Understanding Visibility of Queer Bodies Through Discursive and Materialist Schools of Thought

Queer bodies have had a constant and consistent struggle to be seen as valid in capitalist societies and often find themselves teetering between invisibility and hypervisibility. This essay works to analyze Rosemary Hennessy and Judith Butler’s contributions in the 1990’s to the discourse on queer (in)visibility as well as address present-day viewpoints on the issue. Hennessy’s Marxist materialist perspective that points to capitalism as the reason for invisible queer bodies is compared and contrasted with Butler’s discursive perspective which emphasizes the semantics of human language that defines our bodies. Both schools of thought are found to be critical and necessary perspectives in a modern understanding of gender politics