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 ...

Feminist theory first emerges as a literary theory during the women's movement of the 1960s, but it is important to remember that it followed a much older tradition of thought and action around women's equality, and is very much a renewal of those traditions. The foundations of this theory can be found in texts such as: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to name a few, but it is not until the 60s that it began to take a theoretical form. The movement realised the significance of the images of women propagated by literature, and saw it vital to combat and question the authority and coherence of those representations. For this reason, feminist literary criticism should not be seen as an offshoot of the feminist movement, but rather, it is intrinsically linked to the movement as a practical tool in influencing attitudes towards women. This makes feminist litera...