I did a recent dive into critical theory about vaporwave and how intertextuality/references redefine their political commentary.

I really enjoyed it but I want to read about gender nonconforming people’s contribution to fashion or music as it relates to commentary through obscure genres, aesthetics, or arts in general.

I’m not sure if that is specific enough, but I can answer any questions. Does anyone have good reading suggestions?

Hi :) I'm a second year psychology student doing research into how queer people view others within the community.

We have based this on the queer theory of "good gays, bad queer" and homonormativity.

It's just a short task and survey that should take 5-10 minutes tops, any participation is appreciated! Thank you

Link (including info about our ethical aproval) : https://run.pavlovia.org/Wake/public-iat/

https://preview.redd.it/k2m8w4vzpxpc1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=71bb512ed3ea8932a95524ebddd1bbfdb28bda38

Title. I’ve read: Baedan 1, Near Life, Queer Death.

Currently reading: Atmospheres of Violence.

On list: Terrorist Assemblages, rest of Baedan(maybe), No Future, Gender Accelerationist Manifesto.

Currently looking in to Halbertstam’s work.

Anything else good to put on my list? Specifically, I am interested in reading into trans ungovernability

I'm looking for an article or something that's peer reviewed that can help me to cite the phenomenon where minorities have to be extra aware of the dominant culture that they don't belong to in order to appear to 'fit in.' Any help would be great, thanks!

Hello! I'm working on a presentation for a college class and I have an idea, but I was wondering if there was a term for it. It's when you have a story that isn't intentionally queer, but becomes interpreted that way due to underdeveloped characters. The example I'm using is The Great Gatsby and Daisy in that the men of the book are very well developed and there is some development of Daisy, but not much especially in a romantic connotation

I would like to pursue a PhD related to queer theory (like critical theory, english, social theory, etc). I know the common advice for pursuing a PhD is to look for scholars you look up to and apply there. The thing is, the people I look up to are either not in the US, dead, or are in departments with no PhD funding.

I'm searching for current queer theory scholars who work in gender studies, specifically, trans studies, especially following Paul B. Preciado's work. My interest is in trans children, queer futurity, and gender subjectivity today.

Thanks.

I'm working on a nonfiction book in which I try to account for the distribution and existence of bisexuals, metrosexuals, bull dykes, transgenders, and gay men and lesbians. Researchers have been preoccupied trying to find a genetic factor, and it is more likely the intrauterine hormone environment is the culprit.

What do you think of the title and the concept? Is it worth pursuing? I will be able to cite scientific sources.

Hey so I'm pretty new to queer theory but it seems pretty interesting and I'm especially interested in the idea of Gender Performativity. I'm trying to write something on this topic but Butler's Gender Trouble seems to be a pretty hard read and I also don't have the time to read the whole thing unfortunately. Does anybody know some shorter essays and stuff that are easier to read?

I’m reading Munroe Bergdorf’s autobiography ‘transitional’ and she has some really interesting passages about queer identity formation - basically that we are assigned ‘involuntary identities’ by other people’s perceptions and expectations of us, and our own identities are shaped by our feelings about these identities.

She says these identities often include an expectation of cis-hetro normativity, and people have difficulty challenging this and suppress parts of themselves to conform. Personally this really speaks to me as a framework of queer identity, and I was wondering if anyone has come across this kind of identity dialectic before and could recommend any further reading?

Thanks!

Hi all, I've been thinking about the notion that trans folks are born trans and I really don't like that at all. To me it feels like I'm being stripped of my autonomy in a way that is similar to when infants are gendered at birth. I think a lot of trans folks use the "born this way" notion as it makes it clear that being trans is not a choice but then I kind of have to ask, why would being trans being a choice be an issue? I know there are reasons why this argument is helpful in trans liberation within the political sphere but in terms of human liberation and bodily autonomy, shouldn't we accept that choosing to be trans is equally valid to any notion of being born trans? I'm curious about your thoughts on this and if I am perhaps missing some lines of reasoning or if there is any recommended literature discussing this. Thanks!

I'm gonna ask this here, because I get absolutely slaughtered in the lesbian communities. My apologies if I'm in the wrong place.

I'm a homosexual cisgender woman. I say homosexual and not lesbian because I'm literally attracted to people with physical bodies and gender identities the same (homo-) as my own--that is, cisgender women who are conventionally feminine.

To me, being homosexual is more central to my identity than being a lesbian. If I were a man, I'm sure I'd be a gay man because I'd be attracted to someone with a body type and gender identity similar to mine. For me, being a lesbian is not about wanting to be with a woman, it's about wanting to be with someone the same as me, and I happen to be a woman.

Now. This presents all sorts of problems into todays queer community, which insists that any non-cis male can be a lesbian. So I go to lesbian events and it's a mix of non-binary folks, trans women, masc/butch lesbians, etc. And that's all fine--I mean, they're all super wonderful people and I love the diversity of identities and experiences!--but I don't know how to express that I want to be with another cis woman like me without being labeled a TERF and expelled from the community.

Is there any theory about this? About being homosexual, that is, specifically attracted to someone with the same gender identity and physical body? I'm trying to find a way to explain to people I'm not a TERF, I'm not trying to exclude anyone from the definition of "woman," but I also want to be true to my desire in the Lacanian sense, which is for objects who are feminine cis women like me.

the more i try to understand the epistemology of queer theory i cant help but see parallels to cartesian dualism. there is a kind of dualistic relationship between sex and gender in the same way Rene Descartes made a distinction between the soul and the matter in which bodies are created from. my understanding of sex and gender is that if people are like computers, sex is the hardware and gender is the software.

but this creates a really strange implication, so lets say for example i am somebody who was born male but ultimately identifies as female. i have a female brain and a male body. if queer theory postulates that this female brain is the true ontological me, and that the male aspect is some false social construct put onto me by society, it seems to imply that my brain is me and my body is NOT me (which makes sense if you identitfy with the software and not the hardware).

in this sense queer theory seems to postulate a kind of ontological dualism. thoughts?

Hi everyone, I was hoping someone might be able to point me in the direction of an academic text which articulates a point I've been struggling to put in a rigorous way.

I'm currently writing my doctoral thesis in film studies, and there is a section on what is called "Heritage Cinema". Without getting to into the weeds on what that is, think British cinema based on canonical literary texts, deploys an iconography of the visual splendour of the aristocracy, stately homes, etc.

There's a vein of theory coming from the mid-90s which sought to fend off criticism of these films on the basis of the fact that they can be read as women's films, and women can apprehend them/enjoy them in a way which is more nuanced than them simply being integrated into a conservative ideology.

I understand where some of this stuff comes from - a frustration with being told by a largely male group of theorists that the things you like are just bad and that's it. However, a lot of this stuff is worryingly gender essentialist in how it constructs the presumed woman who re-appropriates these films. Additionally, what really rubs me the wrong way is how gay men are brought in to buttress this point. In the writing I'm talking about (mostly Claire Monk [1995]), the way gay men are talked about as engaging with this cinema sees gay men and women as virtually interchangeable - it presumes these two positions are similar to the point of thinking there's little to differentiate the two in how they relate to things like enjoying lavish costumes and sets, etc. This feels just so cynical on the part of this theorist, but it's something I feel I've contended with before - some female theorists seeing gay men as, to put it horribly, female-coded men, rather than having a position of their own, even if that, of course, shares some similarities with others.

If there's any text in particular which takes this tendency to task, I'd be grateful to anyone who could point me in its direction.

Hi, I’m in my early 20s, philosophy college grad, a lesbian, and I’ve always enjoyed reading about queer history and theory. What I can’t get around is Butler’s writing. It gets very tiring. If I pick a page at random and start reading, I get what they’re saying, but it feels like they add many unnecessary clauses just to be crystal clear. But in adding more they just include more ambiguous and unspecified terms that clutter the argument. Plus, they never specify the axioms they hold at the beginning of the book. It feels like I need to be my own translator as I go through it (like reading old English) and sometimes think, “girl, we get it, could’ve said the same in half the space”.

This is probably the most famous book on queer theory so I don’t want to let it fly by.

Do I have to read Foucault first? Am I taking things in the wrong order?

1. where can I find a text or essays that summarizes Butler’s key premises?
2. is there any essay before Gender Trouble that explains its premises?
3. anybody come up with a method to go over the book?

Hello everyone! I'm a master's student in psychology and I'm collecting anonymous data for my thesis which is a research study aiming to investigate the psychological impact of any kind of discrimination one might have experienced, including discrimination on account of somebody's sexual orientation or/and gender.

I would be really grateful if you could participate by filling out my survey! Thank you very much in advance! :)

This is the link to my survey for everyone who wants to help:

https://forms.gle/C7HQjkcc9cHeaLg29

Exploring masculinities, by Pascoe & Bridges

I'm (38m) an academic and have only recently come to accept and identify as bisexual. I've read plenty of critical theory including queer theory over my education and career (Sedgewick, Butler, Berlant, Puar, Foucault for example) so I'm not entirely new to queer theory by any means but I am new to understanding myself through it quite as directly. I'm wondering what people think are some vital recent texts to put on my reading list. I was in grad school 10 years ago so there's something of a gap in the last decade (although I'm not totally unaware of some major ones like say Sexual Hegemony or Black on Both Sides) but just wanted to ask, what's some of the most exciting and liberating stuff right now?

I’m currently in a queer theory course and one of our readings for this week, along with various other readings, is just the introduction to this book. Maybe it’s because this is my first foray into all of this so I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the reference points but I can’t make heads or tails of what is being said, it’s so dense and written at a level of scholarship that is way above my level of comprehension.

Is anyone able to provide a little clarification on what they’re arguing here or can point me in the direction of something that can help?

So a while ago, I was trying to ask hetero women a question in r/askwomen, but it got removed because it turns out they have a rule against excluding minorities (in this case, gay/bi women) in your questions. This is a bit odd, because the effect is that minorities can't ask a question of the majority (for example, a lesbian or in this case a gay man can't ask hetero women a question). I've noticed there's no such subreddit as r/askstraights or r/askstraightmen or r/askstraightwomen, although there are subs like r/askgaybros and r/asklesbians (but these subs are themselves most often used by gays, so they don't really serve the purpose of disseminating information between gays and bisexuals and straights).

In some of the factories I've worked in, a lot of my coworkers were really curious about certain aspects of gay dating/sex experience, and they were often happy to share their own experience as heterosexuals which was interesting because we all came out with a better understanding of sexuality and dating as human phenomena and of our own sexual experiences as really something particular and different from other people's, etc.

I'm using the term culture kind of loosely here, because somebody might have nothing to do with an established "gay culture" but still have experiences to share. In another sense, though, it's really not that different. In the last factory I worked at, we had Mexicans as part of some program who came in and worked with us for a few months and then went back to Mexico. I should note a) yes, they were actually from Mexico (for some reason, when I mention this, people are quick to assume I'm using "Mexican" to mea. "Latino"), and b) yes, they were paid a dollar less than the rest of us to do the same work (not that big of a difference, but still an example of superexploitation). But they invited me to their fiestas at their apartment and taught me some Spanish and about life in Mexico, which isn't that different from the experience I have with American heterosexual coworkers.

Anyway, it seems like these dialogues across ethnic/linguistic/sexual lines are pretty useful and help to eliminate apprehension and such when it comes to people who are different from you. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed people walking on eggshells not because they have a problem with me being gay but because they worry there's a "right" way to talk to me or they have a question they're afraid to ask or whatever.

Is this something that's discussed at all among queer theorists? It seems like there are artificial walls being put up where people feel compelled to avoid certain topics or they worry they'll accidentally say something offensive, or they're just plain unsure and a lot of it could easily be eliminated by just having open, frank discussions. The factory floor is kind of a unique setting for this to take place because we are all proletarians being exploited and working together. But also, it can take place in any other setting really.

Is there a reason we have askgaybros and asklesbians, but not askstraights? Or why more straight people don't use those subs to ask questions? Is there more we can do to break down all these walls? Is there a word that's already being used to describe this? Again, I'm not sure "cross cultural exchange" is best.

Hello everyone!

I am updating a reading list for an MA module that focuses on queerness in literary studies. I have been out of the loop for a few years and wondering would anyone have any reading suggestions about emerging ideas or theories in QT? My scope would go to about 2016 so I have a bit of catching up to do!

I am an older cis-het woman. I try to understand and integrate emerging theories about gender and sex, but I still feel like I'm just not wrapping my head around it all. I do believe that, for example, a person can know that they were born into a body of the wrong sex, or that someone can know that they are attracted to someone of the same sex (as opposed to being groomed or whatever). I believe your biology when you're born lays out your preferences.

I followed a rabbit on Google today, reading about "Queer Milton" and a few other articles about queer theory applied to medieval and post-medieval literature. Please tell me if I am interpreting what I read correctly:

1. Literature has traditionally been interpreted and understood through a heterosexual point of view
2. Until the 18th/19th century, many queer people were queer in addition to maintaining husband/wife/child relationships, which brings into question the nature of relationships and sexuality and author intention in almost any literature
3. The way that I think about what I read in relation to my own gender and sexuality should be extended to those who aren't me, and should be taught as such

What am I missing?

Also, in trying to understand gender, which is a social contruct (?), aren't we all on a spectrum with male and female on either end? Agender is the midpoint? I'm not trying to minimize anyone's experiences, and I apologize if I am.

I'm asking stupid questions not because it'll make me accept all this as normal variation in the human experience, because I already do. I know I can't possibly understand the struggle of being "other" in this culture. I just want to be a well educated, well informed elder. If I offended anyone, again, I apologize.

Thank you.

I am a starter in queer studies. I have just finished reading Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick's core works. Can someone suggest some more recent, up-to-date and important works of queer theory? Books, articles and essay collections are all acceptable.

Thank you so much!

Hi to everyone!

I just have this question: is there any author who decided to move away from a linguistic way of interpretation but still supporting the main assumptions of queer theory?

Thanks in advance!