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| Work by Robert Mapplethorpe |
Between the time of Sappho and the birth of Natalie Clifford Barney lies a 'lesbian silence' of twenty-four centuries.
- Bertha Harris, Our
Right to Love (1978)
Gender studies differs from Feminism in as far as Feminism is concerned with the social construction of women's identity whereas gender studies is concerned with the social construction of all gender identities and experiences - whether man, woman, transgendered, gender-blended, queer, ambiguous or something entirely else.
Gay and Lesbian studies developed in the 1970s as a response to the Lesbian and Gay Liberation movement ( itself sparked by the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, when a multicultural crowd of drag queens, transexuals, gay men, and working class lesbians fought back against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in lower Manhattan ). Gay and lesbian studies provides a forum for recuperating the forgotten or concealed histories of gay and lesbian people, cultures, and institutions. Queer Theory is related to LGBTI studies, but takes a different approach. The word queer meaning "weird" has been used as a form of derogatory slang, but it's a word that some LGBTI people have reclaimed; used profoundly to subvert its stigma. Michel Foucault was enormously influential in the development of Queer Theory. Foucault's History of Sexuality (1978, 1984) argued that "homosexuality" should be seen as a historically specific product of a particular society. Although Foucault's work has been criticised for its lack of culturally-specific analysis, it did set in many ways an agenda for the study of sexuality as a cultural construct rather than as a biological given. So what is normal - or normative? Normative means not what is "normal" but what is considered "normal". Society dictates that certain ways of living are normal, and then persuades individuals to conform to these standards and perpetuate them, but there's no such thing as "normal", however, much society would like us to think that there is.
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