queer theory case study

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Queer studies in education.

• Jennifer C. Ingrey Jennifer C. Ingrey Western University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.249
• Published online: 24 May 2018

A survey of key contributors and theoretical tensions in the applications of queer studies in education is purposefully partial namely because of the impartiality embedded in the nature of ‘queer’, a verb whose action unsettles, dismantles and interrogates systems of normalization, beginning with heteronormativity and heterosexism. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s before influencing education, including both elementary and secondary schooling; however, queer is complex in that it involves the signifier or signified term: it is both the integration of queer content in curriculum as well as the practice of queering educational practices (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy and practice). The queering of pedagogy involves the queering of the educational subject, both teachers and students. In such a survey of queer in education, the ontological groundings for queer are important to consider given the paradoxical nature of queer to unpack and unsettle whilst maintaining its hold on an identity category in order to do its unsettling work. Indeed, the consequent recognition of the subjecthood of queer in educational contexts is a significant note in this attention to queer’s application in education. Queer also moves beyond not only an inclusion of queer content, but also exceeds queer sexualities to cohere and contrast with trans-infused approaches. Queer theory considers that the future of queer may well exceed beyond sexuality and gender altogether to become a practice of unsettling or critique more generally. Its continuity in education studies as well as its potentially impending expiration are concerns of scholars in the field.

• queer studies
• queer theory
• queer pedagogy
• futurity of queer
• queering subjects
• queer education

Introduction

A comprehensive survey of queer studies from its emergence to its current applications would be next to impossible in many ways, but even less so a productive pursuit; even a more precise look at queer studies in education on its own might simply reproduce many volumes, articles, and the surveys of others who provide diverse views, draw on various tenets, consider multiple implications, and harness contrasting theoretical underpinnings. What is productive is to attempt to survey the highlights of how queer studies have contributed to the field of education, however vast a project that may be, not only to generate a picture of its pedagogical and curricular realizations but also to chart these theoretical tensions to ponder the futurity of queer at all. Much like Butler ( 1990 ) drawing the outline of feminism to move into that which feminism could not address (i.e., the dismantling of gender terms that serve as the basis of feminism but construct the promise of queer theory) and thus finding queer theory, queer theory may have to encounter its own outline, the border that marks that which cannot be queer and must then be taken up by some other theoretical orientation. Or queer may be able to bend and reshape itself to accommodate the multitude of tensions that stick to its many diverse ponderings and applications because, as most eloquently articulated in Jagose’s ( 1996 , p. 1) primer on queer theory, the “definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics” (p. 1). Whichever is the case (and according to poststructuralists and postmodernists alike, there will be many cases not always in line with each other), the malleability of queer may have its own limits, but they may not be yet reached. In other words, one may question that even if queer studies cannot continue to serve in its pursuit to dismantle heteronormative and heterosexist institutions and cultures of education, has it necessarily been exhausted?

What then is queer? And from where did it arise? How did it enter education, in what ways, and how may it exit? Does the future of queer see its inevitable death? Or can it re-create itself in inventive ways that will continue to serve the populations of LGBTQ youth and adults to represent their lived experiences, their subjugated knowledges, to reverse the normalization of heterosexuality in education policy, curriculum, and practice, and to continue to work toward empowering activists and actors to make institutional change? Indeed, does queer have to stop there? In what ways can queering move itself away from a focus on bodies, sexualities, and genders and critique other injustices or techniques of oppression in education?

This article aims to signal the developments of queer studies in education from outside education to within its field including pedagogical and curricular and policy implications. And yet I aim to chart these movements not necessarily in a linear way, as this in itself would be antithetical not only to the actual rhizomatic development of queer studies (see Hall, Jagose, Bebell, & Potter, 2013 ) but also to its theoretical character as partial, multi-faceted, and divergent. Indeed, this charting has elements of chronology until it does not: the flow from one contributor leads to another, even if at times it is a turning backward in temporal reality to revisit key ideas or see new ideas via different contributors. While it is impossible to be comprehensive, it is possible to highlight the key contributions, key developments to the field, to perform the function of a guide to the reader of queer studies in education.

Ontological Questioning/Theoretical Tensions of Queer

As with many writings on queer theory, its very nature of being is often defined, or attempted to be, with a more complex picture arising than what a reader may wish, especially if said reader is a novice to queer theory or is looking for the simplest version possible. Jagose ( 1996 ) cites the early 1990s in gay and lesbian studies as the inception of queer theory due to its increasing deployment in academic circles. Spargo ( 1999 ) names the late 1980s as that period of crystallization of this notion of queer theory, where queer departs from the limitations of lesbian and gay studies to become mobilized “as a verb that unsettles assumptions about sexed and sexual being and doing” (p. 40). Another key theoretical underpinning to queer theory, according to Spargo, is the influence of Foucault’s ( 1990 ) History of Sex that framed sexuality as a social construction: “sexuality is the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours, and social relations by a certain deployment deriving from a complex political technology” (p. 127). Foucault’s work has been queered via the work of Spargo ( 1999 ), Judith Butler ( 1990 ), and others. Halperin ( 2003 ) credits Teresa de Lauretis for coining “queer theory” in a California conference in 1990 where, because of its shock value (i.e., regarding the origins of the word “queer” as defamatory), that intentionally and “scandalously offensive” (Halperin, 2003 , p. 340) usage defined queer as something that means to unsettle and disrupt as well as to highlight the “incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire” (Jagose, 1996 , p. 3). Indeed, De Lauretis ( 2011 ) explains this inception of the term as the framing “of a project at once critical and political, aimed at resisting the cultural and sexual homogenization in academic ‘gay and lesbian studies’ ” where she had hoped “to confront our respective sexual histories and deconstruct our own constructed silences around sexuality and its interrelations with gender and race” (p. 257). It was her intention in that early 1990 conference to unleash homosexuality from its marginalized past, its placement as subordinate to a perceived fixed, dominant heterosexuality, that which received legitimacy (De Lauretis, 1991 , p. iii). Halperin ( 2003 ) thought this was de Lauretis’s attempt to “make theory queer . . . and to queer theory” (Halperin, 2003 , p. 340), where the former term critiqued theory for its heteronormativity and heterosexism, and the latter reframed theory’s purpose in examining sexuality and desire.

As Halperin ( 2003 ) traces the trajectory of queer theory from these early unorganized days to its eventual (and quick) acceptance, or canonization (as he terms it), into the academy, despite its fuzziness or ability to truly be known, he notes the paradox of a theory whose existence depends on the critique of normal to become itself so widely normalized and, in fact, so adopted by non-queer actors and academics. It is here that the separation of queer as the signified and a signifier becomes apparent. In the first instance, queer as the signified, how one “makes theory queer” (Halperin, 2003 ), or what the queer is in queer theory, historically (and probably presently) seemed easier and more palatable by heterosexist institutions and academies than the alternative. That alternative is the second instance, that is, the act of queering theory, Halperin’s “to queer theory,” or, the verb-ing of queer, a much more difficult and contentious pursuit. Queer as container (the signifier) or the contained (the signified) is a very important distinction because, if one is without the other, the inclusion of non-normative gender and sexuality and sex is not a requirement of queer theory. Halperin’s ( 2003 ) argument is that queer was and can be taken up to mean something ultimately not queer at all but a placeholder for “liberal” (p. 341), critical studies, and just something “progressive”; put another way, “queer theory proper is often abstracted from the quotidian realities of lesbian and gay male life” (p. 343). Perhaps this is what De Lauretis ( 2011 ) laments when she recalls that earlier motivation in 1990 to pair the academic and the political pursuits within this thing called queer theory, a promise she thinks can actually no longer be realized because, in a long and rather dense psychoanalysis of Edelman’s text, No Future , she explains the incompatibility of the two where theory is “literary or speculative” and politics is “empirically or fact-based” (p. 258) and thus leads to her conclusion that “queer theory does not map out a program of political action” unless and until “a kind of translation” (p. 259) happens.

What this means for queer theory’s applications, especially in the field of education, is that some practitioners and scholars take up queer as either signifier or signified or both; in other words, how queer is the act of unsettling and disrupting the normalization of sexuality and gender, how queer can mean merely the act of critique of basically anything even that outside of sexuality or gender expression/identity, or how queer can be an additive piece of content in terms of LGBTQ knowledge. Another way to think of this scaffold is to reference Kumashiro’s ( 2002 ) framework of antioppressive education whereby the first two phases mark education as for or about the Other (I see these as overlaying upon the phases of queer as signified), and the latter two phases claim education as an operation that is critical of privileging and othering as well as education that changes students and society (where I see these as the doing or the queering of education beyond the merely tokenistic or additive moves). Nonetheless, it is still important to chart how queer theory has inserted and woven itself through educational practices, policies, and theories.

In concurrence with the notion that queer is at once complex and undefinable, the editors of the Routledge Queer Studies Reader, Hall et al. ( 2013 ), claim an almost paradoxical definition that simultaneously maintains this necessary incoherence. Indeed, by harnessing queer studies via a definition that describes its very inability to be harnessed, they capture the variations and tensions with the practice of queer: “queer studies is the institutionalization of a new—or at least newly visible—paradigm for thinking about sexuality that emerged simultaneously across academic and activist contexts in the early 1990s, constituting a broad and unmethodical critique of normative models of sex, gender and sexuality” (Hall et al., 2013 , p. xvi). For Butler ( 2013 ), known as a founding figure of queer theory, queer is also about a destabilization of the fixedness of normative gender, sex, and sexuality, and it works because of its defamatory past, in its “shaming interpellation” (p. 19). Through the performativity of gender that produces a queer subject, what also forms through that interpellation of queer is the necessary solidarity for community and political progress. That is, queer, at once a marginalized and marginalizing epithet, has been reclaimed to seek out and disrupt that process of marginalization.

Queering Education

William Pinar’s ( 1998 ) edited volume on queer studies in education marks that transition period where education theorists, curriculum specialists, and practitioners begin to take up queer studies in their various applications, not that even these applications agree with each other. And Pinar would not cite his work as the inception of queer studies in schooling; rather, in the lengthy introduction, he begins by providing a brief history beginning with the ancient Greeks, skips to the 1970s where curriculum advanced queer theorizing, and then cites Britzman’s ( 1998 ) queer pedagogy and Bryson and De Castell’s ( 1993 ) work that “signaled a heightened visibility for scholarship focusing on gay/lesbian/queer concerns” (Pinar, 1998 , p. 2). Despite this emphasis on the inclusion of gay and lesbian content in an attempt to “correct the repression of queers in the curriculum” (p. 3), these early queer scholars, including Pinar, were also concerned to critique the heterosexist nature of education, thereby arguing that education should “come to” realize the need to deploy queer pedagogy and curriculum, or ways of queering that “displaces and decentres” (p. 3) heteronormalization. In addition, queer became a term that, if not completely inclusive, opened more possibilities of identification than the terms lesbian and gay, terms that remained productive but limited in their application and certainly disparate in their political aims.

With caution, Pinar calls for “queer” as “a very provisional term of perhaps a momentary coalition . . . [that] may serve important intellectual as well as political and pedagogical purposes” ( 1998 , p. 4). But the history and contemporaneity of queers is not always in line with solidarity: homosexual people or people who do homosexual acts (which are not the same thing) have warred with how to define themselves falling to, on the one hand, assimilationism—that which is perceived to be like heterosexuality except with a different sex act—or, on the other hand, separatism—that which sees the repudiation of the heterosexualized other to create an entirely new identity category or at least to trouble current identity categories. Somewhere in the middle is the desire to retain alliances across the diverse subject positions of lesbian, gay, queer identities. What results in these decisions is either an inevitable essentialism (of the two, the more historical position)—which leads to the potential for political mobilization—or the abandonment of essentialism in favor of a more nuanced understanding of queer identity but one that threatens a collective identification (a more contemporary dilemma, according to Pinar). And the complexity of homosexual or queer identity construction is doubly difficult when, as Pinar ( 1998 ) asks: What are the implications for our students when we are “reconfiguring ourselves?” (p. 8); in other words, how do educators and educational practitioners who are identifying as lesbian, gay, queer, etc., move away from essentialism because it simplifies identity and limits subjectivity, and yet also grasp the relationality of identities via a postmodernist/poststructuralist lens? In Derridean terms, one is defined by its relation to an other, thus establishing the effects of power via this hierarchy; indeed, the one, the dominant, depends upon the repudiation and subordination of the other to fortify its own boundaries. What queer theory does is a destabilizing of said relations.

Pinar cites Seidman’s work that asks for a change in queer identificatory work; where Seidman ( 1993 , p. 137) insists on the queer self to consider its positionality within cultural and social institutions and practices and thus move away from a poststructuralist preoccupation with self, Pinar ( 1998 ) sees a different trend, especially as evidenced in his volume: the queer self requires more attention, a closer turning back in on oneself to understand its own restructuring (p. 10) but in order to refuse erasure. Pinar returns to the ancient Greeks to review the pederasty of early pedagogy, a sort of crude banking method of teaching (p. 11), that reads the dominant position of the teacher as essentially male (and phallic), and the subordinated position of the student as female (although he is a boy, he is just the literal and figurative receptacle of knowledge). In this scenario, pedagogy is heterosexualized even though it is a same-sex relation: it marks “a supreme indifference to sexual difference” (p. 11) that reproduces effects even in modern pedagogy, according to Bredbeck ( 1995 ; cited in Pinar, 1998 , p. 12). It is the aim of the edited volume, according to Pinar, that this erasure of difference be denied so that queer theory can “challenge the reproduction of sameness, of indifference, of patriarchy” (p. 13) and allow for educational spaces through curriculum and pedagogy to acknowledge queer’s suffering, failures, as well as positionality (p. 43) so that queer educators and practitioners can “try to find ways to decenter, destabilize, and deconstruct . . . the heterosexist normalizations that so essentialize many of the students we teach” (p. 44).

To take Pinar up, and indeed, located in his volume, Susanne Luhmann ( 1998 ) investigates the queering of pedagogy or the querying of queer pedagogy, two among many of the considerations vital to the unpacking of what queer pedagogy actually does. While it was Halperin’s ( 2003 ) intent to review the competing ideas of queer pedagogy as either content or form, Luhmann ( 1998 ) settles on a definition that rejects those common assumptions that queer is either the container (i.e., the structure and mode of teaching) or the contained (i.e., the stuff in said teaching), or whether it is something that one teaches to queer students. It is none of these things, according to Luhmann, but a way to be “critical of mainstream education as a site for the reproduction of unequal power relations . . . [specifically] the practices of normalization at stake in the study of sexuality” (p. 142). Teaching about lesbian and gay content is not only simplistic, it has also been used as a means to address homophobia as if the discourse of safety is the only place for queers in the mainstream classroom content. Luhmann’s concern is that, again, this additive and pathologizing acknowledgment of lesbian and gay folk does nothing to restructure the heteronormalizing structure of schooling or to address the heterosexist privilege of educators and educational leaders, etc. Furthermore, it reproduces the cycle of normalizing heterosexuality. What queer pedagogy is meant to do is to deconstruct these binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality that depend on each other, indeed, where the former depends upon the repudiation of the latter “by refusing stable identities and by producing new identifications that lie outside binary models of gender and sexuality” (p. 151).

Asking how queer is meant to unsettle that hetero-privileging process, Luhmann cites the strange and perverse performativities of “queer sexual practices and identities that seek to transgress and subvert heteronormative sex/gender dichotomies” ( 1998 , p. 145) because they mark the boundaries of normal and threaten their stability all the while invoking a challenge to the stabilization of not only sexuality but also gender. Furthermore, while Luhmann insists queer asks the subject to consider its own subject-making through these processes of sexual and gender normalization and to consider the rupture of said system, she also worries that the result will leave said subject feeling lost or hopeless. If queer pedagogy is meant to destabilize and unsettle, can it always be successful in this constant refusal, she wonders. Indeed, might queer revert to totalizing tendencies, and thus put “into crisis what is known and how we come to know?” (p. 147). The question really falls upon the student in this case as one whose resistance to learning may be as a result of a personal crisis, of reaching one’s own boundaries of what is capable of knowing and now facing the realm of what one cannot bear to know (p. 150). Queer pedagogy acknowledges this confrontation and makes room for it, framing learning as “a process of risking the self” (p. 151), all the while positioning the self in the structure of normalization and privileging. Citing Rosello’s ( 1994 ; cited in Luhmann, 1998 ) pedagogy for language instruction as a metaphor for queer theory, Luhmann concludes that while learning is a “highly social process,” so too is the making of the self, and thus both must occur in dialogue that interrogates what is legitimate knowledge and what becomes knowledge that is unreachable or de-legitimated. Queer pedagogy is “an inquiry into the conditions that make learning possible or prevent learning” (p. 153).

In the same volume, Rodriguez ( 1998 ) examines the political potential of queer youth to act as a site for political and pedagogical resistance in the making of their own subject positions as democratic. In this pursuit, Rodriguez also makes the claim, following Giroux (cited in Rodriguez, 1998 ), that teacher preparation programs in their refusal to incorporate theory miss out on the possibilities that theory offers, namely “the necessity of recognizing the importance to them of another group’s struggles ” (p. 181). Citing examples of youth who resisted the heterosexist school policies and/or climate, Rodriguez’s chapter positions youth, and queer youth at that, as an untapped category of political mobilization to challenge mainstream educational cultures that normalize heterosexuality.

Queering Schools

Letts and Sears ( 1999 ) contribute an edited volume that focuses on the application of queer to the field of elementary education. Sears’s ( 1999 ) opening chapter examines teaching queerly, or teaching as a way to “refuse to participate in the great sexual sorting machine called schooling” (p. 5). Here he reclaims “queer” from its role as epithet in many a sexual outsider’s painful past to transform it to a critical teaching approach that disrupts heteronormative classrooms and prioritizes no child over another based on alignment with the sexual norm. Indeed, teaching queerly is an ethical practice that encompasses “honesty, civility, authenticity, integrity, fairness, and respect” (p. 4). In this pursuit, he offers five propositions for teaching queerly: teachers must dismantle sexual and gender binaries; rather than attempting to discover causation of homosexuality, educators should better spend their energies interrupting homophobia and heterosexism; confronting homophobia requires difficult self-examination given its embeddedness in a heteronormative culture; children’s innocence is a cultural and social construction, thus to teach queerly is to adjust one’s gaze to consider the child’s perspective and provide knowledge that is supportive and productive for their authentic learning; and refusing to erase queer families in curriculum also recognizes their legitimacy and right to inclusion in queer curriculum.

The essays in the volume account for queerness in terms of the identity of the educator as a form of inclusion in the way of curriculum about queer people but also do so to interrupt the heteronormativity of the elementary classroom and to make a case for the “risky teaching” (Bickmore, 1999 ) of this approach as a rejection of censorship. They also consider the intersections of queer sexualities with race, ethnicity, and gender through, for one, the construction of black males’ transgressive sexualities (Earl Davis, 1999 ) as severely policed; such an analysis offers insight into “the complex interaction of these identities” (p. 51) and the little-known terrain of black boys navigating sexuality in middle school culture. Kumashiro’s ( 1999 ) essay names the intersections of queer, male, and Asian identities via his own fraught schooling experiences. Here he works through various reading lenses that acknowledge cultural differences between certain Asian and American cultures to correct the misreading of queer Asian masculine identities who suffer oppression at multiple levels. Curricular attention is also paid in Martino’s ( 1999 ) essay on reading practices that disrupt heteronormative thinking via specific texts and scaffolded strategies within the English classroom. While a good start is the inclusion of queer texts, Martino is encouraged that educators find it possible to move toward a critical perspective that dismantles normalized sexual categories and thus also turns away from mere tolerance. In the afterword, Leck ( 1999 ) asks the reader to consider how this volume moves us to “new opportunities for dialogue that can dramatically, dynamically, and subtly open vital new possibilities for more reflective and just practices of schooling” (p. 260).

Talburt and Steinberg’s ( 2000 ) edited volume marks a mid-point in the short history of queer studies in education. In the introduction, Talburt ( 2000 ) is concerned with not only the futurity of queer but also its then current status as it must continue to grapple with its paradoxical situation, a situation that does not seem easily remedied even nearly two decades later. While queer dismantles and unsettles, by its very nature, it also requires a stable dominant other to dismantle and thus invokes identity as fixed, resulting in a sort of “haunting of queer by identity” (p. 4), according to Talburt. This paradox is a concern to Halperin ( 2003 ) also. And yet, Talburt ( 2000 ) queers even this tension arguing its productivity because, while queer depends on a concretized notion of identity in order to do its work of queering, it then “engages the identity discourses that structure the terms of educational policy and practice while at the same time pushing beyond them” (p. 5). Queer cannot follow the postmodernist path of deconstruction to the point of unintelligibility. Its gains are secured only in its ability to be intelligible to an educational context, in Talburt’s estimation.

Queering Pedagogy

Bryson and DeCastell ( 1993 ) note that queer theory, or indeed, even gay and lesbian studies, initially refrained from addressing the field of education; and thus their articulation and (failed?) attempt to implement queer pedagogy as “im/perfect”-ion is an important contribution to the field of queer studies in education. How even queer pedagogy is understood aligns again with the problems of defining queer theory along the same signifier/signified lines as discussed with Halperin’s ( 2003 ) work. According to Bryson and DeCastell ( 1993 ):

Queer pedagogy could refer here to [1] education as carried out by lesbian and gay educators, to [2] curricula and environments designed for gay and lesbian students, to [3] education for everyone about queers, or . . . to [4] the deliberate production of queer relations and the production of subjectivities as deviant performance—. . . as agitation . . . to intervene in the production of so-called normalcy in schooled subjects. (p. 12)

In the first instance (i.e., queer pedagogy as delivered by queer educators), Bryson and DeCastell ( 1993 ) express the tensions involved in practicing a queer pedagogy as educators who are lesbian with lesbian and heterosexual students in a particular lesbian studies course, which is embedded in a heterosexist and heteronormative academic system. In the second instance (i.e., where queer pedagogy may mean the curriculum for gay and lesbian students), not only do they cite the dangers to the self as professors in terms of risking professional security and/or tenure and promotion, they also consider the psychological harm to be conjured as a lesbian “object” while speaking as the self (for professors and students both), a self whose story is inevitably heard by the dominant heterosexual (and often white) other whose privilege and entitlement prevents the possibility of the lesbian as “subject” to ever be realized. Regarding an application of the third instance (i.e., where queer pedagogy may mean the education for everyone about queers), Bryson and De Castell ( 1993 ) worry about the inevitable essentializing of the lesbian “object” into an identity that appears fixed, stable and coherent, indeed, as belonging to “the lesbian experience.”

While Petersen ( 2000 ) makes a claim for essentialism as strategic, a tactic employed by post–second-wave feminists to mobilize the ranks of women for political gain under the guise of the “women’s experience,” this is not a position Bryson and De Castell ( 1993 ) would accept for queer studies again because of the risk to the lesbian subject. Rather, they found their straight-identifying students tended to consume lesbianism as content (i.e., queer as signified) rather than as a form (i.e., queer as signifier) that could allow a reflexivity or returning of the gaze to the self to notice “the constructedness of their own identities” (p. 4), a pedagogical move they called “an ethic of consumption” (p. 4), which addresses the final instance of their definition of queer pedagogy (i.e., a purposeful agitation or disruption of what is normalized). Their heterosexual students’ reluctance to play with form, invest in and divest of their own experiences in course assignments, and their obvious discomfort in class discussions led Bryson and De Castell ( 1993 ) to their own reluctance: “every ounce of our emotional, intellectual, and social energies were consumed by the problem of accommodating the white heterosexual women’s discomfort . . . despite our repeated insistence that this was not something we wanted to do” (p. 5). And thus they conclude that despite their aims to do a queer pedagogy, a “radical form of praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of ‘normalcy’ in schooled subjects” (p. 1), they were equipped only “to entrench essentialist boundaries which continue both to define and divide us” (p. 8); in other words, queer pedagogy in all of its possibilities (from queer as signified to signifier) remained an impossibility in their given context, time, and place and the heterosexist and heteronormalizing academe.

Probably most influential in the field of queer pedagogy is the work of Deborah Britzman ( 1995 , 1998 ); indeed, Luhmann ( 1998 ) draws much from Britzman’s ( 1995 ) article, “Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight.” Here, Britzman also cites the history of queer as epithet or strange and refuses to continue this marginalization; she also rejects queer as tokenistic or merely celebratory. Rather, queer can allow for a rethinking of the heterosexist curriculum and beyond, “a way to rethink the very grounds of knowledge and pedagogy in education” (p. 151). And in such a critical unpacking, queer also interrogates the “constitution of bodies of knowledge and knowledge of bodies” (p. 151); in other words, queer acknowledges the process by which certain forms of knowledge are created and legitimated via and within normalizing discourses (i.e., bodies of knowledge) that render straightness or heterosexuality (or other forms of privilege) to be dominant and, in so doing, cause straight and non-queer bodies (i.e., knowledge of bodies) to be normalized. And in this articulation, Britzman is looking to a future for queer pedagogy beyond the queer body. Nonetheless, the subject of queer, as in the person who is queer, is not to be reproduced as the victimized, traumatized other, or, as Luhmann ( 1998 ) may help us to understand, one to be included only in discourses of safety or, by extension, anti-bullying/anti-homophobia campaigns. Britzman ( 1995 ) calls for queer as something grander, an “ethical project” (p. 152) that refuses to produce difference as the abject, that refuses to maintain the polarities of heterosexuality as normal and homosexuality as marginalized.

The proposal of how to actually do this queer pedagogy is much of what Halperin’s ( 2003 ) history highlighted: Britzman ( 1995 ) positions queer as both signified and signifier, or even somewhere in the middle: “something queer happens to the signified—to history and bodies—and something queer happens to the signifier—to language and to representation” (p. 153); but what is of utmost importance is that Britzman’s queer is the doing , or the verb-ing , the action of a critical dismantling of such systems of normalization and not a reference to an actor, or one who is queer. What queer leads the subject—or the learner, again as Luhmann ( 1998 ) interprets—to is a confrontation with what one cannot bear to know, indeed, “what hegemonic discourses of normalcy [as would be familiar to the straight subject] cannot bear to know” (p. 154). In this way, queer pedagogy is not a way to teach to or about queer, but a process that disrupts and is also productive of knowledge. The ontological conundrum of queer is one that worries both Luhmann ( 1998 ) and Britzman ( 1995 )—maybe less so the latter, but still something to be acknowledged: How does the signifier queer (and not the signified) retain its power to critique and unsettle, to interrogate relations and produce new ones, if its very nature is not to be fixed, its “meanings that [which] refuse to be held” (p. 155)? Britzman seems not to dwell on such concerns, but rather lets them fuel the techniques or strategies of queer pedagogy that this paper introduces.

As a note, the irony of outlining techniques via a theoretical orientation that refuses stability or prescription as a mark of indoctrination, to claim the least, is not lost on Britzman; again, she merely acknowledges it and moves on. These techniques are as follows: “the study of limits, the study of ignorance, and the study of reading practices” ( 1995 , p. 155). Where the first two draw upon Foucault’s ( 1980 ) regimes of truth that produce legitimate knowledge and Butler’s ( 1990 ) theories of subjectification, or the making of the queer subject, the third pedagogical route is most productive because it looks most like a pedagogical practice. What is of note in the first two areas is all that is rejected in traditional attempts to address queer issues in education: the mere inclusion of queer content, the special event that celebrates a queer culture, safer sex campaigns that pit homosexuality as contagion, and the reading of queer literature. These scenarios reproduce the normalized heterosexual position that is entitled to knowledge about queers for their own protection and education. Thus, the third route, queer reading practices, contains the path to this disruption: “reading for alterity” (p. 163) marks how one is meant to face the limits of legitimate knowledge, to face one’s own ignorance, or that which has been framed as subjugated knowledge, or that which is not worth knowing according to dominant discourses. The self confronts the self via reading to consider how the self gets interpreted as legitimate (or not) through reading; the self also forms a relationship with the text to consider what gets taken up as knowledge; and the self must consider how one reads to confront the limits of one’s knowledge. In essence, Britzman’s ( 1998 ) queer pedagogy is a way to “stop reading straight” (p. 164), to recognize that every reading is mitigated by discourses of power, privilege, and normalization that mark the reader as either normal and legitimate or deviant and abject. Indeed, “reading practices might well read all categories as unstable, all experiences as constructed, all reality as having to be imagined, all knowledge as provoking uncertainties, misrecognitions, ignorance, and silences” (p. 164).

Queering Subjects

Rasmussen ( 2006 ) provides a key contribution in the form of her book that focuses on the site of secondary schooling through which she thinks about implications for research on queer youth in schools. She is very concerned about the persisting construction of queer youth as victims (see also Luhmann, 1998 ; Rofes, 2004 ); while Rasmussen does not dispute the reality of higher rates of self-harm, suicide, disengagement from school and drop-out rates for LGBTQI youth, it is the repetition of these data as either introduction to research or as a focus for entire studies on this population that “gradually become a part of the canon in research related to sexualities and secondary schooling” (Rasmussen, 2006 , p. 2). Furthermore, much research on queer youth presents a paradox in that to assert or celebrate a queer identity is to do so without resorting to essentialism; it is Rasmussen’s aim to avoid such pitfalls while attempting to “keep open the way for alternative approaches to researching [queer youth] . . . away from a focus on abjection and survival . . . [as a] movement away from the wound” (p. 2).

Drawing on Butler ( 1997 ), Rasmussen ( 2006 ) notes that queer theory deconstructs binary categories of sexuality and gender that are aligned to create a fiction of heteronormativity and thus also disrupts the common practice of how educational research constructs these categories as unproblematic and fixed. Rasmussen’s ( 2006 ) aim is to consider the possibilities for queer youth in schools to construct new relations of power. Her text focuses on three main areas: she identifies key discourses in education research; she interrogates how these discourses inform understanding of LGBTQI youth in schools; and she considers how queer theoretical frameworks offer new possibilities for researching LGBTQI youth in schools. While her data focus on personal experiences in Australia and the United States, as well as online media and grey material and academic journals, her focus is not to present a comparative analysis nor to presume the applicability of her research remain limited to a regional context. In addition, she interviewed 17 participants with whom she was already familiar and who were working with teachers and students who identified as LGBTQI to ask about their understandings of gendered and sexual identities and the connections to their working context.

Via her discussion of a media story from Australia featuring a youth protesting his school’s homophobic treatment, Rasmussen ( 2006 ) makes the case of the repetition of how media construct queer youth as object “through the storying of homophobia” (p. 15). This “process of objectification” (p. 18) denies youth any agency and fails to acknowledge the richness and complexity of stories about how youth come out, face peers, and become subjects in schools. Curriculum support documents that address anti-homophobia strategies also fail to construct identities as relational, perpetuating the binary hierarchical structure of heterosexuality and homosexuality.

In a move toward queering methodology geared toward studying sexualities and schooling, Rasmussen ( 2006 ) deploys a biomythography approach that allows for a close examination of one’s own positionality as researcher/academic to align with “a queer theorist’s determination to destabilize unified understandings of identity” (p. 38); in this way, Rasmussen takes up the call from Britzman ( 1998 )—who, in turn, draws upon Butler’s ( 1990 ) theory of subjectivation—to examine one’s own “grounds of their own possibility, their own intelligibility, and the work of their own identifications and critiques that may exceed identity as essence, explanation, causality, or transcendence” (Britzman, 1998 , p. 81). Because Britzman is concerned to articulate a queer pedagogy that departs from a mere address of, for , or, about the queer other, this self reflexivity of the educator and/or researcher is where Rasmussen asks researchers to confront the self in relation to others to discover, according to Britzman ( 1998 ), “whether, in the process of coming to know, one invests in the rethinking of the self as an effect of, and condition for, encountering the other as an equal” (p. 81). For Rasmussen ( 2006 ), this confrontation involves “a consideration of how some researchers and research projects come to be constructed as risky or inappropriate in educational contexts while others are valorized” (p. 43), and therefore, a way to depart from essentializing queer versus straight identities in education research. Ultimately, Rasmussen’s approach to methodology is to problematize the politics of inclusion, that which: sympathizes with the queer other; is concerned for the queer other’s safety; and then also negates the necessity to turn any critique upon the self as well as the systems of normalization that draw strict and fixed boundaries around sex and gender identities.

As one form of methodological analysis, Rasmussen outlines three theoretical devices, discourse, tropes, and catachresis that have informed her study. The latter builds upon Butler’s ( 1993 ) work to explain terms that stand in for phenomenon not yet named and, consequently, may do so inadequately. For example, “lesbian, gay, transsexual, drag king, boy-dyke fag, and sissy-fag might be understood as catachreses . . . [because they] create a signifier for an individual performance or experience that previously had no descriptor” (p. 55). Calling attention to such a naming practice not only allows for the discovery of the constructedness (and therefore artificiality) of identity categories but also points to what Butler ( 1990 ) argues is how meaning always exceeds language; in other words, language and discourse do not precede action but are constructed within. The implications of such thinking help in the critical pursuit of deconstructing sexual and gender binaries and, in Rasmussen’s ( 2006 ) study, also contribute to a new way of doing queer research on sexualities in secondary schools that move away from a pathologization that marks the queer other as an “object of pathos” (p. 2) to consider how queer methodologies and epistemologies “can foster ethical ways of becoming subjects” (p. 223).

In line with Rasmussen’s rejection of the queer as object, Eric Rofes ( 2004 ) dismantles the narrative of violence and suffering queer youth through the model “martyr-target-victim” (p. 41). Through reflection of his own teaching experiences, Rofes finds this narrative model was not only the application from outsiders but also how queer youth positioned themselves. He was concerned in his teaching to depart from the traditional knowledge about queer youth that focuses on their at-risk lives full of suicidal ideations and drives to self-harm to move to narratives of survival, resistance, and affirmation. Along with Rasmussen ( 2006 ), he was also concerned to avoid reiterating discourses of anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia, where Haskell and Burtch ( 2010 ) provide one example in their guide to educators that includes anti-bullying strategies. While a well-intended approach, it is also highly reductionist to teaching about queers because it forecloses the agency of queer youth and fails to recognize them beyond their position of marginality. In one particular undergraduate course, Rofes ( 2004 ) developed an assignment to address youth agency, asking students to reflect upon a single instance where they had played an active role in their own gendered and sexual development. While the aim was to empower and uplift, Rofes’s students recalled painful pasts, framing themselves as victims. They expressed later that they had thought the assignment unfair, that it had pitted gay as a choice, as if they had a role in their own suffering; in essence, they felt it was blaming the victim. Rofes discusses the limited position these students thought available to them as gendered and sexualized subjects, as if suffering and misery were the only legitimate narratives available to them, leading to his call for more research that sees queer youth as resilient and celebrated.

DePalma’s ( 2011 ) paper draws from a larger empirical study that “sought strategies for interrupting the operation of heteronormativity and gender conformity in primary schools and classrooms” (p. 3) in the United Kingdom via the No Outsiders research team, critical friends, and a participatory action research approach. This paper focuses on the research contributions of a gender specialist, Jay Stewart, to incorporate attention to trans issues and gender nonconformity in teachers’ approaches to challenging gender and sexual norms in elementary schools. Here DePalma ( 2011 ) queers gender norms as well as sexuality for several reasons. They are both embedded in Butler’s heterosexual matrix that operates to harness stable and coherent notions of dominant sexual and gendered identity while repudiating the marginalized Other. Gender and sexuality are also often conflated in everyday practice: if one perceives a gender transgression, a sexual transgression is assumed to follow. And yet DePalma is careful to note the tensions between the application of queering to transgender issues. She proposes a necessary sort of “irreconcilability” ( 2011 , p. 3) between the two that simultaneously queers trans while recognizing the claimed un-queerness of transsexuals who desire to pass; here, queering trans is only in a critically conceptual way that allows one to rethink systems of gender normalization.

Queering here is about troubling, or the action (i.e., thus, queer is again the verb) of unsettling sexual and gender categories “or simply refusing to believe in these categories” (p. 1). While she deploys the terms “queering” and “transing” as a subheading to her analysis of children’s reading practices of gender and sexuality, she does not expand on the distinction between the terms except to align with Stryker’s ( 2006 ) stance on the productive possibilities of trans experiences inviting us “to unlearn what we think we know about what sex, gender, and sexuality are and how they correlate” (DePalma, 2011 , p. 3). Martino and Cumming-Potvin ( 2016 ) make an explicit case for the coherence and complementarity of their application of queer theory and transgender studies in their study about LGBTQ texts in primary school language arts classrooms. While they outline queer as the interrogation of the systems of gender and sexual normalization and trans-informed approaches—approaches that are already fraught and conflicted between the gender defender and the gender outlaw (p. 4)—as a form of gender democratization, the authors defend the use of both theoretical strategies (i.e., queer politics and gender democratization) as something that can “co-exist and provide useful analytic points of departure for investigating the pedagogical significance of addressing one’s embodied relationship to and identification with particular norms as a life-long project of continuous negotiation and work on fashioning the gendered self” (p. 5). In addition, Martino’s ( 2012 ) earlier work develops the transgender imaginary as a productive site that incorporates a queering of masculinities and thus combines, while acknowledging the tensions, queer and trans-informed critical approaches.

Deploying another form of imaginary, Atkinson and DePalma ( 2008 ) look through an implicit queer lens to propose a homonormative imaginary, a move that realizes the purpose of queer theory to interrogate, dismantle, and then replace current systems of gender and sexual normalization. Most creatively, their carnivalesque analytic approach asks the reader to consider inversions to typical news stories or classroom scenarios as a “momentary reversal of convention” (p. 31); their aim here is not only to amuse (although that is a pleasant side effect) but also to inspire teachers to imagine the possibility of a queer future, one that recognizes the history of heteronormativity in schools while accounting for new iterations of gendered and sexualized subjects.

Future of Queer

Much as queer emerged from fuzziness, queer looks to the future in the same way. Its continuing productivity or its impending expiration are opposing grounds that scholars take up to imagine a future with or without queer in education studies. Rasmussen and Gowlett’s ( 2014 ) special issue invited contributions that resulted overall in “conflicting ideas that circulate in relation to queer ideas in education research . . . [that] give an indication of continuing contestations and tensions that adhere to queer concepts in education research” (p. 332). Referencing Britzman’s ( 1995 ) call to queer pedagogy beyond the realm of queer content and queer bodies, Rasmussen and Gowlett ( 2014 ) trouble the boundaries of queer theory that keep it tethered to gender and sexuality issues and ask why it cannot expand to do, as Connell and Pearse ( 2015 ) imagine is possible (as well as Britzman, 1998 ), critical work of other social privileges and inequities. In an earlier paper, Talburt and Rasmussen ( 2010 ) frame the after-queer as a way to consider the future of queer in education studies in this very pursuit of the expansion of its borders of application; they also position queer education studies as a unique field to draw in other disciplines who wish to learn from education’s “empirical and theoretical engagement with youth in and out of institutions” (p. 2). Queer educational research has the potential to inform not only queer bodies but also how youth negotiate their relationship to and within societal structures, “institutions, social imaginaries, everyday public pedagogies, and popular culture” (p. 2).

In an introduction to a special issue, Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz ( 2005 ) argue that their contributing essays articulate a queer studies that does have the relevance and fortitude to address other areas beyond gender and sexuality, including “empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism . . . [as well as] immigration, citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights” (p. 2). These areas that have remained untouched by queering require some attention as to how and why this is so. Renn ( 2010 ) fixes a queered gaze onto the field of higher education. In a meta-analysis, Renn ( 2010 ) examines the decidedly unqueer environment of higher education; despite the proliferation of queer studies in academia, the institution of academia itself has preserved its nonqueer status from tenure systems, ranking practices, evaluation procedures, and graduate education structure: “in short, colleges and universities have evolved to tolerate the generation of queer theory from within but have stalwartly resisted the queering of higher education itself” (p. 132). Other papers consider the expansion of queer beyond sexuality and gender. Rasmussen and Allen ( 2014 ) expand the boundaries of queer theory’s application in education to “consider questions of race, poverty, and precarity” (p. 434) arguing much of queer theory historically erases race in its ethnocentricity—a hypocritical move, I argue, given its close care to avoid such erasure of sexualized and gendered difference. Gowlett ( 2014 ) uses queer/queer(y)ing methodology, a deliberate play on the interrogative capabilities of queer, to move beyond queer topics—specifically to analyze subject selection for one senior student who is concerned to disrupt or interrogate the rigid boundaries of intelligibility in this administrative school practice. Rasmussen, Gowlett, and Connell ( 2014 ) clarify also that queer theory’s seeming apolitical nature is indeed highly political: simply because it aims to unsettle without a replacement by a new authoritative order, they argue that queer receives the reputation of neutrality. It is indeed the opposite: because queer draws attention to the neutrality that is inscribed in the iterative processes of gender and sexual normalization, it is thus highly political, uncomfortable, and devoid of neutrality. Despite its multiple and contested interpretations and applications, Rasmussen et al. ( 2014 ) conclude that what is clear is the “rich tapestry of conceptual ideas” (p. 334) surrounding queer; what is certain is queer theory’s uncertainty, but also, they conclude, its continuing place in education studies.

As a temporary final word (at least to this article), a volume on queer concepts in education (Rodriguez, Martino, Ingrey, & Brockenbrough, 2016 ) provides an overview of the multiple and contested applications of queer theory in educational practice from pedagogy to curriculum to policy while simultaneously considering its futurity. It returns to an examination of the very ontological premise of queer, asking, as many scholars continue to do, what queer actually is, what it fails to do, and where it should go, including the relevance for an intersectional and international context. Fashioned as an encyclopedic survey of critical concepts, it refuses to order, classify, or prioritize the contributors’ essays; rather, it provides a mapping of the field, invoking the method of cruising (Munoz, 2009 ) to preserve queer’s fluidity, instability, and indecision, all the while highlighting the richness of its current and future insights in education research.

Concluding Queer

In this short review of key contributions of queer studies to education, I have charted a sort of chronology but also disrupted such a linear narrative in favor of the nature of queer as itself “neither linear nor complete but contextual and partial” (Talburt, 2000 , p. 4). And indeed, partial it is. While locating appropriate markers to hit has been tricky—from the inception of queer theory in the late 1980s through to its immersion into elementary and secondary education, through its twisting path between representation and inclusion versus affirmation and critique, to its as-yet-undetermined next steps in education that either threaten or promise a robust future of queer—I, quite appropriately, feel this picture is incomplete. But because queer refuses harnessing, totality, and fixedness, I am just going to leave it at that.

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• Gowlett, C. , & Rasmussen, M. (2014). The cultural politics of queer theory in education research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , 35 (3), 331–334.
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• Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy . New York: Routledge Falmer.
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• Martino, W. (1999). “It’s ok to be gay”: Interrupting straight thinking in the English classroom. In W. J. Letts & J. T. Sears (Eds.), Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling (pp. 137–149). New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Martino, W. , & Cumming-Potvin, W. (2016). Teaching about sexual minorities and “princess boys”: A queer and trans-infused approach to investigating LGBTQ-themed texts in the elementary school classroom . Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , 37 (6), 807–827.
• Munoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity . New York: New York University Press.
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• Rasmussen, M. , Gowlett, C. , & Connell, R. (2014). Interview with Raewyn Connell: The cultural politics of queer theory in education research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , 35 (3), 335–346.
• Renn, K. A. (2010). LGBT and queer research in higher education: The state and status of the field. Educational Researcher , 39 (2), 132–141.
• Rodriguez, N. (1998). (Queer) youth as political and pedagogical. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 173–185). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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13.1: The Basics of Queer Theory

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• Stephen McGlinchey, Rosie WAters & Christian Scheinpflug
• E-International Relations

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Queer theory’s origins are in LGBT studies – which focus on sexuality and gender. It soon distanced itself from those approaches due to disagreements with the stable identities that LGBT studies suggest. Queer theory emphasises the fluid and humanly performed nature of sexuality – or better, sexualities. It questions socially established norms and dualistic categories with a special focus on challenging sexual (heterosexual/homosexual), gender (male/female), class (rich/poor), racial (white/non-white) classifications. It goes beyond these so-called ‘binaries’ to contest general political (private/public) as well as international binary orders (democratic/ authoritarian). These are viewed as over-generalising theoretical constructs that produce an either/or mode of analysis that hides more than it clarifies and is unable to detect nuanced differences and contradictions. But queer theory also analyses and critiques societal and political norms in particular as they relate to the experience of sexuality and gender. These are not viewed as private affairs. Just as feminists perceive of gender as a socially constructed public and political affair, so queer theorists argue with regards to sexuality and gender expression.

As the word ‘queer’ was used to describe homosexuals in the nineteenth century, queer theory traces its lineage from the study of sexuality in its private and public forms. A commonplace meaning attributed to the term revolves around being non-conforming in terms of sexuality and gender, thus adding an ambiguous notion to being or acting queer. Hence a queer approach towards sexual equality complicates identity-based LGBT advocacy, as queer thinking expresses a more challenging, fluid perspective. This split has become even more pronounced as the international politics of sexual orientation and gender identity receives an ever-increasing degree of public attention. Some states have implemented substantial equality provisions in order to prove that they are ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ enough, while others have responded with pushback in the form of homophobic legislation and persecution. Sexual orientation and gender identity rights, which themselves are questioned by queer theorists as overly reliant on Western liberal norms of human rights and democracy, have become points of political contention, eliciting domestic culture wars as well.

Consider the debate in the United States over whether transgender individuals should be free to use the toilet of their personal choice. The status of sexuality and gender politics in IR has clearly been elevated via cases such as this which can quickly transcend domestic politics and enter the international realm. In addition, it has also impacted apparently unrelated policies such as defence policies, health care and labour market regulations and thus created new avenues for the re-construction of conventional IR concepts. As a result, new perspectives are needed to explain this inherent part of the social and political world. Queer theory does not assume a uniform access to reality, but rather acknowledges that subjective knowledge(s) about sexuality, gender and other social aspects are constructed rather than preexistent, fluid rather than stable, and not always in line with societal norms. In this sense, queer theory has moved beyond focusing simply on the experience of sexuality and gender.

Sexuality politics and the queer scholarship connected to it arrived late on the theoretical scene in part because sexuality and gender initially were anchored in the private, rather than the public, spheres. Scholars advanced critical and feminist viewpoints emerging from the writings of Michel Foucault (1976), Judith Butler (1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) among others. Foucault’s groundbreaking linking of sexuality and knowledge to political power, and Butler’s rejection of stable sexual orientation and gender identities in favour of everyday performed ones remain foundational notions. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s calling attention to the discursive definition of homo/ heterosexuality in society further defined queer thinking. These scholarly statements were hardly accepted in mainstream political science because they rejected objectivity and highlighted the conditional and unstable human nature of social and political orders, including IR questions of security and governance. Hence queer theory evolved largely in literature, philosophy, sociology and queer studies programmes without making substantial inroads into IR theorising.

Despite the distinct emergence of queer theory from these wider origins, some questions remain. One of the major issues is to what extent ‘queer’ should be adopted as a label for transgressive (socially unacceptable) forms of thinking and acting – as this would in turn create a queer/mainstream binary. This is something that queer scholars argue against. Another issue lies in the vague definition of queer theoretical tenets and terms, leading to uncertainty about how a queer theoretical lens can best be deployed in various disciplines by a wide range of individuals. In its application to IR, queer theory challenges many assumptions about world politics unrelated to sexuality and gender. It aims to deconstruct established simplistic binaries – such as insecurity/security or war/peace – and recognises the inherent instability of political and social orders. Instead, it embraces the fluid, performative and ambiguous aspects of world politics. Hence, it criticises those approaches to politics and society that assume natural and moral hierarchies. It problematises, for instance, the way in which non-traditional sexualities have become normalised according to ‘hetero-normative’ standards, including the aspiration towards marriage and child rearing. Queer theorists argue that this results in a societal integration of sexual minorities into mainstream consumer society – making them less willing (or able) to contest deeper political inequalities.

Queer theory perceives sexuality and gender as social constructs that shape the way sexual orientation and gender identity are displayed in public – and thereby often reduced to black-and-white issues that can be manipulated or distorted. With regard to more classical IR topics, it critically assesses the assumption that all societies find themselves at different points along a linear path of political and economic development or adhere to a universal set of norms. Hence it embraces ambiguity, failure and conflict as a counterpoint to a dominant progressive thinking evident in many foreign or development policies. As a scholarly undertaking, queer theory research constitutes of ‘any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations’ (Nash and Browne 2012, 4).

Weber (2014) highlights a lack of attention to queer theory by decrying the closed-mindedness of standard IR theories, arguing that queer scholarship in IR exists but is not recognised. The invisibility of queer theory is slowly changing, with case-study work on state homophobia (Weiss and Bosia 2013) or collective identity politics (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014) and the increasing relevance of transnational LGBT rights discourses for IR scholarship. But if empirical work in this area concentrates mainly on the agency of groups in their surrounding political structure, what is ‘queer’ about LGBT advocacy perspectives? These works offer comparative case studies from regional, cultural and theoretical peripheries to identify new ways of theorising the political subject by questioning the role of the state as we have come to accept it. They add to IR by broadening the knowledge about previously under-recognised perspectives that critically examine IR’s apparently obvious core concepts (or ‘myths’, as Weber calls them) such as sovereignty, power, security and nationalism. They do so from the vantage point of the outsider and infuse these well-worn IR concepts with critical considerations and interpretations. Importantly, they contest existing dualistic binaries in mainstream IR – such as state/system, modern liberalism/premodern homophobia, and West/Rest. Queer IR scholars look for the contribution queer analysis can provide for re-imagining the political individual, as well as the international structure in which people are embedded.

Reflecting on the possible futures of queer theory, there are various important aspects to consider. Progress in LGBT politics is mainly limited to the Global West and North and evokes culture wars about how hetero-normative such advocacy should be. And, it elicits international (homo)colonialist contentions about the culturally intrusive manner by which LGBT rights are promoted. This becomes clear when powerful transnational groups, governments or international organisations propose to make foreign aid disbursement conditional on equality reforms in certain countries. At the same time, they do not sufficiently recognise that their explicit LGBT support increases the marginalisation of minorities in certain states. It has to be mentioned though, that many LGBT organisations have a better understanding of local contexts and often act with the cooperation of local activists, though typically in a weaker position than the intergovernmental institutions they are allied with. LGBT politics and queer IR research can inspire and parallel each other as long as sexual advocacy politics does not fall prey to overly liberal, patronising politics. No matter if in the domestic or international arenas a number of problematic issues remain with the alleged progress of LGBT politics: if predominantly gay and lesbian rights such as marriage and adoption equality are aimed for, can one speak of true equality while transgender individuals still lack healthcare access or protection from hate crimes? And if the normalisation of Western LGBT individuals into consuming, depoliticised populations leads to a weakening of solidarity with foreign LGBT activists and appreciation of their difference, what effects does this have on global LGBT emancipation? Queer theory is an important tool for helping to better appreciate the complexity of these debates.

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42 Queer Theory

Gayle Salamon is Professor of English and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. Her research interests include phenomenology, feminist philosophy, queer and transgender theory, contemporary continental philosophy, and disability studies. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (Columbia University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. Her most recent book, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (NYU Press, 2018), uses phenomenology to explore the case of Latisha King, a trans girl who was shot and killed in her Oxnard, California, junior high school by a classmate. Her coedited volume with Gail Weiss and Ann Murphy, titled 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020.

• Published: 12 May 2021
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This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in queer theory, with particular attention to the challenges it has posed to the concepts of normativity, identity, and the category of “woman.” It explores queer theory’s emergence from lesbian and gay studies, and considers its relation to feminist philosophy and trans theory. The chapter outlines the founding contributions of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, along with several other influential queer theorists, and traces the concept of heteronormativity from its central place in queer theory’s earliest works to more recent reconsiderations.

Queer theory is a creature notoriously resistant to ontological capture. Michael Warner and Laurent Berlant described the difficulty in their “anti-encyclopedia entry” titled “What Can Queer Theory Teach Us about X,” in which they suggest that “queer theory is not the theory of anything in particular, and has no precise bibliographic shape” (Berlant and Warner 1995 ). Queer theory does not possess a singular methodology and cannot be said to have common or even similar objects of study. Its intellectual lineages are diverse, its disciplinary locations far-flung, and its political aspirations and effects unpredictable. Nevertheless, there are some shared characteristics that unite this body of work.

Queer theory emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s to challenge two different formations in the American academy: the essentialist tendencies of much of the feminist thinking of decades prior, and the identitarian commitments of lesbian and gay studies, which was developing simultaneously and of which queer theory is sometimes considered a subset. Lesbian and gay studies emerged in the 1980s as a reclamation project whose goal was the “uncovering” of the hidden and suppressed lives and loves of lesbian and gay people. This search for gay and lesbian subjects was simultaneously historical in its belief that gay and lesbian subjects might be found and reclaimed through careful minings of the margins of history, and ahistorical in its premise that gay identity existed as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon (Duberman et al. 1989 ).

Within lesbian and gay studies, the term “gay” had been adopted as a way of shifting language about sexuality away from the more clinical and pathologized “homosexual” as well as to distinguish from earlier homophile groups. The term “queer,” in its embrace and reclamation of an epithet of abuse, aimed to transform weaponized language into a politically powerful form of identification. David Halperin relates that queer theory as a moniker came into being as something of a joke at a conference organized by Teresa de Lauretis. It was precisely the nonreferentiality of “queer” that could either cut toward radicality or provide cover for its opposite. Halperin suggests that although its initial use was deliberately and “scandalously offensive,” it became co-opted by the mainstream: “Queer theory appeared on the shelves of bookstores and in advertisements for academic jobs, where it provided a merciful exemption from the irreducibly sexual descriptors ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ ” (Halperin 2003 , 340). Later commentators lamented that “queer” had become merely the latest synonym for gay identity, precisely the consolidation that its earlier uses had tried to disrupt or frustrate. In musing about the identificatory possibilities of “queer,” Sedgwick suggested that perhaps all that was required for it to be true was the impulse to use it in the first person. Another foremother of queer theory, Gloria Anzaldua, adopted the term in a first-person mode that brought her racial identifications into relief in her foundational book Borderlands/La Frontera : “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.)” (Anzaldúa 1987 , 102). Yet as ubiquitous as queer theory was in the American academy, few queer theorists adopted that as their demonym.

If the project of lesbian and gay studies is to assemble and fortify a singular if not universal gay subject, queer theory intends to contest and challenge the subject. If the goals of gay and lesbian studies are liberationist, the aims of queer theory are to lay bare the regulatory forces and norms that inevitably underlie gender and sexuality. Rather than focusing on individuals and their orientation, queer theory brings into relief the structures—psychic, cultural, linguistic, political—through which sexuality becomes possible and legible. Siobhan Somerville describes the difference between lesbian and gay studies and queer theory thusly: “If much of the early work in lesbian and gay studies tended to be organized around an opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the primary axis of queer studies shifted toward the distinction between normative and nonnormative sexualities” (Somerville 2014 , 205).

The concept of heteronormativity is one that queer theorists from a broad range of academic disciplines—philosophy, literature, history, sociology, anthropology—tend to hold in common. Heteronormativity situates queerness in a perpetually slant relation to the norm. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged” (Berlant and Warner 1998 , 548). The concept of heteronormativity reoriented the questions that queer scholars would pursue: Not where are the queer subjects? , but rather how do we become subjects in the first place? Into what regimes of gender and sexuality are we conscripted, and through what means? In posing these questions, queer theorists share certain presuppositions: that sexuality is constructed rather than natural, that queer as a descriptor offers significant resistance to referentiality, that attention to the workings of power and its relation to recognition and legibility is of crucial importance in understanding sexuality. As Berlant and Warner put it: “without forgetting the importance of the hetero-homo distinction of object choice in modern culture, queer work wants to address the full range of power-ridden normativities of sex” (Berlant and Warner 1995 , 345). Analysis of those power-ridden normativities was aided by the work of Michel Foucault. The advent of Foucault’s ( 1990 ) work, and in particular his History of Sexuality , Vol. 1, first published in France in 1976 and translated into English the following year, offered a challenge to this way of thinking about sexuality, and thus about gay and lesbian identity. 1 His radical claim that the homosexual was invented, as a personage and species, and his analysis of the discursive production of sexuality would have a significant role in shaping the field. Foucault was a significant influence on two of the most central figures in queer theory: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Both Butler and Sedgwick claimed that our identities are always circumscribed by forces beyond our choice or control while simultaneously arguing for the lived possibility, and political necessity, of enacting our identities in other than normative ways. The critiques of identity advanced by queer theory have been thorough, with three aspects emphasized here: First, whereas identity is a thing, identification is a process, a doing rather than a being. Second, if identity is a relation between similars, identification is about lines of affiliation strung between differences (identifying as or identifying with a group, for example). In eschewing identity in favor of identification, queer theorists have sought to emphasize the ways in which we are always constituted by forces outside ourselves. And third, understanding processes of identification requires attention to larger structures and flows of power. For this reason, queerness itself can only be understood in terms of the larger social structures in which it is situated.

The philosophical foundations of queer theory are most apparent in the work of Judith Butler. Butler’s theorization of gender and sexuality emerged from a legacy of feminist thought that insisted on sex as a category of philosophical significance, but where the category of “woman” often went uninterrogated, either because its referent was unproblematically assumed or because it was supposed that political solidarity required a unitary subject. 2 Butler was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that it is woman’s situation and not her body that creates her condition, and Butler took up Beauvoir’s pronouncement that “One is not born, but becomes, woman.” 3 Butler’s most enduring contribution to queer theory was her theory of gender performativity. Butler first articulated her theory of performativity in her 1990 book Gender Trouble , clarified it in response to critics in Bodies That Matter (1994), expanded it to consider intersex and transgender in Undoing Gender (2004), and reimagined as an intersubjective mode of social protest and resistance in Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

Performativity challenges the conceptualization of gender expression as individual, self-contained, and hermetically sealed, something that wells up from the deep spring of individual consciousness, offering a sense of certainty about the subject and her place in the world. In Butler’s view, gender becomes consolidated as a result of the gendered acts that we repeatedly perform. She insists that there is not self that exists prior to its gendering, but rather that the gendered self comes about as a result of these repetitions. Gender is thus a doing rather than a being, though it is a doing that paradoxically comes to be read and understood as a being. The subject does not emerge prior to gender but with and through gender, and gender does not exist apart from its regulation but is that regulation. Through iteration, or repetition with a difference, Butler claims that those norms can be transformed, if not quite dispensed with.

Gender, in this view, is a constant labor, never fully or finally realized, and lived through the body. But our habits of understanding cause us to interpret those acts of gender as evidence that gender is an aspect of personhood caused by a material and bodily something called “sex.” Butler inverted this ontology, suggesting that rather than a material thing called sex giving rise to an immaterial thing called gender, our bodily performances of gender lead us to surmise material sex as its probable cause. She thus calls into question “compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real” (Butler [1989]1993, 313). In Butler’s view, even the least hyperbolic expressions of gender are performed rather than natural. But normative genders and sexualities conceal their nature as performances through their repetition and their ubiquity. They become, in effect, naturalized , and retroactively assert their foundationality. At the end of Gender Trouble , Butler offers drag as an example of gender performativity, suggesting that theatrical or parodic aspects of gender such as drag can function as a model for the acquisition of normative gender as well as for queer gender or sexuality. Parody functions as such to the extent that its repetitions of the norm result in an unraveling of that norm, exposing it to be illusory. “Gender,” as Butler writes in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” “is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (Butler [1989] 1993 , 314).

Queer theory, in all its forms, is an attempt to turn away from an understanding of sexuality understood as a facet of individual identity, in favor of viewing it as a product of social forces, what Butler calls in Gender Trouble the “heterosexual matrix.” Butler asserts that “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes” (Butler 1993 , 308) through the creation of a constitutive outside, in which identity sets outside and beyond itself a region of impossibility whose exclusion allows for the coherence of the category. But, as Butler explained, all identity categories are melancholically haunted by what they are required to repudiate. Thus, Butler emphasized the disavowed homosexuality at the heart of heterosexuality, bringing the resources of psychoanalysis to bear in order to outline the psychic processes by which such losses of gendered possibility are simultaneously lost as lived possibilities yet still maintained by the normatively gendered subject, buried but still reverberant. The radical potential in Butler’s argument is the room it makes for enacting norms of gender and sexuality otherwise, even when those norms are powerful and saturating. Indeed, as she has written repeatedly, her aim is to expand the conditions of livability for precarious lives, queer and trans among them.

Another of queer theory’s primary foundational figures was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her first book, Between Men (1985), Sedgwick disarticulates desire and affiliation between men from homosexual identity, reading works of Western literature for their “homosocial” bonds. Those bonds structure not only gay male culture, Sedgwick argued, but also all culture. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), published the same year as Gender Trouble , Sedgwick claims, contra Foucault, not that a modern regime of the homosexual as personage had supplanted an earlier age of sodomitical acts, but rather that these different regimes existed in “unrationalized coexistence” (Sedgwick 1990 , 47). Elsewhere in that text, however, Sedgwick leans into Foucault’s theorizations of discipline, panopticism, and surveillance, particularly in her theorization of “the closet” and its paradoxes. Like Butler, Sedgwick is interested in the homosexuality that lay at the heart of heterosexuality, and like Butler she is deeply critical of consolidated identity positions. Both thinkers theorized queerness as a radical critique of orthodox habits of mind, body, culture, and language.

Sedgwick’s language is literary rather than overtly philosophical, and her fine-grained queer readings of canonical literature are deeply inflected by a sense of play, even as she adopts and transforms the axiom as a favorite form of writing. Sedgwick imagines a queerness that was multiple, distributed, and heteroglossic. In Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick defines queerness as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” She asked: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?” (Sedgwick 1993 , 6). In Touching Feeling , Sedgwick turned to affect studies, a branch of cultural studies that would be further explored by subsequent queer theorists. 4

Much of queer theory emerges from feminist theory, yet not all its points of origin are anchored there. Gayle Rubin, whose essay “The Traffic in Women” (1975) did much to organize feminist discourse on sex and gender in the decades after its publication, was also a significant figure for queer theory. Rubin is a feminist anthropologist whose essay “Thinking Sex” (1984/2002) called for a new kind of theorizing about sexuality. The conceptual tools offered by feminism, she argued, had reached the limit of their usefulness for understanding the oppressions of queers and other sexual minorities. With this, Rubin upended Adrienne Rich’s earlier suggestion that lesbianism was best understood as an intensification of the experience of being a woman, leaving lesbian sexuality almost incidental to the continuum of womanly identification that found its furthest endpoint in bonds of affection, political commonality, or other filiation between women. Rubin also positioned herself against feminists like Catherine MacKinnon for whom relations of power were entirely derivable from relations of gender. 5 If a feminist framework took gender difference—restrictively understood as the difference between men and women—as the sole determinant of the relation between power and sexuality, then such a framework would have little descriptive purchase on the lives of not only gays and lesbians, but also sadomasochists, perverts, sex workers, those engaged in cross-generational sex, and an always-incomplete list of others. The persecution and prosecution of these groups meant that their members shared a commonality that transcended their identities and were bound together by their transgression of norms, even when those transgressions looked nothing alike. Though her concerns were less linguistic than Butler’s or Sedgwick’s, Rubin’s central target was normativity, and her goal was the expansion of lives that deviated from the “charmed circle” of procreative heterosexuality. Rubin called for a queer studies centered around practices rather than identities, a theory of bodies and pleasures, to cite the Foucauldian rallying cry.

David Halperin, a classicist and cofounder of the journal GLQ , was another early queer theorist deeply influenced by Foucault. His book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) considers sexuality in the ancient world, enumerating two aspects of modern sexuality that were entirely foreign to the ancients: the idea that sexuality is an autonomous sphere, and sexuality as a force of individuation. The latter was a legacy of sexuality’s creation and capture by psychological discourse. As Michael Warner observed in Fear of a Queer Planet , prior theories of sexuality had tended toward either history or psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis remained a favored analytic within queer theory because it had offered to date “the most rigorous and sophisticated language about sexuality” (Warner 1993 , 55). Psychoanalysis had always had queerness at its center, and its insights about sexuality were sustained throughout queer theory, thinking it not as a biological imperative but rather as what results once culture is done organizing our hungers and our aversions, our life drives and our death drives. To the proposal that “sexual orientation is a fairly clear and simple political matter, that discrimination should be eliminated but that gay people have no further political interest as a group,” Warner responds that sexual orientation, and society’s treatment of people based on sexual orientation, can only be understood in terms of the larger social structures that shape not only the reaction to queer identity but also queer identity itself.

In 2012, Warner wrote an afterword speculation about the “time” of queer theory, a time which is always presumed to have already happened, as queer theory has often been characterized—from its very inception—as existing elsewhere or in the past. 6 In “Queer and Then,” a piece whose title echoed Sedgwick’s “Queer and Now,” Warner delineated “the basic impulses from which queer theory took its point of departure: a broadening of minority politics to question the framework of the sayable; attention to the hierarchies of respectability that saturate the world; movement across overlapping but widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a series of margins that have no identity core; an oddly melancholy utopianism; a speculative and prophetic stance outside politics—not to mention an ability to do much of that—through the play of its own style” (Warner 2012 ). The essay is saturated with questions of temporality, which could also be said of queer theory itself, in which the notion of “queer time” has been a persistent and fruitful area of inquiry. Carla Freccero describes the struggles between anachronism and historicism in queer theory and advances a “fantasmatic historiography” in her book Queer/Early/Modern (2005), and temporality and perversion in contemporary queer life have been surveyed in Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) and Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005). 7

One of the most generative and controversial moments in recent queer theory was the publication of Lee Edelman’s book No Future (2004), in which he mounts a critique of what he titles “reproductive futurism,” the cultural subsumption of all things good and hopeful under the sign of the child. Edelman’s work joined Leo Bersani’s influential essay “Is the Rectum a Grave” (1987) to advance what would come to be known as the “antisocial thesis.” This work was psychoanalytic in focus, strongly emphasized negativity and the death drive, and was for the most part unengaged with theories of gender or feminism, presuming a gay male subject that was radically self-divided, if not shattered. In Homos , Bersani describes queer desire as “desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself” (Bersani 1995 , 59). In her reading of Bersani, feminist philosopher Lynne Huffer has suggested that for all its emphasis on difference, queer theory has too often presupposed a seamless and unified “we” able to speak and be heard, institutionally and beyond, claiming that “there is a consistently universalist logic at work in the deployment of the seemingly anti-universalist category of ‘queer’ ” (Huffer 2013 , 64).

Indeed, the charge of false universalism has been leveled against queer theory from nearly its founding, finding one of its important articulations in Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” which called out the racial and class exclusions of a theory meant to represent marginality itself (Cohen 1997 ). Within sociology, Roderick Ferguson’s articulation of a “queer of color critique” in Aberrations in Black (2014) and José Muñoz in Disidentifications (1999) have taken up questions of race and marginalization within theories of the queer subject, and Muñoz wrote specifically against the antisocial thesis in his final book, Cruising Utopia (2009). Some of queer theory’s most prolific branches have been auto-critical, enacting a rethinking of some of its foundational assumptions. 8 Lisa Duggan’s diagnosis of homonormativity in queer thought (Duggan 2003 ) and Jasbir Puar’s articulation of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages (2007) critique of the ways in which a queer discourse can be conscripted in the service of neoliberal and conservative aims. David Eng’s theorization of “queer diasporas” in the face of queer liberalism considers the function of “the racialization of intimacy” in legal discourse, adoption, and racial reparation. At the time of this writing, the liveliest debate in queer theory might be on the question of normativity and deviance in queer studies, evidenced by Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson’s special issue of differences, “Queer Theory without Antinormativity” (2015). 9 In that volume, Heather Love offers a critical reassessment of queer theory’s self-understanding as radical, marginal, and necessarily anti-normative, and asks after the possibility of a re-engagement with the “queer normal” that had for decades been an object of the study of sexuality in the social sciences (Love 2015 ).

The newer field of transgender theory has both engaged with and opposed itself to queer theory, with which it has a significantly shared history. Its foundational works were deeply inflected by queer theory, even as its concerns were distinct. 10 Susan Stryker has defined transgender as “the movement across a socially imposed boundary from an unchosen starting place” (Stryker 2008a ) and has suggested trans theory as “queer theory’s evil twin” (Stryker 2004 ), while Mel Chen has written that their opposition suggests a “false dichotomy,” even as trans theory has asked how “one might excavate the trans in what has been taken and subsumed under the rubric of queer” (Chen 2012 , 135–36). The term “homonormativity” itself offers one significant example, as its use in trans studies as early as 1998 named the exclusion of trans people by queer activists, a trans genealogy that Stryker has deftly traced (Stryker 2008b ). Some of the most significant work in recent queer theory takes up the issue of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, particularly against queer and trans people of color. To close by returning to ontological capture: Eric Stanley in “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture” discusses what the ubiquity of anti-queer violence means for the nature of queer being, particularly for queers of color. He describes attempts to extinguish queer life by “overkill,” which he describes as “such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. … [O]verkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone” (Stanley 2011 , 9). Leaning into Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Giorgio Agamben, Stanley describes queer and trans life as caught between the impossibility of finding an “outside to violence” and the necessity of keeping hope for a life lived otherwise.

Ahmed, Sara . 2006 . Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Eng, David L.   2010 . The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Muñoz, José Esteban . 1999 . Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky . 1990 . Epistemology of the Closet . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky . 1993 . Tendencies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky . 2003 . Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Stanley, Eric . 2011 . “ Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture. ” Social Text 29 (2 (107)): 1–19.

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Tongson, Karen . 2011 . Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries . New York: NYU Press.

Warner, Michael , ed. 1993 . Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory . University of Minnesota Press.

Warner, Michael . 2012 . “Queer and Then?” Chronicle of Higher Education . January 1, 2012.

Wiegman, Robyn , and Elizabeth Wilson . 2015. “ Queer Theory without Antinormativity. ” Differences 26 (1, May).

On Foucault’s legacy for feminism, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures , and Penny Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures . For an alternative genealogy of Foucault and queer thought, see Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault .

See Feminists Theorize the Political for several accounts challenging this presumption.

On Butler’s relation to Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Gayle Rubin, see Salamon “Rethinking Gender.” On “the most famous feminist sentence ever written,” see the edited collection “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient”: The Life of a Sentence.

On queer affect, see Jose Munoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down”; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings ; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism ; Heather Love, Feeling Backward ; Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness ; Tavia Nyong’o, “Trapped in the Closet with Eve”; and Halperin and Traub, Gay Shame .

See MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography and Method.”

See Muñoz ( 1999 ) and Ferguson ( 2004 ).

On queer time in queer space, see Samuel Delany’s seminal Times Square Red, Times Square Blue , as well as Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology . For works in queer theory that offer a corrective to the equation of the queer with the urban, see Scott Herring’s Another Country and Karen Tongsen’s Relocations .

See Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy , in particular his powerful reading of the racial politics neglected in queer celebrations of Lawrence v. Texas . See also his earlier Racial Castration for a consideration of psychoanalysis, racialization, and queerness.

See Wiegman and Wilson, “Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” and Annamarie Jagose, “The Trouble with Antinormativity.”

See Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” and Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

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The Gale Review

A blog from Gale International

Unpacking Queer Theory: An Investigation into the Methodology and the Importance of Gale Primary Sources

│By Madeleine Pedley, Gale Ambassador at Liverpool John Moores University│

Unpacking Queer Theory

Within this blog, I will be using Gale Primary Sources’ Archives of Sexuality and Gender to find case studies and investigate Queer Theory. The importance of using Gale Primary Sources within explorations into methodology is that they enable students to build upon initial research and produce supported interpretations through their extensive archives. This blog aims to investigate the Queer Theory methodology and provide examples of application through selected sources. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of such examples and how History of Art and Museum Studies students can use Gale Primary Sources .  

The Queer Theory methodology is used to explore works of art or text from a new perspective, with the outcome providing a different narrative to interpret the piece and redefine it within an LGBTQ+ setting. 1 It is not there to make an artwork suddenly homosexual but to allow for alternative and contemporary discussions to take place. 

Completing a BA in History of Art and Museum Studies

History of Art and Museum Studies offers a comprehensive education into interpretation and critical analysis of art, focusing on the theories presented within the Art History canon; the addition of museology allows students to gain theoretical and practical experience within curatorial practices. The combination of both provides skills that directly link to jobs within the creative sector like a Conservator, Museum/Gallery Curator, Exhibition Officer and Commercial Art Gallery Manager. It also provides a platform for students like myself to investigate areas of art that interest them, whether that is a time-period, artist, or methodology.

Queer Theory and Critical History, Together at Last by Laura Doan, reviewed by Martha Vicinus 

This review outlines a couple of themes within Queer Theory, indicating how by using this lens, critical analysis of sexuality can be redefined. The first is when Vicinus begins the review by setting out how the author develops a “fresh approach toward interpreting same-sex erotics” through the use of various readings of text and popular culture, including a World War I recruitment poster; this example can be used to show how by approaching an image in a new way, a different interpretation can be produced.

For instance, this poster above can be viewed as a flirty image meant to encourage men through the use of a female’s alluring sexuality and the challenge towards their masculinity. However, through a Queer Theory lens, the discussion around the women’s dialogue could present a narrative that she is being genuine and wants to explore this possibility of being a man; and just like that you have delved into discussions around gender and ultimately Queer Theory. 

Themes of Queer Theory

However, as mentioned above, Queer Theory is not just about gender – it is an intersectional methodology that considers a range of themes within its domain. This quote below can be seen as a stepping stone, through its initial highlighting of sexuality, towards the larger conversation of how gender, class, and race impact Queer Theory:

Vinicus goes on to state how through this methodology the theme of sexuality can be explored, especially sexual acts that resist explanation through other lenses. The theme of sexuality within the review demonstrates how sexual orientation cannot be defined by what is seen by others, as it is far more complex. This is supported by the mention of Doan’s case study and their conclusion of how “social class, distinguished war service or a good barrister often trumped questions of sexual behaviour”, indicating the influence surrounding issues of gender, class and race.

Plus, they also consider how an individual’s appearances are not indicative to their sexual desires, therefore it is in the realm of possibility for the image above to have a Queer Theory reading despite its initial heterosexual aesthetic.

Making Things Perfectly Clear? By Barbara Korbal  

This document is a review of the publication  Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture  by Alexander Doty, and how the use of the Queer Theory methodology impacted mass culture, like TV shows and films. This particular text is a great example of using Gale Primary Sources to find additional material; by using the Archives of Sexuality and Gender , I found this text despite not initially looking for information surrounding media, which became extremely useful in the investigation of Queer Theory and this blog.

The review offers a wide range of examples of both the potential and limitations surrounding a methodology like Queer Theory, as Korbal provides a great critique of the work and even elaborates on certain points made by Doty.  

The extract above provides an interesting point concerning how everyone can be a “Queer receiver” as the inclusion of non-heterosexual elements within cultural-consumerism products invites this; by presenting moments within popular TV shows and films, individuals with a cis-gendered and heterosexual nature will also be present in the audience. This concept of straight consumerism of homosexual products indicates how “queer expression has always existed within, or alongside, what traditionally have been considered straight cultural forms and conventions”.

This suggests that the use of Queer Theory on such scenes is not forced but beneficial to expanding critical analysis and creates the “multiple possibilities for locating queer moments”, as well as redefining the audience. 

Media Representation and Stereotypes

Korbal critiques the publication on how it handles the discussion surrounding lesbian love presented within sit-coms, as Doty includes all references referring to same-sex female relations and implies they are reflections of lesbian love and sexuality; this creates an issue as some of these homosexual moments were intended as jokes, double-entendres, or displaced comments.

Korbal argued against it as it construed what lesbian sexuality is and distances it as a Queer desire, thus beginning the discussion into how the media impacts representation; an argument made possible through the Queer Theory methodology and its consideration of sexuality, gender, race and class.  

This final extract raises the issues inside of the Queer community, unpacking how even in the LGBTQ+ community there are stereotypes and differences between each other. As in my first case study, the example of if sexual activity is defined as simply penetrative, the act of “kissing and fondling between women may be seen as training for the “real thing” or simply as affectionate teasing”. This supports the suggestion of the removal of lesbian moments from Queer desire as well as the difference in perception between homosexual men and women. This indicates the gender differences within the gay community, a concept that can be applied within Queer Theory when comparing two or more pieces of work.  

New Interpretations

Overall, these case studies show the importance of finding sources that provide different perspectives and themes even within the same methodology. The Queer Theory lens is complex and can be used to view sources with a new interpretation, as demonstrated above. The art world is developing alongside the social issues presented today and so the need to look back on history differently is increasing; as “Queer theorists opened a new, provocative approach to the historical past”. So, the use of Gale Primary Sources to find texts such as these has never been more imperative to critical writing and analysis of art. 

Blog post cover image citation: Doan, Laura, and Martha Vicinus. “Queer Theory and Critical History, Together at Last.” The Women’s Review of Books , vol. 31, no. 2, March-April 2014, pp. 13+. Archives of Sexuality and Gender , https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/PTAUFZ071486691/AHSI?u=livjm&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=0b8241f4 .

If you enjoyed reading about Queer Theory, then check out these posts:

• Franco Stevens and the History of Curve Magazine
• The Lesbian Avengers and the Importance of Intersectionality in LGBTQ+ Activism
• Pride and Protest: LGBT+ Disability Activism in the US, 1985-1995
• Indiana University Bloomington Libraries (2024) Philosophy, Introduction to Queer Theory [Online] Available at: https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=995240&p=8361766 [Accessed 12/01/2024]

About the Author

Madeleine Pedley is a Gale Ambassador at Liverpool John Moores University, where she is completing a BA in History of Art and Museum Studies. Madeleine has recently completed her dissertation on “Shunga and how it Represented the Attitudes Towards Gay Sex in Edo Period, 1603-1868, Japan”, in which she explored the methodology of Queer Theory and its impact on interpretations produced when analysing Shunga art. Outside of her academic studies, Madeleine has a keen interest in travelling and has been awarded several travel grants during her time at university, as well as producing several music events around Liverpool with local promoters, bands and artists. If you would like to keep up with Madeleine's future events, you can find her LinkedIn here .

Where is the Queer? A case study of LGBTQ representation in Aotearoa New Zealand exhibitions

Modern museums and galleries are cultural spaces that often participate in human rights advocacy and social activism. Exhibitions within these spaces are the physical manifestations of these ideologies, the way that institutions connect with their audiences and with the communities they purport to represent. ‘Where is the Queer?’ explores the ways that museums and galleries in Aotearoa represent queerness within their exhibitions, in various stages of the development process. This dissertation addresses a key gap in the literature by critically re-engaging with queerness, exploring the intersections between queer theory and museum theory in an area under-examined in New Zealand practice.  This research was exploratory in nature, utilizing a credible multi-method case study approach to retrieve data from an ephemeral process, exhibition production. Archival documentary research provided the necessary background to the exhibitions’ development, as well as supporting evidence for various curatorial choices. Interviews with curators then established key areas of interest, including curatorial strategies, conceptual goals, tailored public programming, and their perspectives on issues with LGBTQ representation.  The findings of this research show that exhibiting queerness is difficult terrain to negotiate, although museums and galleries generally aim to present and include a diversity of perspectives in a balanced way. However, the ways that queerness is represented also tend to rely on now outdated ideologies, such as an emphasis on gay men’s perspectives, reductive ‘coming-out’ narratives, and a neutral stance on the messages the exhibitions put forward. The comparative analysis of the cases points to the need for museums and galleries to engage more critically with queer history, theory and the community more broadly. In practice, this means greater levels of collaboration with the communities they hope to serve, taking a more activist approach that gives authority to queer voices throughout development. This is significant as queer communities become increasingly visible and celebrated in New Zealand society; representing these communities in public spaces needs to be a process in line with current ideas and not rely on defunct, overly simple, or potentially damaging modes of representation. This research therefore has applicability for both museum curatorial practice and a broader human rights movement, by challenging the sector within New Zealand and internationally to engage effectively with queer content.

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Queer social work: Cases for LGBTQ+ affirmative practice

2019, Queer social work: Cases for LGBTQ+ affirmative practice

This collection of case studies offers real-life scenarios from a range of social work scholars, educators, and practitioners, representing diverse sexualities, genders, and intersectional identities. Together, they demonstrate contemporary, multilevel, queer-affirming social work practice with LGBTQ+ people and communities. "Richly descriptive and eminently readable, Queer Social Work is a welcome addition to the available literature on social work practice with LGBTQ+ people. The volume is particularly valuable for its rich illustrations of intersectionality in client identities and the implications of these intersectional identities for each client's life problems and sources of potential support." ▶ JAMES I. MARTIN, New York University "Tyler M. Argüello and his colleagues' rich history and expertise in the social work profession exemplify the meaning of rigorous and scholarly work as much as they illustrate a commitment to social justice for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Their timely and widely relevant contributions are truly well-constructed and will be most useful for students, practitioners , and educators alike across a variety of readership populations and diverse settings.

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This article recounts the development of a qualitative study regarding the response of school social workers to gender-variant students. Specifically, it discusses the use of a Queer theoretical framework, still quite rare in social work research, and its implications for research design and methodology. In conclusion, it suggests the relevance of Queer theory in exploring issues related to flexible and non-normative forms of identity, and in describing “difference” as positive.

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This narrative offers my reflection as a gay social worker on coming out. I highlight my struggle to find, embrace and exercise my queer voice, as well as examine how my family of origin informed both this personal and professional journey. It is the embracing of these once perceived obstacles that have enriched my life, given meaning to my professional development as a social worker, and ultimately were adopted as my social worker superpowers. I begin by sharing my coming out story to provide a backdrop. Then, I explore how my own lived experiences and my family of origin helped co-author my professional narrative. I discuss how multiple factors had a hand in: a.) my decision to enter the profession of social work, b.) my choice of practice settings and served populations, c.) the theoretical perspectives that ground me, and d.) the importance of my role as an advocate. I end the narrative by outlining the contrast and similarities between my past and current practice. I hope that in considering the ways that this biographical disruption has significantly contributed to my identity as a teacher, practitioner, and scholar, readers might appreciate their own search for authenticity, and the lessons learned.

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The Importance of Queer Theory: An Abridgement on Trans Healthcare in the UK

Termed by queer scholar Teresa de Lauretis in 1991, Queer Theory is a relatively new approach to International Relations, that seeks to rebuff the socially held belief/expectation that heterosexuality and the rigid man/woman gender binary is the ‘norm’ or “benchmark” for gender and sexuality formations (De Lauretis, 1991) , in conjunction with the belief that homosexuality, and more recently, trans identities are the ‘opposites’ of cis-heterosexuality. Contrary to superficial interpretation, Queer Theory is not just focused on political policies specific to gender or sexuality but takes a particularly extensive, comprehensive look at the power structures that form our knowledge production today.

When the anti-trans discourse in British politics has never been more virulent, such an approach has never been more imperative. The media’s fixation on inclusivity as a potential danger to the cis-hetero population has meant that politicians have taken distinct pro-anti LGBTQ+ stances in order to attract/retain certain groups of voters and increase popularity. This is particularly dangerous to trans/gender diverse people, not just in terms of increasing the likelihood of verbal and physical violence towards them, both domestically and in wider society, (Bachmann and Gooch, 2017), but also as it distorts medical understanding and practices into a political tool. People are given access not based on developing medical research, focusing on the needs of patients and the availability of technology/healthcare procedures, but on the political persuasions of those in power. For clarity and concision’s sake, herein I will be referring to anyone trans and binary-orientated, and non-binary, and any who are seeking healthcare or medical treatment for gender differences from those assigned at birth as Trans and Gender Diverse (TGD) Persons.An observation not limited to TGD healthcare by any means. The power dynamic here is where a system of oppression can be identified where cisgendered politicians with generally very little connection to the topic are making life-enabling/destroying decisions on the bodily autonomy, self-identification and perceptions of an already marginalised community. 

Denying access of certain groups to fair, equal and sufficient healthcare is not only discriminative but is inherently violent. Such denial can lead to increased psychological distress, external abuse and discrimination and physical/biological harm.

It is with this understanding, that the significance of queer theory is highlighted and, I hope with this essay, made clear. I will endeavour to answer the eponymous question in two sections: first, through theory exploration and methodology, explicating the most salient points of queer theory, and second, applying this theory to a case study of TGD access to healthcare in the UK, to demonstrate on a smaller scale, how the world could be made less violent and oppressive with such an approach.

Queer Theory argues against integration of non-traditional sexualities or gender diversities into the heteronormative expectations and institutions for interpersonal relationships and interactions (like that of marriage and children), as oftentimes it is these expectations, systems and institutions which sustain misnomers and forced silences around queer people and communities (Thiel, 2017).  This is where queer theory can be seen to diverge from LGBT theory which can be seen to reproduce harmful stereotypes and expectations by simply adding new categories to the traditional binary, and generally forcing Western ideals of equality on an international scale where different approaches and cultural boundaries need to be considered (Bosia, 2014). Instead, society including policy-makers should acknowledge that our understanding of sexuality and gender is limited by historical and by-proxy religious, typically Western expectations and we should develop policy with an acceptance that sexuality and gender is more diverse, fluid and far-reaching than previously thought.

It is these Western expectations and Eurocentriscism that play a significant role in devising attitudes towards gender. (Sandor, 2022). We’ve seen through history where heteronormativity has emerged, developed and ‘colonised’ the world from areas of the world where ‘homosociality and homoerotic affectivity’ (Najmabadi, c2005 p.4) was/is an encouraged practise. The same can be seen to apply to gender diversity. By enforcing a Western ideology that gender is constrained to the binary on an international level, and creating development policies and principles with this ideology supporting them, it can be said that Eurocentric oppression and the chasm between the North/South divide is worsened. This highlights the objectives of queer theory to expand our expectations for where a queer theoretical lens ‘should’ be applied and restricted to; looking at a vast range of policy areas like that of foreign policy and the military (Richter-Montpetit, 2018).

Access to Healthcare for TGD people in the UK

In order to understand how queer theory could be applied universally to achieve a less oppressive, violent world, I will descale the universal incorporation and analyse one example of treatment towards queer people in a modern context and how queer theory may tackle the most prevalent issues. As aforementioned, TGD access to healthcare in the UK is under increasing stress. With the NHS stretched to its limits, TGD care is one of the many areas bearing the brunt. Not just this, but actions by the political elites are making it increasingly difficult to access sufficient ‘affirming healthcare’. There are 3 main issues that are restricting access within the health sector: extensive delays, lack of understanding from medical professionals and ‘uncomfortable’ assessments/tests to prove ‘gender dysphoria.’ [1]

Affirming healthcare ranges from reversible, partly-reversible and irreversible. There is much discussion as to whether children should be able to access the former [2] . Horton conducted a study with 60 children, adolescents and their parents, who were in the process of legally transitioning accessing puberty blockers to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics in exogenous puberty processes. Almost all participants discussed their anxieties and trauma regarding the difficulties in access (Horton, 2022). At the moment, delays stand at up to five years and is increasing each year with the growing number of children being added to the waiting list ( Stonewall, 2018).

Not only are these delays damaging to young people mentally but the physical repercussions of being on PBs for too long without the necessary hormone replacement can be physically and biologically harmful ((Chew et al.,) as in Horton, 2022).

One of the causes of their delays is the extensive and oppressive assessments that have to be done to establish ‘gender dysphoria’. This system requires TGD individuals “prove” their discomfort, distress of continuing to present as their birth gender to a panel of typically cisgendered people. Of course, TGD experiences differ across individuals with some not feeling any pejorative feelings regarding their gender diversity but the lack of experience on such panels almost certainly hinder their ability to understand the individual’s position; another demonstration of cis control over TGD rights to self-autonomy and individual expression. [3]

It is worth noting also, that gender-affirming healthcare has developed not to cater to TGD persons’ needs but first to cisgendered people. From post-menopausal hormone treatment, to men’s reproductive healthcare (including Viagra), treatment is available over the counter and on prescription with very few impositions despite having significant impacts, when offered to cis-people. The very same hormone treatments that can be provided fairly easily/quickly through GPs and Hospitals can be denied and delayed for years dependent on the gender identity of the service-user. (Parsons, 2021).

One of the most permeating roots of these issues is the lack of understanding and reliance on misnomers from medical practitioners and gender clinic providers. Research has found that GPs/healthcare staff have denied young people affirming care based on falsified and misconstrued research that has suggested a high likelihood of an individual de-transitioning later in life [4] and an identification with same-sex attraction rather than opposing gender (Serano, 2019; Horton, 2022).

In the latter, it is reflective of a wider issue of false imbrication of gender and sexuality amongst healthcare providers. While of course, the two are well-connected areas of discussion and are often used in conjunction, even in queer theory, they are far from interchangeable. One parent noted a doctor suggested “[the child] might realise they’re just gay”. This reinforces the idea that forcing endogenous puberty on a child will encourage “cisgender” realisations — suggesting it’s a connection to heterosexuality that forces children towards trans ideations. Never has there been scientific backing for the thought that this could be the case yet it remains a prominent healthcare misconception.

In adult healthcare, delays are even longer and physical harm as a result of insufficient healthcare is more likely (Norris and Borneskog, 2022). In just two instances: perinatal care and population health screenings [5] : for TGD pregnant people, access to healthcare is made more complicated with gender being reflected in perinatal wards of hospitals (coloured walls), gendered terms and cards. Also dangerous is the lack of recognition of AFAB TGD people who, once legally recognised as male are no longer eligible for PHS and vice versa despite often still possessing the biological pre-dispositions that make medical concerns like that of breast cancer or HPV more likely.

Conclusion: Queer Theory’s Inclusion in Policy Making and its Repercussions

In conclusion, the current disarray of TGD healthcare in the UK is not contained to a small or exclusive case. TGD healthcare has been constrained and rolled back in states across the world as misnomers are conflated in the media. This issue could be drastically improved if queer theory was adopted into policymaking across the world, with genders and sexualities outside of the traditional, ‘norm’ or binary recognised as valid.

If queer theory was used in political spheres and medical practices, reforms could be introduced to make such healthcare much more accessible, less oppressive and less violent even with the cuts and pressures affecting NHS care generally [6] . To address delays, assessments should be more trusting of individuals experiences and self-identification, being a more accepting practise and one which prescribes the same treatments to TGD people as it does to cispeople. And less reliant on outdated research like that of the detransition theory, and sexuality and gender diversity conflation (Norris and Borneskog, 2022).

Globally this should be encouraged in international/cross country institutions and conglomerates acknowledging the medical knowledge and humanitarian policies of self-autonomy and personal identity along with societal progressive principles of inclusivity and equality, relying less on traditional, religious establishments that restrain identity to the binary and one sexuality. This application outside of the UK, of course, is a wider and far more complex issue as aforementioned above. For these reasons, to prevent further oppressions, such measures should be advised with caution.

TGD people would not only benefit from improved healthcare like that mentioned here, but from far reduced hate crime rates, improved mental healthcare, and active political recognition/representation. All of which would help to achieve a far less violent, far less oppressive world.

[1] This term needs to be proven to obtain a legal change of gender on official forms like that of a birth certificate, according to the Gender Recognition Act ( Gender Recognition Act 2004 , 2005).

[2] Until 16 where puberty blockers are available, and at 18, surgical procedures that are irreversible are available. Both easily available in theory only.

[3] The oppressive quality can easily be noted in the structure; almost reflecting that of a court or tribunal with the individual having to testify in their own defence and the panel acting as Judge, and Jury, possibly even executioner when denying gender dysphoria in an individual (Horton, 2022).

[4] With regard to the former instance the “80%” case often referenced has long been disproved but is still misconstrued and falsely inflated. Such cases are less than 1% of all  transition procedures and most commonly cited as being due to social ostracization from family, friends and employers and religious institutions (Serano, 2019).

[5] Here, I will be using this term to include: abdominal aortic aneurysm screenings, breast screenings and cervical screenings that are offered to exclusively men (the former) and women (the latter) according to NHS legal gender classification.

[6] For example, if varying gender differences was acknowledged in the political sphere, the GRA would accept non-binary identities as legal genders on birth certificates, changes would be made far cheaper or preferably free and the process made far less complex.

Bibliography

Bachmann, C. and Gooch, B. (2017) Stonewall | LGBT in Britain – Trans Report (2017) . Available at: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/lgbt-britain-trans-report (Accessed: 14 January 2023).

Bosia, M.J. (2014) ‘Strange Fruit: Homophobia, the State, and the Politics of LGBT Rights and Capabilities’, Journal of Human Rights , 13(3), pp. 256–273. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2014.919217 .

De Lauretis, T. (1991) ‘Queer theory: Lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction’, differences , 3(2), pp. iii–xviii.

Gender Recognition Act 2004 (2005). Statute Law Database. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/3 (Accessed: 29 January 2023).

Horton, C. (2022) Experiences of Puberty and Puberty Blockers: Insights From Trans Children, Trans Adolescents, and Their Parents . Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07435584221100591 (Accessed: 14 January 2023).

Najmabadi, A. (c2005) Ebook of Women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity . University of California Press. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb04732.0001.001 (Accessed: 11 January 2023).

Norris, M. and Borneskog, C. (2022) ‘The Cisnormative Blindspot Explained: Healthcare Experiences of Trans Men and Non-Binary Persons and the accessibility to inclusive sexual & reproductive Healthcare, an integrative review’, Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare , 32, p. 100733. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.srhc.2022.100733 .

Parsons, V. (2021) ‘Cis people get gender-affirming healthcare over the counter. Why not trans folk?’, PinkNews | LGBTQ+ news , 19 November. Available at: https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/11/19/gender-affirming-healthcare-cis-people-trans/ (Accessed: 29 January 2023).

Richter-Montpetit, M. (2018) ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The “Queer Turn” in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies , 46(2), pp. 220–240. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817733131 .

Sandor, G. (2022) Consequences of the Conflation of ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’ on Trans Healthcare . Temple University. Libraries. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/7651 .

Serano, J. (2019) ‘Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation: A Guide for Understanding Transgender Children…’, Medium , 3 June. Available at: https://juliaserano.medium.com/detransition-desistance-and-disinformation-a-guide-for-understanding-transgender-children-993b7342946e (Accessed: 29 January 2023).

The truth about trans (2018) Stonewall . Available at: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/the-truth-about-trans (Accessed: 29 January 2023).

Thiel, M. (2017) ‘Introducing Queer Theory in International Relations’, in International Relations Theory . Bristol, England: E-International Relations Publishing, p. 181.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Queer Asylum Seekers as a Threat to the State: An Analysis of UK Border Controls
• God Save The Queer: Discussing the Role of the Family in International Relations
• Queer Oppression in the Global South and the Structural Violence of Development
• Everyday (In)Security: An Autoethnography of Student Life in the UK
• Toward an Affirmative Critique of Abstraction in International Relations Theory
• The Impotent Man: How Constructed UK/EU Gender Identities Legitimised Brexit

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