Talk:Queer theory

message: While there have been valiant efforts by editors over the years, some of the problems noted on this Talk page going back a dozen years are still problematic.  I think there might be a case for WP:Blow it up and start over here.  Here are selected highlights of issues noted above (some of these may be long fixed):
* #Problems – "poorly writteen" (2007); a mess; no definition (2012)
* #wrong from the start – confuses one particular theory of QT, with QT itself (2006); 
* #Rewrite needed – POV pushing, inappropriate tone (2007); worse than nothing, incomprehensible (8/07); inaccessible (2007)
* #Please check – needs to be rewritten (2007); German article is better (2007)
* #Confused and Poorly Written – confused and jumbled (2008); no definition (2009); showboating editor (2009)
* #criticisms – needs streamlining (2009)
* #Lede?? WTF – the lead is pseudobabble  (2010) [quotes long section which remains largely the same]; convoluted (2012)
* #Critique of queer theory section – paragraph lifted from Green paper (2011) [paragraph 2 of current version still is largely the same] 
* #long-term unaddressed problems with this article – OR tag from 2011 still there (2013) [still there now]
* #Of course it's incomprehensible! – if the definition as "post-structuralist critical theory" is correct, then that's why (2014)
* #Introduction Fails – unable to define it after reading the lead (2017) [still true]
* #Clarity, please! – needs a shorter introduction that crisply and clearly defines queer theory (Mar 2018) [still true]
* #Gobbledygook in the Criticism section – section should be blanked (2019) [just added today]
My own contribution, the last one in the list above, is only one in a long list of complaints about this article. Very possibly, it's time for WP:TNT.  I don't often think (maybe once before) that an article is worth blanking and starting from scratch, but this might be one of those cases.  I will notify a couple of lists, and top authors and TP editors here.  Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 05:58, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Rather than just talk about something theoretical and try to guess whether something that doesn't exist yet would be better than the article we have, it would be better to have something concrete to compare it to. So I'm coming up with a new draft. Will notify, when I have it ready. Mathglot (talk) 22:26, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone through a couple of paragraphs of the criticism section and attempted to remedy some of the more egregious sentences, but it's all so disorganized I agree that simply rewriting would be better. Gnomenea (talk) 00:30, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

text: I'm always a supporter of stubbification for articles like these. I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 16:39, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:   I will reply to the Rfc (see below) shortly. Only replying here, to let you know that I have no idea what you are requesting above, with your "Please notify" comment.  Btw, in reply to my own, long-ago comment: RL got in the way, and I don't have another draft, so we should proceed without it. Mathglot (talk) 07:22, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: , that's a standard request to notify me included in my signature. I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 08:27, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  TNT? Little improvement over the last decade 

message: As above, there's been concerns over this article for years, and its state before I stubbed it was complete nonsense, with no clear definition of queer theory and several contradictions, along with chronic journal spam- in fact, the entire article just seemed to be a series of nonsensical fringe theories. If someone is planning a rewrite, please make sure it doesn't become the nonsense it was before. Moneytrees🏝️Talk🌴Help out at CCI!  17:04, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: ,  for doing this. I went ahead and updated the cleanup tags. I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 21:03, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Given the inherent complexities of the topic, your apparent position that the existing article was entirely unacceptable bodes poorly for reconstructing this article. Queer theory is a category of thought - an ongoing conversation, rather than a single position within that conversation. Other articles pertaining to broad philosophical and sociological schools of thought are routinely at least this complicated, at least at face value. If this article needs to be multiple articles, that's another matter. GearheadLydia (talk) 02:27, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: I'm in agreement with , but given that  disagrees and another user has reverted Moneytrees' change, it seems like we need to reach a consensus on this. warmly, ezlev. talk 02:40, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: I've created a RfC for this issue. Please see below. warmly, ezlev. talk 02:57, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Hi . Someone added that the article needed to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards on 13th November, and that's cool, I understand the rationale. Then I noticed that you have recently deleted the page for Queer Theory and wanted people to start over with the entire article. Do you *need* to delete the article in order for the rewrite to start happening? I agree with  above, Query Theory is a relatively new category of thought that keeps evolving. As of right now, the issues raised with the article is that it contains original research, deal primarily with Western culture and do not represent a worldwide view, and the article being too technical -- none of which in my opinion stops the article from giving the reader a basic understanding of the subject at hand. I have read the Talk page and the rationale behind the TNT, but most of the criticisms there do not exist anymore except for the #Gobbledygook in the Criticism section, which I totally agree with them that we should rework that one section. Disclaimer: I am the one who restored the article, I apologize for any inconvenience caused. Conancat (talk) 02:47, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubbed 

message: Multiple users have raised concerns over serious and potentially inherent issues with this article over the past several years; this can be seen in the talk page sections above. Other users have resisted suggestions that we WP:NUKEIT, with one suggesting that the article might instead be broken up into multiple smaller articles.
Should we:
* Option 1: Make no major change to the article.
* Option 2: WP:STUBIFY the article, then recreate it.
* Option 3: Break up the article into multiple smaller topics.
warmly, ezlev. talk 02:56, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Additionally: I think my biggest concern is that, in the interim before significant additions can be effected, the stubbed version of the article was so vague as to be nearly useless, except to signal that something should be here and isn't. If we can do better than that in the interim, we probably should. Also, we should probably be considering how this article got this way before just saying "okay, time to start over". As ezlev said, if we build over a warped foundation, we're going to get consistently poor results - but I suspect the underlying warped foundation is the overly nebulous scope of this article. GearheadLydia (talk) 04:14, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:   (Struckthrough 07:35, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Please remember that "nuking" means starting over. Unlike an actual nuke, nothing is destroyed; it's all there in the history, preserved in pristine condition, just waiting for the right moment to be reused.  The "furniture" and "chandeliers" will simply be in storage for a little bit, while a proper, shining new edifice is constructed for them. No need to leave them to rot in the shabby, old one. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 06:55, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: , this is a good point, and you're right. Thanks for catching me on that. warmly, ezlev. talk 07:37, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Alright, I really don't have any remaining reasons why stubbing this article isn't a good idea; but I'm nonetheless concerned that this article is just going to end up back in the same place again if we don't have a specific idea of what we want out of the new article, or an idea of what specific problems led to the problems we're seeing now. That absolutely doesn't mean we shouldn't try anyway even if we can't pin that down, though. GearheadLydia (talk) 17:49, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  , I agree with you; random, drive-by edits to a stub, from good-faith but inexperienced editors who know little about this complex topic, could go haywire. I'd like to lay out my thoughts about how to avoid that, and steer a new stub onto the right track. Please see section "#Creation of a structured stub", below. Mathglot (talk) 02:16, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

text: , I believe I dream of horses notified several projects near the beginning of the RfC, per the small print in their comment in the survey section. warmly, ezlev. talk 17:49, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:   Oh yes, I see now; I missed that. Thanks; we'll hopefully get some more. Mathglot (talk) 19:06, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for Comment - Stub this article? 

message: * Option 2: Stubify the article, then recreate it. I have a decent understanding of what queer theory is, and this article is still very difficult for me to understand. I want a high-quality and informational article to be available for anyone who looks up queer theory on Wikipedia, as I'm sure everyone reading this does, and the unfortunate reality is that this article is neither high-quality or informational. Several of the issues with this article have persisted through several years and multiple attempted cleanups or fixes; I see no reason why that will not continue to be true if we keep attempting to build on such a warped foundation. I think the best option is to blow it up and start over. warmly, ezlev. talk 03:07, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Additionally: I think my biggest concern is that, in the interim before significant additions can be effected, the stubbed version of the article was so vague as to be nearly useless, except to signal that something should be here and isn't. If we can do better than that in the interim, we probably should. Also, we should probably be considering how this article got this way before just saying "okay, time to start over". As ezlev said, if we build over a warped foundation, we're going to get consistently poor results - but I suspect the underlying warped foundation is the overly nebulous scope of this article. GearheadLydia (talk) 04:14, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:   (Struckthrough 07:35, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Survey 

message: Whichever option is chosen, as far as taking a fresh, top-down look at the topic, I recommend considering two options: how other tertiary sources define and structure their articles on Queer theory, and also to consider the structure and scope of introductory college articles on the topic. In the case of the former, you can just check encyclopedias online or at your local library. In case of the latter, there are countless examples. Here's one, from the introductory course at the University of Massachusetts (skip to page 8 of the pdf for the course description). (I am not endorsing this course as a shining example; this was simply the first one that came up in search.) You can find many more examples of intro college courses via this search.  I think that how encyclopedias approach the topic, and how university course descriptions organize their coursework into a semester, could be a good initial proxy for how we should approach this article. Finally, I'm partial to SEP (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) when they happen to have an article about something. Unfortunately, SEP doesn't have a dedicated article about QT, but they do have a chapter on it, in the article on Homosexuality; it can be found here. Hope this helps. Mathglot (talk) 06:47, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Please remember that "nuking" means starting over. Unlike an actual nuke, nothing is destroyed; it's all there in the history, preserved in pristine condition, just waiting for the right moment to be reused.  The "furniture" and "chandeliers" will simply be in storage for a little bit, while a proper, shining new edifice is constructed for them. No need to leave them to rot in the shabby, old one. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 06:55, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: , this is a good point, and you're right. Thanks for catching me on that. warmly, ezlev. talk 07:37, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Alright, I really don't have any remaining reasons why stubbing this article isn't a good idea; but I'm nonetheless concerned that this article is just going to end up back in the same place again if we don't have a specific idea of what we want out of the new article, or an idea of what specific problems led to the problems we're seeing now. That absolutely doesn't mean we shouldn't try anyway even if we can't pin that down, though. GearheadLydia (talk) 17:49, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  , I agree with you; random, drive-by edits to a stub, from good-faith but inexperienced editors who know little about this complex topic, could go haywire. I'd like to lay out my thoughts about how to avoid that, and steer a new stub onto the right track. Please see section "#Creation of a structured stub", below. Mathglot (talk) 02:16, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

text: , I believe I dream of horses notified several projects near the beginning of the RfC, per the small print in their comment in the survey section. warmly, ezlev. talk 17:49, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:   Oh yes, I see now; I missed that. Thanks; we'll hopefully get some more. Mathglot (talk) 19:06, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discussion 

message: I think User:GearheadLydia's concern that things could go haywire again if picked up from a stub is a valid one. I'd like to propose a framework for an approach that I believe will avoid this. I think the risk of it going sideways again is highest, if we just plunk a stub out there, with no framework or vision for future expansion. Instead of doing that, we should define a structure on our own first here, and then create the stub.
Tl;dr if you want to skip the rest of this, is: go to /New framework sandbox and either create a new article stub skeleton of your own by defining and naming the section structure, or modify an existing one. We can come up with a consensus for the best one and develop it, and use that as the new stub. 
Details: My proposal, is that we leave the current article in place as is *for the time being* (a couple weeks?), and decide first, here on the Talk page, on a new article structure *before* we TNT it down to a stub, so that we all have an idea, more or less, of an agreed migration path towards a good article. 
  
By "article structure", I mean,  basically, a set of section headers and subsection headers, but with no content in them (or maximum, with one sentence, if the section title is obscure or technical, and a scoping definition is required). As examples of what I am talking about, please see example one, and Draft talk:War guilt question/French article sections. These examples have section headers, but no content; they point the way to a future article.
We can do something like that. The choice of section and subsection titles define a particular approach to a new article that we could take.  We can define this new structure here in WP:TALKSPACE, before we actually write the stub, using WP:SUBPAGEs of this Talk page to develop an approach to a new article structure, as shown in the linked examples.  And, there can be more than one approach, we can compare different approaches and pick one, or we can all contribute to one approach and try to find consensus, whatever works.
Once we have an agreed-upon skeleton framework consisting of nothing but section titles, we can proceed to the next step, which is to start adding content.  We don't have to write a complete article here, but should try to add a least one sentence per section, and one reference each. At that point, we can blow up the current article, and replace it with our new stubbed skeleton.
 
The reason for this kind of approach, rather than just blow it up and place a bare sentence or paragraph at the article now, is to address GearheadLydia's concern. Most editors trying to improve an article in good faith, will add a bit of content here or there, within the existing article structure.  If we specify that structure at the outset, then we will be providing a vision for future expansion. (Naturally, like everything else here, the article structure is also subject to change by consensus, but to the extent that three or more of us agree on an approach here now, that will establish an a priori consensus at least as a starting point, and will be resistant to arbitrary change by well-meaning newbies, while still being amenable to change by a new consensus of editors that finds something better, which is as it should be.)
How many sections/subsection should we start with? That should also be decided in talk, also. As a wild guess having done this before, I'd say around six to fifteen, and ten is a good number (the current article happens to have ten named sections). Here are the number of sections in articles on Queer theory in other language Wikipedias: ca:8, de:10, es:18, fr:7, it:5, nl:3, pt:7, ru:0 (one long stub; no sections), zh:7.
I've created a hub page (subpage of this page) at /New framework sandbox as a starting point, with some red links you can click to create an article skeleton approach that can be discussed here. Also, this is a Wiki, so feel free to work on any of them, if there are more than one. Hopefully, a few different approaches will get created by interested editors here (I'll create one of them), and then we can all look at them and either compare and see if there's one that stands out, or maybe munge a combination of one or more, as a starting structure for stub development. Then, we can start to flesh it out here in talk space with a sentence or two per section, and some references, and then move it to WP:MAINSPACE as the new stub when we all agree it's ready.  How does that sound to everybody?
I hope this approach works, but if not, please feel free to modify it, or propose another one. If you like it, next step is here: ⟶ /New framework sandbox. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:16, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creation of a structured stub 

message: There appears to be a strong consensus that this article should be stubbed until such a time that a new version of the article can be created. Is there a reason this hasn't happened yet? Morgan695 (talk) 20:48, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: To clarify, my question is specifically why the article hasn't been stubbed yet; I can see that the creation of a new version of the article is still ongoing. Morgan695 (talk) 20:49, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

text: I have just tried to stub the article, but it was insta-reverted, first by a bot, then Moneytrees with a … self-revert?! *shrug* I don't get it. Now do you want to start over or not? o_O --Wiki-Wuzzy (talk) 22:27, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: , IMO you were right to revert the bot, but why did you self-revert and leave this stuff up there? Crossroads -talk- 05:12, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: , I had second thoughts. It's one of those things where you've done something recently that you later thought was a bad idea and wish you hadn't done, so when you go to do something else you doubt yourself. Moneytrees🏝️Talk/CCI help  05:24, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Picking up stubbing question 

message: — Assignment last updated by Turnj (talk) 16:16, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Added the section on "Queering family communication." Rcc90 (talk) 18:40, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Communication Theory and Frameworks Fall 2022

message: — Assignment last updated by Beatswithbea (talk) 00:47, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: LGBTQ Reproductive Health

message: Nor is it a field of Critical Theory. Queer Theory came about from Identity Politics, and the gay liberation movement. In fact the use of the term Queer predates the origins of Critical Theory, and dates back to the drag balls of the 1900s.
There is a brief run down of Queer Theory proper here  but again, there's no mention of Critical Theory. In fact, it specifically points towards post-modernism and post-structuralism. Foucault is mentioned, but he's not actually a critical theorist - but a post-modern theorist. He is in fact on record  as saying he hadn't read The Frankfurt School critical theorists prior to the bulk of his academic work.
Is any one opposed to me changing the first sentence to describing Queer Theory as a field of Post-Structuralism, as that's a more accurate and directly related academic subject? RecardedByzantian (talk) 13:02, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Queer Theory didn't originate with Critical Theory. 

message: In detail 129.0.80.149 (talk) 06:45, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  What are the tenets of queer theory 

message: — Assignment last updated by James073 (talk) 04:07, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Intro to Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies-16