Queer Theory

Queer theory is a theoretical framework that analyzes the construction and maintenance of sex, gender, and sexual categories, as well as the inadequacy of these categories to capture sexual and gender behaviour and identities.

1) A fundamental assumption of queer theory is that there is fluidity and diversity in gender and sexual identities and behaviours over the life course.

2) QT further argue that current dominant ways of thinking about and organizing gender and sexuality often elide this diversity and fluidity. For example, they note that sex/gender/sexuality are normatively fused in the western imaginary insofar as people tend to think that if they know someone’s sex, which they figure they know based on their gender presentation, and they know that person’s choice of sexual partner (male or female), then they know the person’s sexual identity. So under this way of thinking, sexual identity is organized around sex and gender. For example, the two dominant categories of sexual identity in North America—heterosexuality and homosexuality—involve either desiring someone of the “opposite” or the “same” sex.

• Jonathan Katz’s historical analysis demonstrates that the history of the development of heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories to organize sexual behaviour and desire was fraught and complex; a long, convoluted, and power-laden process.
• An important point Katz makes is that heterosexuality and homosexuality arose together because they depended on each other for meaning. One was constructed as the normative form of sexuality, the other as the non-normative.

3) A profoundly important insight of queer theory is that creating a non-normative category requires the creation of its opposite (a normative category), otherwise deviations from the norm have no meaning. When two categories are created as each other’s opposites and rely on one another for meaning, QT call them binary categories. For example, heterosexual and homosexuality are binary categories of sexual identity.

4) QT argues that categories (such as the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality) “exert power over individuals”. They can lead us to feel profoundly good and right about ourselves, or the opposite (wrong and bad). Categories also create identities by labeling us and by defining who belongs in one category, and who doesn’t. Who’s in, who’s out. Once we create binary categories, we necessarily omit those who don’t neatly fit the categories. And we create a template for thinking about identity in specific terms. So for QT a fundamental premise is that the categories we use in family studies themselves should be the subject of investigation.

5) QT often focuses on the non-normative, those who don’t neatly fit the categories that we’ve created to organize desire, and brings to light instabilities, incoherencies, and subversive possibilities. (The question, is Jennifer Finney Boylan’s marriage gay?, is difficult to answer because her experience defies easy categorization.)

6) Queer theory also challenges us to interrogate the norm. When we talk about married people, divorce, parenthood, often family scholars are talking about heterosexual marriage, divorce, and parenthood. But heterosexuality isn’t marked, it’s simply assumed to be the norm. One way that heterosexuality maintains dominance is by being the unmarked, assumed category. Queer theorists refer to this as heteronormativity: when heterosexuality is the taken-for-granted (normative) form of sexuality. Heteronormativity describes the condition in which heterosexuality is presumed.