Queer Frameworks and Queer Tendencies (original) (raw)

At the turn of the twenty-first century we are living through a period of intense and profound social change, characterized by many European social theorists as a shift from modernity to postmodernity. 2 In developing analyses of processes of postmodernization, sociologists have focused on changes in the realms of social life which the discipline has traditionally held to be significant-work and production, nation, politics and the state-and, in the context of the growing influence of feminist sociology, they have also devoted considerable interest to changes in gender and family relations, and the sphere of intimacy. 3 Also central to theorizations of recent social change is a new emphasis on the sphere of the cultural, as sociologists identify the increasing importance of the cultural and symbolic, and the aestheticization of everyday life. 4 The aim of this article is to contribute to sociological understandings of the social changes of postmodernity by focusing on an area-the