Contemporary discourses around sexual identity depend on a couple of elements for their intelligibility. When we speak of homo-, bi-, and heterosexuals, our understandings tend to fall into categories of who a person feels affective attraction for and/or engages in sexual acts with.
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Archives for queer theory
Michel Foucault & Sexualities
Michel Foucault is the commonly acknowledged forerunner in the conversation around discourses of sexuality. In his History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (originally published in French in 1984), Foucault takes to task the "repressive hypothesis."
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bell hooks on heterosexuality
Foucault was not alone in being troubled by current paradigms around sexual orientation. In a brief aside in her book Feminism from Margins to Center, author, feminist, and social activist bell hooks also critiques the current paradigm, but from a different angle.
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David Halperin & Sexualities
Halperin suggests that modern discourses of homosexuality are clouded and destabilized because they are built (consciously or not) on earlier categories.
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Judith Butler on the Construction of Gender and the Sexes
Butler proposes that even our ideas around biological sex are as conditioned by cultural discourses as our concepts of gender.
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