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HandWiki. Queer Theory. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29608 (accessed on 22 September 2026).
HandWiki. Queer Theory. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29608. Accessed September 22, 2026.
HandWiki. "Queer Theory" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29608 (accessed September 22, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, October 17). Queer Theory. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29608
HandWiki. "Queer Theory." Encyclopedia. Web. 17 October, 2022.
Queer Theory
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The content is sourced from: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Philosophy:Queer_theory

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” 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-corrective surgery. Queer theory holds that individual sexuality is a fluid, fragmented, and dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities and it may vary at different points of his 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 studies queer theory sexual activity

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