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In turn, in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Cohen highlighted how the use of queer often defaulted to an understanding of power based in the binary of heterosexual versus homosexual that ignored the interplay of race, gender, and class.
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In her essay, “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay History,” Duggan noted that queer theory’s rejection of liberal humanism, progressive narratives, and the consolidation of identity often posed unwelcome challenges to a historical field that significantly relied on the assertion of minority identity and was indebted to the terms and promises of a still-new social movement.
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Two major interventions into this conversation came in 19, from Lisa Duggan, a historian, and Cathy Cohen, a political scientist, both in the pages of queer theory’s leading journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly ( GLQ). While the reclamation of the word was offered in large part as an alternative to an increasingly mainstream lesbian and gay culture and movement, activists and scholars continued to debate its use: was it a new identity, or did it denote a structure or relation? Might it refer only to sex, sexuality, or gender as distilled categories of differentiation, or might race, nation, or political economy also outline relevant norms? What was to be the relationship between social movements and academic scholarship? And given that academic queer theory was mostly associated with literary-critical approaches, where did the discipline of history fit in? īut I emphasize the word variably because queer activism and queer theory have never been one thing. Queer indexed a range of practices and identities that strayed from the ideals of the heterosexual family, be they held by so-called straight or gay people, or that stood outside a particular modern understanding of sexuality as constitutive of the self rather than as a set of situated practices. Queer activism and theory also provided an approach to what historians such as John D’Emilio or Jonathan Ned Katz argued: that sexual identities-in fact, the very idea of heterosexuality or homosexuality-are socially constructed and historically specific. In ground-breaking manifestos and theoretical texts alike-from Queer Nation’s “I Hate Straights” (1990) to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990)-activists and scholars variably offered analyses of and social alternatives to the social sedimentation of the normative terms of heterosexuality, primarily in U.S.
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The members of Queer Nation, founded in New York City in 1990, and the producers and readers of what was labeled as “queer theory” by the next year, were by no means the first to affirmatively or wryly reclaim queer, but they set the word into a new play that changed the language and the methods of both social movements and academic scholarship for years to come. Many lesbians, gay men, and those who would increasingly claim the category transgender who had felt the sting of the queer insult were quite surprised, then, to encounter the term’s reemergence in the 1990s, spurred both by a political formation of militant and creative LGBT activists and by a new cadre of academic scholars. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new social movement called for the rejection of labels such as queer and even homosexual (itself seen as pejorative and medicalizing) in favor of proud proclamations like “Gay Is Good.” It was often but not always offered as epithet and ascribed to others rather than claimed for oneself and by the twentieth century it was most commonly used for reasons of perceived sexual or gender non-conformity. Queer carried particular currency in scandal from the lingo of newspaper exposés and gossip columns to private epistolary speculation. Up through the nineteenth century the word was primarily used to mark individuals considered odd or outside social norms. HanhardtĪmong the first lessons instructors teach in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) history classes is about the changing definitions and uses of the word queer.
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Photo from the Seattle Municipal Archives () under a Creative Commons License 2.0 () Queer History Christina B.