Historically, the term “queer” was a stigmatizing label that often included disabled people in its purview. A century ago, for instance, someone with a missing limb or a cognitive impairment might be called “queer.” In recent decades, sexual minorities have reclaimed “queer” as a badge of pride and a mark of resistance to regimes of the normal, mirroring the embrace of terms like “crip” and the capaciousness of the term “disability” itself. These are all political, highly contested terms that refuse essentializing meanings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the activist group Queer Nation’s chant “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was historically concurrent with the disability rights activist slogan “Not dead yet.” What the field of queer studies shares most fundamentally with disability studies is a critique of the effects of normalization on embodiment, desire, and access. “Queer” opposes not heterosexuality but _heteronormativity_—the often unspoken assumption that heterosexuality provides the framework through which everything makes sense. Before Michael Warner invented the term “heteronormativity” in the early 1990s, scholars had been working with a notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” coined by the lesbian feminist writer [Adrienne Rich (1983)](/disability-studies/works_cited/rich-adrienne/ "Rich, Adrienne."). Disability theorist Robert McRuer picked up Rich’s account...