QUEER THEORY

QUEER THEORY

…sexual dissidence…

 

Omar Colmenares
Written

Today I want to present the story of Charles, a teenager, who lives southwest of London, I do not know if he is gay, I do not know, I do not care, labels are outdated, besides limiting the greatness of the human being, that if it is true he has a surprising personality, he is a great human being, he is profound, he loves literature, he likes Mozart's music; He says he is something Bohemian, he is passionate about the arts, he usually hides whenever he can in the national Gallery.

It is crossed out as "Fagod" “Fucking fagot” "Gay" # but the truth does not worry him, he claims to have no identity. And for what? Because you have to name everything, but Charles is a Queer guy ... if he really is a QUEER.

Well, like charles, thousands of young people in the world are not willing to be qualified as heterosexuals, or as homosexuals, because even in landscapes there are nuances, because human beings are like the atom, and the composition of many atoms, we have everything a bit, then because we have to use a qualifying adjective to pretend to identify something or someone.

When I took the job of doing the research to develop this article I came across the concept of deconstruction, but what the fuck is that? Is it to destroy what has been achieved by LGBTI organizations? , at all, your struggle is plausible and courageous, and thanks to your effort today we have a better, more inclusive society; but the deconstruction to which I refer is a philosophical term added at first to "Heidegger", put here, it is like that which seeks to dislodge the structures that underlie the narrative and language of sexual minorities, such as that which people like I, we do not fit into that LGBTI acronym, nor do we identify ourselves as Homosexuals.

Not all queers wear tight jeans, or colorful clothes, we are not all the circus clowns, we do not all pretend to be the gay guy who entertains the parties with his black humor as a family, we are not all those fashions, glamor and dyed pompadour , some of us, we wear glasses, we have mustaches, we speak as men that we are, and we do not dream of mimicking heterosexual relationships with Gay marriage.

For years, speakers of U.S. English used the term queer to identify something odd or peculiar, and if tied to gender or sexuality, the term's reference was highly derogatory and often intended to be. But the term's meaning began to shift during the 1980s, in response to the AIDS crisis, unmet lesbian health care needs, and other signs that "gay liberation" benefited only a privileged (often white, often male-bodied) few. Writers such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and the women of the Combahee River Collective also began to take up the term in their writings, often critiquing hegemonic feminism by expressing intersectional oppressions experienced by lesbians and women of color. In fact, as far as non-conforming sexual subjects were concerned, the term queer was a very useful point of reference. If outsiders called homosexuals queer, they no longer shied away from the invective, but embraced it, turned its meaning inside out, and hurled the offensive claim back in the face of the oppressor: "We're here, we're queer, so get used to it!"

In the 1990s, a tradition of scholarship began as critiques of gender theory and lesbian/gay theory, creating frameworks of analysis that were oriented around categories of identity and tightly defined homo-/hetero-sexual binaries. What that new tradition proposed was a non-conforming theory - a queer theory - which offered alternative perspectives on normative academic practices, while questioning the authority proclaimed by academic norms. While often non-conforming by academic standards, the alternative perspectives were but also innovative and provocative. Their "oppositional relation to the norm" generated "...a diverse, often conflicting set of interdisciplinary approaches to desire, subjectivity, identity, relationality, ethics and norms".

Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorization of 'queerness' itself. Heavily influenced by the work of Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into natural and unnatural behavior with respect to homosexual behavior, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories. Italian feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis coined the term queer theory for a conference she organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990 and a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies she edited based on that conference.

Through the context of heterosexuality being the origin and foundation of society's heteronormative stability, the concept of queerness focuses on, "mismatches between sex, gender and desire"[2] Queerness has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex bodies and identities, gender ambiguity and gender-confirmation surgery. Queer theory holds that individual sexuality is a fluid, fragmented, and dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities and it may vary at different points during one’s life. Its attempted debunking of stable (and correlated) sexes, genders, and sexualities develops out of the specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions.

Queer theory also examines the discourses of homosexuality developed in the last century in order to place the "queer" into historical context, deconstructing contemporary arguments both for and against this latest terminology.

Queer Theory's overarching goal is to be sought out as a lens or tool to deconstruct the existing monolithic ideals of social norms and taxonomies; as well as, how these norms came into being and why.[8] The view is that these notions and norms are rigid organizing categories that do not sufficiently explain different attitudes, behaviors, or conditions of individual experiences. In addition, it analyzes the correlation between power distribution and identification while understanding the multifarious facets of oppression and privilege. Feminist and Queer Theory are seen as applicable concepts that provide a framework to explore these issues rather than as an identity to those in the community. Queer is an umbrella term for those not only deemed sexually deviant, but also used to describe those who feel marginalized as a result of standard social practices. It is a “site of permanent becoming”.

Queer theory explores and contests the categorization of gender and sexuality. If identities are not fixed, they cannot be categorized and labeled, because identities consist of many varied components, so categorization by one characteristic is incomplete, and there is an interval between what a subject "does" (role-taking) and what a subject "is" (the self). This opposition destabilizes identity categories, which are designed to identify the "sexed subject" and place individuals within a single restrictive sexual orientation.

What can I say to finish, but say that not all queers are the same. Some of us have a brain; that is an opportunity to analyze in depth these social phenomena, sexual minorities, rights and freedoms, which of course do not imply libertinism but the right to be what you want to do without harming anyone, without imposing arbitrarily but win with respect.