Pretty vague and poorly presented. Allow me:
Quote:
Queer Theory is a pairing of words coined by Teresa de Lauretis during a working conference on theorizing lesbian and gay sexualities that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990[1]. Around this time Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Epistemology of the Closet, David Halperin published One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and countless others went to work on this new area of thought. The beginning debates sometimes focused on social constructionist vs. essentialist ideologies. That is, are the categories of sexuality socially contrived, created through discourse, or are they natural givens, outside of our control to make or change?
This binary may itself be a false dichotomy, as discourse shapes our understanding of what is natural and what is cultural shapes discourse-- but it still is a useful starting point for exploring these debates. Constructivists counter that there is no natural, that all meaning is constructed through discourse and there is no other subject other than the creation of meaning for social theory.
In a Constructivist perspective it is not proper to take gay or lesbian as subjects with objective reality; but rather they must be understood in terms of their social context, in how genealogy creates these terms through history.
For example, as Foucault explains in his The History of Sexuality, 200 years ago there was no linguistic category for gay male. Instead, the term applied to sex between two men was sodomy. Over time the homosexual was created through the discourses of medicine and especially psychiatry. What is conventionally understood to be the same practice was gradually transformed from a sinful lifestyle into an issue of sexual orientation. Foucault argues that prior to this discursive creation there was no such thing as a person who could think of himself as essentially gay.
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Queer theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gee whiz, Dean didn't even rate a mention. Anyway, now, how does that philosophical concept determine reality through "brainwashing"?