Queer Theory Research Paper

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Queer theory and anthropology of gender and sexuality

Introduction

In the late 20 centuries, queer theory interrogated the reification of binary gender categories and the taken-for-granted ‘heterosexual matrix’. According to Queer theory, gender is socially and culturally constructed, and through repeated gendered performance that individual acquired gendered identity. Moreover, sexuality and gender has attracted anthropological concerns along the history of the disciplines. Though being influenced and shaped by the social climates, anthropologists have always been devoted to providing alternative perspectives on western sexual mores. Therefore, it is not surprising that some of the main themes and insights of feminist theory and queer theory …show more content…

It also established a discourse about women which was exclusively constructed in dialogue with Western cultural assumption. It challenged men’s right to speak for women, however, it found itself unintentionally speaking for other women, which is that feminism anthropologist trying to avoid. However, the anthropology of women is significant. According to Moore, anthropology of women is significant. It challenged the ‘male bias’ in the discipline, which is a ‘special’ case of the recognition of the ethnocentric assumptions underlying anthropological theory. It is this recognition that important, because it ultimately brought into question many of the ‘taken for granted theoretical frameworks within the ‘anthropology of women’ itself. This interrogate to the anthropological underlying theoretical framework also bring the ‘anthropology of women’ into question, which give rise to the anthropology of gender. Moreover, Abu-Lughod (1993), in her Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories, draws on anthropological and feminist insights to construct a critical ethnography. She challenges the power of anthropological theory to render adequately the lives of others and the way feminist theory appropriates Third World women. Similar critique was made by …show more content…

Therefore, some of the work of feminist anthropology in the 1980s and beyond, resonates queer theory. For examples, cultural models of the person, such as those found in Melanesia, that emphasise the combination of gendered substances that make up each individual body make it difficult to attribute an essential gender to a person, and it becomes even more difficult to accommodate within dominant western. Its awkwardness, according to Graham (2014), in his newly published book anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory, lies in the anti-normative agenda, which is not always easy to reconcile with anthropology’s mission to make sense of other ‘societies’ in local terms. I appreciate the Graham’s work in comparing queer theory and anthropological concerns on sexuality. However, queer theory is not about the sexuality minorities. As Graham recognized in his book about queer theory is not about gay or lesbian studies, but he failed to look at the queer theory’s implication on the ‘subject’ and ‘power’. Graham also critiques queer theory by pointing out the political agenda behind it, he suggested that:” the removal of biology from feminist concerns was part of a necessary political project aimed at undermining the biological essentialisms that were deployed to justify women’s subordination as natural, grounded in indisputable and universal biological facts

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