Avail Yourself Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer By Riki Anne Wilchins Readily Available As Audiobook

god i could read this instead of having to read foucault very informative and helped me understand Gender theory, I really liked the information given in this, Thank you A great primer into queer theory with some amazingly detailed information that everyone needs to read and WAY more easy to understand than some of the theory.


I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley, The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own This book is an amazing intro to post modernism in relation to queer theory.
I found so much in this book and it changed the way I look at the world, Very intersectional and excellent view points on modern society and the way it was built, best thing i read was 'If sex is not just about reproduction, it is not just about genes, XY chromosomes, and hormones either, Sex is introduced to explain skeletal structure, mental aptitude, posture, emotional disposition, aesthetic preference, body fat, sexual orientation and responsiveness, athletic ability, social dominance, shape and weight, artistic ability.
It is also supposed to explain any number of socalled "instincts", including the nesting instinct, the maternal instinct, and perhaps even the Budweiser instinct.
' so many typos. did no one edit this book For someone with no background in philosophy, postmodern or modern theory, or queer theory, this book served as a good primer to postmodern gender theory.
It also roughly sketched out the histories of feminism, gay rights, and transgender rights, It has a chapter about criticisms of postmodern theory as well,

It wa pulished in, so some of the information may be out of date, and it is most definitely a book from America.
It also touches on some semipractical approaches to using postmodern theory, but as it is a very much discussion based and individual theory it doesn't offer any concrete steps to take, leaving that up to you.


Overall, a good primer and put into understandable words many theories I've only seen fragments of, Queer Theory, Gender Theory by Riki Wilchins is a very good basic introduction to the theory for those who either don't want to read the theory or want a basic foundation before diving into the nuance and detail of the theories.


I wasn't prepared for just how basic this was going to be, so it took a while for me to appreciate what it does so well.
I've been reading this theory and using it since thes thes for Butler and forget that not everyone enjoys reading theory, As I've said before, yes, I am a nerd, What this book does is highlight where much of the theory foundationally Derrida, Foucault, and Butler meets the application or activism, This does not try to express every nuance, it offers the reader a basic understanding so that they can then better understand where some of the ideas come from.
I would imagine that for those looking for an intro, this may well suffice, For others, this may pique their interest to learn these ideas in greater detail,

One thing that makes this particularly interesting is that Wilchins does not spare any one or any group critique, Not so much confrontational but more pointing out where feminisms or some gay rights groups miss main ideas or, even worse, do to trans what had been done to them.
This is done in hope of creating understanding and making bridges, not condemning,

I would recommend this to readers who want a foundation either for better understanding or as a prelude to more serious study.


ed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley, A onestop, nononsense introduction to the core of postmodern theory, particularly its impact on queer and gender studies, Nationally known gender activist Riki Wilchins combines straightforward prose with concrete examples from LGBT and feminist politics, as well as her own life, to guide the reader through the ideas that have forever altered our understanding of bodies, sex and desire.
This is that rare postmodern theory book that combines accessibility, passion, personal experience and applied politics, noting at every turn why these ideas matter and how they can affect your daily life.


Riki Wilchins is the founding executive director of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, The author of Read My Lips and GenderQueer, She was selected by Time magazine as one of “Civic Innovators for thest Century, ” Queer Theory, Feminist Theory is far more general than I anticipated, While I see value in this book for introducing people to more complex ideas, for those who are already familiar with these conversations Derrida, Foucault, Butler, transissues there is not too much to gather from this book.
Wilchins doesn't complicate these conversations, Rather she presents them in a way that resonates in the Queer Theory, Gender Theory's subtitle, "an instant primer, " This book hasn't altered how I see the world, but that has much to do with my subject position, Yet I can easily see this book transforming the way others think about the world, Really interesting, great primer on the subject, has inspired me to read more A fairly accessible intro to queer theory and gender theory, It does what it aims to do, It's very accessible and gives an easy introduction to complex theorists, The ideas are interesting. I loved the idea of moving beyond Identity politics which I was discussing with my friend the other day, This is a bit more of a summary than typical but I think it gets at some of the strengths of the book particularly in the practical application of rather confusing theoretical perspective.
I love the focus on stories, personal experiences, and constructive asides that Wilkins uses that make this quite readable and enjoyable,

Queer Theory, Gender Theory is a colloquial exploration of post modern theory applied to the issues of feminism, gender, and queer theory.
Wilchins draws on her own experiences as a transsexual as well as the stories of friends like intersex spokeswoman Cheryl Chase and the stories that pervade our pop culture like Brandon Teenas, depicted in the award winning movie Boys Dont Cry.
Starting with a brief but crucial history of the politics of gender, gay, and transsexual rights, Wilchins “begins where all good theory hopes to go before it dies: politics” p.
. In this Wilchins is able to relate these typically obscure theoretical views to the practical ideas of change and political action that try to improve life for the disempowered.
She also probes into the relationships between sex and gender, noting how one is often advanced at the expense of the other, Furthermore, the case of intersex infants ties together a clear picture of the intersections and conflicts between the different factions of gender and sexual orientation groups.
A true deconstructionist, Wilchins troubles the ideas of using post modernism theory citing its proclivity to apathy, complexity, frustration, lack of solutions, isolationism rather than “constructive social engagement” p. and universality instead of the individuality of intersectionality, After prying into some of the ideas in Judith Butlers seminal text, Gender Trouble, as further tools for investigation of identity, Wilchins concludes with a section on GenderPAC, a gender rights advocacy group, and a plea to “Get Involved.
Because gender rights and human rights, and the time for them is now” p,. One of the problems with academic writing is make it accessible for the masses, Many academics write brilliant things that would benefit society at large, yet only other academics really understand it, However, the author does a great job in this book of break down such queer and gender theorists as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault so that anyone should be able to understand their general principles to their theories.
This book was featured at the website of the local LGBT bookstore, for quite some time, so I thought it would be worth checking it out.
At page, somewhere halfway through the book, I felt compelled to put it down, It was a chore reading it, Lacking passion and not even hinting at humor anywhere, I had the feeling I was listening to an onetonetune, in an ever flat landscape.

I wasn't into postmodernist theory anyway, and this book didn't any nearly convert me, I will probably return to it some day, when I feel I have the patience and determination to finish it, An excellent, accessible intro to Queer Theory and its possibilities, Having read many theoretical texts, I was mentally supplying footnotes for most paragraphs, For those who think QT is obscure and useless, I'd say this text stands a chance of changing their mind, This is not a bad overview of the basics of Queer Theory, It could have been a bit more detailed in areas, but overall, it was okay, The major problem with this particular edition is the formatting it's atrocious, The one I have is a later edition in which the formatting was done by "formattingu, com, " and it is a train wreck, Footnotes are in the body of the text, set apart by "NOTE" next to them, and there are so many typos and missing words, I almost lost my mind.
I don't know what happened with this reprint, but I would suggest getting an Alyson Publications edition if you want to read this, A fantastic introduction to queer theory, I feel educated. I picked this up mostly as a joke after learning that iced coffee and walking quickly are queer symbols, While researching whether or not I was queer for liking iced coffee and wondering if this is what my San Francisco friends meant when they said they were queer, I came across this book, and was surprised to learn that there is a THEORY behind being queer! Fascinating!

After a quick wikipediajob on queer theory that didn't prove to be helpful in the least, I thought I should probably read a book on the topic.
Either it would be informative, or it would be further evidence that the humanities are full of crazy people spouting off on "theories" that are completely impenetrable win/win, really.


So I dove in during a long bus ride, And I was pleasantly surprised! Wilchins makes a good argument that it's stupid to draw strong dichotomies based on sexuality, Does it make a man a homosexual if he thinks about kissing another man Not only is this not right, argues Wilchins, it's not even wrong.
These categories are useful insofar as they help us predict the future, but they are not helpful as identifiers,

I don't remember much else about the book, I ran out of steam on it, I never intended to abandon it, but I did, and I have no desire to read more, Queer Theory was significantly less shit than I was expecting it to be! I remember being impressed with a few of the arguments while reading it, but damned if I can remember what they are now.


EDIT:I revisited this book because it was on my list of unfinished books on my kindle, The second time around it was worse, In many ways, this book is exactly what I was looking for, and it is exactly what it describes itself as: a primer to queer theory and gender theory.
Now that I've been introduced to the main ideas and theorists Foucalt, Butler, etc, I feel better able to dive deeper,

But there were SO MANY TYPOS in this book it seriously detracted from its readability, I tend to not comment on typos because a it's classist and ableist and b it often seems to have more to do with the editor and the amount of funds available at the publishing company, which often seems to mean that exactly these kinds of books written by authors with marginalized identities on topics that "mainstream publishers" don't find acceptable/profitable suffer from more typos through no fault of their own but given the amount of typos in this text and how much it really impacted the reader's ability to understand what was being shared particularly around already complicated theories, I think it's important to note.

The first three chapters deal with very brief parsimonious history lessons about the scope of activism that underpinned much of later queer theory and postmodern gender analysis.
Although useful as a primer to someone trying to enter the subject from the beginning, It's still extremely thin and doesn't give much insight at all that isn't reproduced elsewhere in much better detail.
It is replete with quite a few questionable statements as well such as:

"In a male centred culture, woman will always be the queersex",

which seems to be false since the main critique mentioned briefly is that symbols that we classify stereotypically as 'male' or 'female' are constructed socially and

not necessarily fixed products of all woman or men, thus woman are not always the queer sex as such a statement disavows the endless 'queer' difference outside the female gaze.
Male centered is vague as it certainly doesn't relate to institutional privilege and is predicated on a subtle phallogocentric argument which I believe has problems.


Chapterbegins by fawning over Derrida:

"He was so complex, so profound, so deep, that even philosophers who heard him, men who read Sartre like you and I read Doonesbury, had no idea what he was saying.
Gifted with a tremendous and insubordinate intellect, Derrida was also unmatched for chutzpah, He used this speech to announce the end of modernism"

Although the book contains a chapter devoted to critiquing postmodern influence on gender studies, there is a lack of critical engagement with moral relativism and it's pernicious desensitization of activism.
To state that its merely pluralism in allowing other perspectives is euphemistic to say the least and merely changing the demarcations we use doesn't change the underlying point.
I find fawning over social theorists in a servile way like this is very nonconstructive and unappealing, Derrida is never really taken to task for his work here and given free reign

Everyone speaks about how corrosive and dead 'knowledge' and 'intelligence' is but relatively few are prepared to speak about the obvious positives of these things and discuss literary criticism that is relational to the text in question, instead of trying to uncover 'hidden' narratives that undermine the very integrity of the text and smash anything it is trying to say.
We speculate endlessly about how language is unreliable without discussing how reliable it actually is in preserving, communicating with others and in producing wonderful works of literature and indeed philosophy.
The reason I mention this is because Sedgwick in her reparative reading seemed to convey similar things, a theorist who never makes the pages of this book despite her large contributions to the field.
Many theorists and critical ideas seem to be minimized or simply ignored, I was reading this mainly as an addendum to my own notes going into an examination exploring gender and sexuality, finding that the work was quite scant for this level.


Although the book is a good primer, I believe it needed to engage with more theoretical work and disavow the autobiographical context a little more.
This seems to be a theme in a lot of books covering queer theory, in that we must be introspective and allow for the author to be personal with us.
It's a style I am beginning to dislike and get annoyed about especially when I want to learn about the concepts and academic work explored.

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