Between the Lines

The male and female signs that greet us at the toilet door offer us two very binary options, but in reality sex and gender is far more complicated than those signs suggest. Sex is never as simple as a binary choices, and it is this that queer theory wants you to understand; that all our pre-conceived ideas about gender roles and sexual identities are in fact unstable, and can be destabilized by simply picking them apart. Queer Theory is a relatively new cultural theory which emerged out of the 1990s, but very much has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault . It looked to establish sexual orientation as a fundamental category of analysis and understanding, and thus it has both a social and political aim. It is a criticism informed by a resistance to homophobia and heterosexism by exposing the ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege. It was the feminist critics of the 70s that first began to explore and dissect gender, but the feminist outlook soon began

Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre Penguin Modern Classics (2000) ***(3/5) Written in 1938, Nausea (La Nausée in its original French) is the first novel of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This review is of the Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by Robert Baldrick. The novel is set in the town of Bouville, France (literally ‘mud town’) and is believed to be a fictional portrayal of Le Havre where Sartre was living at the time of writing. The novel takes the form of the diary entries of 30-year-old Antoine Roquetin as he suffers from strange and unexplained sensations of sickness that he refers to as ‘the Nausea’. I found Roquentin a difficult character to relate to as, on face value, he is man who seems to wallow through a comfortable, bourgeois life in which he has very little to worry about. For the last decade, Roquetin has been been researching the Marquis de Rollebon, a French aristocrat who lived during the French Revolution. Roquetin’s sickness begins