Summary of the Lesbian, Gay and Queer Criticism

Lesbian criticism

Lesbian criticism and feminist criticism grew from the same soilas responses to patriarchal
oppressionand because lesbian critics are generally feminists, lesbian criticism is
concerned with issues of personal identity and politics analogous to those analyzed by
feminists.
Lesbian critics address issues related to both sexism and heterosexism. In other words,
lesbian critics must deal with the psychological, social, economic, and political oppression
fostered not only by patriarchal male privilege, but by heterosexual privilege as well. And this
second form of privilege has often put heterosexual and lesbian feminists at odds with each
other.
A better way to define a lesbian is to say that she is a woman whose sexual desire is towards
woman.
A lesbian continuum, Rich explains, include[s] rangethrough each womans life and
throughout historyof woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has
had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman (239). Womanidentified experience includes, for example, emotional bonding through shared work or play,
the giving or receiving of psychological support, and the shared experience of joy in any
form. Woman-identification does not preclude sexual desire or sexual activity, but neither
does it require them.
Lesbians deny patriarchy one of its most powerful tools: heterosexuality.
Some lesbians are separatists. They disassociate themselves as much as possible from all
men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well. They may also disassociate
themselves from lesbians who dont share their views.
A lesbian critic might argue that a writer known to have been a sexually active lesbian.
A lesbian critic might perform is to argue that a writers literary output establishes her lesbian
status even when available biographical material posits only a passionate emotional bond, a
romantic friendship, with another woman.
Lesbian literary critics perform a number of other tasks.
o They try to decide what constitutes a lesbian literary tradition and what writers and
works belong to it.
o They attempt to determine what might constitute a lesbian poetics, that is, a uniquely
lesbian way of writing.
o They analyze how the sexual/emotional orientation of lesbian writers has affected
their literary expression; how the intersection of race and sexual/emotional
orientation has affected the literary expression of lesbians of color; and how the
intersection of class, race, and sexual/emotional orientation has affected the literary
expression of lesbians of working-class origins. Lesbian critics also analyze the
sexual politics of specific texts by examining, for example, how lesbian characters or
masculine women are portrayed in literature by and about lesbians.
o They study canonized heterosexual texts, too, in order to learn what attitudes toward
lesbians they embody explicitly or implicitly. And they identify and correct
heterosexist interpretations of literature that fail to recognize or appreciate the
lesbian dimensions of specific literary works.

Gay Criticism

Unlike lesbian criticism, gay criticism doesnt tend to focus on efforts to define homosexuality.
Sexual relations between men, or even just the sexual desire of one man for another, are the
generally accepted criterion of gayness in white middle-class America today.
Many gay men today prefer to refer to call themselves as gay, because the word
homosexual is associated for many people with the belief that homosexuality is a mental
disorder.
Masturbator became a pathological sexual identity in the nineteenth century. It is an act that
medical professions today consider a normal, healthy outlet was considered so dangerous in
the nineteenth century that children suffering from the affliction were tide to their beds at

night to prevent their touching themselves, and there are several case histories of doctors
burning the genitals of little girls in order to cure them.
Drag is the practice of dressing in womens clothing.
Drag Queens are gay men who dress in drag on a regular basis or who do it professionally.
For other gay men, drag is a form of political activism used to draw attention to gay issues,
criticize homophobic government and religious policies and raise funds to fight AIDS.
For some gays, they practice cross dressing because it is their source of self-expression and
entertainment that can be a political statement against traditional gender roles.
Drag is a way of refusing to be intimidated by heterosexist gender boundaries and to
challenge other gender roles.
Gay sensibility affects their literary works, but gay literary from the late years were
underappreciated, distorted, or suppressed and gay writers were presumed heterosexual.
Homophobic American culture has damaging effects to gay men and boys who grow within is
the learned self-hatred.

Queer Criticism

The use of the term queer can be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the word from what
has been its homophobic usage in order to demonstrate that heterosexists shouldnt be
allowed to define gay and lesbian experience.
Some lesbians and gay men have adopted the word queer as an inclusive category for
referring to a common political or cultural ground shared by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals,
and all people who consider themselves, for whatever reasons, non-straight.
From a theoretical point of view, the words gay and lesbian imply a definable category
homosexualitythat is clearly opposite to another definable category: heterosexuality.
For queer theory, then, our sexuality is socially constructed (rather than inborn) to the extent
that it is based on the way in which sexuality is defined by the culture in which we live.
The word queer has a range of meanings in literary studies today. As an inclusive term, it can
refer to any piece of literary criticism that interprets a text from a non-straight perspective.
Therefore, any of the examples of gay and lesbian criticism discussed earlier could be
included in a collection of queer essays. However, if we restrict ourselves to its narrower
theoretical meaningits deconstructive dimensionqueer criticism reads texts to reveal the
problematic quality of their representations of sexual categories, in other words, to show the
various ways in which the categories homosexual and heterosexual break down, overlap, or
do not adequately represent the dynamic range of human sexuality.

Some shared features of lesbian, gay and queer criticism

critics from all three domains have taken an interest in recurring themes that appear
throughout gay and lesbian literature and that constitute part of an evolving literary tradition
These themes include the following:
o initiation
o coming out to family and friends
o coming out at the workplace
o dealing with homophobia and with heterosexist discrimination
o the psychology of gay self-hatred
o overcoming gay self-hatred
o the role of camp and drag in gay life
o dealing with loneliness and alienation
o finding love
o building a life with a gay or lesbian partner
o the quest to build a lesbian utopia
o life before and after Stonewall
o life before and after AIDS (in terms of both ones personal life and the collective life of
the gay and lesbian communities)
o caring for loved ones with AIDS
o mourning the death of AIDS victims
o the importance of gay and lesbian community
Lesbian, gay, and queer criticisms often rely on similar kinds of textual evidence. For
example, in addition to the more obvious forms of textual cuessuch as homoerotic imagery
and erotic encounters between same-sex characters there are rather subtle textual cues
that can create a homoerotic atmosphere even in an otherwise heterosexual text.

A few of the most common examples of these subtle cues:

Homosocial bondingThe depiction of strong emotional ties between same sex

characters can create a homosocial atmosphere that may be subtly or overtly
homoerotic. Whether homoerotic or not, however, the depiction of homosocial
bonding foregrounds the profound importance of same-sex emotional ties in the
development of human identity and community, which is a human potential often
devalued, marginalized, or trivialized by the homophobic anxiety of heterosexist
culture.
Same-sex doublesA more subtle, somewhat abstract, form of gay and lesbian
signs consists of same-sex characters who look alike, act alike, or have parallel
experiences.
Transgressive sexualityA texts focus on transgressive sexuality, including
transgressive heterosexuality (such as extramarital romance), throws into question
the rules of traditional heterosexuality and thus opens the door of imagination to
transgressive sexualities of all kinds.

The boundaries among lesbian, gay, and queer criticism remain somewhat fluid. Your purpose in
using the kinds of textual evidence just described, as well as your own self-identified critical
orientation, will determine whether your interpretation of a literary work is a lesbian, gay, or queer
reading.