Definition of Queer Theory

The organization of social movement queer had a profound impact on the academic field, as a consequence, within certain circles dedicated to cultural studies and feminism, the term expression queer theory. This process took place, mainly, in the United States, but it extended, in the panorama of the academy, to a planetary scale. The Italian philosopher Teresa de Lauretis (1938) was one of the first to recover the term queer to account for the shift produced within the Humanities with respect to studies gay-lesbian, based on the diagnosis that the latter showed a tendency towards homogenization and normalization of what, initially, had been considered as a position dissident.

The queer, in this sense, exceeded the categories of homosexual discursivity, highlighting the intersections with the categories of race and social class. Then, gender, sexual practices, race and class status were categories that, in practice, appeared interrelated, so that the theory had to analyze them as a whole. Currently, queer studies have been consolidated within the academy as a theme for specific reflection.

The origins of the queer concept

The word queer —translated from English as “strange”, “strange”— was used in current speech (in contemporary English-speaking societies), as a form of of calling, with a derogatory connotation, people who identified themselves with gender and sexual identities that did not meet the "standards" imposed by society, namely people who were not heterosexual or whose gender identities did not correspond to their sex assignment at birth (transgender people).

Towards the end of the 20th century, there is a movement of reappropriation of the term, by those people who were segregated by their sex-gender choices, who take queerness as a banner under which an economic, political and cultural position is claimed. Faced with the current social order, claiming to be queer was a form of resistance to a series of structural violence that was presented in terms of normality. Thus, within American society, the word queer begins to be used, in a ironic, instead of “gay” —whose translation into Spanish is “cheerful”— resignifying its use to denounce the discrimination towards those identities.

In this way, progressively, the queer movement was constituted, as a social movement articulated around the vindication of ways of dissidents with respect to a society that was based on exclusion, marginalization and that exercised multiple forms of violence towards those who did not conform to the rule established. The queer movement takes up as an inheritance the organizations feminist and gay/lesbian politicians of the 1960s and 1970s, who are considered pioneers in the fight against sex-gender discrimination.

The disputed gender

The work of the American philosopher Judith Butler (1966) The disputed gender (1990) is recognized as a reference writing for queer theory. There, on the one hand, a critique of the predominant heterosexism within feminist theory up to that time was raised and, on the other hand, a reflection on the ways in which tacitly imposed gender norms in Western societies made certain types of gender unlivable lives.

The strongest bet of Butler's elaborations has been to show how gender and sexuality are constructed or acted on, based on practices, conventions and institutions; therefore, they do not occur naturally nor do they strictly depend on biological data.

Although Butler emphasizes gender studies, his developments extend to a elaboration of the identity, in general terms, as the result of a series of practices that are material and that can vary over time, difference from the way in which the western tradition had defined it, under essentialist categories, as an invariable and ideal.

Bibliography

Perez, M. (2016). Queer Theory, why? Isel, 5, 184-198.