Queer theory

Okay.

Uh, let, let's talk for a moment about queer theory or however many moments you want to.

Mm-hmm.

Um, 'cause again, it, it's such a big part of your book, um, and, and so many of, uh, so many of these people were also, uh, Jewish.

I mean, in your book, you go, you go quite into, in-depth into this, uh, feminist queer theory, um, as this deliberately sort of murky counter-cultural movement that basically sides with the Palestinians not despite, but actually because of the raging lunacy of it all.

The, the whole concept, it seems, because, you know, growing up, I'm, I'm much older than you are, um, I'm, I think I'm a generation older than you are.

Um, you know, the word queer, it literally just meant weird Like, it, like we didn't, we didn't, as kids or whatever, ever, even though, you know, we would say, "Oh, that's so gay," and we knew what gay was-

I feel like I'm explaining this as though I think this is true, but I'm, I'm just saying.

I would briefly answer it because I'm not the author of this piece.

But in my understanding, the author finds certain resonance between disability and queerness.

As disabled persons require specific infrastructures for navigating public and private spaces, Queerness may demand separate infrastructural sensibilities at the same time, away from the heteronormative design and imaginations.

Whether it is washroom or playground or classroom spaces, infrastructures cannot always connote physicality but also speciality, where a conviviality may prevail for differences and diversities.

But your question is very valid and I feel this has to be passed on to the author of the chapter, Saiyantandatta.

If we hold those as our convictions, then we can dive into the deeper conversation on homosexuality.

Let me define, therefore, what is homosexuality, and I want to define it and place it within the broader context of what is called queer theory.

Now, in your outline I gave you, I had forgotten that piece of information.

So if you are following on the outline I gave you, just beside homosexuality, please, you can put the word queer, Q-U-E-E-R.

So homosexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by an enduring emotional, romantic and or sexual attraction to persons of the same sex or gender.

It describes the lived orientation of many people who identify as gay or lesbians and is distinct from biological sex or gender identity.

Queer theory, which is a part of what homosexuality conversation comes out of, queer theory is the academic language.

So it emerged in the 1990s and it challenged the fixed understandings of gender and sexuality.

[electronic music] In 2009, a scholar named José Esteban Muñoz opened a book with a sentence that sounds, at first, like a contradiction.

"Queerness," he wrote, "is not yet here, not a fact about who you are today, but an orientation towards something that has not arrived." He was not describing the absence of queer people, obviously.

He was describing queerness as a horizon, a way of living turned toward a future current conditions will not allow, rather than a settled identity satisfied with whatever rights the present is willing to grant it.

That is also, this show would argue, a near-perfect description of anarchism, not a blueprint for a finished society, but an orientation toward what has not yet been built, refusing the argument that the way things currently are is the way they have to stay.

Rather than refusing the future entirely, Muñoz wanted to reclaim it, to insist that queerness is itself a way of reaching toward a future that has not been designed yet, drawing on the philosopher Ernst Bloch's idea of utopia as a horizon that organizes hope without ever fully arriving.

What Muñoz rejected, pointedly, was what he called the here and now, a pragmatic gay politics content to win specific, achievable rights inside the existing system, marriage chief among them, and call the project finished.

Queerness, in his framing, is a refusal to accept that the present's menu of options is the actual limit of what is possible.

That is, again, almost exactly what this show has spent two seasons calling prefigurative politics dressed in different vocabulary.

that how do we make a world a better place? We queer everything.

And queering here doesn't just mean homosexuality.

Queering means transgressing established norms to make what is prohibited into what is permitted and to make the old prohibitions into symbols of oppression.

You know, it's funny that you're saying this, but I have another quote right in front of me where you say, the open mind and soon the transgressive mind was seen as the indispensable guardian of the open society, which I suppose in its apotheosis or whatever becomes this queer theory approach.

Because I think one thing we should be asking ourselves is, the hiring committees that hired the Judith Butlers at Harvard, she's a Harvard English theorist who is very at the forefront of queer theory.

Well, today in 2026, I am a local pastor's wife and my husband is Kent Butterfield and he is the pastor of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham.

We've been there for quite some time, but I'm also a former professor of English, Women's Studies and Queer Theory from Syracuse University.

in Syracuse, New York.

And in my 20s and my 30s, I was a gay rights activist and a practicing lesbian.