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October 21, 2002
Not liking your society right now
From Genderfuck: A Disruption of the Learning Process:
The need to study this court case [Pat Doe v. John Yunits] through the lens of Queer Theory is entirely important to this paper. It establishes the new ways of thinking about systems such as the judicial courts and schools, and society such as education and social thought processes. Queer Theory emerged as the study of sexuality in academia. Basically, the queer theory movement started in the late 1980s through academic conferences. The movement was primarily focused on “new ways of thinking and theorizing.” Queer Theory was an answer to what Judith Butler described as “unwritten and written codes of heterosexualized gender systems”(Butler qtd. in Stein 181). Queer theories are constructed upon the following guidelines:
a conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively and enforced through boundaries and binary divides.
the problematization of sexual and gender categories, and of identities in general. Indentities are always on uncertain ground, entailing displacements of identification and knowing
parody which leads to deconstruction, decentering, revisionist readings, and an anti-assimilationist politics
a willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not be seen as the terrain of sexuality, and to conduct queer “readings” of ostensibly heterosexual or nonsexualized texts. (Stein 181-2)
There's more information about the court case in link, if you're interested. Don't think it's the one mentioned in this MetaFilter discussion, but some of the ill-informed commentary applies equally well. Or equally badly. Or something.
I was more interested in this bit, from the introductory paragraph of the paper:
Identity is a key factor of an individual in the society. Identity often is skewed despite the rhetorical statement: “You are who you are.” However, many times a society unconsciously attempts to mold the identities of individuals into homogenous products. The important thing is not to let yourself prejudge individuals or acts of people because this creates an assumption that brings a stigma against the individual.
I've been stumbling over my own ignorant assumptions quite a bit lately, plus having to deal with other people's, with the result that I'm really not liking a society that produced them, or me, very much at the moment.
That, and discussions of identity politics always give me a headache. It's usually in the context of a perfectly valid point, but the first person to post a comment using the word "essentialist" will win a very special prize.
Posted by Aaron at October 21, 2002 08:45 AM
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Theory. Goddamned Theory. I've never been able to sit and read a whole paper on Queer Theory, even though I've [Read More]
Tracked on October 23, 2002 03:40 AM