Assignment on Paper no. 204

This is a blog on Assignment Paper no. 204 Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies and my topic is Queer Theory. 

Definition of queer theory

    an approach to literary and cultural study that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality. 

The word “queer,” like the word “performance,” has a vexed historical trajectory. Once a pejorative slur targeted at gender and sexual nonconformists, queer is currently also a hip signifier of postmodern identity. To embrace “queer” is to resist or elide categorization, to disavow binaries (that is, gay versus straight, black versus white) and to proffer potentially productive modes of resistance against hegemonic structures of power. This deployment of queer, then, exemplifies the traits of performance in that “its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.” In academic circles queer has become a catalyst for theorizing not only gender and sexuality in ways that detach them from singular or rigid identitarian markers, but also a way to discuss race and class in antiessentialist ways. A poor, fifty-year-old, African American female rugby player from the southern United States might be considered “queer,” for instance, because each of the adjectives that describe her do not comport with the traditional ideas of who plays rugby. According to this logic, this particular player is queer because she is anomalous, odd, or strange in the world of rugby. It is this oddity and strangeness that queer theorists would use to argue that all identity is fraught because it is always already mediated through language and ceded to those who have the power to control representation. Thus this player's queerness can be taken as subversive because her presence in the rugby league - a sport typically populated by white middle-class men - transgresses the image of the “rugby player” in the social imaginary and potentially deconstructs power relations within the context of rugby as a sport. Through the slide from personal pronoun to active verb (for example, “I am a queer” to “The actor queered the character”), the term has been reappropriated to activate a way to theorize subjectivity, social relations, and culture in general.(Cambridge) 

Queer theory is a tool that can be used to reconsider sociopolitical, historical, and cultural norms and values. Similarly, in qualitative research, queer theory tends to analyze the narratives of LGBTQ+ people and groups in ways that seek to queer everyday experiences. Both the theoretical framework and the narratives collected and analyzed in qualitative research are significant to unpacking business-as-usual in and across sociocultural contexts. This is especially true for systems of schooling, whereby LGBTQ+ people and groups are marginalized through schooling and schools, a process of exclusion that is detrimental to queer youth who are learning in spaces and places specifically designed against their ways of being and knowing. The significance of qualitative research as it meets the framework of queer theory is that it offers a practically and institutionally queered set of voices, perspectives, and understandings with which to think about the everyday in schools. This becomes increasingly important as schooling has historically been a place in which LGBTQ+ students and groups have resided at an intersection, where the sociopolitical and cultural marginalization that keeps the status quo in place crosses with contemporary values that both interrupt and reify such histories.

(Oxford) 

In 1993, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asked a genre-defining question: “What’s queer?” (p. 8). The complexity behind this inquiry has historical and contemporary implications, particularly as they intersect with educational contexts. Defining “queer” is a task wrought with sociocultural, political, and historical challenges, as Sedgwick and other queer theorists (e.g., Butler, 1990; Cohen, 1997; Lorde, 1984; Halberstam, 1998) have argued. For example, even among an open set of possibilities and perspectives that is central to wrestling with definitions, queer theory, and the research that is engendered by and through queerness are not immune to questions of colonization and of co-opting narratives in the name of political agendas that call for equity but narrow the terms under which access is available (Cohen, 1997).

The multiplicity of dimensions, differences, and similarities that constitute queerness, its forever-fluid identities and forms, and numerous scholarly lenses answer Sedgwick’s question as a productive knot of possibilities. Within this knot there is a sense of temporality imbued with potential (Muñoz, 2009) that reaches through fictional discourses (Butler, 1988) and is grounded in everyday challenges. Queer literature is often characterized by theories that press for more fluid “both/and” perspectives, attention to everyday practices and policies that impact queer and questioning peoples, and modes of qualitative research that focus on the methodological opportunities afforded by various constructions of “queering” research practices and possibilities.

Queer theory and its relationship to qualitative research is significant to higher education, sociocultural understandings, and experiences for marginalized populations in schools for at least the following three reasons. First, there is a question about what queerness means, a question that is often unpacked through sociohistorical, contemporary, and self-reflexive lenses. Queerness is therefore one possible way to think about scholarly fields and offer a particular kind of critique of academic understandings. Second, as cis-normative and heteronormative perspectives remain the status quo for norms and values in everyday school culture, queer theory put into practice through qualitative research can serve as a powerful tool with which to shift historical and contemporary understandings in schools and communities. This is an intentional move away from deficit models of queer youth. A moment when research can redefine the image of the wounded queer child and focus on questions of agency within the challenges queer youth face in schools (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2012; Carlson & Linville, 2016; Wozolek, 2018). Finally, because the consequences for such scholarship strongly inform the ways of being and knowing of marginalized youth in schools, implications for this work are similarly significant. In sum, queer theory is therefore not only important to the productive movement of qualitative research and education, but also to questions of equity and access for some of the most vulnerable youth living and learning in schools today.

This article begins by giving a brief historical outline of queer theory. This is important because, as is discussed in the section “The Contours of Qual, Queer Theory, and Education,” educational places and spaces are significant to the historical contexts that have informed the field. Next, the article briefly defines the contours of queer theory in qualitative research and education. Then there is an exploration into the implications of queer theory and qualitative research as it is resonant with education. This examination is carried out by specifically looking at three facets: the implications of queer theory for academic understandings, the impact of the field on schools and schooling, and the influence that such theories and ideas have on the everyday lives of students. Finally, the article discusses potential next steps for the field as it continues to act as a bloom space (Stewart, 2010) for effective ideas, ideals, and possibilities.

Queered Histories

Queer theory has a rich, longstanding history of voices and perspectives that consistently and continually seek to define, redefine, and trouble the boundaries and borders of its theoretical frameworks and the multiple fields they touch (e.g., Abelove, Barale, & Halperin, 1993; Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991; Halberstam, 1998, 2011; Hall, Jagose, Bebell, & Potter, 2013; Johnson, 2016; Johnson & Henderson, 2005; Sedgwick, 1993). In other words, queer theory was not ahistorical prior to 1991, when Teresa de Lauretis coined the term and thus named the field. In fact, it can be argued that those scholars and scholarship that are widely regarded as foundational were retroactively brought under the umbrella of the burgeoning field now known as queer theory. In short, it was not queer theory but work about queer ways of being and knowing that underscored the field prior to its early nomenclature.

Part of the difficulty in defining queer theory as it relates to qualitative research is that there have always been queer voices in qualitative work. Regardless of what is formally discussed in terms of queer ways of being and knowing (e.g., Gilbert, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993), whether it is hidden cultures that exist with an undercurrent of queer voices (e.g., Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998), or that which is explicitly and implicitly silenced from heteronormative spaces (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2012; Lorde, 1984; Miller & Rodriguez, 2016), queer perspectives and voices have always been, and continue to be, present. Whether they do this, for example, through broad social behaviors in science (e.g., LeVay, 1996; Stein & Plummer, 1994), or the arts (e.g., Halberstam, 2005), queer ideas permeate scholarly fields. In short, a complex web of queer theory has always existed in the form of narratives across qualitative research.

Although these stories are central to the meta narratives of the field, they ultimately belong to people and groups that compose a counterculture that is steeped in sociopolitical challenges and successes. These histories exist across layers of scale, from individual voices to polyvocal cultural understandings (Bakhtin, 1981; Gershon, 2018). For example, within the United States, queer theory resonates, from Two-Spirit identities (Driskill, Finley, Gilley, & Morgensen, 2011) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to Emily Dickinson’s love poems and Audre Lorde’s essays (Bronski, 2012). It has roots that reach from the Mattachine Society, extend to the Stonewall Riots, and are enmeshed with the AIDS epidemic. It is a culture that lives in rock and roll, the glam of the 1970s, and the glitter of Studio 54. Although not always identified as “gay” at the time, these spaces opened the epistemological closet (Sedgwick, 1990) of queer ways of being into the places of heteronormative culture. While figures like David Bowie and nvironments like the discotheque were not always discussed in terms of queerness, it took a particular kind of heteronormative privilege not to see particular icons and places as having an eye toward the LGBTQ+ community.

As queer spaces and places disrupted the cis-hetero patriarchy, these events proliferated across scholarly dialogues. The destabilization of normalized ideas about sex, gender, and power existed across theoretical conversations (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1978; Rubin, 1984), and resonated with qualitative inquiry that was rooted in sociocultural implications (Bersani, 1987; Lather & Smithies, 1997). In other words, as scholars read across contexts and understood everyday activism as having as much significance as theoretical understandings, qualitative frameworks were deeply impacted.

Example

Many Bollywood movies have explored various social issues such as child marriage, polygamy, dowry system, casteism and terrorism. However, homosexuality, a taboo subjectin Indian society and religion, has yet not been fully explored in Bollywood. “Homosexualityrefers to sexual behaviour with or attraction to people of the same sex or to a homosexualorientation.” Gay refers to male homosexuality whereas lesbian refers to femalehomosexuality.

Indian society is largely conservative and the films dealing with the subject of homosexuality,centring on the problem of homosexuality, are in reality being made for a society where it isstill deemed taboo to talk about homosexuality openly, let alone expose the issue on the bigscreen. But contemporary Indian cinema has undergone substantial changes over the last couple of decades. To be at a same stage as that of the rest of the world in this age ofglobalisation and modernisation which is trying to shake some of our cultural roots, someIndian film directors have attempted to deviate from the typical romantic movies to try anddelve into controversial and even taboo topics such as homosexuality.

 

GAYS AND LESBIANS IN POPULAR HINDI CINEMA:

To discuss about the portrayal of homosexual characters in Popular Hindi Cinema, we can broadly defined it into two categories:- one consists of movies like Fire, Girlfriend, My Brother Nikhil, Dostana I Am where the homosexual characters are central to the narrative of the movie and other consists of movies like Kal Ho Na Ho (KHNH), Rules Pyaar Ka Superhit Formula, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., Fashion where these characters are secondary to the narrative. But regardless of the category, these movies try to show the reaction of society to homosexuals in general.

(Words:2167) 

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