Sexuality and Contemporary Literary Theory (original) (raw)
1997, Chapter co-authored with Sonya Andermahr. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th edition, ed Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf)
Introduction Lesbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe. Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist persecution and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The movement utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repressive character of mainstream heterosexual society. Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘hetero-sexism’ to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological condition, ‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power relation, and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism: the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s.
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