Queer studies is an even more recent branch of theoretical inquiry, having been named as an area of study only in the early 1990s. The scholar who is usually identified as first using the phrase "queer theory" in print is Teresa de Lauretis, in her 1991 essay "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities," published in the important journal differences.

However, the texts that are considered most responsible for influencing and developing the principles of queer studies are Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Desire (1985).

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In his History of Sexuality, Foucault explores social constructionist models of sexuality and sexual codification through religion, politics, and economics. Foucault argues against thinking of any form of sexuality as something natural or universal.

In Between Men, Sedgwick develops the idea of "homosociality." Sedgwick argues that nineteenth-century British culture was built primarily on asexual bonds between men (such as friendship, apprenticeship, camaraderie in the workforce, and so on), which necessitated, for social and economic reasons, strong prohibitions against homosexual bonds.

Homosociality represents the range of bonds between men that are necessary to maintain a social order, including those bonds between men through women, such as marriage, birth, and so forth. These bonds are presumed to be contrary to pure homosexual bonds, especially within Western cultures, which do not necessitate women as mediating figures. Sedgwick, however, demonstrates how these two antithetical terms, homosexuality and homosociality, frequently collapsed into each other in practice.

What makes queer studies "queer," therefore, is not that it concerns homosexuality or that its practitioners are lesbians or gay men, but that it questions assumptions that are steeped, often subtly, in biases.

Whereas lesbian and gay studies attempts to use existing disciplinary lenses (for example, history, political science, literature) to look at homosexuals and sexual orientation in a more positive light than they had been previously, queer theory attempts to "queer" these disciplines, that is, to change them by weeding out the deep heterosexist biases within them.

Queer studies emerged from gay and lesbian studies' attention to the social construction of categories of normative and deviant sexualities. But while gay and lesbian studies focuses largely on questions of homosexuality, queer studies expands its realm of investigation.

Queer studies considers, and conducts a political critique of, anything that falls into normative and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and identities. The word "queer," as it appears in the dictionary, has a primary meaning of "odd," "unconventional," or "out of the ordinary." "To queer," then, is to render "normal" sexuality as strange and unsettled, to challenge heterosexuality as a naturalized social-sexual norm, and to promote the notion of "non-straightness."

Thus, queer studies expands the scope of its analysis to all kinds of behaviors, including those that are gender-bending, as well as those that involve "queer" forms of sexuality. Queer studies insists that all sexual behaviors, all concepts linking sexual behaviors to sexual identities, and all categories of normative and deviant sexualities are social constructs, sets of signifiers that create certain types of social meaning.

For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of social codes and forces, forms of individual activity and institutional or political power, which interact to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment, and then operate under the category of what is "natural" or "essential."

Essentialist notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality are challenged by queer theorists, who, instead, assert an understanding of sexuality that emphasizes shifting boundaries, ambivalences, and constructions that change depending on historical and cultural context.

Two particularly influential works in queer studies are Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Alexander Doty's Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (1993).

Butler's work rejects stable categories of sexuality altogether, and challenges standard gay, lesbian, bisexual, , and politics. In Butler's conception, these terms are rendered meaningless when stripped of the religious, political, and economic codifications that support them.

Alexander Doty's notion of "queer reception" in Making Things Perfectly Queer demonstrates another way that standard categories of sexuality are challenged. Doty separates "reception" from "identity" and stresses the way a spectator may derive "queer pleasure" from standard categories in viewing film and television. Thus, heterosexual-identified women spectators might experience "queer pleasure" at the sexual tension generated in films such as Thelma and Louise, or heterosexual-identified men might enjoy the exaggerated of certain sporting events or films such as Rambo.

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

The field of cultural studies has significance for glbtq people because of its concern with social and sexual politics, its focus on subcultural production and consumption, and its commitment to progressive social change.

The term "homosexuality," coined in 1869, with "heterosexuality" as its opposite, has led to a binary concept that oversimplifies the complexity of human sexual behavior.

Not limited to activity in the traditionally conceived political sphere, identity politics refers to activism, politics, theorizing, and other similar activities based on the shared experiences of members of a specific social group, often relying on shared experiences of oppression.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

As an academic field, sociology has only recently begun to examine sexuality, and members of the profession are divided over glbtq concerns.

Women's studies, an interdisciplinary academic field that was inaugurated at major universities around 1970, is now offered at every conceivable type of academic institution throughout the world.

Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml Duberman is an astute commentator on gender and race issues and a pioneer in glbtq studies.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

The founder of psychoanalysis and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud initiated a fundamental transformation in the self-understanding of Western men and women, including especially the role of sexuality.

The controversial lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig has produced some of the most challenging fictional and theoretical work of second-wave feminism.