queer studies

noun

plural in form but singular or plural in construction

: an academic field of study focusing on matters relating to gender, human sexuality, and sexual orientation with emphasis on LGBT issues and culture

Yet the open secrets of humanism make an odd fit with the homoerotic subtexts. Queer studies, at its most exciting, has challenged the very idea of human nature.

—Lawrence Lipking

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan … Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James.

—William Grimes

called also LGBT studies

Word History

First Known Use

1990, in the meaning defined above