Argumentative Essay: Queer Subculture

John D’Emilio’s “Capitalism and Gay Identity” contracts what life was like for gay men and lesbians throughout the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1970s, gay men and lesbians were able to come out freely, and eventually started to get accepted by everyone in society. They were able to express themselves without any regards, and started to become the person they were destined to be. People within the gay community have always expressed tendencies of liking the same sex, but societal norms did not allow them to express themselves. However, during the 1980s, as more people decided to openly come out, it started to take a toll on their identity. Society then started to question the importance of people who were brave enough to come out to the world.

In a recent podcast regarding a transgender high school student being forced to change in the nurse’s office instead of in the locker room with other students addressed the controversy regarding the treatment of members of our society who identify as LGBTQ. Throughout the podcast, multiple individuals have voiced support for the school’s decision to isolate the transgender student when changing. Do to the opinions voiced in the podcast regarding this case, I realized that the treatment of the high school student is only one example of the existing discrimination towards those who identify as LGBTQ. As such, I intend to explore the controversy of LGBTQ and our obligations that we have as members of the same society. Throughout this paper, I

This paper will continue on, researching the societal change/acceptance in the gay and lesbian community as no longer being unorthodox and with the stigma coming from the gay community itself.

LGBT history has changed the way society works in the United States and has had an impact around the world. The homosexual community came as an impact to the world during the early 1900’s. They were considered different; odd, ill, and weak, but little did we know the effects it would have in today’s society and politics. The war, queer, and AIDs movements seem to relatively impact members of the gay and lesbian community the most. In an series of interviews in “Word is Out” conducted by Nancy Adair and Casey Adair, the reader is introduced into the lives of Pam, Rusty, and Pat; lesbian women living within their true identity during the mid-1900’s. Their stories consist of broken family relationships, marriage failure, and gender roles. To help one understand the dynamics of their relationships and lives, John D’Emilo talks about the effects of war and how it structures and damages the gay community and their opportunity for equality. Elizabeth Davis speaks about the Lesbian experience in public spaces that exposes many to find their character by associating with those that fit best to their community in “Lesbian Bar Culture in the 1930’s and 1940’s”. The LGBT community for centuries has won the spotlight in the news and many articles published in well know newspapers, but what many never get to hear or see are the struggle that many homosexuals face. Both gays and lesbians in the United States have received backlash because of their race, gender, and social class. The

Gay male culture is by far the most talked about among the LGBTQI community — it has been talked about greatly by the media. And, arguably, it is the most influential. In politics, social values, and peoples’ perceptions, the gay male culture has changed the way many think of the gay community, and the LGBTQI community as a whole. Queer, fag, bear, twink: gay men promptly made their voices heard. After Massachusetts become the first state to legalize gay marriage, and the entire United Sates following nearly 10 years later, gays have instantly became a “sensation” of sorts.

This paper examines the social aspects of the sexual identity in America, illustrating how sexual identities have progressed, evolved, and transformed. Social categories have been created as a tool used for social divide and control, inadvertently creating stereotypical facts and discriminatory opinions on sexes; while also helping create social and welcoming communities, whose goals are to diminish ideals such as those. Concluding, this paper will have explained the dichotomous categories of different sexualities and the divides within them. The already established sexual divide leaves no room for those stuck in the in between of today's society, especially one as progressive as America’s. Derived from the examples giving, this paper argues

Within the 1990s there is a persistent problem of Gay culture. Early in the 1990s it was hard to come out and let the world know that you are gay. Within the early 1990s The Wedding Banquet (1993), although it approached the issue of Wei-Tung Gao trying to tell his parents that he is gay and still accepting as who he is. Contrastingly within the late 1990s it becomes more acceptable to society by having celebrities coming out like Ellen Degeneres during her tv show Ellen. The two kinds of media contrast as a form of whether or not to come out as a gay or not during a time when AIDs was prominent and new.

The documentary explored the community of transgender and gays and really connected with the matrix of domination. Matrix of domination analyzes race, class, and gender as different but interrelated axes of social structure. In the documentary, society perpetuates marked and unmarked categories of sexual orientation. Marked and unmarked categories connect to power as it is distributed off of various reasons, some identified and some unidentified. The drag queens, gays, and transgender suffer because of these often unspoken social norms. As these sexual orientations are not normal in society, society might call these people “queer.” In the article “Queer” from Keywords for American Cultural Studies, the term queer is used “interchangeably with the terms “gay” and “lesbian” or occasionally “transgender” and “bisexual.” (Somerville 2007) This shows that society uses a term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are not straight and not normal. Also, from the writing “Critically Queer” by Judith Butler, he said that the word "queering" “persists as a defining moment of performativity.” (Butler 1993) The word performativity means the enactment of the spoken word historically of force and consolidation, so this emphasizes how the term “queer” is a performative that has one domain in which power acts as

The history of the United States tends to be understood through analysis of periods of conflict. From the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, both World Wars, the Cold War (and its affiliate proxy incidents), and finally modern day. What this skeletal description misses are the individual struggles of people who spent their lives marginalized due to societal stereotypes and discriminatory legislation. Groups have been affected due to identities that include but are not limited to: race, religion, ethnicity, immigration status, and sexual orientation. Of course this history of identity politics is not limited to the US, but the exploration of the LGBT movement within these borders can offer an important perspective on the tumultuous

"This new gay culture increasingly marks a full spectrum of social life: not only same-sex desires but gay selves, gay neighbors, and gay social practices that are distinctive of our affluent, postindustrial society".

In addition, a historically misrecognition constructs homosexuality as the deviant. According to Fraser (1998: 141), misrecognition is a ‘status injury’, which marks certain identifications as the deviation from a normal condition. For example, from a heterosexist’s perspective, HIV is assumed as a disease that is diffused between gay men, which they have been targeted as the key group to prevent HIV (Rosengarten, 2009). Besides, gay men’s bodies are labelled as ‘virus carriers’, and it links with the norm of moral degeneracy. Indeed, to associate gay men with HIV carriers conveys an injustice of their status, which can be seen as the social patterns of evaluation and interpretation (Fraser, 1998: 143-144). Young (1990) uses homophobia as the

The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community is among the subculture groups that are stigmatized by the U.S. society. They are deviant of the heterosexual norm. Society labels sexualities, which expressions of sexuality it values or stigmatizes. The meanings of sexuality change over time in different contexts, which reveals the sexuality as defined by the society. Sexuality is defined as “the ways we experience and express ourselves as sexual beings”. Sexuality is more than sexual behaviors, it encompasses socially constructed meanings of sex and gender, which includes the culturally specific norms, beliefs, traditions and taboos that are related to sex. For an instance sex between an adult and a child is considered a taboo in the U.S. If sexuality is socially constructed, so are sexual identities. What makes a man “gay” or “straight”? Is a straight guy who slept

Thirdly, queers challenge the categories as well as binaries of sexual and gender by questioning the categories and binaries’ reasonability. Queer theorists concern about how and why the categories of gender and sexuality are shaped, thinking the main reason is to better control people so as to achieve political goals. As de Lauretis (1991) stated, the existing strategies of homosexual, which is created based on the existing categories of gender and sexuality, is to ensure the “ center” integrated. Moreover, they reject and question the usefulness of categories. According to

Compulsory Heterosexuality for Women: How Much Has Changed in 30 Years? Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” explores the concept of heteronormativity, which is the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm and all other sexual orientations are deviant. Rich’s text focuses on women’s experiences with heteronormativity, as it deals primarily with compulsory heterosexuality for women and society’s erasure of lesbian existence. She argues that patriarchal society romanticizes heterosexual relationships because males benefit from them. By enforcing compulsory heterosexuality and erasing the existence and possibility of lesbian relationships, it gives men constant access to women as sexual and romantic partners (Rich, 1986, p. 135).

Queer theory questions creations of normal and divergent, insider, and outsider.2 Queer theorists analyse a situation or a text to determine the relationship between sexuality, power and gender. Queer theory challenges basic tropes used to organize our society and our language: even words are gendered, and through that gendering an elliptical view of the hierarchy of society, and presumption of what is male and what is female, shines through. Queer theory rejects such binary distinctions as arbitrarily determined and defined by those with social power. It works to deconstruct these binaries, particularly the homosexual/heterosexual binary.4