11 Queer Questions (mid-term preview)

Monday, Feb 2, we will review the texts, theories, and issues that we have read and discussed during Weeks 1-4. To help you prepare for this review and for the mid-term in-class examination please note the following points:

1) Why is a queer study so invested, complicated, and concerned with issues of history and historiography?

2) What are (the) five goals of queer studies?

3) In composing a people's queer history we, as a class, focused on historical information and personal knowledges that we already knew, so to speak. Why did we do it this way? What about queer studies would valorize this personal, rather chaotic, version of an intellectual history of gender, sex, sexuality, etc. ?

4) What is (are) the dilemmas of rooting queer studies in a gay and lesbian history and theory? What does this possibly obscure?

5) Who are the queer theorists and advocates and activists discussing when talking/thinking queer?

6) What is the major critique of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" within queer studies? What are the methods (or lack of methods) that are employed in this analysis and critique?

7) Thinking of post-structuralism as a form of criticism and politics is useful in what ways? How may it not be useful, or even detrimental, to political emancipation and political representation?

8) Who is queer? What does GLBT have to do with it?

9) What is Sedgwick's notion of homosociality? How does it operate and what are the features of her argument?

10) What is "written on the body" according to Jeanette Winterson? How does a body operate in our society as a text? Is this useful to any particular goal of queer studies? If the body is able to be "read" then how should one speak of oppression and repression and liberation? What would Judith Butler expect from this discussion and what would she propose to be done?

11) Foucault's argument is counterintuitive to most discussions of liberation and freedom. How? Who are the other Victorians; what is the repressive hypothesis; what is discourse and how is power formulated within the text, History of Sexuality?