Queer Studies - Background

Background

Though a new discipline, a growing number of colleges have begun offering academic programs related to sex, sexuality, and sexual orientation. There are currently over 40 certificate and degree granting programs with at least five institutions in the United States offering an undergraduate major; a growing number of similar courses are offered in countries other than the United States. In 2003, the most substantial programs at City College of San Francisco, the City University of New York, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, SUNY Purchase College and New York University. Other colleges that provide degrees in the subject include Yale University, University of California, Los Angeles, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Maryland, DePaul University, St. Andrews University, California State University Fullerton, California State University Northridge, Portland State University, University of North Texas, and University of Toronto. Some colleges provide minors such as Syracuse University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Often drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault, founding scholars of queer studies include Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner. Because of some of its major strands of analysis are related to public perceptions, emphasis is often placed on the integration of theory and practice, with many programs encouraging community service work, community involvement, and activist work in addition to academic reading and research.

Techniques in queer studies include the search for queer influences and themes in works of literature, the analysis of political currents linking the oppression of women, racialized groups, and disadvantaged classes with that of queer people, and the search for queer figures and trends in history that queer studies scholars view as having been ignored and excluded from the canon.

Professor Kevin Floyd has argued that the formative arguments for Marxism and those that have been the basis for queer theory should be reformulated to examine the dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification, and to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social "reification" enforced by capitalism.