Queer Theory Essay

Queer theory challenges students and scholars alike to consider the overarching power structures and institutionalized hierarchies that permeate society, culture, and politics. Careful attention to issues such as biopolitics, Homonationalism, and hate crime/civil rights, remain essential to feminist thought. Queer approaches to such issues provide the tools with which to push back and intervene, however, the practice seems imperfect because there are contradictions within queer approaches to these issues. While touting an image of inclusivity, queer theory becomes ensconced in the biopolitics that it seeks to destabilize by positioning some queer populations as more ideal than others and thus promoting a homonational identity. Queer theorizing

Exceptionalism is the notion that a certain state (such as the United States) is inherently more advanced than other states. Society positions the exception as the new normal, which marginalizes undesirable populations. Thus, the self-proclaimed exceptional state claims moral superiority—and authority—over inferior states. Erasure of discourses regarding race, class, gender is a byproduct of such thinking. It would seem that queer theory could confront biopolitical structures through careful attention to intersectionality and visibility initiatives. After all, queerness rests on deviancy and a challenging of the normative. In doing so, however, queerness positions one set of queer subjects (those that do not transgress) as “ideal”, while demarcating those queers whose identities or lives appear non-normative, deviant, and

Halberstam warns his readers to move beyond framing Brandon’s murder as an individual tragedy, and instead to view it from a perspective that considers the multiplicities of structures that created the opportunity for his death in the first place (35). By framing the murder of Brandon within systemic institutions, the problem of transphobia is no longer limited to the individual and can be understood as widespread and even worldwide. The emergence of U.S. modernity, Halberstam and Duggan note, coincided with the lynching of black men, murders of lesbian women, and violence against queer bodies (35). It is not a coincidence, then, that an African American man (and a woman) also died with Brandon. Halberstam suggests that the historical positioning of these deaths are linked, and that they are transposable within the context of biopolitics and necropolitics (35). Biopolitical violence creates a hegemonic national identity that separates normal (exceptional) subject from deviant subject and thus allows for the destruction of the