Gender Studies/Queer Theories:

I believe it is important to start by defining the key terms that will be appearingthrough out this section. Many unfamilar terms and shorthands will be used through out this article.

1. The three sisters: the three sisters are used in the context of three styles, or lenses, at which people will read, write, at look at a work. they include Women's Studies, Feminist Critisism, and the youngest of the three sister terms is Gender Studies. Women’s studies was born in the 1970s and took its momentum from the larger women’s movement
   afoot at that time. Feminist criticism tended to be more oriented toward
   the past than women’s studies, and offered theoretically engaged scholars a coherent, interdisciplinary discourse. Gender studies, the most recent development, takes in not onlyscholarship concerned with the experiences and utterances of women
   (paradigmatic subalterns in virtually every culture), but also scholarship
   concerned with broader issues of gender difference, especially gay/queer studies
   and what is now often called ‘men’s studies’ or ‘studies of masculinity’.


2. Feminist: are often asociated with the womens rights movements and the economic and socialogical equality of the sexes.


3. Binary: means something based of or on two parts.


4. Gender Identity: psychological identification with either of the two main sexes.


5. Gender Role: social confomity with expectations of either of the two main sexes.


6. Erotic preference: gynophilia, androphilia, bisexuality, asexuality and various paraphilias.
   
   
   

Gender studies and Queer theories explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women, extending from the biological to the social. Biologically, the male gender is defined by reference to the presence of a Y-chromosome, and its absence in the female gender. However, there is debate as to the extent that the biological difference has or necessitates differences in gender roles in society and on gender identity, which has been defined as "an individual's self-conception as being male or female, as distinguished from actual biological sex." Historically, feminism has posited that many gender roles are socially constructed, and lack a clear biological explanation, but find their explanation in unequal (male/female) economic power and other power relations.

When one studies gener issues and Gender Roles, you will soon find there is a murky grey area amoung these issues. Issues arise in gender orrientation, natural genitic mutations, and in identities. People whose gender identity feels incongruent with their biological sex may refer to themselves transgender or transexual. A wide variety of phenomena have characteristics termed gender, such as hermafridites, dwarfism, and so on.

Queer theory is a field of gender studies that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of gay and lesbian studies and feminist studies. Queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into "natural" and "unnatural" behavior with respect to homosexual behavior, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and

"The lambda has been used as a symbol of gay pride and identification since the 1970s. The Gay Activists Alliance first used the lambda as a symbol of the energy of the gay/lesbian movement."says Kathy Beige.

deviant categories. While it is true that most believe that Queer theory only focusses on gay and lesbian aspects and influence on litureature, it also focuses on issues of orrientation and gender roles. Some argue that queer theory is a by-product of third-wave feminism, while others claim that it is a result of the valuation of postmodern minoritizing, that is, the idea that the smallest constituent must have a voice and identity equivalent to all others.Queer theory's main project is exploring the catagorizations of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorized and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorize by one characteristic is wrong. For example, a woman can be a woman without being labeled a lesbian or feminist, and she may have a different race from the dominant culture. She should, queer theorists argue, be classed as possessing an individual identity and not put in the collective basket of feminists or of colour or the like.

Unlike sex, which is a biological concept, gender is a social construct specifying the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are to follow. According to Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, gender is the "costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance" (p.238). As Alan Wolfe observed in "The Gender Question" (The New Republic, June 6:27-34), "of all the ways that one group has systematically mistreated another, none is more deeply rooted than the way men have subordinated women. All other discriminations pale by contrast."

In NORC 1996 General Social Survey the following question was asked:

"Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not?

Twelve percent of men and 29% of women responded "yes." Among women, there was no significant difference among age groups; interestingly, women in their fifties and seventy and older were most likely to identify themselves as feminists while those in their thirties and sixties were least likely to do so. Women with four or more years of college were about 40 percent more likely to think of themselves as feminists than those with less education. This relationship, however, varies by race: While increasing education is associated with increasing identification among white women, among African American women the greatest identification was among the least educated (40% of black women who did not graduate from high school considered themselves feminists, as opposed to 19% of white women; among women with four or more years of college, 38% of whites compared to 27% blacks thought of themselves as feminists).

Gender studies and Queer theories vary based on race, age, and political standings.