A quote by bell hooks

As poet Brandon Wint wrote in a much-quoted social media post several years ago, “Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.”

As writer and activist Shon Faye puts it, “Queer is about removing labels and replacing them with a question. It is a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics. It says, ‘I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’”

I love queerness so much as a beautiful and belligerent tradition of people whose sense of love and beauty and justice and art and adventure and family is too expansive for the examples that were set for us. But rather than keep quiet, we insist on something truer for ourselves.”

David Halperin attempts to define “queer” in his 1997 book, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in which he argues that Foucault’s idea that sexuality is a product of discourse revolutionized gay and lesbian political activism. He describes “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in par

4 QUEER THEORY Freedom from the Normal