In addition to Foucault’s work, historical events contributed to the development of Queer Theory. In Foucault’s view, cultural sanctions have not repressed sexual practices but, on the contrary, have produced a modern discourse of sexuality that forces subjects to speak about their sexual practices and desires continually.
Foucault argued instead that a science of sexuality emerged as one element within the analytic of biopower-a set of 19th-century medical and social technologies that nation-states employed to control their populations. In it, Foucault rejected the “repressive hypothesis,” which considers sexuality to be a “natural” expression of human identity and treats culture as a repressive force that constrains sexuality. An important antecedent to this flurry of queer scholarly activity was the publication of Foucault’s three-volume work The History of Sexuality, published in English between 19. Whereas the former defines homosexuals as a distinct minority, the universalizing view holds that queerness subtends all forms of sexual desire and practice, including heterosexuality. Sedgwick characterized two contradictory and pervasive views of homosexuality, “minoritizing” and “universalizing” discourses.
Sedgwick similarly attacked foundational models of sexual identity, exploring the closet as more than merely a metaphor and revealing its omnipresence in American culture as a duplicitous social practice (the open secret) and juridical double bind (with a legal system that demands the simultaneous erasure and production of homosexuality).
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Drawing upon the social constructionist views prominent in the work of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, Butler argued that gender is neither a natural nor a stable element of biological or social identity, but rather is constantly brought into existence through a series of performative activities: everyday gestures and actions that have the potential to reconstitute notions and practices of masculinity and femininity and thus resist normativity. Queer Theory emerged from departments of literature, film, rhetoric, and critical studies in universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe during the early 1990s, exemplified and inspired by the publication of two paradigm-shifting books: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( Butler 1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet ( Sedgwick 2008) (both cited under Theory).