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Chapter
  • Print publication year: 2001
  • Online publication date: March 2008

17 - Gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender criticism

from GENDER AND SEXUALITY
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Summary
The political ferment of the Gay Liberation Front and the Women's Liberation Movement encouraged lesbian and gay intellectuals to devise critiques of how and why western cultures violently proscribed same-sex desires. In 1990 Queer Nation arose from the pro-active campaigning of the "AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power". This movement reclaimed the word "queer", a term that had been used in the past to shame homosexual men and women. In the polemical context of queer thought, two sexual constituencies grew increasingly vocal in their criticism of the ways in which lesbians and gay men had for at least two decades insisted that homosexual political identities provided a privileged site of resistance to an oppressive heterosexual and patriarchal society. This chapter explores some of the landmark works of cultural, literary and political criticism that emerged as the terms gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender in turn came to represent significant moments in struggles to liberate dissident sexual communities.

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online ISBN: 9781139055376
  • Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300148
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