Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature

and culture influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, decentered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan)

 Gay, lesbian, and queer theory examine the ways in which sexuality and sexual difference play with, within, and against the very conditions of meaning that allow a word to be uttered. As such, any text, even one as "factual" and "nonsexual" as a parking ticket or a recipe for a casserole, can become the object of gay, lesbian, and queer theorization.

 Gender difference refers to those spectrums of meaning governed by the binary terms man/woman, whereas sexual difference refers to those governed by the binary terms heterosexual/homosexual. Typically, sexual difference is expressed through gender difference; hence the common stereotypes of the feminine gay man and the masculine lesbian, wherein a deviance in relation to sexuality is made meaningful through a deviance in gender identification.

 Although sexual difference and gender difference are almost inextricable from each other in Western cultures, it should theoretically be possible to separate them and to examine the interplays between and within them. Moreover, how gender and sexual difference interact in any given text can provide clues about the ways in which power operates in the culture producing that text. Reading these clues, by and large, has been the goal of gay, lesbian, and queer theory.

 Gay theory examines sexual difference as it is applicable to the male gender; lesbian theory examines sexual difference as it is applicable to the female gender; queer theory attempts to examine sexual difference separate from gender altogether, or with a radical deprivileging of the status of gender in traditional discourses.

 Many critics working with gender and queer theory are interested in the breakdown of binaries such as male and female, the inbetweens gender studies and queer theory maintains that cultural definitions of sexuality and what it means to be male and female are in flux

 What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles? What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters? What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?

 How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure and forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative? What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters? What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?

 What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary history? How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are apparently homosexual? What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) homophobic? How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?

 In recent years 'queer' has come to be used differently, sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual selfidentifications and at other times to describe a nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies. The rapid development and consolidation of lesbian and gay studies in universities in the 1990s is paralleled by an increasing deployment of the term 'queer'.

 As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation. ''It's about how you can't understand relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between them.' e.g. Dostana

 Queer theorists scorn traditional definitions of ''homosexual'' and ''heterosexual.'' There is no strict demarcation between male and female, they argue. Instead, queer theorists say, taking their cue from the historian Michel Foucault, sexuality exists on a continuum, with some people preferring sex partners of the opposite sex, others preferring partners of both sexes. Only since the 19th century, queer theorists argue, have sexual definitions become rigid. And along with this rigidity, they say, has come anxiety, panic and intensifying homophobic attitudes.

 Ms. Sedgwick said: ''I think it's ridiculous to say 'queer theory' is not about ethical responsibility. There is an ethical urgency about queer theory that is directed at the damage that sexual prohibitions and discrminations do to people.'