From a historiographical perspective, Sedgwicks piece is seminal and inspiring. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The editors are scholars and authors of Jewish studies, queer theory, and religious studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. Like Muoz, Carruthers emphasizes the importance of the Black imagination, specifically the ability to imagine alternative economics, alternative family structures, or something else entirely.[42] This work cannot be accomplished if groups like the HRC, which has a clear procapitalist agenda, shape public discourse about LGBTQ+ issues. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons. In the third chapter, Sedgwick underscores the way in which homophobic anxieties have come to be embedded at the heart of heterosexual identity during the end of the 1800s and through the work of Wilde and Nietzsche. Sedgwick: "Queer and Now" (Powers) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's article, "Queer and Now," collected in her book Tendencies (Routledge 1994), challenges the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be queer, i.e., not part of a binaried heteronormative coupling in early 1990s America. Your email address will not be published. What are the key events that Ford identifies as defining the broad outlines of the history of the word. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. An academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. And ultimately, it is a way to shout out loud that those things we have always just accepted all the moving parts that come to define family, sexuality, or queer those are things we havent had a full conversation about yet, and part of what we havent acknowledged is the expansiveness of categories, of all the parts that determine sexuality, but also race, also gender, also nationality, also age, and religion and class. Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Fat Art/Thin Art (Duke, 1994); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990). The U.S. militarys policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clintons administration. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical. Want to create or adapt books like this? Judith Butler describes the social construction of gender, and the policing of gender, by social institutions in this video in the Big Think series. Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. The gorgeous narrative work done by the Foucauldian paranoid, transforming the simultaneous chaoses of institutions into a consecutive, drop-dead-elegantdiagramofspirallingescapesandrecaptures,isalsothe paranoid subjects proer of himself and his cognitive talent, now ready for anything itcan present in the way of blandishment or violence, to an Newton writes, The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that is, genital sex. A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following: It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. Although this interpretationis certainly supported by the text, I wonder if it really captures the nuance of what Sedgwick is trying to do. Ferguson demonstrates that predominantly white sociologists have used works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and other African American writers to construct theories about Black sexualities and therefore Black people (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). InCruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muoz explores the critical imagination, which he refers to as transformative thought that can prompt and shape social change. The marriage of two people of the same sex or gender in a civil or religious ceremony. These meanings and values are transmitted through cultural texts like television, music, or film and are produced within social institutions like schools, museums, and families. It seems to me that she is carving out a way to put everything on the table, to say, ok heres what were up against, heres what Im up against, heres what I can do, heres what I am doing, heres what we need to do, heres what we need fewer people to do, heres what people have always been doing. In this sweeping history of sexuality, Foucault creates an influential theory of sexual-identity formation. 16 - Feminist criticism and queer theory - Cambridge Core Jack Halberstam. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. Queer & Now by Michael Johnson - Prezi TheAdvocate interviews Kate Bornstein, and she explains the gender revolution (https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/11/20/iconic-kate-bornstein-explains-gender-revolution). As a result, meanings and values change across space and time. Icon Books is licensed under a, Figure 1.2. Tongson Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Summary/Susan Petrole, The Combahee River Collective Statement Summary (Powers), TS Redmonds Summary of Audre Lordes Zami, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Susan Petrole), Lorde Summary- Uses of the Erotic (Hummel), Alexander Pedagogies of Crossing (Shoemaker), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Culture (Warmington), Green, Pink, and Lavender Gaard (Shoemaker), Cape Queer? Epistemology of the Closet Updated with a New Preface by Eve - eBay However, as a consequence, new lines and divisions were drawn between heterosexual and homosexual life, and heterosexuality was able to secure its non-homosexual status through measured displays of affection or sentimentality. In other words, much as Newton observes about drag performances of femininity, anybody can put on a gender expression. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, by Roderick A. Ferguson. On Writing Since Queer Theory, the reader is confronted, not only with a summary of their project, but also with a rather profound elucidation of the competing, disparate voices that claim to speak for and about the movement. Bacon expounded on the topic in the caption, urging his fans to support the ACLU's Drag Defense Fund going after anti-drag bills being passed throughout the U.S. "Drag bans are bad karma. Summary Of Sedgwick's Epistemology Of The Closet | ipl.org Human Rights Campaign. A political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government. Additionally, when she proceeds to list the elements that supposedly compose ones sexual identity circa 1991 (7), she deftly points out that this groupings attempts at unifying the differences inherent in different peoples sexual identities into a seamless and univocal whole (8) is an impossible task, but hope exists in the fact that the idea of queer opens up a world of endless possibilities and contradictions for defining and understanding ones self. Product Information. At roughly the same time, the term queer theory began to circulate and quickly gained momentum within academic circles. The reception of Ancient Greek art during the Romantic period, says Sedgwick, was significant insofar as it served as the occasion for a general societal acceptance of unphobic enjoyment of the male figure. [5] She wanted to break with the past and transform the future by developing new ways of conceptualizing sexual identities in the present of the 1990s. In the introduction, Sedgwick presents axioms - "assumptions and conclusions from a long-term project of anti-homophobic analysis" - that inform her book's project. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks article, Queer and Now, collected in her book Tendencies (Routledge 1994), challenges the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be queer, i.e., not part of a binaried heteronormative coupling in early 1990s America. Gender always reveals the preference to heterosexual because the social institution makes gendershow more content Fausto-Sterling introduces the terms herms, ferms, and merms to categorize anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal differences that fall outside a male-female sex dyad. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, by Tan Hoang Nguyen. Their scholarship gestures toward what a queerly transformed world might look like. Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). According to Nguyen, this reinvention of the term bottom has the potential to interrupt, disrupt, and transform sexual, gender, and racial norms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). This is our fight, and even if we are a small population, our fight is rooted in democratic values and human rights, the right to life and dignity. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible, by Malik Gaines. According to Duggan, groups like the HRC represent the interests of white middle-class gay men whose privilege provides them cover to access social institutions and benefit from assimilation in ways unavailable or undesirable to other members of the LGBTQ+ community. Epistemology of the Closet Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary Because queer theory focuses on the interruption, disruption, and decentering of whiteness and on patriarchy, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity, this is a must read (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Faculty web page Office hours by appointment. Instead, queer theory and activism demand publicness, reject civility, and challenge the legitimacy, naturalness, and intrinsic value of institutionswhether marriage or the militarythat regulate gender and sexuality. It begins by elaborating on distinctions between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies before identifying important trends in queer theory. 576 ratings35 reviews. A political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government. Butler states that there is a difference between saying that gender is performed as opposed to saying gender is performative. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals. Her scholarship appears in the Journal of Homosexuality, the European Journal of American Studies, Fast Capitalism, and other journals and edited collections. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization. Also like Rubin, her intellectual investments and theoretical findings were harbingers of things to come. The book includes essays written by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Gender is definitionally built into homosexuality, but sexuality represents beyond gender and reproduction. A strategy or one who enacts such strategy to gain access to, or assimilate into, existing social structures, like monogamous marriage or serving in the U.S. military. Kevin Bacon & Kyra Sedgwick Call U.S. Drag Bans 'Bad Karma - MSN What fears? Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited Her updated version of the classic My Gender Workbook (1997) is an accessible, humorous, and interactive introduction to contemporary gender theory, as well as the intersection of gender, sexuality, and power (New York: Routledge, 2013). Kevin Bacon And Kyra Sedgwick Shut Down Drag Bans In Just 14 - HuffPost His essay is included in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by M. Hames-Garca and E. J. Martnez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1945, which won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. Sedgwicks deconstructivist approach shows us that any social binary that defines subjects in society (especially the binary of heterosexual/homosexual) is not a relation of symmetry between two terms.