Queer
We tell a story about queer that goes like this: Once a slur used to shame and stigmatize same-sex desire, radical LGBT activists, artists, and academics in the 1990s reclaimed it as a term of gender subversion, antirespectability, and antinormativity (J. Butler 1993b). Today, queer consolidates these dispositions and is put to use by varied people who take umbrage with binary sexual and gender identities, such as straight or gay, male or female, normal or abnormal, cisgender or transgender. Those who seek more to disturb, shatter, or undermine the heteronormative cultural order than to be included or represented by that culture and order especially claim the term (Halberstam 2011). Against “second-wave” feminist constructs of the personal as political, many use queer to stress cultural subjectivities and lives foreclosed by both dominant society’s and feminists’ imaginaries of the “personal” or the “intimate.” The feminist sex wars of the 1980s, out of which some important strands of queer theory developed, pivoted precisely on the exclusion of certain modes of gendered embodiment, sexual desire, and pleasure. And yet, however destabilizing or agonistic assertions of queerness against cultural inclusion and political representation are or appear to be, they are not always in and of...