Pao, Mary Queen Shelsy

LM4A
Research Methods I
Theoretical Framework
In 1990, when Teresa de Lauretis organized a conference under the newly coined rubric
of queer theory, she promoted the term for its capacity to trouble what she diagnosed as the
built-in complacencies of lesbian and gay studies. For de Lauretis, queer theory offered a way of
thinking about lesbian and gay sexualities beyond the narrow rubrics of either deviance or
preference, as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant
discourses with other constructions of the subject in culture (Jagose, 2009)
De Lauretis intended queer theory as a corrective to what she saw as the universalizing
protocols of lesbian and gay studies that neglected to position homosexuality in relation to
gender and race, with their attendant differences of class or ethnic culture, generational,
geographical, and sociopolitical location (Jagose, 2009)
Feminist theory, no less than queer theory, is a broad and heterogeneous project of
social critique that works itself out across provisional, contingent and non-unitary grounds,
unconstrained by any predefined field of inquiry and unanchored to the perspective of any
specifiable demographic population. The rapid emergence of queer as a critical and activist
term in the 1990s and concomitantly the accelerated ascendancy of queer theory within the
academy do not attest to the waning of feminist theorys relevance. (Jagose, 2009)
Feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating
the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality. (Jagose, 2009)
This study will further define and substantiate the contentions on the peculiarity of the
preferences of LGBT based on this theory - it will elaborate on the reasons why generalization
should not be applied to people and groups.
This theory, in relation to the LGBT, will explain that making your own unique choices
does not go down to being against the norms or defying the will of majority. This will give more
detail on the way of living of the LGBT and how they are being deprived of recognition and
equal treatment.