Lesbian, gay and queer criticism

Question 1

Boston Marriage

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Homophobic Reading

Answer 2

Reading informed by the fear and loathing of homosexuality.

Question 3

Gay Liberation Movement

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Homophobia

Answer 4

institutionalized discrimination (discrimination that is built into a culture’s laws and customs) against gay people.

Question 5

Internalized homophobia

Answer 5

Self‑hatred some gay people experience.

Question 6

Heterosexism

Answer 6

Institutionalized discrimination against homosexuality, and the privileging of heterosexuality that accompanies it.

Question 7

Compulsory heterosexuality

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Heterocentrism

Answer 8

The assumption that heterosexuality is the universal norm by which everyone’s experience can be understood.

Question 9

Biological Essentialism

Answer 9

The idea that a fixed segment of the population is naturally gay, just as the rest of the population is naturally heterosexual.

Question 10

Social Constructionism

Answer 10

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are products of social, not biological, forces.

Question 11

Minoritizing Views

Answer 11

Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on their minority status.

Question 12

Universalizing views

Answer 12

Ways of understanding gay and lesbian experience that focus on the homosexual potential in all people

Question 13

Attacks of minoritizing and universalizing views against homosexuality

Answer 13

(1) gay people are born sick (or evil); (2) gay people are sick (or evil) products of a sick (or evil) environment.

Question 14

Defense of minoritizing and universalizing views of homosexuality

Answer 14

(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.

Question 15

Homoerotic

Answer 15

Erotic depictions that imply same‑sex attraction or that might appeal sexually to a same‑sex reader.

Question 16

Homosocial

Answer 16

Same‑sex friendship of the kind seen in female‑ or male‑bonding activities.

Question 17

Lesbian criticism

Answer 17

must deal with the psychological, social, economic, and political oppression fostered not only by patriarchal male privilege, but by heterosexual privilege as well.

Question 18

Lesbian

Answer 18

A woman whose sexual desire is directed toward women.

Question 19

Lesbian Continuum

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Separatists

Answer 20

Women that disassociate themselves as much as possible from all men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well.

Question 21

Gay criticism

Answer 21

How does being gay influence the way one sees the world; gay sensibility.

Question 22

Domains of Gay sensibility

Answer 22

Drag, camp and living with AIDS

Question 23

Drag

Answer 23

The practice of dressing in women’s clothing. Drag doesn’t necessarily involve the fantasy that one is a woman.

Question 24

Camp

Answer 24

Is a form of expression characterized by irreverence, artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality.

Question 25

Living with AIDS

Answer 25

Includes AIDS‑related discrimination.

Question 26

Queer

Answer 26

The use of the term queer can be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the word from what has been its homophobic usage in order to demonstrate that heterosexists shouldn’t be allowed to define gay and lesbian experience.
Is a common political or cultural ground shared by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and all people who consider themselves, for whatever reasons, nonstraight.

Question 27

Queer criticism

Answer 27

categories of sexuality cannot be defined by such simple oppositions as homosexual/heterosexual. Building on deconstruction’s insights into human subjectivity (selfhood) as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible “selves,” queer theory defines individual sexuality as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities.

Question 28

Homosocial Bonding

Answer 28

The depiction of strong emotional ties between same‑ sex characters can create a homosocial atmosphere that may be subtly or overtly homoerotic.