Queer Theory - Background Concepts

Background Concepts

Queer theory is grounded in gender and sexuality. Due to this association, a debate emerges as to whether sexual orientation is natural or essential to the person, as an essentialist believes, or if sexuality is a social construction and subject to change.

The queer theory has two predominant strains:

  • Radical deconstructionism: interrogates categories of sexual orientations.
  • Radical subversion: disrupts the normalizing tendencies of the sexual order.

The essentialist feminists believed that genders "have an essential nature (e.g. nurturing and caring versus being aggressive and selfish), as opposed to differing by a variety of accidental or contingent features brought about by social forces". Due to this belief in the essential nature of a person, it is also natural to assume that a person's sexual preference would be natural and essential to a person’s personality.

Read more about this topic:  Queer Theory

Famous quotes containing the words background and/or concepts:

    In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.
    James Conant (1893–1978)