ABSTRACT
‘One of the most striking changes in the humanities in the 1980s has been the rise of gender as a category of analysis’. Queer theory, as Paul Burston and Colin Richardson explain, ‘provides a discipline for exploring the relationships between lesbians, gay men and the culture which surrounds and (for the large part) continues to seek to exclude us’. Moreover, ‘by shifting the focus away from the question of what it means to be lesbian or gay within the culture, and onto the various performances of heterosexuality created by the culture, Queer Theory seeks to locate Queerness in places that had previously been thought of as strictly for the straights’. There are at least four different feminisms: radical, Marxist, liberal and what Sylvia Walby (1990) calls dual-systems theory. Each responds to women’s oppression in a different way, positing different causes and different solutions.
