Article - How Queer Theory turned its back on gay men: when anti-normative faux-radicalism devours a field

[UtopiaPlanitia]

Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 2024). I thought FWR might find it of interest.

https://archive.fo/CYBZi

'The academic field dedicated to overcoming our vast inheritance of homophobia ironically perpetuates it.'

'According to Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term “queer theory” in 1990 (and who has since distanced herself from it), the field was an attempt to explore “gay sexuality in its specific female and male cultural forms … claiming at once equality and difference, demanding political representation while insisting on its material and historical specificity.”'

'Once the focus of queer scholarship effectively shifted from particular, historically constituted communities of sexual minorities to the figure of the anti-normative outsider as such — the abstract queer — it became increasingly common for scholars to express disdain for objects of study taken from gay and lesbian life as failing to meet their standard of radicality.'

That was a really interesting read - thanks for sharing.

I’m glad you found it interesting - it certainly gave me lots to think about, especially the idea of adopting permanent outsider status as a mark of status to signal that you are radical and not boring or pedestrian and then using queer theory to justify that attitude/behaviour.

"... a primary function of queer theory, and the notion of queerness, in the academy today is to transform the actual experiences, practices, and histories by which gay men have been constituted as a distinct community into an abstract, symbolic, infinitely manipulable intellectual resource that can be mobilized by theorists for their own purposes."
Puts me in my of the responses of so many "queer" individuals to Fred Sargeant's memories of the US gay liberation movement.