Queer studies

Queer studies are the academic study of issues raised in literary theory, political science, history, sociology, ethics, and other fields by an examination of the identity, lives, history, and perception of queer people.

The most serious and abstract of these, in common with feminism, tend to be concerned with the identification of homosexuality as defining a class of "The Other" subject to persistent and brutal bodily repression - acceptable even in some cultures in which other forms of it are abandoned. This is thought to resemble the objectification and commodification of women as creatures suitable only for receipt of love, although, the queer more often received hate historically. A key concern is that only in the 19th century did homosexuals apparently become a species rather than a habit or disorder, in the Western world's legal and philosophical view. The term gay is often deprecated by those who reject this view, just as it is embraced by those who accept it and propose gay pride as the solution to repression.

Some primary scholars in Queer studies include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, John Boswell, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Techniques in Queer theory include the search for Queer influences and themes in works of literature; the analysis of political currents linking the oppression of women, racialized groups, and disadvantaged classes with that of Queers; and the search for Queer figures and trends in history that are contended to have ordinarily been ignored and excluded from the canon.

Queer studies are not to be confused with Queer theory, a deconstructionist analytical viewpoint within Queer studies which is based on certain assumptions about subject-object problems.