English Literature And Theory This blog contains the explanation of various critical theories that provide a new insight to view literature and interpretation of various literary texts.

The word "queer" in queer theory has some of these connotations, particularly its alignments with ideas about homosexuality. Queer Theory is brand new branch of study or theoretical speculation; it has only been named as an area since about 1991. Queer Theory emerges from gay/lesbian' studies attention to the social construction of categories of normative and sexual behavior. But while gay/ lesbian studies, as the name implies, focused largely on questions of homosexuality, queer theory expands its realm of investigation. Queer theory looks at, and studies, and has a political critique of, anything that falls into normative and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and identities. The word "queer", as it appears in the dictionary, has a primary meaning of "odd", "peculiar", "out of ordinary."

Queer Theory concerns itself with any and all forms of sexuality that are "queer" in this sense- and then, by extension, with the normative behaviors and identities which define what is "queer"(by being their binary opposites). Thus queer theory expands the scope of it's analysis to all kinds of behaviors, including those which are gender-bending as well as those which involve "queer" non-formative forms of sexuality. Queer theory insists that all sexual behaviours, all concepts linking sexual behaviours to sexual identities, and all categories of normative and deviant sexualities, are social constructs sets of signifier which create certain type of social meaning. Queer theory follows feminist theory and gay/lesbian studies in the idea that sexuality is an essentialist category , something determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of morality and truth. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex group of social codes and forces, forms of individual activity and institutional power, which interact to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment, and which then operate under the rubric of what is "natural", "essential", "biological", or"god-given".