Lesbian, gay and queer criticism Flashcards
Boston Marriage
A term used in the late nineteenth century New England to refer to a monogamous relationship of long standing between two women, who were usually financially independent and often shared interests.
Homophobic Reading
Reading informed by the fear and loathing of homosexuality.
Gay Liberation Movement
Began in 1969, after the gay and lesbian patrons of Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn bar finally responded to police brutality by fighting back, two thousand strong, during two nights of rioting. Also called the Stonewall.
Homophobia
institutionalized discrimination (discrimination that is built into a culture’s laws and customs) against gay people.
Internalized homophobia
Self‑hatred some gay people experience.
Heterosexism
Institutionalized discrimination against homosexuality, and the privileging of heterosexuality that accompanies it.
Compulsory heterosexuality
The enormous pressure to be heterosexual placed on young people by their families, schools, the church, the medical professions, and all forms of the media.
Heterocentrism
The assumption that heterosexuality is the universal norm by which everyone’s experience can be understood.
Biological Essentialism
The idea that a fixed segment of the population is naturally gay, just as the rest of the population is naturally heterosexual.
Social Constructionism
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are products of social, not biological, forces.
Minoritizing Views
Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on their minority status.
Universalizing views
Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on the homosexual potential in all people
Attacks of minoritizing and universalizing views against homosexuality
(1) gay people are born sick (or evil); (2) gay people are sick (or evil) products of a sick (or evil) environment.
Defense of minoritizing and universalizing views of homosexuality
(1) it is biologically natural for some people to be gay, no matter what environment they’re born into, and therefore they should be accepted as natural; (2) homosexuality is a normal response to particular environmental factors, and therefore gay people should be accepted as normal.
Homoerotic
Erotic depictions that imply same‑sex attraction or that might appeal sexually to a same‑sex reader.
Homosocial
Same‑sex friendship of the kind seen in female‑ or male‑bonding activities.
Lesbian criticism
must deal with the psychological, social, economic, and political oppression fostered not only by patriarchal male privilege, but by heterosexual privilege as well.
Lesbian
A woman whose sexual desire is directed toward women.
Lesbian Continuum
It include[s] a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman‑identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. Woman‑identification does not preclude sexual desire or sexual activity, but neither does it require them. A woman can thus move in and out of the lesbian continuum throughout her life or remain within it entirely.
Separatists
Women that disassociate themselves as much as possible from all men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well.
Gay criticism
How does being gay influence the way one sees the world; gay sensibility.
Domains of Gay sensibility
Drag, camp and living with AIDS
Drag
The practice of dressing in women’s clothing. Drag doesn’t necessarily involve the fantasy that one is a woman.
Camp
Is a form of expression characterized by irreverence, artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality.
