I often describe myself as a queer researcher, and despite the multiplicity of meanings that phrase holds for me, I am still often taken aback when people ask me to explain exactly what that means. It is a personal title as much as it is an academic and professional one. I call myself a queer researcher because my identity falls under the umbrella of queer; because many of my research subjects similarly fall under the umbrella term queer, usually in more ways than one; because I am fascinated and excited by the ways artists queer identity, challenging its supposedly stable confines. However, the answer I often give people first is that my academic focus has primarily been utilising queer theory to research queer subjects who are queering identity in their cultural outputs. But this ‘simplified’ sentence itself hides a multiplicity of meanings and definitions because what exactly is queer theory,what is queer, and what is it to queer?
Reflecting on everything queer meant to me, I became curious as to the history of the word queer and how it had taken on so many meanings, not only in my life but in our social, cultural, and academic worlds. This article looks to trace the history of the word queer and how it has come to be an adjective, a noun, a verb, an insult, an identity, a theory, a methodology, a way of life and so much more. It is undoubtedly an imperfect history. As scholars like Kadji Amin in his article “Genealogies of Queer Theory” explain, there is “intrinsic difficulty in defining queer theory” (18), let alone the word queer given its multiple meanings, usages, and pasts, all of which are deeply personal to many. For instance, it is worth considering queer’s colonial roots and legacy, with some noting the word itself does not easily travel outside Western contexts. Though I will try to tell a full story of the word, my own narrative is still limited, impacted by my social positioning as a white Western queer academic. Nonetheless, I will try to give some sense of how we have gotten to a place where queer has become such a mad-libs ace.
"Snob Queers"
From the 16th century, the word queer in English was an adjective describing something or someone weird, eccentric, or unconventional. However, in the late 19th century people started attaching the word to homosexual identities. Indeed, it is important to note that the modern idea of a set “homosexual” identity didn’t start to develop in Europe until the late 17th to early 18th centuries. To cut a very long (and much more nuanced) story short, before this period, homosexuality occurred in Europe, but it was not seen as a set identity. Rather, homosexuality was a practice one could participate in, or even a phase of life, often something done when one was young. Throughout the mediaeval and early modern period, practising homosexuality was illegal in much of Europe, but it was a practice one could get away with if kept quiet and done within certain social bounds. However, the Enlightenment’s obsession with categorisation coupled with the need to justify colonisation led Europeans to create a stream of new socio-cultural identities ranked from most to least civilised. Driven by a need to differentiate white colonisers from the colonised, settled ideas of what it meant and looked like to be straight or gay, Black or white, man or woman were developed. Such hierarchically structured binary views of identities solidified within European thinking and were violently exported globally via colonisation. A hierarchy of social identities formed, which, by the dawn of the 19th century, was taken as naturally occurring fact. With this came a strong belief that there was a right and wrong way to express one’s identity, where everyone was expected to mimic the behaviour of ‘civilised’ white men and women. Amongst these new dejected or ‘wrong’ identities was the homosexual.
The word queer’s attachment to this relatively new homosexual identity was popularised thanks to the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Wilde had sued the Marquess of Queensbury for accusing him of being a sodomite. The issue was, Wilde had been having an affair with the Marquess’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, colloquially known as Bosie, for nearly four years. The defamation suit went horribly wrong as the details of Wilde and Bosie’s long sexual affair were made public. What followed was another wildly popular public trial of Wilde for sodomy. In the court case covered by nearly every major news outlet of the time, a letter written by the Marquess of Queensbury was read aloud accusing Wilde, and other supposedly homosexual men, of being “snob queers.” The insult stuck.
Newspapers covering the trial, especially in America, rapidly picked up the phrase. Soon Americans adopted the new colloquialism beyond coverage of the trial as an easy insult to describe gays and lesbians. By 1914 the term seems to have become common parlance, travelling back to the UK. However, a 1934 dictionary entitled The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang notes that the term queer is an adjective describing a “Homosexual. Derogatory from the outside, not from within.” Additionally, letters from the period show some describing themselves as queer to denote their homosexual identification. Taken together, this suggests that while to the heterosexual English-speaking world queer was an insult, homosexuals as early as the mid 20th century were claiming the term as an identity they willingly attached to themselves without shame.
The Effect of the "Gay Plague": Reclaiming Queer
The HIV-AIDS epidemic in the 1980s fundamentally reshaped the LGBT+ community, redefining LGBTQIA+ activism as well as academia. With this came a full and public reclamation of “queer”. HIV is a viral disease transmitted through bodily fluids which overactivates a body's t-cells, those primarily responsible for fighting infection, to the point of destruction, leaving those affected extremely vulnerable to disease. At its most advanced stages, HIV becomes AIDS, at which point the immune system is nearly non-existent. HIV and AIDS made its way from Africa to the Western World as early as the late 1960s. By the mid-1980s gay men, as well as Black men and women and intravenous drug users, were dying at extortionate and disproportionate rates from the disease. The highest number of cases however, were amongst Gay men as HIV passes more easily via anal sex than vaginal. The disease quickly became known as the “Gay Plague”, and as such, was resolutely ignored by the American government with President Ronald Reagan having little interest in acting.Indeed in 1982, after 1,000 Americans had died of the disease, Larry Speakes, Reagan’s press secretary, laughed off a question by reporter Lester Kinsolving as to whether the administration planned to do anything about the disease's spread, showing just how flippantly the Reagan administration viewed the disease. Between 1981 and 1990, 100,777 deaths in the U.S. were attributed to AIDS. 59% of these deaths were gay or bisexual men, 21% were intravenous drug users. Unsurprisingly, such a massive death toll within a single community fundamentally changed the face of LGBTQIA+ organising.
LGBTQIA+ organising in America had grown exponentially in the post-war years. And by 1969 when the infamous Stonewall Riots occurred, a “Gay Liberation Movement” could be officially introduced. As its name suggests, this movement largely avoided using the term ‘queer’ or even ‘homosexual’, preferring terms like gay and lesbian. Though this movement undoubtedly had more radical edges, often pushed by people of colour, trans individuals, and others with intersectional identities, by the 1990s the mainstream Gay Liberation movement’s politics had become quite assimilatory. When the movement gained public recognition in the 1970s and 80s, it was white gay men whose voices and issues were centred, as the movement pushed for acceptance of gays and lesbians (often alone) into the normative structures of heterosexual society. Normative structures are those considered socially acceptable or ‘natural’, such as the idea that the ‘proper’ family is a heterosexual nuclear unit consisting of an active male father, passive female wife, and their children. LGBTQIA+ identities are generally non-normative, meaning they break with settled, stereotypical understandings of how male and female identity are meant to manifest. However, the mainstream gay liberation movement downplayed these non-normative characteristics by looking to mimic those of stereotypical heterosexual couples, such as the right to marry. What the AIDS movement made abundantly clear was this type of activism and inclusion would not protect gay men from the increasing violence inflicted by the state’s inaction during an epidemic ravishing their community. What emerged was a movement for Queer liberation, and the mad-lib usage of queer began.
Before this period, there were LGBTQIA+ individuals identifying as queer, as an identity marker denoting their homosexuality. This trend grew exponentially in the 1990s, with many proudly protesting as queer individuals and collectives during the AIDS epidemic. Through these organising efforts, many came to see queer as an umbrella identity under which a range of non-normative, LGBTQIA+ identities could organise. However, the term “queer” used to denote a non-normative identity was not solely limited to the LGBTQIA+ community. As Cathy Cohen notes in her seminal article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997), if queer is defined as a non-normative or ‘unconventional’ identity or social positioning, then it is not only LBTQIA+ individuals who could organise or identify with the adjective. Indeed, per her title, she denotes that “Welfare Queens”, or heterosexual Black single mothers on welfare, similarly exceed the boundaries of normative heterosexual identity by breaking the mould of the nuclear family, living without a ‘bread-winning’ patriarch. Cohen, alongside diverse activists and academics, used queer to denote not only LGBTQIA+ identities, but any non-normative identity, allowing for broader coalitional political organising under the label queer. Unfortunately, in popular parlance, the idea that queer is a term for all non-normative identities has largely been lost. Instead, today queer as an identity is often used solely to denote the umbrella of LGBTQIA+ identities, rather than any non-normative social position.
Alongside the reclamation of queer as a celebratory alternative identity came a new “queer” politics. The AIDS epidemic had clearly illustrated to the LGBTQIA+ community that assimilatory politics based largely in Civil Rights strategies of the 1960s had done little to stem the crisis of violence their community currently faced. As such, activists turned to a more radical politics, inspired by the Black Liberation Movement and radical Black scholars. These organisations, like the Black Panther’s, turned to alternative lifestyles and structures of community aid, celebrating their differences rather than looking for access to and acceptance from white society. It is here that the idea of “queer” became a verb, a type of politics one could enact rather than any set identity. In the scope of queer politics, to queer was to live outside of the bounds of the heterosexual, white, middle-class nuclear family. The goal of queer politics became dismantling the restrictive confines of a ‘proper’ identity, looking instead to celebrate ‘other’ ways of living. In other words, they looked to queer identity.
Instead of looking to gain access to the structures of white capitalist society, queer activists looked to build new structures outside of these norms. This new queer politics is summarised in brash poetics by QUASH, or “Queers United Against Straight-acting Heterosexuals”, in 1993, stating:
Assimilation is killing us. …Getting a corporate job, a fierce car and a condo does not protect you from dying of AIDS or getting your head bashed in by neo-Nazis. The myth of assimilation much be shattered…Fuck the heterosexual, nuclear family. Let’s make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression.
Thus, queer became an action, a way of living and doing politics by publicly enacting different social structures and ways of life outside socially acceptable limits. To queer was to upset or deconstruct socially accepted notions of something to open considerations of other possibilities, so to queer sexual identity was to upset the notion that heterosexuality was natural and good and everything else a perverted subversion. By the mid 1990s, queer carried a multiplicity of meanings and usages to different groups. It was a noun used to denote an identity, an adjective used to insult those thought to be homosexual, and a verb used to describe a new way of living and enacting politics.
Queer in the Academy: Queer Theory
The AIDS epidemic’s effects were not contained to activism, rippling through the academy as well. The developments occurring in the 1990s in relation to LGBTQIA+ studies and activism are largely inseparable, as many academics were also activists and vice versa. As people started identifying as ‘queer’, academics were increasingly interested in understanding identities. This was accompanied in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with the burgeoning growth of identity knowledges like Women Studies, Black Studies, and Latino Studies. By the 1990s, academics began to shift the focus of identity studies away from the confines of predefined societal groups. There was a growing understanding that by studying identities separately, those holding multiple identities or not fitting into pre-defined identity groups at all were overlooked. By the 1990s debates around these topics came to a head with the crisis of the AIDS epidemic.
So, while activists were trying to upset ideas of identity, scholars were following a similar pattern of deconstructing preset identities. A body of work quickly developed challenging predetermined identity categories, aiming to trace the mechanisms of power that constructed and enshrined normative identity while tracking methods to upset these mechanisms. This work soon came to be known as “queer theory” – largely defined by its focus on upsetting settled ideas of identity, though there are those who may still debate this definition. To understand this multiplicity, it is important to tell at least some of the genealogies of queer theory in the academy.
Traditionally, the genealogy of queer theory is traced largely to the work of three theorists: Foucault, Butler, and Sedgewick. All three scholars prompted in some way the interrogation of preset, presupposed identities, focussing on homosexuality as their case study. Paradoxically, this early focus on homosexual identities soon came to define the discipline. Indeed, queer theory in many academic circles replaced older Lesbian and Gay studies entirely, becoming a shorthand for a new identity study. To this day, this tension causes rifts amongst queer theorists who debate what exactly the focus of queer theory and queer studies should be. Is queer theory another identity-study or is it the exact opposite, a study looking to dismantle identity?.
Importantly, this is not the only genealogy of queer theory. As scholars like Amin have noted, this popular genealogy of queer theory is incredibly Euro-American centric. All three authors named are white, and their early subjects were often equally white with limited discussions around race. But another tradition of queer theory exists which does account for a myriad of social identities, often referred to today as queer of colour theory. This theory’s use of queer differs slightly from and even pre-dates the popular reclamation of the word by activists and the academy at large. People of colour in their scholarship and activism had long challenged the limits of identity, a history which has only recently been understood and claimed by the academy as an alternative origin and influence to queer theory.
Queer of colour theory was heavily influenced by the work of women of colour theorising in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, something leading scholars in the discipline like Munoz are quick to acknowledge. Many of these academics and activists were lesbians or bisexual women whose non-normative sexual identity, race, class, and gender influenced their writing. This discipline traces its genealogy back to theorists like Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, among many others. It is within this tradition of Black, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and decolonial organising that we see the first printed use of the term queer as a theoretical provocation. In a 1981 piece the brilliant Chicana feminist, writer, artist, poet, and powerhouse Gloria Anzaldúa used the term queer to denote racialised identities on the ‘borderlands’ of abjection. From this genealogy a body of queer of colour theory developed, populated by scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Sara Ahmed, Juana María Rodríguez, among many others, investigating and challenging the complex matrices of power that normalises settled identity categories.
Clearly then, understanding queer theory and the operations of queer in scholarship is no less difficult than understanding the term’s use in popular parlance. It seems no matter where you look in the English-speaking world, queer carries with it a multiplicity of meanings. So, where does that leave us?
A Queer Tomorrow?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers. Queer means many things to many people. So, perhaps all we can do is be mindful of how we use the word – to make sure we define, to the best of our abilities, the way we are using it. For me, as for many others whose history is intertwined in one way or another with the word, its meaning will likely always be personal.
Queer is a reminder of just how slippery language can be, how it can attach itself to many things, even those that are paradoxical. To many, such multiplicity of meaning can be overwhelming, confusing, and exhausting. Indeed, many activists and academics are keen to abandon the word altogether. But I see a promise in queer’s multiplicity. The very fact that the word has become so loaded with rapidly changing meaning and connotations creates a sense of hope. If a word can come to be so multi-faceted, then can we not let our identities be the same? In some ways, the history of the word queer is a metaphor for many of the things the word itself has tried to accomplish. Queer exists in fluidity, existing differently moment to moment, without ever losing its importance of continuity. In that way it is stable, it holds value and meaning even as those meanings change. I hope for a world in which we can all one day do the same.
“The future is queerness’s domain… Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” - José Esteban Muñoz (2009)
Further Reading
Amin, Kadji. 2020. “Chapter 1: Genealogies of Queer Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, by Siobhan B. Somerville, 17-29. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. “La Prieta.” In This Bridge Called My Back, by Cherríe Moraga, 198-209. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York City: Routledge. —. 1990. Gender Trouble; Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York City: Routledge.
Center for Disease Control (CDC). 1991. Current Trends Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection/AIDS -- United States, 1981-1990 . 25 Jan. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001880.htm#:~:text=From%201981%20through%201990%2C%20100%2C777,deaths%20were%20reported%20during%201990.
Clarke, Mollie. 2021. 'Queer' History: A History of Queer. 9 Feb. Accessed April 15, 2024. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/queer-history-a-history-of-queer/.
Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437-465.
Fitzsimons, Tim. 2018. LGBTQ History Month: The Early Days on America's AIDS Crisis. 15 Oct. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-history-month-early-days-america-s-aids-crisis-n919701.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality an Introduction. Edited by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York City: Vintage Books.
Hanhardt, Christina B. 2024. “Queer History Article.” Organization of American Historians. Accessed April 20, 2024. https://www.oah.org/tah/queer-history/queer-history-1/.
HIVInfo. 2023. HIV and AIDS: The Basics. 25 July. Accessed April 16, 2024. https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-and-aids-basics#:~:text=AIDS%20stands%20for%20acquired%20immunodeficiency,%2C%20illnesses%2C%20and%20certain%20cancers.
Lemmey, Huw, and Ben Miller. 2022. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London and New York: Verso.
Lopez, German. 2016. The Reagan Administration's Unbelievable Response to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic. 1 Dec. Accessed April 15, 2024. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids.
Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186-209.---. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742-759. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. n.d. Queer. Accessed April 15, 2024. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queer#h1.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City: New York University Press. —. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota.
Rodríguez, Juana María. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York City: New York University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. —. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York City: New York University Press.
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