Queer Studies

 Hello reader :) In this blog I am discussing Queer theory. What do Queer critics do? and some examples. 

Queer studies

Definition :

an academic field of study focusing on matters relating to gender, human sexuality, and sexual orientation with emphasis on LGBT issues and culture. 

Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance—such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality— from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities. The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry. See Teresa de Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, 1991; and Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, 1996. 

Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements”— in parallel with the movements for African-American and feminist liberation— during the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment, and countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. 

Lesbian and gay literary theory had emerged prominently as a distinct field only by the 1990s - there is nothing about it, for instance, in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), or in the first edition of Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985). As with women's studies twenty years before, the growing significance and acceptance of this new field is indicated by the presence of 'lesbian and gay studies' sections in some mainstream bookshops and publishers' academic catalogues, and by the establishment of relevant undergraduate courses, for which there is now a course reader, the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, published in 1993.

What lesbian/gay critics do 

1. Identify and establish a canon of 'classic' lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct tradition. These are, in the main, twentieth-century writers, such as (for lesbian writers in Britain) Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamund Lehmann, and Radclyffe Hall. 

2. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman). 

3. Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of selfidentification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries. 

4. Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures, for example, by omitting overtly homosexual love lyrics from selections or discussions of the poetry of W. H. Auden (Mark Lilly). 

5. Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over, for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry. 

6. Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity or femininity, such as the nineteenth-century adventure stories with a British 'Empire' setting (for example those by Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard) discussed by Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys (Routledge, 1991). 

Example

We studied Orlando as a text in over syllabus. This novel by Virginia Woolf breaks many things in society. And also we seen movie Vita and Virginia based both writers homosexual relationship. 

Fire 

This is 1996 movie director by Deepa Mehata Two woman who are in homo sexual relationship. 

Badhaai Do

Shardul, a gay guy, and Suman, a lesbian woman, enter into holy matrimony to appease their families. However, when Suman's girlfriend moves in with them, their lives become more complex.

Four more shorts

Four unapologetically flawed women live, love, blunder and discover what really makes them tick through friendship and tequila in millennial Mumbai.Character of Umang singh represent homosexual identity in all series of this show.