Queer's Theory Of Sexuality

Queer Theory has been exponentially developed in the last two decades. Notions of gender and sexuality are constantly being re-signified by a tendency to understand fragmented identities in terms of sex and gender distinctions. The debate has been centered on the idea of queerness as a question of being vs. doing. It became widely-accepted during the last century when homosexuality was accepted as something you were born with. However, with the recent development of Queer Theory, the body and the complex relationship between sex and gender began to progressively receive special attention. In this context, the notion of sexuality and gender has been destabilized against the notion of self and what is considered to be natural. Psychologists like

Freud begins by questioning human sexuality conceived as the effect of a natural instinct. By introducing the notion of drive instead of instinct, there is a breakdown in the concept of "normal", since the sexual drive has no natural purpose or end. Subsequently, Freud makes a distinction between the sexual and the genital. To clarify the distinction made between the sexual and the genital, Freud gives as an example the act of kissing. In the kiss, there is no intervention of genital organs and yet there is something strongly sexual. The detachment of sexuality with respect to the genital has the advantage of allowing us to consider the sexual activity of children and perversive individuals under the same views as that of the normal adult. In other words, what is defined as polymorphous perversity: every body part in the child is open to the possibility of becoming and erogenous zone, allows us to understand adult sexuality. In this context, not even the sexual interest of men for women is obvious but a problem that requires clarification. Freud raises the question about the nature of homosexuality, but at the same time, heterosexuality is a problem that requires explanation. In other words, the self is defined by the sexual drive and as Freud

According to Foucault, the relationship between power and sexuality has been historically defined in negative terms. There is talk of "exclusion", "prohibition" and "transgression". The connection between institutions and sexuality is still seen in terms of negativity and exteriority; what Foucault identifies as "repressive hypothesis". Foucault does not refute the discourse that sexuality has been repressed and silenced and that it is necessary to bring it to light. What he does is show that this discourse is part of the very institution of sexuality. In other words, the critical discourse of repression act as roadblock for this power mechanism as he puts it, “These sites [hospitals, boarding schools, churches, etc.] emitted discourses aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to talk about it” (31). Foucault was more interested in analyzing why people were so interested in sex, rather than sex itself. The idea of self was a power relationship where sexuality was voluntarily made visible to power institutions because power was seen as imposed from above. Power was executed through the use of confessionals. It was not about confessing "the infractions to the laws of sex", it had to do more with convert desire, all