Queer

Whereas gays may just want to be accepted like everyone else, queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into. It is an almost never acknowledged but completely central divide that has existed as long as ‘gay’ has been recognized as

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

Sometimes being queer is about all those things; they are at the heart of our history and the root of our oppression. Sometimes being queer is about being cast out; sometimes it’s about casting ourselves out, walking or running away while we still can. Sometimes being queer is about being the monster, the one who corrupts, the one who devours. Some

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.”

“A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapse

even the "straight" women are doing something that can arguably be seen as pretty "queer"

Queer ecology as an interpretive framework seeks to disrupt how heteronormative projections onto nature produce bad science. Queerness, it turns out, isn’t a rarity inside ecosystems. It is ubiquitous, from flowers to insects to fungi.

As I was coming out to myself, it was comforting to construct a narrative of childhood Otherness. The fact that I had never felt normal made radical queer politics all the more appealing. The norm was deeply flawed, not only about sexuality but at its core; we were right, and righteous, in raging against it with all our will. Queer theory, activism

autism’s queerity is often storied by means of disorientation: