Queer Studies

"Heteronormativity is the notion that heterosexuality is the only “normal” sexual orientation and that romantic relationships exist only between the opposite sexes. It is also the belief that people fall distinctly into two genders, male or female, and that their dress and behaviors reflect their biological sex assigned at birth. Similarly, a heteronormative orientation typically means that a person believes that one’s biological sex, gender, and gender expression should align and that one’s sexual orientation should be heterosexual. This creates a system of expectations, demands, and constraints on persons who deviate outside traditional gender, gender roles, or sexual orientations."

"The movement is based both on reform principles, seeking formal equality through changes in legal norms, and radical principles, seeking substantive equity by changing the cultural value systems that regard minority sexual orientation and gender identity as shameful. The global movement as a whole has, as its primary focus, the decriminalization of gay relationships (i.e., repeal of sodomy laws), but in some places also includes expanded goals, such as laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations and effective public health programs to combat HIV and AIDS. "

"Queer and queering are political terms that have provided a means of legitimizing the embodied realities of people who do not identify as hetero-normative....At its most radical, queer is a statement of identity that rejects any fixed gender categories (Gender/Sex) or stable notions of attraction (Sexuality)."

"Queer ethnographies and autoethnographies link the methodological and representational practices of ethnography and autoethnography with queer theory’s critical framework for understanding difference, minority discourses, and identities. Queer auto/ethnographies offer researchers a strategy for creating just and humane scholarship that seeks to change people’s lives and worlds."

'Queer studies is an emerging interdisciplinary academic subject that combines empirical research and theoretical accounts of gender and sexuality....The open nature of “queer” recognizes the multiple forms of oppression experienced by the gender-variant and sexual minorities and the many ways in which each identity is experienced."

"Queer theory is a term that has been applied to a body of work that has explored gay, lesbian and bisexual life experience. Crucial to queer theory is the recovery of the concealed and repressed presence of gay and lesbian ‘actors’ and activities within social and cultural life. More broadly, queer theory has explored the processes through which sexual identities are constituted within contemporary culture. Here queer theory has advanced anti-essentialist claims regarding the cultural construction of sexual identities including their plurality and ambivalence."

"While sexual orientation is commonly conceptualized as discrete categories of heterosexual/straight (opposite-sex attraction), homosexual/gay (same-sex attraction), and bisexual (both opposite- and same-sex attraction), sexual orientation and sexual identity are far more fluid and complex than these categories suggest."