Queer Theory Texts

Ever heard that nursery rhyme about how girls are made of "sugar and spice and everything nice," and boys are made of "frogs and snails and puppy dog tails"? Well, those stereotypes just won't quit...

Wilde edited more than five hundred words out of the original manuscript of this novel, and everyone still considered it obscene. (We here at Shmoop would love to know what those five hundred words...

This is another American play where the guys act like manly men. They drink and smoke and play cards. They fight and then feel bad about drinking. And then they smoke and play some more cards. The...

Querelle has one heck of a shore leave. There are a couple of murders, a drug deal, some sex, some drinking, and a little bromance. Jean Genet breaks all the stereotypes of male homosexuality with...

Why's there all this fuss over the American Dream? Can't a guy just have a good smoke and stare at the sky once in a while? In Death of a Salesman, Miller questions the heady expectations placed up...

The greatest minds of Ginsberg's generation weren't doing so well. Let's just say they had issues. You know, with anger and drugs and poverty and stuff. And Ginsberg was tired of all this oppressio...

Like you, we here at Shmoop hate being put into boxes. And the Victorians forced "abnormal" sexuality into two such itty bitty cultural boxes: "the brothel and the mental hospital would be those pl...

Butler's always got our (queer) backs. In an updated preface to her tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler says, "…the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility of...

According to Eve Sedgwick, the closet isn't so secret after all. See, what we do talk about gives other people clues about what skeletons we're hiding in our closets. And the specific language we u...

Heteronormativity and heterosexuality are two different things. Consider this example: a girl with tattoos and a shaved head holds the hands of two guys as she walks through the park. A married cou...

Ever wanted to eat dessert before dinner? Well, in this work, Halberstam says, "futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience, namely...