Queer Theory - History

History

There has been a long history of critical and anarchistic thinking about sexual and gender relations across many cultures. Sexual and gender radicals are no new thing. Most recently, in the late 1970s and 1980's, social constructionists conceived of the sexual subject as a culturally dependent, historically specific product.{{}} Before the phrase "queer theory" was born, the term "Queer Nation" appeared on the cover of the short-lived lesbian/gay quarterly Outlook in the winter 1991 issues. Writers Allan Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier drove home the point that Queer Nation strove to embrace paradoxes in its political activism, and that the activism was taking new form and revolving around the issue of identity. Soon enough Outlook and Queer Nation stopped being published, however, there was a mini-gay renaissance going on during the 1980s and early 1990s. There were a number of significant outbursts of lesbian/gay political/cultural activity. Out of this emerged queer theory. Their work however did not arise out of the blue. Teresa de Lauretis is the person credited with coining the phrase "queer theory". It was at a working conference on lesbian and gay sexualities that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990 that de Lauretis first made mention of the phrase. She later introduced the phrase in a 1991 special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, entitled "Queer Theory, Lesbian and Gay Sexualities." Similar to the description Berube and Escoffier used for Queer Nation, de Lauretis asserted that, "queer unsettles and questions the genderedness of sexuality." Barely three years later, she abandoned the phrase on the grounds that it had been taken over by mainstream forces and institutions it was originally coined to resist. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, and David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality inspired other works.Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick arranged much of the conceptual base for the emerging field in the 1990s. Along with other queer theorists, these three outlined a political hermeneutics, which emphasized representation. These scholars asked questioned if people of varying sexual orientations had the same goals politically and did those in the sexual minority feel that they could be represented along with others of different sexualities and orientations. "While some critics insist that queer theory is apolitical word-smithery, take seriously the role that signs and symbols play in shaping the meanings and possibilities of our culture at the most basic level, including politics conventionally defined."