WOMS200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Jacques Derrida, Queer Theory, Gay Liberation
23 May 2018
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Lecture 17
Queer Theory Part 3
Towards Studies of Sexuality as Political
1980s & 1990s:
• Sexuality as sexology – biology, physiology, psychology
• Various approaches to sexuality – sociological, cultural, political
• Gay liberation
• Sex wars of the 1980s (sex positive vs. sex negative)
• HIV/AIDS
Post-structuralism
1960s:
• Queer theory had its theoretical basis in the academic turn to post-structuralism
• Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault
• the rejet the idea of a sigle, uiersal, asolute truth
• ritial of theories ased o grad arraties that attept to eplai all of hua
eperiee i ters of oe speifi struture
Queer Theory is Born
• Took plae at Theresa DeLauretis oferee at Uiersit of CA 99
• Turning away from identity politics and towards acts/practices
• Ways in which power relates to sexuality
• What did DeLaurentis say queer theory did?
o Refusing heterosexuality as the standard on which all sexual formations are
based
o Insisting that sexual subjectivity is shaped through sex and gender
o Moving away from a singular understanding of gay/lesbian
Multiple Queer Theories
• Were developed in the 1990s
• Drawing on post-structuralist theories to examine power relations relating to sex,
sexuality and gender
• Through destabilizing the taken-for-granted dominant understanding which assumes
that heterosexual is the normal/natural standard of sexuality, and categorizes people in
relation to this
• B eposig ho seual ad geder idetities…
o Are constructed through the available ways of thinking and being in different
times and places
o Are performed, something that we do, rather than something that we
(essentially) are
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