-based oppression.

Queer Theory is based on the mystical religious teachings of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Deborah P. Britzman, and many others.

Children influenced by Queer Theory adopt new “gender identities,” fantasize about “social transitioning,” perform drag, and experiment with fictional sexualities and related behaviors.

Today, children across America find themselves under the spell of Queer Theory.

Those in Queer Theory’s inner school are called Queer Activists.

Queer Theory’s most influential contributors were all Marxist in orientation. Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler inherited the core concepts developed by Marxists in the first half of the 20th century and applied them specifically to studying sex, gender, and sexuality. They used Marxist theology as a launchpad for their social critiques and, in so doing, created the new flavor of Marxism that we are all dealing with today—Queer Marxism.

Critical Theory is a playbook for Marxist political activism. The goal of Critical Theory is to relentlessly criticize a society’s institutions and culture, demanding that those institutions give in to Marxist demands. Marxists practice Critical Theory to capture institutions and then use those institutions to generate cultural revolution.

Queer Theory is a radical ideology that uses activism (queering) to convince people that nothing is normal or natural. It specializes in convincing people that sex, gender, and sexuality are social (political) constructs—fabrications invented and sold as “the truth” by dominant classes—but those categories are not limiting factors. Queer Theory’s activity is to deconstruct the very concept of normalcy.

The medialization of politics turns into politics into an apolitical media spectacle.

And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants. What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher. If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her. We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity. But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with antinormativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival.

When I became a Christian, I had to change everything—my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in. I was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian and feminist groups on campus. I was writing a book that I no longer believed in. And, I was scheduled in a few months to give the incoming address to all of Syracuse University’s graduate students. What in the world would I say to them? The lecture that I had written and planned to deliver—on Queer Theory—I threw in the trash. Thousands of new students would hear my first, fledgling attempts to speak about Christian hermeneutics at a postmodern university. I was flooded with doubt about my new life in Christ. Was I willing to suffer like Christ? Was I willing to be considered stupid by those who didn’t know Jesus? The world’s eyes register what a life in Christ takes away, but how do I communicate all that it gives? Do I really believe, in Charles Bridges’s words, “The very chains of Christ are glorious” (p. 33)?1 Peter, after being beaten for preaching the gospel, rejoiced that he was “counted worthy to suffer shame for [Christ’s] name” (Acts 5:41). I pondered this. To the world, this is masochism. To the Christian, this is freedom. Did I really believe this? Do I really believe this today?

As early as 1948, the Kinsey Report had reinforced the bluff-your-way-into-Freud theory of human sexuality, placing everyone on a bisexual continuum. So good citizens learned there might be something queer in everybody – and everybody meant even themselves!

Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory.

Queer Theory, manifestly, exists in a bizarre academic time-warp. Even as homosexuality has grown increasingly accepted in mainstream America, and as the institutions of the closet and the gay ghetto have steadily evaporated, Queer Theorists continue to cling to the old separatist agenda—continue to try to reinforce the idea that gays are strange, marginal, anti-establishment, contrarian, and rebellious—and continue to try to pretend that when they echo the tired twenty-year-old platitudes of Kushner, Goldstein, and Vaid they are saying something new.

My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn’t dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission.

If sex is not just about reproduction, it is not just about genes, XY chromosomes, and hormones either. Sex is introduced to explain skeletal structure, mental aptitude, posture, emotional disposition, aesthetic preference, body fat, sexual orientation and responsiveness, athletic ability, social dominance, shape and weight, artistic ability. It is also supposed to explain any number of so-called "instincts", including the nesting instinct, the maternal instinct, and perhaps even the Budweiser instinct.

The problem with being everything is that it mostly gets me a whole lot of nothing. In theory I should be able to claim all the identities and related spaces above, but we all know that's not true. Instead I find myself isolated. And a liar.

Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler didn’t develop their theories of sex, gender, and sexuality from scratch. Each of these thinkers shares a common philosophical starting point—a framework that they mapped their ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality onto. If Queer Theory is a vehicle for cultural and personal revolution, it runs on the engine of Marxism. In fact, Queer Theory is Queer Marxism. Queer Theory cannot be understood without peeking under the hood, revealing the Marxist mechanics that give it life.

Queer Theory defines another ideology called “homonormativity,” which doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means. “Homonormativity” is an ideology that brainwashes people—especially homosexual people—to believe being gay or lesbian is or can be normal, as opposed to intrinsically radical. It convinces people—especially homosexual people—to believe gay and lesbian people should be accepted as a normal variation of human sexuality and even to “pass” by dressing and living their lives in ways Queer Activists deem to be “coded as” “normal,” what might be described paradoxically as “the straight people of gay people.” Queer Activists believe being gay or lesbian should be a front of radical potential and Queer Activism, not just another normal variation of human experience, and so they believe the adoption of “homonormativity” further oppresses “queer” people by normalizing homosexuality.

Queer Theory is a dangerous, destructive cult religion.

the goal of Queer Theory is to break the brainwashing program so you can free yourself from yourself (as society allegedly demands you to be). The goal is to break off the societal chains on your soul so you can realize who you really are “on the inside.” To do this, you start queering society, breaking all traditions, rules, and norms. Then, free from the constraints of an illegitimate order, you become queer.

Queer Theory claims that society brainwashes men and women into believing they must participate in heterosexual relationships and brainwashes gays and lesbians into “passing” as straight by living normal lives.

The goal of Queer Theory is to use political activism to make people conscious of the “prison” society locks us all into, thereby making people conscious of the prison they have constructed for themselves. This queer consciousness is the state of being awake to the “truth” of Queer Theory. In developing a queer consciousness, one becomes a radical activist who uses Queer Theory as the lens through which they view all of society. Queer Theory informs how those with queer consciousness think and act in the world. Queer consciousness inspires one to view society as a prison they must dismantle and break free from to free their soul. In short, Queer Theory is a vehicle for a complete and perpetual cultural and personal revolution.

- But tell me, who was that queer cove with the spool of twine and the German accent? - The Austrian accent? Jeeves gently corrected. I may be mistaken, sir, but I think that was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. - So not an unhinged gardener? - Dr Wittgenstein is the author of the Tractatus. - A short history of farm machinery in the Ukraine? - The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sir, concerns itself with a picture theory of language.

- But tell me, who was that queer cove with the spool of twine and the German accent? - The Austrian accent? Jeeves gently corrected. I may be mistaken, sir, but I think that was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. - So not an unhinged gardener? - Dr Wittgenstein is the author of the Tractatus. - A short history of farm machinery in the Ukraine? - The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sir, concerns itself with a picture theory of language.

Withholding speech, in other words, can signify domination: the one who says less wins the emotional game, which is exactly why self-help guides aimed at straight women ... advise women to meet men’s silence with silence (don’t call back, don’t respond to emails, and so on). Straight women are essentially being told to use silence to empower themselves by fanning the kind of desire that, as we have established, arises from the other’s enigma.

Queer melancholia theory, an especially lush account of how the mourning process bodies forth gendered subjects, insists that subjectivity itself is a record of partings and foreclosures, cross-hatched with the compensatory forms these absences engender. Within this paradigm, queer becoming-collective-across-time and even the concept of futurity itself are predicated upon injury—separations, injuries, spatial displacements, preclusions, and other negative and negating forms of bodily experience—or traumas that precede and determine bodiliness itself, that make matter into bodies. This paradigm is indebted, via Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, not only to Derrida but also to Freud’s theory that a bodily imago and eventually the ego itself emerge from raw suffering.

If you see anyone trying to narrow the definition of neuroqueer and trying to police who gets to use the tern, feel free to tell them that I said to stop acting like a fucking cop. The world needs more queering and fewer cops.

Spribille told me about a paper called “Queer theory for lichens.” (“It comes up as the first thing in Google when you enter ‘queer’ and ‘lichen.’ ”) Its author argues that lichens are queer beings that present ways for humans to think beyond a rigid binary framework: The identity of lichens is a question rather than an answer known in advance. In turn, Spribille has found queer theory a helpful framework to apply to lichens. “The human binary

Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourse - how things are spoken about - the deconstruction of categories and a profound skepticism of science.

The main industry of queer Theorists is to intentionally conflate two meanings of "normative," and deliberately make strategic use of the moral understanding of the term to contrive problems with its descriptive meaning.

Papers that use queer Theory usually begin by examining an idea, problematizing it in queer (or "queering" or "genderfucking") ways, and eventually concluding that there can be no conclusions.

This radical neglect of biology limits the ability not just of queer Theory but of all scholarship on these topics to rigorously investigate socialized aspects of gender presentation and expectations - while rendering potentially valuable insights from queer Theory nearly completely irrelevant to those serious about such questions.

Judith Butler, a feminist and LGBT scholar and activist who was foundational to the development of queer Theory, epitomizes the opposite approach to this dilemma. In her most influential work, Gender Trouble,17 published in 1990, Butler focuses on the socially constructed nature of both gender and sex. For Butler, “woman” is not a class of people but a performance that constructs “gendered” reality. Butler’s concept of gender performativity—behaviors and speech that make gender real—allowed her to be thoroughly postmodern, deconstruct everything, and reject the notion of stable essences and objective truths about sex, gender, and sexuality, all while remaining politically active. This worked on two levels. Firstly, by referring to “reality-effects” and social or cultural “fictions,” Butler is able to address what she sees as the reality of social constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. For Butler, the specific constructions themselves are not real, but it is true that constructions exist. Secondly, because the “queer” is understood to be that which falls outside of categories, especially those used to define male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, disrupting and dismantling those categories is essential to activism. “To queer” can therefore be used as a verb in the Butlerian sense, and the “queering” of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or accepted truths associated with it. The purpose of this is to liberate the “queer” from the oppression of being categorized.

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourses—how things are spoken about—the deconstruction of categories, and a profound skepticism of science.

Queer Theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender and sexuality to be oppressive. Because queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality. It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language.

Like the other postmodern Theories, queer Theory is a political project, and its aim is to disrupt any expectations that people should fit into a binary position with regard to sex or gender, and to undermine any assumptions that sex or gender are related to or dictate sexuality.

In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society and determining what people held to be true and, consequently, how they spoke about it.

One way to sidestep such guilt is to make our objects of envy boys rather than men. There is a definitive boyishness to the litany of masc aspirational figures I opened this chapter with, and it's not at all incidental. They are all safe boys to love: non-threatening, gentle, empathic, features that are amplified by the nexus of youth and whiteness. This is, indeed, what makes them popularly palatable teen heartthrobs, and what makes transmasc cathodes to them ones that don't threaten to devour. Awkward-Rich, in a brilliant criticism of what he calls "the boys of queer trans theory," suspects that the figure of the boy (as theorized in the work of Jack Halberstam, Bobby Noble, and others) emerges as central to these strains of trans masculine theorizing because he stands for a kind of "masculinity without phallic power" that "fashions masculinity for the [feminist] movement." In halberstam's work, the boy—and, specifically, the paradigmatic boy that is Peter Pan—signals a refusal to grow up and into the staid gender stereotypes associated with heteronormative adulthood.

Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice

Because of its internal complexity and single-minded focus on oppression, intersectionality is riddled with divisions and subcategories, which exist in competition with—or even in unrepentant contradiction to—each other. Some people in the United States therefore argue that gay white men (Fitzgerald 2019) and nonblack people of color—generally assessed as marginalized groups—need to recognize their privilege and antiblackness (Chung 2017). This can lead to the insistence that lighter-skinned black people recognize their privilege over darker-skinned black people (Tracey 2019). Straight black men have been described as the “white people of black people” (Young 2019). It is also not uncommon to hear arguments that trans men, while still oppressed by attitudes towards their trans status, need to recognize that they have ascended to male privilege (Abelson 2014) and amplify the voices of trans women, who are seen as doubly oppressed, by being both trans and women. Gay men and lesbians might well find themselves not considered oppressed at all, particularly if they are not attracted to trans men or trans women, respectively, which is considered a form of transphobia and misgendering (Sara C 2018). Asians and Jews may find themselves stripped of marginalized status due to the comparative economic success of their demographics, their participation in “whiteness,” or other factors (Kuo 2018; Lungen 2018). Queerness needs to be decolonized—meaning made more racially diverse—and its conceptual origins in white figures like Judith Butler need to be interrogated (Small 2019).

Herein lies the material basis of trans femininity: a cis woman might be a sex worker and both proletarian and bourgeois standards for female respectability have long been defined in contrast to the figure of the sex worker, but trans femininity has been positioned by police and cultural producers in a categorical relation to sex work since the late nineteenth century. This is a feminist theoretical conclusion that trans feminine lives reveal and trans women politicize.

At the core of Lacanian ethics if therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why the act opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).

The American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, for instance – a key figure in the academic discipline of Queer Theory, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s – would, I imagine, be unbothered by the chicken scenario, just as she is unbothered by unusual sexual behaviour in general.

Adherence to queer theory forbids any discussion about sex and gender that does not restrict itself to 'gender identity', namely the sexist social construct that gives ideological effect to women's oppression. Faith in 'gender identity' is hardened into its own brand of dogma, ideological conformity and coercion.

Queer Theory is not merely academic; it is full of religious rituals and observances.

Queer Theory demands total submission and obedience.

As I write this, the Koch brothers, along with the Manhattan Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and America First Legal are financing the attack on racial and queer justice in education by lying to the American public that critical race theory (CRT) is being taught in our nation’s schools and drag queens are grooming children. The Koch brothers don’t simply aim their wealth at model legislation and shifting public perceptions. They also attempt to directly influence electoral results by financing right-wing candidates and movements like the Tea Party.

All I wanted was to live the life of the mind, and I know it’s a terribly shopworn thing to say, but there you have it. I didn’t stand in any camp, I wasn’t a formalist or a feminist, I didn’t want to call myself a reader-response person or a deconstructionist or a poststructuralist. I wasn’t a Marxist or a proponent of queer theory, or a Freudian, a post colonialist, or God help us! there was a black man in our department, a graduate student like me, who wanted us to start a movement to rename Multiculturalism ‘Slave Studies.’ He believed there was some sort of cleansing, revolutionary power in the ‘ironic distancing,’ that’s what he called it.” Langston took a deep breath, then sighed, remembering it all. “And no one could say anything to him, because we had no authority—that’s the key to the recent developments in the critical tradition: if you’re inside—and believe me, academia is nothing but a cult of expertise, it is the only religion alive and well—only if you’re inside do you have any authority, and if that’s the case, no one can speak to you. Your curriculum vitae becomes your fortress.