Queer Film Theory

 

Queer theory was originally associated with the radical gay politics of ActUp, Outrage, and other groups which embraced “queer” as an identity label that pointed to a separatist, non-assimilationist politics. As it has come to be understood in cultural theory, however, queer theory challenges either/or, essentialist notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality within the mainstream discourse (the “binary sexual regime,” to use historian George Chauncey's phrase), and instead posits an understanding of sexuality that emphasizes shifting boundaries, ambivalences, and cultural constructions that change depending on historical and cultural context. "To queer" is to render “normal” sexuality as strange and unsettled, to challenge heterosexuality as a naturalized social-sexual norm and promote the notion of “non-straightness,” challenging the hegemony of "straight" ideology. This emphasis on non-straightness lends queer theory its assimilationist, anti-essentialist cast, for when one considers the realms of fantasy, the unconscious, repression, and denial, much that is ostensibly considered “heterosexual” easily falls within the realm of queer. The influential work of Judith Butler, particularly Gender Trouble, with its now broadly overused concept of “performative” sexuality and gender identity, seeks to reject stable categories altogether. While thoroughly disruptive of mainstream “truth regimes” of sexuality, it also challenges standard gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender politics. In Butler's conception, these terms are rendered meaningless when stripped of the institutional means that support them. Alexander Doty's notion of “queer reception,” in Making Things Perfectly Queer, is another way in which standard categories are challenged. Doty separates “reception” from “identity” and stresses the way a spectator may derive “queer pleasure” by deviating from standard categories in viewing film and television. Thus straight-identified women spectators might experience “queer pleasure” at the sexual tension generated between Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise; straight-identified men might enjoy the exaggerated homoeroticism of Stallone's Rambo.

I found this info at - https://faculty.washington.edu/mlg/courses/definitions/queer.htm

 

 

Queer theory is about the stereotyping homosexual people in film. This can be offensive to some viewers as the stereotyping could lead to people being wrongly accused of their sexuality from what they wear, act like, speak like, look like and their general interests. This is shown in the film mean girls as one of the charcters is commonly mistaken for being a lesbian from how she acts and dresses, this is her being stereotyped.