Understanding Gender Theory

• Gender theory is more accurately termed 'sexuality theory' because it explores how gender is connected to sexuality and identity.
• Gender theory examines the identity politics of sexuality.
• Critical theory argues there is always a theory underlying cultural expression, even when denied.
• Gender theory is applicable to classical literature and contemporary culture.
• Early Greek poetry contains gender theory through idealization of youth and intergenerational desire.
• Plato's Symposium theorizes desire between various gender combinations.
• Aristophanes' character in Symposium attempts to account for diverse sexual desires.
• Aristophanes claims humans descended from conjoined beings, split by Zeus.
• Longing for completion through erotic attachment is theorized as natural.
• Queer theory questions assumptions about dyadic partnering for personal fulfillment.
• Christian era saw tightening regulations on proper and improper sexual desire.
• Judaism and Christianity strict moral teachings governed domestic relationships.
• 'Gender theory' in that era regulated male/female relationships and proscribed same-sex relationships.
• Prevailing gender and sexual paradigms regulate everyone's lives.
• The late Middle Ages saw increasing stigmatization of same-sex activity.
• This stigmatization was driven by social changes like urbanization and emphasis on individualism.
• Domestic, reproduction-based relationships became more valued, threatening those not conforming.

Power Dynamics

• Erotic relations have always been intertwined with networks of power.
• Marital relationships often have public implications and consequences.
• Gender theory urges multidimensionalizing power relationships, resisting simple top-down models.
• Increasing social control can signal emergence of vibrant manifestations of social nonconformity.
• Urbanization allows individuals to establish communicative and erotic relationships.
• New technologies enable individuals to find each other and proclaim a shared identity.
• Religious definitions held sway for centuries, with 'sodomy' defining non-normative sexuality.
• Same-sex desiring men were cast as 'sinners'.
• Social discourse largely ignored same-sex desiring women, highlighting gender differentials.
• The rise of natural and social sciences brought new emphases on philosophical reasoning.
• Identity politics included the women's movement and the anti-slavery movement.
• Traditional hierarchies were abraded by a market economy and communication technologies.
• Changes in prevailing sexuality theories cannot be separated from socio-cultural changes.
• Michel Foucault stated 'The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage'.
• The Victorian era saw an explosion of new scientific knowledge, scrutiny of human beings, and prescription of proper functioning.
• Psychology, anthropology, sociology, and analytical history all provided perspectives on social subsets.
• Social sciences aimed to track down causes and qualities of deviance.
• The 'homosexual' became a category, part of the new discipline of sexology.
• The 'heterosexual' also became a category.
• Freud explored human beings as 'case histories', tracing proclivities to childhood experiences.
• Underlying desire to 'understand' includes the drive to classify, contain, and perhaps cure abnormality.
• Sexual deviance originated in social, familial, and biological processes.
• Classification systems are hierarchical, influencing gender theory.
• Claims of objectivity mask imbrication of the sciences within value systems.
• Gender theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is a meta-commentary on contextual embeddedness.
• Theoretical categorizations became newly perceived as socially constructed.
• Gender theory is heavily indebted to feminist theory.
• Early feminist writers questioned socially prescribed gender roles.
• Beauvoir's observation in The Second Sex says ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'.
• Biology and body functionings are not inherently meaningful but are interpreted by society and social value systems.
• Most feminist theorists repudiate reference to 'natural qualities of womanhood.
• Theorists examine the identity politics of desire, sexuality and expression.
• Gender theory redirects attention to how forms of desire and expression become privileged.
• Gender theory is political theory, bound up with social rights movements.
• Theorists have attempted to undermine concepts of heterosexual/homosexual.
• Applied gender theory examines social constructions and normalized valuations.
• First impulses in twentieth-century gender theory were to argue for equal rights.
• Historical information was recovered concerning important sexual nonconformists.
• Judy Grahn's works argued for the transhistorical and transnational importance of lesbian and gay cultural expression.
• Attention to nuance and commitment key characteristics to the critical movement known, queer theory.
• Umbrella term 'queer' seeks bridges categories for sake of political coalition-building.
• 'Queer' was reclaimed as political term of radical coalition-building by AIDS activists.
• Queer activists proclaimed end to complicity with deadly silence because climate fear and hatred.
• 'Queer theory' from the 1990s translated political energy into philosophical language.
• It is radically anti-essentialist theory, arguing that everything is interpretable as social construction.
• Gayle Rubin signaled need iconoclasm in sexuality studies 'Thinking Sex’.
• Rubin argues 'it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically'.
• Judith Butler is a leading voice in queer theory, between gender and feminist theory.
• Butler emphasizes 'performance' as analytical category.
• Butler suggests that all identities–gendered and sexual are forms of scripted performance.
• This means exciting potential for individual agency in rewriting performances.
• Heterosexuality compelled repeat to establish the illusion identity and permanently at risk.
• Mundane subversions, can contribute to a destabilization of traditional hierarchies.
• Eve Sedgwick explored patriarchal structures of male bonding and suppression of homosexuality.
• Sedgwick embraces inclusivity for a definition of 'queer' that bring elements anyone's gender or sexuality signify monolithically.
• Gender theory can dilute political and critical of a host identity causes.
• Gender theory offers opportunities for collective action among other people.
• Michael Warner argues introduction that 'queer' represent the aggressive impulse of generalization.
• There remains warranted traditional scepticism within the large collectives.
• Specificity does do finding to the experiences oppression?
• Gender theory binary gender social mandates (masculinity and femininity
• Vigilance and is process necessarily but in-sufficiently
• Something gained, linking the oppressions on biological sex
• Theorists and risks sexuality differing sexual conformation.
• Judith Halberstam writes female successfully heterosexist feminist programs self conscious.
• For Halberstam it à finds performative noncon-traditionally that change.
• Linking problematic speaking own experiences horrible that subsumptive.
• Viviance Anglo that lesbian issues Halberstam’s inspired.
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• Judith challenged textualize theorized individuals.
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Explore the nuances of gender theory, its roots in critical theory, and its historical expressions. This analysis covers its critical examination of norms, power dynamics, and the impact of socio-economic factors on gender paradigms. Learn about historical perspectives from early Greek poetry to the Middle Ages.