Every theory has its pet names. What does Queer Theory think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Literature never ceases to be complex for the queer theorist, because queer theorists are as interested in what's said as what's not. Language hides more than it reveals, it's devious and sneaky, like a diaphanous veil.
But if we carefully examine who is speaking and how they are speaking, we can find clues as to what meanings are moving between and beneath the silences. How a text performs "sexed" language, social expressions, and gender roles, shows us that every text has a hidden agenda, has a secret desire to tell us how we're supposed to live.
To the queer theorist, literature is a game of cat and mouse. Language both reveals and conceals meaning. Are you up to this challenge, readers? En garde.
What is an author?
An author is a performer, a diva, a conductor, a mad scientist, or all four. The author creates a text that is coded with issues of gender and sexual identity that it may not even be aware of. The author is never speaking with a voice that is completely masculine or feminine, because things are never so simple.
But the author will combine the bits and pieces of language to create characters that challenge or conform to gender expectations. What should my princess wear? How bad should my villain be? Queer theorists just love analyzing these kinds of authorial choices.
And because an author may have many deep-seated and unexplored psycho-sexual issues locked away in her "closet," how those characters are constructed may reveal the author's own secret life as well.
What is a reader?
The reader is at a masquerade. She is free to take on whatever identity she wishes without judgment or fear of being discovered. She may have a masculine perspective reading one chapter, and then transform and be moved to be more sensitive in the next chapter.
The reader is free to assume many sexualities, many genders, and multiple personalities, according to the queer theorist. The reader may, in fact, be the queerest member of the whole literary experience. The reader, in these private moments with the words on a page, is able to release the strangeness it holds back in public.
Queer theory revels this open space. It seeks to release the reader from all social expectations in order for the text to work its mysterious magic.