Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Vint, Sherryl
• Butler, Andrew
• Roberts, Adam
• Bould, Mark

Titel

QUEER THEORY

Ist Teil von

• The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 2009, p.320-329

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• From its somewhat nebulous inception, queer theory was a powerful tool for the utopian project of rethinking the politics and history of sexuality and, extending from sexuality’s centrality to the contemporary Western psyche, pretty much everything else: “an understanding of virtually any aspect of Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (Sedgwick 1990: 1). According to Foucault (1980), the modern world has so overvalued sexuality that it has come to seem central to everything that humans are and do, and has become subject to – perhaps even the central subject of – a new discipline of “normalcy.” Where earlier regimes had depended on established authorities, notably religion, to determine proper from improper, saint from sinner, by the late nineteenth century an entire disciplinary regime of “biopower,” bolstered by the new authorities of science, medicine, psychiatry, criminology, and statistics, was in place, dening the good as what is most common (hence Derek Jarman’s quip that “Heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s just common” (Jarman 1992: 19)).