Revisiting Episode 10: Queer Theory: Subverting Life's Categories

Few realise how deeply queer theory has influenced the politics of gender and sexuality. In this episode, first released February 12th, 2021, Sasha and Stella explore the “smashing of binaries”

Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast
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In this episode, we dove into the slippery world of queer theory—a philosophy that has profoundly influenced the way society now talks about gender, sexuality, and identity, often without most people realising it.

Queer theory is hard to pin down—by design. It challenges how we know what we know, encourages the dismantling of binaries (like male/female or gay/straight), and often resists definition altogether. As Stella puts it, queer theory is “a slippery fish.” But slippery or not, its consequences are real—and they’re everywhere.

We explored how queer theory has infiltrated culture, education, medicine, and even literature. Terms like “mother” and “father” are now viewed as exclusionary in some spaces. In schools, “queering the curriculum” is often presented as progressive—yet rarely questioned. The push to deconstruct categories has gone so far that we’re now asking: If you can’t be a man, and you can’t be a woman, then what are you?

Key Points We Covered:

• The link between female oppression and women’s reproductive biology—and why erasing the category of "woman" can undermine hard-won rights.

• The increasingly politicised nature of gender: queer theory insists that gender is political.

• Questions that highlight the limits of queer theory: If someone lived alone on an island, would they still have a gender? Can we really base a person’s identity on behaviours or aesthetics?

• The rise of identity labels that require no physical, medical, or behavioural markers—just self-declaration.

• How queer theory blurs the line between childhood and sexuality—and why we must push back on this dangerous trend.

Sasha also shared personal reflections on her journey as a woman, how her understanding of sexuality evolved, and why female sexual development remains understudied and misunderstood. Stella discussed how her daughter once asked, “Who says being fat is unhealthy?”—a question that reveals just how deeply the “everything is a social construct” mindset has taken root.

We both agreed: questioning is healthy in any democracy. But when taken to extremes—where reality itself is endlessly deconstructed—it becomes not liberating but disorienting. If everything is a social construct, then nothing is real. As Stella remembered from a graffitied wall in her childhood: “Everything you know is wrong.”

In a culture increasingly suspicious of objectivity, queer theory has shaped not only how we talk about gender and sexuality, but how we treat mental illness, disability, and difference. We now live in a world where denying reality is seen as progress—and insisting on observable truth is labelled as bigotry.

But as we discussed, cleverness isn’t enough. We must also be wise. Pushing boundaries is only admirable when it's done with care, honesty, and an understanding of the consequences.

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🎧 Listen to Episode 10:
“Queer Theory: Subverting Life's Categories”
Watch the episode on YouTube

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Let us know your thoughts! Have your views on queer theory evolved in the gender debate? Have you seen shifts in your perspective over the last few years?

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