Gender studies

The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It deals with lesbian and gay writing and analyzes how their life and experience were distorted in history. There are a lot of words to describe different orientations but nobody would define a heterosexual. We create labels and expect certain stereotypes like a masculine lesbian with short hair, hating men. But there are women falling in love with women who do not claim they are lesbian because they hate that label. The term queer covers everybody from LGBTQUA (o) – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, undecided, allies and (others) who do not want to be labelled.

In language, we are only three distinct gender categories - feminine, masculine and neuter but in reality there are not such extremes. We have to distinguish biological sex = clear physical differences you are born or operated into, being female, male and intersex (people born with both sexual organs, sometimes called the third gender, quite a lot of them in industrial countries but only recently more debated) VS gender = the way we are seen by society, shaped by culture and history. Gender has rather a scale as it is constantly shifting. Whereas sex is a biological feature we are born with, gender is performed - one adopts it because of cultural, political and social pressures.

ADRIENNE RICH called it compulsory heterosexuality = from early childhood the society forces as to be heterosexual and only later we discover we may not be. Many stick to this model for convenience, religion conformity, easy life and economic purposes.

A feminist gender critic JUDITH BUTLER adds that our performance creates what gender we are seen by others. She says that very often we take heterosexuality as original and everything else as a deviant copy. Also a common idea with homosexuals is that someone plays the man (earning money, manually capable) and someone the woman (cleaning, cooking) but that is again only a pushed family model by homosexuals. Lesbians, as women, suffer a double oppression.

A post-structuralism critic MICHEL FOUCAULT in his book called History of Sexuality says that homosexuality was as a term invented at the end of 19^th century. Until then, homosexual practices were tolerated but Victorian period wanted to make a label, put it somehow into encyclopaedia. He believed that Victorians talked about it that much and they made it into a problem. However, it had been here all the time, just not punishable by the law. Nevertheless, the booming industrial revolution needed legal definitions for workers and started suppressing non-productive alternatives as the society needed reproduction. However, even in Victorian era, no member of Bloomsbury Group was heterosexual. Virginia Woolf had a female lover but also a husband to fit Victorian standard. They claimed to fall in love with people, not with sexes.

Queer theory serves to openly and frankly question and examine traditional forms and constructions of sexuality throughout literary texts. Theorists mainly examine the manners through which texts examine, question and reject various forms of sexuality. Sexuality is considered to be entirely a social construction, though a changeable and rather unstable social construction. There is no ideal, true or absolute practice of sexuality (or gender) and the propriety of all forms of sexuality are relative to various political, social and cultural attitudes. Theory focuses on examining the different ways in which literary texts have understood and negotiated sexuality, as well as the ways they have possibly invented, promoted, repressed, and altered modes of sexuality. It does not serve to promote any particular type of sexuality but to instead recognize sexuality.

Gynocriticism = feminist critics should neither treat texts written by men nor draw their methodologies from a male-centred critical tradition. ''Genuinely women-centred, independent, and intellectually coherent."