Queer and Eco Criticism

 This blog is about Thinking Activity on. Queer and Eco - Criticisms. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Cultural Studies.

Queer Theory

What is Queer Theory ?

Queer theory is a field of study that examines the nature of sexuality- and gender-based normativity and how society defines and polices the concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and gender and sexual identities.

As a branch of gender and sexuality studies, queer theory aims to deconstruct what is acceptable or “normal.” Queer theory opens new avenues of thought to define concepts considered central to identity and identity politics.

Queer theory is a field of study that challenges existing traditional ideas about identity, sexuality, and gender – particularly that of heteronormativity, or the belief that heterosexuality is the natural, moral, or “normal” expression of sexuality. For queer theorists, heteronormativity permeates various aspects of society, is reinforced by institutions (think the Church and the legal realm), and is ultimately a way to yield power and control.

In a sense, queer theory is the study of what we as a society deem as “normal” and why these assumptions exist in the first place. It seeks to understand who benefits from and who is “othered” or isolated by these constructs.

However, in the same way that the origins of queer theory may be difficult to pinpoint, it is hard to distill the queer theory definition into a single idea or concept. Queer theory emerged from a variety of studies and cultural movements, including feminism, gay and lesbian studies, sexual subcultures, and black activism, particularly around the late 1980s and early 1990s.

What lesbian/gay critics do 

1. Identify and establish a canon of 'classic' lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct tradition. These are, in the main, twentieth-century writers, such as (for lesbian writers in Britain) Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamund Lehmann, and Radclyffe Hall. 

2. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman). 

3. Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of self identification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries. 

4. Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures, for example, by omitting overtly homosexual love lyrics from selections or discussions of the poetry of W. H. Auden (Mark Lilly). 

5. Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over, for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry. 

6. Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity or femininity, such as the nineteenth-century adventure stories with a British 'Empire' setting (for example those by Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard) discussed by Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys (Routledge, 1991).

Essays and flim

English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) 

Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989); 

Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (1990); 

Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation, Marlowe to Milton (1991);

 Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds., New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (1992); 

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993); 

Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet (1993); 

Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994); 

Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998

Examples: 

1.Kapoor and Sons

2. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga

3. Aligarh (2016)

Directed by Hansal Mehta, Aligrah was a LGBT movie based on a true story depicting the tragic life of Professor Ramchandra Siras (Manoj Bajpayee). Siras was the heading the department of Classical Modern Indian Languages Faculty at Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. Once, a local news channel barge into his home and finds him having sex with a rickshaw puller. That incident ends up changing his life forever. He’s sacked by his university and is ridiculed by society.

India's first Transgender principal in Kolkata 

Born into a lower-middle class family - her father was a factory worker, while her mother is a homemaker - Ms Bandyopadhyay went to school on the outskirts of Kolkata before heading off to a prominent city college to study Bengali. She wrote a paper on women's rights and joined a college in a remote village in a Maoist-affected region in West Bengal to teach Bengali.

Eco - Criticism

What is Eco Criticism?

Environmental criticism, also known as ecocriticism and “green” criticism is a rapidly emerging field of literary study that considers the relationship that human beings have to the environment. As Cheryll Glotfelty noted in the Introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, “Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature form a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts”, environmental critics explore how nature and the natural world are imagined through literary texts. As with changing perceptions of gender, such literary representations are not only generated by particular cultures, they play a significant role in generating those cultures. Thus, if we wish to understand our contemporary attitude toward the environment, its literary history is an excellent place to start. While authors such as Thoreau and Wordsworth may first come to mind in this context, literary responses to environmental concerns are as old as the issues themselves. Deforestation, air pollution, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism have all been appearing as controversial issues in Western literature for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years.

What Ecocritics do

1. They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world. 

2. They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world -concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources. 

3. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century. 

4. They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature. 

5. They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories (with their emphasis on the linguistic and social constructedness of the external world) and instead emphasise ecocentric values of meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves.

Critics and his works 

• The Future of Environmental Criticism by Lawrence Buell.
• Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.
• Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton.
• Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour.
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
• The Comedy of Survival by Joseph W.
• James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), 
• Thomas Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' (1751), 
• William Cowper's The Task (1785),

Example

Poem :Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Throughout history, there has always been a seeming fascination with how the world will end. In recent years, these discussions have centered around nuclear disaster, immense climate change, and general cynicism. Two thousand years ago (give or take), the Revelations chapter was added into the Christian Bible, detailing a prophetic vision of the end of the world. This has long been a topic embedded in the human psyche. At some point between the present and Revelations’ authorship (closer to the present though), Robert Frost added his own ideas to the mix, and the result was Fire and Ice, one of his most well-known poems, and certainly one of his most powerful ones. This poem is known for its simplicity and biting message, as well as its call to stop and think, offering a different perspective on the end of everything.

The disagreement in general society on the topic of how the world ends. In a modern sense, “fire” and “ice” could well be stand-ins for “nuclear disaster” and “climate change.” Frost’s use of “fire” and “ice,” however, is largely a metaphoric decision that opens the poem up to different kinds of interpretation. Ice and fire, of course, are opposites of one another, suggesting that most people have entirely opposing views on the apocalypse — after all, the world can’t end in ice and fire at the same time. Ice and fire also represent two extremes which, on a grand enough scale, could cause immense damage, and are fitting metaphors for harbingers of death.