Sex, Gender, Queer Theory and Race

Sex, Gender, Queer Theory and Race

Queer theory is a term that emerged in the late 1980s for a body of criticism on issues of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity that came out of gay and lesbian scholarship in such fields as literary criticism, politics, sociology, and history. Queer theory rejects essentialism in favor of social construction; it breaks down binary oppositions such as “gay” or “straight”; while it follows those postmodernists who declared the death of the self, it simultaneously attempts to rehabilitate a subjectivity that allows for sexual and political agency. Some of the most significant ...