#jeffrey weeks

[yourdailyqueer]

Jeffrey Weeks

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: Born 1945  

Ethnicity: White - Welsh

Occupation: Historian, sociologist, activist, writer

[elanormcinerney]

Sheila Rowbotham & Jeffrey Weeks | Socialism and the New Life

Virginia Woolf | Orlando

Anne Carson | Notes | If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

Alice Notley | The Descent of Alette

Amina Cain | The Sleeve of My Coat | Creature

[wellconstructedsentences]

The moral panic crystallizes widespread fears and anxieties and often deals with them not by seeking the real causes of the problems and conditions which they demonstrate but by displacing them on to 'Folk Devils' in an identified social group (often the 'immoral' or 'degenerate'). Sexuality has had a peculiar centrality in such panics, and sexual 'deviants' have been omnipresent scapegoats.

Jeffrey Weeks

[charlottejohanne]

First reading session for gender studies...

"A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

We cannot escape history, even as we try to divine its inner meanings. We live history, even as we seek to dwell in the moment. History shapes our possibilities at the same time as we attempt to shape it, remake it. Our sense of agency, of being able to mould our possibilities, is a defining characteristic of being human, but that agency is always fashioned by what is historically possible and feasible. This is true of all cultural phenomena. It is especially true of sexual cultures." 

- from chapter 2 of Sexuality by Jeffrey Weeks.

Ye gods. This is the kind of paragraph you write in desperation as the beginning of the introduction of the uninspired and uninspired essay you're throwing together two nights before the deadline, and which you hopefully have time to go over again and scrap, because COME ON, with the clichés and the sentences devoid of actual content, and trite vagueness all around.

And don't even get me started on his view of history as this seemingly quasi-sentient entity. 

This is going to be interesting...

[peachyplu-blog]

Homosexuality - Jeffrey Weeks & Steven Seidman (& some Adrienne Rich)

Ya ya ya another one of these. I have finals and this helps K! 

So read on if you're interested on how to 'normalize' homosexuality and 'understand' it. 

These two guys are pretty cool and interesting. I got an A+ on my assignment for comparing them so.... READ THIS IF YOU WANNA LEARN SOMETHING INTERESTING

Lets start with Weeks.... 

Weeks - Relationships > Identity 

2 main paradigms - Identity vs relationship paradigm

Identity paradigm = dominant.

Identity paradigm criteria for being homosexual set out.

Relationship paradigm = the replacement.

Relation paradigm says that, homosexuals may identify themselves as such but may not act in the 'correct' manner. For example, someone who calls them self gay, may like men but may not enjoy gay bars or having sex with them. They simply feel attracted to them. 

Relationships should be examined over labels/ identifications. Sexual history and presence should be examined. 

The relationship paradigm allows questions of power, diversity and sexual pluralism. 

4 Stages of Identification by Plummar:      1) Sensitization (person becomes aware of being different)      2) Signification (person develops meaning to differences)      3) Subculturalization (recognizing their different through         interaction with others)      4) Stabilization (realizing and accepting feelings & way of life)

Adrienne Rich - homosexuality is normal everybody else is crazy. Lesbian does not equal hating men. 

  Seidman - Things change; normalization is key 

Being homosexual has become more 'normal'. 

As societies acceptance of homosexual behaviour increases more people will 'come out of the closet'. 

The term 'closet' is a framework of sexuality. It is a way to narrate the homosexual experience. 

Oppression creates a group identity. 

Sexual identity is a social construct. 

Wants to integrate homosexuality into 'normal' life (ie - pop culture, politics, law etc). 

Normalizing homosexuality will allow people who are homosexuals to feel less threatened when they 'come out of the closet'.

Short commentary:  Unlike other things I've written, these two theories do not compete with each other. These theories both support one another. When you think about it, as homosexuality becomes more integrated into everyday life, people will start looking at relationships rather than labels. Also, in order to create more normalization, these relationships must be shown on TV in all their various forms. In the Seidman article, he talks about how a man he interviewed in the 70s stayed in the 'closet' due to fear. This man feared that if he came out people would harm him. Later on in Seidman's career (in the 90s) he interviewed another homosexual man. This man said that he feared coming out a bit, but he wasn't afraid of getting killed because of his sexual orientation. Obviously, today homosexuality is widely accepted today. Many problems lie with in laws and people of the older generation. Homosexuality is very much integrated, like Seidman wanted, in our pop culture. Just look at Modern Family. 

[communalperversion-blog]

'Homosexuals' were once regulated and defined by 'experts'; now these experts need no longer do it, for the homosexual has assumed that role for himself or herself.

from Kenneth Plummer's The Making of the Modern Homosexual, 1981.

Jeffrey Weeks writes about this move toward self-definition (/ identity policing from within) in Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985):

In the embryonic stirrings of the post-war gay movement [...] the idea of a 'minority' status was a radical one because it stressed self-activity, self-consciousness and political alliances. The concept was intended as a mobilising call, stressing what homosexuals had in common rather than what divided them. But when the hoped-for mass gay movement did at last emerge in the late 1960s the idea of a gay minority had a different fate. The chief radical intent of the early gay liberation movement was to disrupt fixed expectations that homosexuality was a peculiar condition or minority experience. Building in large part on the celebration of a polymorphously perverse sexuality in the work of Marcuse and the radical Freudians, homosexuality was perceived as a potentiality in all of us. Early theorists of gay liberation looked forward to the 'end of the homosexual', the breaking down of socially constructed divisions between sexual subjects. A radical separation was proposed between homosexuality, which was about sexual preference, and 'gayness', which was about a subversively political way of life. Now in a neat ruse of history it was the less radical elements in gay liberation who took up the idea of a gay minority. A polymorphously perverse 'gayness' looked forward to a breakdown of roles, identities, and fixed expectations. But the new spokespeople, acting openly for the 'gay minority', argued for 'rights', for the legitimate claims to space of what was now an almost 'ethnic' identity, and became the new integrationists. The consolidation of a minority status has obvious advantages. It fits easily into the common discourse of liberal pluralist societies. It offers legitimacy to the claims of the oppressed minority and can act as a spur for legal and other reforms. It is also, as the ex-Communist founders of Mattachine saw, a mobilising idea: it might be a myth, but it is a powerful and believable one. It has, of course, become more than an idea. In the creation of urban communities throughout the cities of the west gays have become an effective minority force, with a complex culture, varied politics and material resources. Gay people have invested a great deal in coming out as homosexual, have often risked careers, friendships and family ties. They have also gained much by their openness, political activity and culture-constructing work: they have consolidated their personal and social identities. In such circumstances challenges to the fixity and permanence of the gay identity and the idea of a gay minority seem a fundamental undermining of all that has been achieved.

There are, however, disadvantages. A number of writers have pointed to the paradox that gay activists began by challenging the naturalness and inevitability of received roles and identities, but have themselves become key definers of a homosexual role, and hence their own source of regulation [...]

The result could be a new sort of sexual conservatism, where little can be risked because too much is at stake. Moreover, in the process, the work of challenging the hegemonic definitions of sexual normality is abandoned: sexual minorities by definition can never become majorities. The acceptance of homosexuality as a minority experience deliberately emphasises the ghettoisation of homosexual experience and by implication fails to interrogate the inevitability of heterosexuality. The emphasis on minority status may be a necessary phase of gay mobilisation, but it is doubtful whether it can be the last word.

[keylimequeen]

We cannot escape history, even as we try to divine its inner meanings. We live history, even as we seek to dwell in the moment. History shapes our possibilities at the same time as we attempt to shape it, remake it. Our sense of agency, of being able to mold our possibilities, is a defining characteristic of being human, but that agency is always fashioned by what is historically possible and feasible.

Jeffrey Weeks-"Sexuality'