DM FYI: QUEER THEORY

These days on social media, specially on twitter, a debate has been taken place around queer theory. The question being discuss is whether queer theory is or is not a thinking that harms the ideas of feminism. Without intention of taking a side I will present some of the keys to understand each position.

Queer theory

Queer theory belongs to the third wave of feminism along with postmodernism and cyberfeminism.

Postmodernism refers to what happened before the modern, the historic period that starts when the modern capitalism is born, after the colonization of America in 1492. In this epoch people ponder over the human being and his/ her rights as a person. Ideas of subjectivity and individual freedom arised.

The modern subject gives the utmost importance to the last name, the family one is born into. That is to say, the modern subject conceded great weight in the development of the subject to the social interactions he or she has in society. In the modern times it was believed each person identity was mostly influenced by her/ his social context. In postmodernity that idea is called into question and a new idea came out: each subject has no essence, her/ his identity depends on the situation. The idea of a fragile subject arises, the constructive idea of identity.

In this context, in the 80’s, a debate begins on what it means to be a woman. The subject is no longer something fixed and changeless, therefore, it becomes something to question. Queer theory is an anti-essentialist theory that question the notion of gender. Queer theorists refuse to believe there is such thing as an homogenous group of “women”.

Judith Butler is the most influential thinker and is considered the promoter of queer theory. She recognizes subjectivity as a process of performativity, of performance, a process in which nothing is stable nor homogeneous. She suggests to question, deconstruct and destabilize the subject and, consequently, the gender of the subject.

Butler raised the theory of gender performativity. She thinks about gender as a social construction, a role each person decides to play. From her point of view, gender is a voluntary representation of the fantasy society sets out. That is to say gender is a social construction that exists only because of those who play the gender roles society stipulates. Thus, gender is a social construction, not a biological aspect of the subject. Butler rejects that a person’s genitals should identify a person as “male” or “female”.

Queer comes from the English term that means “strange”, “abnormal”. However, the everyday use of the term was “sick”. Towards the end of the 19^th century, the term began to take on sexual connotations to refer to those who do not conform to the norm of heterosexuality. From the 19^th century on, those who were not heterosexual were studied in terms of illness. Before, they were treated in terms of sin.

Queer theory questions the heteronormativity through Foucault’s unfinished text: History of sexuality, in which the author studied the function of the repression of sexual impulses as a relevant factor in the formation of advanced societies.

Joan Rivière published an article titled Womanliness as masquerade (1929) in which she affirmed female sexuality can be articulated according to two bases: homosexual or heterosexual, but between these two categories there are many other categories. That is how she tried to explain how women “masculinize” or “feminize” her actions according to her situation. For example, some women adopt qualities described as “masculine” to break through a professional world dominated by men. Therefore, Rivière reflected that gender can be “masked” (adopted) by people as they see fit.

Rossi Braidotti reflects about the body as nothing more than a tool for relating to the world, but not an essence. She believes your body does not determined your identity.

In 1990 in New York, the group Queer Nation is founded. Its goal was to fight homophobia and raise awareness of gays and lesbians, but always with the aim of dissolving the borders and differences that gender creates. Queer theory tries to overcome and invalidate the gender classification of people as a way to end sexism and homophobia.

Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler reported mass media as “gender technologies” as they present and disseminate ideas about what it is to be a woman or a man, fostering gender roles that create a dichotomy in society.

To learn more about queer theory:

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler
Technologies of gender by Teresa de Lauretis
Nomadic subjects by Rosi Braidotti
Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality by Gayle Rubin
Thinking sex by Gayle Rubin

Criticism of the queer theory

The opposite theory to queer theory is the one uphold by the TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists). They do not accept trans women as women, arguing that gender is a biological category and so is the reason for the oppression of women in the patriarchal system. Trans women were born with male privileges. Therefore, they think that to reject the reality of gender would be to deny the oppression suffered by women all over the world due to their gender.

The main critic to queer theory rises from this idea that the rejection of the reality of gender leads to denying the oppression that women suffer for the mere fact of being so. However, not all people who reject the queer theory support TERFs' theory.

Most people against queer theory reject the gender performativity suggested by Judith Butler, partly, since they understand that she proposed to be queer as the only way to escape the “traps” of gender. They deduce that Butler suggested that the only way to get out of the “being a woman” script is to adopt a queer role.

Moreover, those who refuse queer theory criticize the main use of men’s theories and the manipulation of the few women’s theories in which queer theorists base their way of thinking. They report against their recovery of men’s way of thinking as the only valid one.

Furthermore, another critic comes from the acceptation and incitation of queer theory of porn, sadomasochist practices and pedophilia.

At the same time as queer theory questions the category of women, it questions the belonging to a social class, the sexuality and the ethnicity of a person since they are all performative acts of the unstable and unfixed identity of each individual. Therefore, queer theory denies the intersectionality proposed by the postcolonial feminisms.

From a marxist and feminist point of view, queer theory is also criticized because it suggests an individual change, each person can make his/ her own revolution. Each person can change the gender roles.

To learn more about the criticism of the queer theory:

Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition by Nancy Fraser
The new myths of feminism by Lidia Falcón (chapter V)
Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys
Heterosexualism in the Colonial/modern Gender system by María Lugones
Queer theory in the Spanish context. Reflections fromfeminism by Laura Posada Kubissa
An introduction to the debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler by Montserrat Galceran Huguet