Critical Approaches to Literature

As I assume many of my readers will not have a background knowledge of Queer Theory, I thought it would be useful to reprint a selection from M.H. Abrams “A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed.” as an introduction to the subject:

“Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance–such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality–from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities.  The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize make and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has been increasingly adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a non-invidious term to identify a way of life and an area for schlarly inquiry.

“Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements”…during the…countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s.  Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the political activities to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority.  Through the 1970s, the two movements were primarily separatist: gays often thought of themselves as quintessentially male, while many lesbians, alighning themselves with the femininst movement, characterized the gay movement as sharing the anti-female attitudes of the reigning patriarchal culture.  Recently, however, there has been a growing recognition (signalized by the adoption of the join term “queer”) of the degree to which the two groups share a history as a despised and suppressed minority and poseess common political and social aims.

“In the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian that has remained stable through human history.  A major endeavor was to identify and reclain the works of non-heterosexual writers from Plator to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde,…, Auden, and James Baldwin,…to Virginia Woolf, [and] Adrienne Rich.  The list included writers who represented in their literary works homoerotic subject matter, but whoe own sexuality the available biographical evidence leaves uncertain.  In the 1980s and 1990s, however–in large part because of the assimilation of the viewpoints and analytic methods of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralits–the earler assumptions about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were frequently put to question, and historical and critical analyses became increasingly subtle and complex.

“A number of queer theorists, for example, adopted the deconstructive mode of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture, such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, and natural/unnatural, by which a spectrum of diverse things is forced into only two categories, and in which the first category is assigned prividege, power, and centrality, while the second is derograted, subordinated, and marginalized. …Adrienne Rich posited what she called the “lesbian continuum” as a way of stressing how far-ranging and diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding among women, including female friendships, the family relationship between mother and daughter, and women’s partnerships and social groups, as well as overtly physical same-sex relationships.  Later theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the standard hierarchical opposition by which homosexuality is marginalized and made unnatural, by stressing the extent to which the ostensible normativity of heterosexuality is based on the suppression and denial of same-sex desires and relationships.

“Another prominent theoretical procedure has been to undo the “essentialist” assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and trasnhistorical types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing these catefories–that is, by proposing that they are social and discursive constructs that emerged under special ideological conditions in a particular culture at a particular time.  …Foucault…claims that, while there had long been a social category of sodomy as a transgressive human act, the “homosexual,” as a special type of human subject or identity, was a construction of the medical and legal discourse of the latter oart if te nuneteenth century.  In a further development of constructionist theory, Judith Butler,…described the categories of gender and sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultureal discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, it also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behaviour that he or she enacts.  Homosexuality, by this view, is not a particular identity that eddects a pattern of action, but a socially pre-established pattern of action that produces the effect of originating in a particular identity. …

“The constructionist view has now been elaborated by considering the cross-influences of race and of economic class in producing the identities and modes of behaviour of gender and sexuality. … Sustained debate among queer theorists concerns the risk of a radical constructionism, which would dissolve a lesbian or gay identity into a purely discursive product specific to a particular culture, as against the need to affirm a special and enduring identity in order to signalize and celebrate it, as well as to establish a basis for concerted political action.

“A number of journals are now devoted to queer theory and to lesbian, gay, and transgender studies and criticism; the field has also become the subject of regularly schedules learned conferences, and has been established in the curriculum of the humanities and social sciences in a great many colleges and universities.”