Queer Theory

Oversimplified, queer theory studies normalcy (who defines notions of norms, who is incentivized by it) and its consequences (how are groups othered, how these notions overlap) to ultimately queer (verb) these frameworks for our liberation.

The contributions of LGBTQ+ individuals have historically been erased and underplayed either through the policing of literature, the sanitization of movements, or revisionist history.

Below are some foundational readings and works {WIP: links to them via UR Libraries}. Feel free to use our queer highlights as 'jumping off points' for further reading in your journey through queer fields/the “gay agenda”.

Read Queer Highlights

 
 

Intro to Queer Theory’s Foundations

WOC Feminisms

“Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech, Sylvia Rivera, 1973
Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House, Audre Lorde, 1979 
=> QRT! 9
Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance, Cheryl Clarke, 1981 
=> QRT! 11
Borderlands/La Frontera (Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan), Gloria Anzaldua, 1987
=> QRT! 27

HIV/AIDS & ACT-UP

Queers Read This zine, Anonymous Queers, 1990
=> QRT! 24 + 52
Is The Rectum a Grave?, Leo Bersani, 1987

Establishing Queer Academia

Thinking Sex, Gayle Rubin, 1982
Gender Trouble, Judith Butler, 1990
Transgender History, Susan Stryker, 2008
Mother Camp, Esther Newton, 1979

 
 

Early Critiques

Normalization and its Others

Fear of a Queer Planet (Introduction), Michael Warner, 1993
Bodies that Matter (Critically Queer), Judith Butler, 1993
History of Sexuality (vol. 1), Michel Foucault, 1976
Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, Lynne Huffer, 2010
Queer is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance, Janet Jakobsen, 1998 
My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, Susan Stryker, 1993
Punks, Buldaggers, and Welfare Queens, Cathy J. Cohen, 1997
Cruising Utopia (Introduction), José Esteban Muñoz, 2008
After the Party (Preface), Joshua Chambers-Letson, 2018
What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?, Muñoz, David Eng, and Jack Halberstam, 2005

Queer of Color Critique

Black (W)holes & the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality, Evelynn Hammonds, 1994
“Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother, E. Patrick Johnson, 2001
Sister Outsider (Age, Race, Class, and Sex) and (The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power), Audre Lorde, 1984
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, Siobhan Somerville, 2000
Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Roderick Ferguson, 2003
Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, Martin Manalansan, 2003

 

Body Politics, Body Norms

Cripping Queer Studies

Crip Theory (Introduction), Robert McRuer, 2006
Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness, Eli Clare, 2001
Sex and Disability (Introduction), Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer, 2012
Women and Performance (Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity), Jasbir Puar, 2009
The Disability Studies Reader (Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century), Lennard Davis, 2006
Disability Studies Reader (Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence), Robert McRuer, 2006
Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, David Mitchell, 1995
Sins Invalid, Patty Berne, 2013

Queering the Gendered Body

The Transgender Studies Reader II ((De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies), Susan Stryker, 2006
Social Text (Leatherdyke Boys & Their Daddies: How to Have Sex Without Women or Men), C. Jacob Hale, 1997
The Transgender Studies Reader (Whose Feminism is it Anyway?), Emi Koyama, 2006
The Transgender Studies Reader (The Empire Strikes Back), Sandy Stone, 1991
Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence in a Post-queer Cultural Landscape, J. Bobby Noble, 2007
Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam, 1998
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serrano, 2007
Signs (Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender), Cressida J. Heyes, 2003
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, 2010

 

WIP! Please excuse the WIP-state of the rest of this page as we populate the (sub)fields left :P

 

Political Exceptionalism

Decolonizing Queer

Policing the Planet (Policing the Crisis of Indigenous Lives: An Interview with the Red Nation), Christina Heatherton, 2016
American Indian Politics (Indigenous Peoples are Nations, Not Minorities), David Wilkens (Lumbee) and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Apache), 2018
Queer Indigenous Studies (Unsettling Queer Politics: What Can Non-Natives Learn from Two-Spirit Organizing?), Scott Lauria Morgensen, 2011 
Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexualities (Introduction: Critical Relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex & Nature), Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, Cheyenne, and Arapaho)
Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, Scott Lauria Morgensen

Biopower/Necropolitics

Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Introduction), Nancy Ordover
Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Administering Gender), Dean Spade
Queer Necropolitics (Introduction), Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco
Signs (Obese Black Women as ‘Social Dead Weight’: Reinventing the ‘Diseased Black Woman’), Sabrina Strings

Neoliberalism & Homonormativity

Materializing Democracy (The New Homonormativity: Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism), Lisa Duggan
The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, David Eng, 2010
Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations, Jane Ward, 2008
The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam, 2011
The Heterosexual Imaginary, Chrys Ingraham, 1994
That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Is Gay Marriage Racist), Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, 2008
Materializing Democracy (The New Homonormativity: Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism), Lisa Duggan
Race Ethnicity and Education (Embodying Diversity: Problems and Paradoxes for Black Feminists), Sara Ahmed
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Kahn-Cullors
Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (Introduction), Liat Ben-Moshe

 

Capital, Class, and Capitulation

Racial Capitalism

What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does it Matter?, Robin D. G. Kelley
Predatory Inclusion, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Critical Ethnic Studies (Racial Capitalism), Jodi Melamed
Harvard Law Review (Whiteness as Property), Cheryl I. Harris

Queer Commodity Culture

Cultural Critique (Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture), Rosemary Hennessey, 1994
Selling Out: The Gay & Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, Alexandra Chasin, 2000
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch (Ellen’s Coming Out: Media and Public Hype), Dwight McBride, 2005
Disidentifications (Pedro’s Real World), Jose Muñoz, 1999
Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Rosemary Hennessy, 2000
Queer Anti-Capitalism: What’s Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?, Alan Sears, 2005
The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Kevin Floyd, 2009
Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters Outside the US, Anjali Arondekar, 2005
The Epistemology of Ethnography: Method in Queer Anthropology, Margot Weiss, 2011
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath , 2005
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansan, 2002

 
 

Critical Queer Thought

Care Work

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Power, Pleasure, Praxis

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Beyond US Normativity

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