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1 Queer Emergenc e 1500 Dunbar Quote 1600 Unlike newly invented scientific terms, innovative marketing slogans and other words or phrases that are devised and propagated for a particular purpose, the word queer emerged from linguistic obscurity during the 1990s with no preconceived intention and with no singularly identifiable proponent. Whist the word homosexual was specifically devised in 1869 by Karoly Maria Benkert to name a new categorisation of human sexuality and the word gay was consciously cultivated during the 1970s to define a newly politicised sexual identity, the word queer had no single champion, no consistently intentioned advocates, and was often used to represent totally contradictory forms of analysis. Reflecting no singular philosophical rationale and with no officially sanctioned etymology, the word queer was simultaneously adopted by a number of apparently disassociated groups and individuals from a number of different cultural and academic spaces and had thrust upon it a whole series of meanings and 1 subtle implications. Sometimes defining the politics of outing sometimes undermining the very idea that there's a closet to come out of, the word queer simultaneously stands as the epitome of biological certainty and the total destabilisation of the very concept of the natural. In order to illustrate queer's circuitous re-emergence into popular language, the first chapter of this thesis aims to briefly sketch a rough chronology of some of the word's major contemporary uses. Starting with a few key references to the word's etymological background and its historic relationship to same sex desire, the chapter continues through predominantly focusing on the many and often contradictory deployments of the word queer during the 1990s. Reaching far beyond the confines of the increasingly established cannon of Queer Theory, the chapter aims, through providing a general introduction to some of the dominant themes most often associated with the word queer, to illustrate the various and diverse traditions that seem to have been encompassed within a single word. Simultaneously illustrating its singularity and multiplicity, the chapter demonstrates how, contained within one word, at one moment in time, dozens of seemingly disassociated discursive threads collided in the self critiquing meshwork of queer emergence. Through emphasising how the word queer is simultaneously new and yet old, how it simultaneously stands for the universal, the other and the imperceptible, this chapter aims not only to provide material and context for subsequent analysis, but it hopes to hint at some the chaotic pathways that the emergence of queer invites us to follow. Odd Stra nge Peculiar The word queer has no neatly documented queer a., n., & v.t. 1. a. strange, odd, history. Possibly related to the German word eccentric; of questionable character, Quer (meaning diagonal, slanted or disjointed), it * shady, suspect; out of sorts, giddy, faint has been recognised in English for nearly five (feel queer); sl.) drunk; (sl., esp.of man) hundred years and enjoys many interrelated homosexual; in Q~ Street, (sl.) in a definitions. As a noun it can be used to describe difficulty, in debt or trouble or disrepute; counterfeit money, a prison sentence or an hence ~'ISH a., ~'LY adv., ~'NESS n. 2. n. effeminate man. As an adjective, it can mean (sl.) (Esp. male) homosexual. 3. v.t. (sl.) singular, criminal, eccentric; or vaguely unwell. spoil, put out of order; ~ the pitch for As a verb it can mean to spoil, to put someone in person, ~ person's pitch, spoil his chances a difficult position, to confuse, to ridicule or to beforehand. [perh. f. G quer oblique (as cheat. Described at some length in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld, the THWART)]. word queer seems to have persistently described Concise Oxford Dictionary the people, places and predicaments that are found on the margins of society. In the sixteenth century for example, a queer ken was a prison, a queer bird was a convict or thief and a queer whid was a refusal, an insult or an evil word. In the seventeenth century queer suck was bad beer, a queer mort was a syphilitic harlot, a queer prancer was a poorly prized horse and a queer clout was a cheap, course or worn-out handkerchief. During the eighteenth century a queer lay was a hazardous adventure, queer gams were bowed or bandy legs, a * Technically Scots English; the most often cited first example of the word queer in the English language is actually in a poem by the Scottish Poet William Dunbar. See OED, Etc. Etc.

2 1700 queer bluffer was the owner of a dangerous or notorious ale-house, and a queer diver was a failed or bungling pickpocket. During the early part of the nineteenth century a queer chum was a suspicious companion, a queer bury was an empty purse and to queer the stifler was to avoid the gallows. A queer lully was a deformed a child, queer ogles were squinting eyes and a queer amen-curler was a drunken parish clerk. During the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, incidences of the word queer seem to have steadily decreased. According to Partridge, whilst there were nearly a hundred queer words and phrases in use at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by 1900, the vast majority had fallen out of favour and most had become completely obsolete. In spite of this remarkably rapid decline, the flavour or sense of queer has persisted through the few queer terms that have survived. Somehow passing from the language of the underworld into more popular usage, phrases such as; to be in queer street; * to be queer as a two bob note ; to feel a little queer; to queer someones pitch; and there's nowt so queer as folk, have maintained queer's strange and multiple meanings. Variously describing economic instability, criminality, illness, corruption and the generally unpredictable nature of the human condition, these few phrases encompass many of the subtle implications of queer's previous incarnations. Although the breadth and specificity of the word may have declined, much of its strangeness, peculiarity and marginality remained. 1800 A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People William Westall. - 1887 1900 According to Rictor Norton, queer's association with homosexuality emerged from the strange dark corners of eighteenth century marginality. Living, literally and linguistically, alongside queer birds, queer morts and queer bluffers, mollies and fribbles were those men who weren't really men. Described in Thomas A. King's Performing "Akimbo", the molly was a cross-dressing sodomite who frequented public houses where 'men stopped speaking as husbands, fathers, gentlemen, and labourers, and 2 pretended to speak as women'. The fribble, meanwhile, was a preening effeminate; 'a man whose conversation is equally insipid, tiresome, and teasing - a mind incapable of feeling either the great 3 and beautiful, or the simple and natural' . Although, as Norton explains, it is difficult to show that the term was used to denote a specific form of sexuality earlier than the nineteenth century, alongside criminals, prostitutes and other deviants the word queer seems to have enjoyed a long association with perverts, the effeminate and the sexually strange. According to Fabio Cleto, the word queer developed a more specifically identifiable meaning during the early part of the twentieth century. Beyond its disreputable strangeness and performative peculiarity, queer started to describe 'that creature brought forth by the nineteenth-century convergence of legal and medical discourses"[13]. Rather than merely being defined by impropriety and a lack of masculinity, the word queer started to be positively associated with a specific type of person. Drawing on Michel Foucault's insistence that the homosexual, as a personage with a past, a case history and a childhood, is a modern construction that had not existed before the middle of the nineteenth century, Cleto argues that the word queer only started to represent homosexuality when homosexuality as a philosophical possibility had started to substantially emerge. Arguing that the public spectacle of Oscar Wilde's trial galvanised ideas around sexuality and gave homosexuality a public face, Fabio suggests that during the early 1900s, the word queer became increasingly associated with Wildean dandyism, flamboyance and a certain effete disposition that he describes as camp. * Often quoted in the American form; Queer as a three dollar bill. In both cases the denomination has never existed and so the phrases implies untrustworthiness verging on the criminal.

3 1980s Some Human Oddities: Studies in the Queer, the Uncanny and the Fanatical. Dingwall, Eric John - 1947 Queer Paradigm Cindy Patton 1950 Gender Trouble Judith Butler How Do I Look? Anthology Film Archives 1990 1970 Queer People Kenneth Plummer HGFKHFKHGFHJ NGHGFHGFKHG Queer William Burroughs By the 1920s however, the word queer seems to have developed an even more specific meaning. Although it was increasingly used by a newly emerging heterosexual mainstream to define all homosexual men as foppish or fay, within the gay urban subcultures that were developing in some of the world's major cities, the word queer had a more particular meaning. Described by George Chauncey in his history of New York's gay subculture, the word queer was often juxtaposed against terms such as fairy or pansy. Whilst pansy and other similarly floral names implied effeminacy and a lack of masculinity the term queer was used to describe men who had sex with other men but who did not effect camp or female attributes. Moving assertively away from naming specifically gendered performances; the word queer started to take on some of the characteristics now most often associated with words like homosexual or gay. Disrupting the natural order that necessarily combines masculine sexuality with feminine sexuality, the queer identity that emerged amongst homosexual men during the 1920s introduced the conceptual possibility of masculinity sexually combining with masculinity. While the terms queer, fairy, and faggot were often used interchangeably by outside observers (and sometimes by the men they observed), each term also had a more precise meaning among gay men that could be invoked to distinguish its object from other homosexually active men. By the 1910 and 1920s, the men who identified themselves as part of a distinct category of men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest rather than their womanlike gender status usually called themselves queer. [Chancey pp.15-16] Citing W.H. Auden and Quentin Crisp as examples, Neil McKenna argues that the word queer 4 was being used predominantly by homosexuals as a “subcultural, elective self-description” until the 1940s and that it was not until the 1950s that the word overwhelmingly developed an oppressive or pejorative sense as it passed into more common mainstream use. In Broadcasting It, Keith Howes records the use of the word queer in films and on television and radio. Tracing its use from the 1930s onwards, he illustrates how a strange word seems to have become increasingly dangerous. Used relatively innocently or in double-entendre during the 1930s, Howes illustrates how, by the late 1940s, the word was increasingly considered 5 obscene and was often subjected to censorship. Famously used in the film Victim to indicate homophobic hatred, the word queer had, by the early 1960s, entered a twilight existence in that whilst it was increasingly becoming a term of abuse, with no readily available alternative, many homosexuals continued to use it as a familiar, if perhaps self-deprecating, term through which to identify. Queer was the universally used word, the definition of the oppressor, and the term symbolising the accepted oppression. Gay was a word chosen by, homosexuals themselves it represented the new mood among gay men and women. 6 [Jeffrey Weeks ] Following its adoption by the gay liberation movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the word gay increasingly replaced the word queer as the politically preferred sign of homosexuality. Whilst queer equated with strangeness, sickness and criminality, the word gay 7 suggested happiness and pride . Within a project aimed at combating homophobia through the development of a positive self-identity and a conscious sense of unity or even community, the word gay operated as more than a mere sign, its victory over the word queer was, in itself, a political challenge to repressive establishment morality. Amidst complaints that a once beautiful word had been stolen and corrupted by a bunch of perverts, the predominant understanding of the word Gay underwent a significant shift. As Neil Miller describes in Out Of The Past, whilst African-Americans took on the term Black to describe their new-found sense of pride and self-assertion, homosexuals adopted the term Gay to express their own sense of pride and to specifically represent themselves as more than just their sexuality. “Gay is a lifestyle. It is how we live. It is our oppression. It is our Tiffany lamps and our guns. It is our 8 history and the history we are just beginning to become.” Twenty years is a short history. Within its first two decades of liberation, it seems that the word Gay had lost much of its once revolutionary potential. Even bolstered by its Lesbian prefix and Bisexual suffix, the word Gay could not meet the demands of new constituencies

4 and changed circumstances. Internal battles within a supposedly singular gay community, continuing social discrimination, increasing governmental proscription, and the arrival of a devastating disease, had all left Gay ineffective or inappropriate. In the face of considerable suffering, an increasing number of lesbians and homosexual men started to feel that happiness, innocence and light-heartedness were perhaps not the most obvious words to use when describing their lives. Well, yes, "gay " is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we've chosen to call ourselves queer. Using "queer" is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It's a way of telling ourselves we don't have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world. We use queer as gay men loving lesbians and lesbians loving being queer. Queer, unlike GAY, doesn't mean MALE. And when spoken to other gays and lesbians it's a way of suggesting we close ranks, and forget (temporarily) our individual differences because we face a more insidious common enemy. Yeah, QUEER can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe's hands and use against him. 9 [QUEERS READ THIS ] 1990 Whilst gay politics had sought liberation through self-determination and acceptance, for people with AIDS or for victims of homophobic attacks those liberatory goals had translated into little more than a constant battle for self-survival and an accute appreciation of the pragmatic necessity of persistent invisibility. Whilst Stonewall and other lesbian and gay pressure groups continued to argue for a progressive politics of assimilation into a pluralist society, Homocult and other queer activists argued that assimilation into a family centred heterosexist society is impossible and that it is only through asserting their otherness, their queerness, that homosexuals can begin to effectively combat the social structures that oppress them. Flamboyantly spearheaded by activist groups such as 10 Queer Nation in the United States and OutRage! in Britain, the word Queer started to substantially challenge Gay's claim to political efficacy. In newspapers and magazines, on club flyers and anonymous posters, the word Queer declared the end of Gay liberation and announced that Queer was Here. Queer Deploym ent In just the past few years in much of the English-speaking world, the term queer formerly a word that nice people didn't use - has escaped the bounds of quotation marks. [Steven Epstein in Seidman p.145] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the polite use of the word queer was extremely rare. Other than a few specific examples such as Kenneth Plummer's Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Queer People, Cindy Patton's Queer Society of Northern California. 11 Paradigm and William Burrough's Queer, the word rarely appeared in academic writing or mainstream publications. As the late 80s turned into the early 90s however, the word queer started to acquire a new respectability. Alongside its aggressive deployment by Queer Nation and other street activists, the word queer was also finding new life amongst certain avant -guarde artists, film producers, video makers and academic theorists. Publicly emerging at the How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video conference that was held during October 1989 at the Anthology Film Archives in New

5 NNNNNNNNNNNN Fill in with other quotes HGHJHGFHGF QUEERS READ THIS Published anonymously by Queers 1991 Inside/Out. Diana Fuss Queer Battle Royal Neil McKenna Queer Theory - Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. Differences Summer 1991 York, this deployment of the word queer not only set queer forms of representation against the proscriptive normality of heterocentrism, but equally attacked the stifling polemic of more established forms of lesbian and gay representation. Drawing together the work of artists and theorists such as Cindy Patton, Stuart Marshall, Richard Fung, Kobena Mercer and Teresa de Lauretis, this groundbreaking conference explored and problematised many of the parameters through which lesbian and gay sexual identity had been drawn throughout the previous two decades. Contesting the anti-sex rhetoric of both the religious right and the more vocal elements of lesbian feminism, these new queer artists and theorists sought to explore the boundaries and contradictions constructed between sexual performance, the representation of health, racial difference, gender roles, pornography, censorship, and sexualised identity. Although only latterly labelled as queer, the publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble in 1989, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet in 1990, and the essays contained in Diana Fuss' Inside/Out in 1991 must also be included as founding moments in the evolution of the word queer. Although none directly employed the word, the sentiments and forms of analysis contained within these various pieces of work have subsequently come to stand as canonical works within the development of a specifically queer form of 12 theorising . Written towards the end of the 1980s, each of these pieces of work engage with, challenge and problematise the notion of an innate or otherwise permanently inscribed sexual 13 identity. In her book Gender Trouble and the essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination for example, Judith Butler is troubled by the philosophical notion that bodies are imbued with a natural or ideal sexual identity that exists beyond discourse. She ultimately argues that 'there need not be a "doer behind the deed," but that the "doer" is variably constructed in and through the deed'. 1991 In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick interrogates the liberatory potential of 14 coming out of the closet in order to personally and publicly declare one's true sexual identity. Through illustrating how the act of coming out can never be fully performed, Sedgwick not only reconceptualises the act of disclosure as a necessarily repetitive process, but, simultaneously, describes sexual identity per se as a similarly processual performance. Meanwhile, in her introduction to Inside/Out, Diana Fuss explains how categories such as heterosexual and homosexual are always defined by their reciprocal otherness and consequently can never fully escape their discursive coexistence. Like Michel Foucault, Fuss suspects that sexual liberation and oppression are, like insides and outsides, necessarily coexistent. 'What we need', she suggests, 'is a theory of sexual borders that will help us to come to terms with, and to organize around, the new cultural and sexual arrangements occasioned by the movements and transmutations of pleasure in the social field." [I]nitial debates over ‘queer’ in Britain were about semantics. Those advocating queer, and those opposing it, shadow-boxed through the dictionaries and social history books, debating 15 whether it was ‘correct’ to use the term self-referentially.” Arriving in London from New York towards the end of 1990, the deployment of aggressive in 16 your face tactics and specifically the use of the term queer as either a political banner or a personal identification became objects of intense debate. Whilst some, generally younger, gay activists considered the word to be challenging, radical and sexy, other, generally older, members of the British lesbian and gay community regarded the word as self-oppressive, th unnecessarily antagonistic and ultimately divisive. On the 17 of March 1991, the London based activist group OutRage* held a meeting to discuss the issue. "Although", according to Ian Lucas, "the meeting closed amicably, the same splits reappeared over coming months, with a series of vitriolic letters in the gay press". [Lucas 98, p.58]

6 A catoon that appeared in the Pink Paper on the xx/xxx/xx Whilst for some the word queer signalled a radical attack on homophobia, for others it marked a community in a state of self-destruction. In the pages of lesbian and gay newspapers, fierce debates took place over whether or not lesbians and gay men should use the word Queer to describe themselves. In a series of letters to the Pink Paper during 1991, for example, Chris White, a defiantly gay man, condemned the sudden popularity of the word Queer. Describing it as an act of self-oppression and an insult to other lesbians and gay men, White argued that the in your face politics of queerly identified activist groups such as OutRage and Queer Nation represented the views and political aspirations of only a very small percentage of the lesbian and gay population. …the word queer is the point where politics of language and the politics of homosexuality converge; where homosexual past, present and future collide; where the shape of all our yesterdays confronts the strategies for tomorrow. Queer is the political amphitheatre where the forces of assimilation and normalisation meet the forces of subversion and separation in hand-to-hand gladiatorial combat. 17 [McKenna ] 1992 In 1991, the summer edition of Differences featured the work of a number of lesbian and gay theorists. Edited by Teresa de Lauretis and variously critically examining the discursive construction of modern sexualised identities, these essays constitute the first collection of writings that were consciously drawn together under the title of Queer Theory. According to de Lauretis, her use of the word queer owes nothing to the politics or in your face tactics of Queer Nation. Instead, inspired by her participation at the How Do I Look? conference, she, like Butler, Fuss and Sedgwick, seeks to analyse the uncertainties or fuzziness of sexual identification. Deploying the word queer in order to establish a critical distance between her analysis and the more conventional forms of theorising that had, until the 1990s, been labelled lesbian and gay, de Lauretis argues that the essays by authors such as Sue-Ellen Case, Jennifer Terry and Elizabeth A. Grosz variously seek to problematise binaries such as Black/White, Male/Female, and Gay/Straight. In Theorizing Deviant Historiography for example, Jennifer Terry explores the binary of sexual liberation/oppression that had underscored most lesbian and gay theorising since the 1960s. Drawing on Foucault's History of Sexuality, Terry rejects the notion of a natural liberated form of sexual identity that might exist before, after, or otherwise outside the homophobic structures of contemporary capitalism. Instead, taking Foucault's genealogy and Gayatri Spivak's version of deconstruction, Terry argues for destabilisation rather than opposition. Cutting through the

7 Queer and Pleasant Danger. Louise Rafkin New Queer Cinema. B. Ruby Rich Queer with Class Homocult Lesbians Talk Queer Notions Cherry Smyth It was the Aids epidemic that caused the rehabilitation of the label "queer" Keith Alocorn GT DFFFDVDFFD DFFFDFDDF gay/straight binary, Terry rejects identity projects that seek equality in favour of guerrilla tactics that constantly search out difference, instability and uncertainty. 1992 According to B. Ruby Rich, 1992 marked a watershed year for independent lesbian and gay film and video production. In early spring, for example, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Derek Jarman’s Edward II opened simultaneously in New York and, within a few days, four further queer films including Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Gregg Araki’s The Living End, were premiered at the prestigious New Directors/New Films Festival. The queer film phenomenon was, according to Rich, introduced in 1991 at Toronto’s influential Festival of Festivals and, within a year, there was suddenly “a flock of films that were doing something new, renegotiating subjectivities, annexing whole genres [and] revising histories in their image”[FN]. The sudden success of Queer Cinema was not restricted to art house audiences or the avant-garde critics of small circulation magazines, queer cinema excited the mainstream press, mainstream film festivals and, perhaps more significantly, the mainstream box-office. As Isaac Julien explains, his 1991 film Young Soul Rebels had received a relatively poor response until, at his insistence, the film’s safely heterosexualised advertising campaign featuring “guys and gals hanging out” was replaced with “an image of the black and white boyfriends, Caz and Billibud, kissing on a bed”. While a new queer cinema flirted with mainstream popularity in the movie houses of New York and London, the word queer was simultaneously being used in Manchester to describe a vehemently anti-capitalist, anti-establishment form of political activism. In Queer with Class, an anonymous group of 'shitstabbers and shoplifters' known as Homocult advanced a version of queer that was not only opposed to the assimilatory aspirations of many established lesbian and gay pressure groups, but was philosophically opposed to any form of politics that sought to represent lesbians and gay men as a coherent social minority. Arguing that heterosexual morality is a product of capitalism and functions only in the interests of a ruling elite, Homocult sought, through their collection of montaged posters and uncompromising slogans, to disrupt, undermine and infect any social structure that contributes to the maintenance of social stability and the status quo. For Homocult therefore, queer marks any performance that disrupts the family, the nation, institutionalised politics or the authority of the capitalist market. Published in 1992 by Scarlet Press, Cherry Smyth's Lesbians Talk Queer Notions, was one of the first publications to take the re-emergence of thye word queer as its specific object of analysis. Presented as a contemporary review of queer's recent developments, Smyth's book emphasises the diverse routes through which queer has found new meaning. Describing the 1980s as dangerous days, Smyth explains how the term queer emerged in response to acts of state sponsored homophobia such as the British government's complacent approach to the AIDS epidemic, its 18 Queer with Class p. xx introduction of Clause 28 and the 19 inception of Operation Spanner . In addition to marking reaction against traditional seats of antagonistic power such as the church, the government, the medical establishment, the police, and the judiciary, Smyth argues that the word queer also signals a reaction against the censorial proscription of certain

8 1993 Queer Looks. Martha Gever et al A Queer Reader Patrick Higgins Fear of a Queer Planet. Michael Warner Queering the Renaissance Jonathan Goldberg Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot. Alan Cantwell Making Things Perfectly Queer. Alexander Doty Queer in America. Michelangelo Signorile Queer Words, Queer Images. R. Jeffrey Ringer Feminism Meets Queer Theory Differences Vol.X No.X forms of feminist analysis, the misogyny of gay male culture, and the apologetic nature of much lesbian and gay theory. Unlike previous forms of homosexual radicalism that merely sought to counter the negative stereotypes of an oppressive mainstream, the word queer appears to mark a more general mistrust of the processes through which categories are drawn and identities are assigned. 1993 In Queer Looks - Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, contributors such as Douglas Crimp, Richard Fung, Martha Gever, John Greyson, Kobena Mercer and Pratibha Palmer critically examine the representation of identities that are produced and performed at the intersection of many different histories or traditions. In That Moment of Emergence for example, Pratibha Palmer explores the problems and opportunities presented by being, simultaneously, female, Asian, lesbian and English. Whilst she clearly illustrates how her skin, gender and desire have been used to mark her as an outsider, she, specifically and purposefully refuses to adopt otherness as a politicised identity. 'I do not speak from a position of marginalization but more critically from the resistance to that marginalization'.[5] In Dark and Lovely: Black Gay Men in Independent Film, Kobena Mercer uses the term queer as a means of problematising the reductive formulations of identity that are produced by the 'right-on rhetoric of "race, class, and gender"'.[239] Arguing that 'we very rarely ever belong exclusively to one homogeneous and monolithic community'[240], he questions the validity and efficacy of constructing a politics around one or other categorical identity. Arguing that social identities are the product of history rather than nature, Mercer, like Palmer, resists the temptation of speaking as a black gay man, but seeks instead to take the very process of identification to task. Taking inspiration from films such as Tongues Untied and Looking for Langston, he argues that performance should not be confused with essence. 'I want to emphasize that these rich, provocative, and important works do indeed "make a difference" not because of who or what the filmmakers are, but because of what they do, and above all because of the freaky way they do it.' [255] For the new radical theorists, the enemy is no longer a ruling class, a hegemonic race or even a dominant gender. Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself. Oppression lies in the very idea of the "normal," the order that divides humanity into two sexes. Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender free world. Queer revolution is thus the ultimate subversive project: It proclaims not only the death of Society's God, but of Nature's Law [David Horowitz] During 1993, in both Britain and the United States the word queer started to appear in academic papers and book titles with increasing regularity. Throughout its various deployments the word continued to signal a variety of philosophical and political possibilities. Whilst David Horowitz, for example, equates the term with a complete denial of identity, Michelangelo Signorile, one of the founders of Queer Nation, uses the term to describe an absolute identity that has "no right to the closet" [363]. In Making Things Perfectly Queer, Alexander Doty uses queer in a general sense as an "umbrella term" [xviii] to include gay, lesbian and bisexual positions, but also deploys it in a specific sense to describe non-straight readings or writings of texts that are cross-gendered, undeclared, unconscious or in some other way escape the boundaries of terms such as lesbian or gay. In Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner suggests that the term has allowed for a critical academic space beyond the expectations of institutionalised lesbian and gay studies. Rather than necessarily replacing other labels such as lesbian and gay, he argues that the term facilitates a broader critique of 20 the normal and allows for the production of queer theory rather than just theory about queers. Meanwhile, in Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler suggests that queer should be thought of less as a word that means something and more as a thing that does something. Never owned or fully defined by any particular constituency, queer has no true or authentic meaning. Switching and changing direction, it insights reactive anger as often as it inspires political action and radically troubles the political rationales through which identities and their labels are constructed. 'The political deconstruction of "queer" ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range, to make us consider at what expense and for what purpose the terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have been wrought.' [229]

9 "Queer" seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person's undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which "queer" can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes - all it takes - to make the description "queer" a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person. [Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick p.9] 1994 The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde, Effeminacy and the Queer Movement. Alan Sinfield Cultural Politics-Queer Reading. Alan Sinfield In her 1993 book, Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick introduces a new topic she had then just started working on, ‘it is still a series of hunches and overlaps; its working name is Queer 1 Performativity.’[11] Drawing on J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words , Sedgwick’s concept of queer performativity specifically relates to those words and phrases that ‘actually perform the actions they name’ [11]. It questions the authority that underlies those phrases and explores how they impact on the discursive construction of genders and sexualities. In Bodies that Matter, Butler explains that ‘Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power’[225]. According to Sedgwick and Butler, in phrases like “I thee wed”, “I pronounce you…” or “I sentence you”, the “I” that appears to perform the act cannot be unproblematically decoded as the action’s subject. Instead, the judge, priest, doctor etc. speaks on behalf of a larger pre-existing authority that both enables the “I” to speak in the first place and that is subsequently reasserted and reassured with every repeated use of the performative speech act. In Performativity and Performance, Sedgwick explains how silenc es can also operate as performative acts. At a marriage ceremony the priest invites the congregation to speak now or forever hold their peace. In that context, silence implicitly binds all present, not only to the legitimacy of that specific coupling, but also to the legitimacy of heterosexual coupling per se and, moreover, the authority of religion and/or state to privilege some relations over or against others. 1994 FILL IN WITH QUOTES FROM OTHER BOOKS Queer performativity emphasises the performance over its actors. It emphasises events over intentions, effects over meanings, and production over producers. Although writers such as Sedgwick and Butler have endowed the term with specific literary or philosophical significance, the general ideas suggested by queer performativity might equally be applied to many other instances and circumstances where the relationship between agent and object, whilst appearing to be settled, unexpectedly remains open to fresh critical analysis. During 1994, the word queer was used by a number of authors to emphasise performance over meaning or authenticity. In Safer Sexy for example, Peter Tatchell argues that, from within the context of an HIV epidemic, sexual morality does not flow from the meanings that may or may not be attached to particular forms of sexual performance but from the mechanics of avoiding 21 the transmission of bodily fluids. In Male Impersonators Mark Simpson explores many of the contemporary rituals and performances through which particular bodies are inscribed with masculinity. Arguing that these performances are both historically and culturally bound, he explains how, in a post industrial society, performing masculinity is becoming more obviously a performative drag. Similarly, in her book Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein argues that gender is not a once and for all, but must be nurtured and constantly reinforced. Juxtaposing her Bar Mitzvah with her genital reassignment surgery, she reveals that whilst both becoming a man and becoming a woman were notionally marked by specific performances, gender is never fully or sufficiently inscribed by any one act or specific performance but must be persistently re-inscribed. In Politics and Poetics of Camp, Moe Meyer uses the word queer to describe the socially disruptive tendencies of camp performance. To confuse camp with flippant, or queer with frivolous, is, according to Meyer, both an expression of heterosexual domination and an opportunity for queer resistance, transgression and infiltration. Whilst it mistakes a specific form of parodic performance for mere surface, it lulls an unsuspecting heterosexual world into 1 Austin, John Langshaw, How to do Things with Words. The William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. [Edited by James O. Urmson.] pp. vii. 166. Clarendon Press: London, 1962.

10 complacency and provides queers with a route for attack. Referring to Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, Meyer insists that through it’s heterosexualisation and appropriation by artistic movements such as Pop, “camp became confused and conflated with rhetorical and performative strategies such as irony, satire, burlesque, and travesty” [7]. Transformed from homosexual parody into the empty gestures of kitsch or schlock, Meyer argues that camp-as-critique was not only lost during the 1960s, but was stolen, cleansed and re-appropriated through the dominating processes of heterosexual discourse. Its queer subject was erased and replaced by nothing more than superfluous nonsense. Rejecting the possibility of any retro-strategies or tit-for-tat battles of reclamation, Meyer suggests that camp, now liberated from its subject and free to circulate amongst straight minds, operates more like a viral infection than a political opposition. Disguised as a harmless bit of fun, camp performance re-members its queer inspiration and, now independently, continues to disrupt and irritate the serious agendas of hetronormativity. For Meyer, camp, through its popularisation “becomes the unwitting vehicle of a subversive operation that introduces queer signifying codes into dominant discourse” [13]. 1995 Queer Noises. John Gill State of the Queer Nation. Chris Woods Cassell's Queer Quiz Book. David Pollard Cassell's Queer Companion. William Stewart Queer by Choice. Vera Whisman A Queer Romance Paul Burston and Colin Richardson What Are YouLooking At? Paul Burston Inqueery/Intheory/Indeed. GLQ Vol.2 No.4 Must Identity Movements SelfDestruct? A Queer Dilemma. Joshua Gamson Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Emile L. Bergmann Paul Julian Smith Barbie's Queer Accessories. Erica Rand While American theorists like Doty re-read I Love Lucy and uncovered queer sentiments in Laverne and Shirlie, on the other side of the Atlantic, British academics were similarly queerly analysing culturally dominant texts for new meanings and radical readings. In 1994 for example, Alan Sinfield published two books on queer meaning. In The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde, Effeminacy and the Queer Movement, Sinfield argues that whilst Oscar Wilde's effeminate manner, his plays and camp humour now stand as iconic moments in the development of a specifically gay style or sensibility, evidence of Wilde's queer status cannot be drawn directly from either text or author. Through arguing that the relationship between 22 effeminacy and homosexuality is a predominantly twentieth century phenomenon , Sinfield suggests that Wilde's irrefutably queer credentials could only ever appear through the subsequent interaction of texts and contemporary culture. Previously, he argues, the production of camp humour and the projection of a flamboyant personality were not necessarily associated with a particular sexual appetite. It is only through the contemporary association of kitsch irony with an identifiably gay sensibility that Wilde becomes, latterly, unmistakably queer. Meanwhile, in Cultural Politics - Queer Reading, Sinfield explores the relationship between mainstream and slipstream cultural production. Whilst he celebrates the creative potential of particular subcultures identified by race, gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality, he is concerned that these sites of resistance may simultaneously be sites of regulation. Side-stepping the ghetto philosophy that neatly separates otherness and normality, Sinfield actively pursues the queer in the normal. Through queerly reading Jane Austen's Persuasion and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Sinfield destabilises the monolithic mainstream and reveals its eddies, undercurrents and moments of turbulence. Although the re-emergence of the term queer may have started on the street, amongst the marginalised and through the avant -garde, by 1994 the queer label had substantially started to reach out beyond the art house, the academic paper and the activist's banner. Described by Sue-Ellen case in her keynote paper to the Queering the Pitch conference in Manchester as accompanying "the swift and complete commodification of lesbian and gay politics", the term queer appears to have started marking commerciality and capitalist success as often as it marks countercultural radicalism or socialist critique. Used by Stephen Whittle in The 23 Margins of the City to describe the commercialisation of Manchester's Gay Village , the term queer often seems to characterise a form of post-modern assimilation wherein cultural difference is reduce to bland peculiarity. Within three years of initially advancing the radical possibilities of the term queer, Teresa de Lauretis specifically sought to distance herself from a term that she believed had 'very quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the 24 publishing industry'. 1995 If, as Case suggests, the commercial success of the term queer needs to be regarded with 25 some caution, then, as Kath Weston argues in Theory, Theory, Who's got the Theory, Queer Theory's passage into the academe should equally be approached with a degree of circumspection. Pointing out that the production of theory can be criticised from the right as dogmatic and from the left as elitist, Weston suggests that the question should not be about whether one theorises, but how one theorises. Drawing a distinction between straight theorizing and street theorizing, Weston argues that queer theorists should guard against

11 becoming established; queer theory should remain activist based and ultimately troubling. 'The point is not to treat street theorizing as "raw data" that remains TBE - to be explained but to approach street theorizing as a wellspring of explanatory devices and rhetorical strategies in its own right'. [p.349]. During 1995 at least two dozen books were published under the title of queer and many others deployed the newly fashionable word to various ends. Some, like Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice, David Feinberg's Queer and Loathing or Chris Woods' State of the Queer Nation, specifically explored aspects of queer theory, activism and politics. Others, however, appear to deploy the term ambivalently or intend it to be directly synonymous with more conventional labels such as homosexual or lesbian and gay. In Queer Noises for example, John Gill invites Queercore bands like Sister George, the Pet Shop Boys, Benjamin Brittan and even Elvis Presley under a queer umbrella. In Our Tribe : Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible, the Rev. Nancy Wilson of the Metropolitan Community Church advances a queer theology that promises to unite Christians of all sexual persuasions. In Queer Spirits, Will Roscoe celebrates a specifically gay male sensibility and in Cassell's Queer Quiz Book , readers are offered a year's worth of vaguely gay, kitsch or camp questions about lesbians, gay men and just about anything else that might be used to fill the gaps in between. By 1995 queer's constant redeployments had extended its meaning to include almost anyone; according to Zoe Scram-Evans, it was even possible to be simultaneously heterosexual and queer. Until recently 'queer' was used as a term of abuse against gay men, like 'pansy' or 'fag'. In the 1990s it has been 'reclaimed' by gay men and lesbians and it is now most frequently used as an umbrella term for 'alternative', and implies anyone or anything not 'straight'. Heterosexual people can therefore be queer too, provided their lifestyles or sexual practice are not 'straight'. So, for example, a heterosexual couple seriously into sub/dom, SM or threesomes could be very queer indeed! 26 [Zoe Scram-Evans, p.72] Apparently appearing from nowhere during the early 1990s, the sudden emergence of the Internet shares many similarities with the popular re-emergence of the term queer. Both phenomena have roots in the Cold War inspired protectionism of the 1950s and 1960s, both evolved in various unseen locations during the 1970s and 1980s and both emerged suddenly and unexpectedly during the first few years of the 1990s. In a series of essays published during 1995 writers such as Jesse Dallas Dishman, Randall Woodland and Allison Fraiberg specifically associate the word queer with the development of new sexualised spaces and potentially new forms of sexuality on the Internet. In Digital Diva: Defining Queer Space on the Information Superhighway for example, Dishman explains how the Internet provides queers with the opportunity to infiltrate and corrupt straight spaces. In Queer Spaces, Modem Boys, and Pagan Statues, Woodland describes how the Internet facilitates the construction of sexualised spaces that escape the traditional inside/outside dichotomy. Similarly, in Electronic Fans, Interpretive Flames: Performative Sexualities and the Internet, Fraiberg describes the post-modern fluidity with which both users and sites on the Internet can develop new and often unexpected sexual identities. In Birth of the Cyberqueer, published by the Modern Language Association of America, Donald Morton also draws a direct correlation between the development of the Internet and the deployment of the word queer within academic discourse. However, unlike more utopian visions of queer cyberspace, Morton suspects that the birth of the cyberqueer might not so much signal the collapse of bourgeois morality as mark its remarkable ability to evolve and meet the demands of changed circumstances. 1996 During 1996, the growing academic respectability of Queer Theory was emphasised by the publication of a number of queer readers and anthologies that variously sought to position Queer Theory within or in relation to more established canons such as political science, sociology and cultural studies. In Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories for example, Shane Phelan explores the interplay between traditional forms of lesbian and gay political theorising and Queer Theory's problematisation of the subject. Meanwhile, in Queer Theory/Sociology, Steven Seidman aims to construct a useful dialogue between the conceptual creativity of Queer Theory and the empirical materiality of sociology. Suggesting that the two disciplines have much to learn from each other, he argues that the development

12 of 'hybrid knowledges or social knowledges that are interdisciplinary and, at times, "postdisciplinary" (i.e. more public-centered than academic-centered) is perhaps urgent today in a world of multiculturalism, hybrid identities, and globalization'.[24] Similarly, in The Material Queer, Donald Morton endeavours to position Queer Theory within a cultural studies tradition that recognises the materiality of society as well as the text. Arguing that Queer Theory's engagement with other disciplines had been minimal, he proposes a Queer Critique that should not only facilitate a 'critique of the non-queer world from the inside of the queer'…'but also a critique-al resituating of the queer itself in relation to the larger social and historical series of which it is a part.' [p.26] 1996 A Queer Companion. Charles F. Fosberry Shakepeare's Queer Children. Kate Chedgzoy The Material Queer. Donald Morton Playing With Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Shane Phelan Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. Simon LeVay Dangerous Bedfellows Pop Out - Queer Warhol. Jennifer Doyle A Queer Geography. Frank Browning Queer Science. In a series of essays and articles published collectively as It's a Queer World in 1996, the social commentator Mark Simpson uses the word queer to describe a world where distinctions such as male/female, gay/straight and active/passive had become increasingly difficult to call. According to Simpson, structural changes in the workplace, the development of effective forms of contraception and the collapse of the nuclear family have variously contributed to significant changes in the roles of men and women. Breadwinners are no longer necessarily male, sex symbols are no longer necessarily female, and marriages are rarely made in heaven. With lesbian chic promoted by commercial organisations and gay iconography constantly featured in the pages of fashionable magazines, Simpson insists that 'It's a Queer old world and getting jolly queerer all the time.'[p.1] During the early 1990s, while a strongly anti-essentialist version of queer theorising was being developed by Judith Butler, Theresa de Lauretis and Michael Warner, a very different form of queer knowledge was beginning to emerge at the Salk Institute in San Diego. First published 27 in Science in 1991 and subsequently developed in The Sexual Brain in 1993, Simon LeVay's discovery of a specifically homosexual neurology finally emerged as Queer Science in 1996. Through combining his own research with Dean Hamer's discovery of a so-called gay gene in 1993, LeVay argues that after more than a hundred years of variously intentioned scientific research, contemporary biological techniques were finally able to demonstrate that, for at least some people, homosexuality is, like skin pigment or hair colour, a naturally occurring human trait. 'The biology reinforces what gay people know about themselves: that their homosexuality is an integral, defining aspect of their being and that an assault on their homosexuality is an assault, not just on their behavior, their rights, or their pride, but on their very selves'. [295] In Blending Genders, writers such as Mark Rees and Stephen Whittle also explore the interplay of gender, sexuality, biology and science. Unlike LeVay's thesis which interprets the scientific presentation of biology as objectively revealing the ultimate truth of gender and sexual orientation, the essays contained within Blending Genders are unable to reach such confident conclusions. In Becoming a Ma n for example, Mark Rees talks about the remarkable elasticity of the gendered body. Certificated as female at birth, King explains that whilst becoming a complete man is practically impossible, physically becoming a non-woman is remarkably easy. 'The action of the Loren's Self-portrait hormones was almost immediate. A couple of weeks later I had my last period and within a month or so people began to notice a change in my voice… Although the growth of my facial hair took much longer, I was surprised by the rapidity of the changes generally.'

Queer Spirits. Will Ruscoe 13 Queer Studies. Brett Beemyn [30] In Gender Fucking or Fucking Gender?, Stephen Whittle, suggests that Loren Cameron's self-portrait can be interpreted as 'a complete education in the current position of gender blending in the world of queer theory.' [211-2] Drawn at the intersection of biology, surgical manipulation, bodybuilding and tattoo, Cameron's naked body passes as neither male nor female. According to Whittle, it does not blend two pre-existing genders, but troubles the observer's ability to confidently recall the parameters through which gender is defined. 1997 The relationship between sexuality and personal identity was elaborated further in 1997 through a number of books that dealt specifically with queer spirituality and religion. In Queer Dharma for example, Winston Leyland explores the relationship between homosexuality and Buddhism and in Religion is a Queer Thing, Elizabeth Stuart advances a queer approach to Christianity as she describes the emergence of a new form of queer theology during the early 1990s. With contributions from Rabbi Lionel Blue, Reverend Richard Kirker, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Peter Sweasey's From Queer to Eternity explores how sexuality and spirituality are variously accommodated, negotiated and celebrated within non-theistic traditions as well as more institutionalised forms of religion. Similarly, in Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit, the concept of queer spirituality encompasses folklore, fairy tales and legends as well as more conventional forms of sacred text. Through combining paganism and shamanism with dance and film under an amorphous queer label, Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit presents queer sexual and spiritual desire as local or culturally specific yet simultaneously transhistoric and universal. Queer Theory/Sociology. Steven Seidman Too Queer. Victoria A. Brownworth It's a Queer World. Mark Simpson Queer Bashing. Angela Mason The Queer Cookbook. Donna Clark and David Shenton 1997 From Queer to Eternity. Peter Sweasey Novel Gazing - Queer Readings in Fiction. Eve Sedgwick Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit. Randy P. Conner et al. Alongside spirituality, the term queer was also used during 1997 to describe the construction of urban spaces, architectures and neighbourhoods. In books such as Queer Space by Aaron Betsky, and Queers in Space by Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette and Yolanda Retter, the term queer was deployed in various ways to describe sexual identities, sexualised spaces, and the complex political, psychological and economic dynamics that run between the two. In Queer and Gendered Housing for example, Bouthillette argues that the relative ability of lesbians and gay men to define the sexual identity of particular neighbourhoods reveals the cultural and socio-economic multiplicities that exist within the term queer. In Constructing Manchester's "New Urban Village", Stephen Quilley describes how a politically defined gay space in Manchester evolved into a commercially defined queer space and how that evolution in part defines the parameters through which lifestyles and sexual identities are constructed. In Having Something to Wear: The Landscape of Identity on Christopher Street, James Polchin specifically explores the intricate feedback loops that exist between the production and consumption of sexually identified spaces and bodies. Rather than interpreting Christopher Street as the product of political resistance, the product of twentieth century commercialism, or the product of Victorian architecture, Polchin argues that queer sites, like queer bodies, can never be traced to a specific cause or a particular author. Instead queer spaces can only ever be interpreted as locales of dynamic process and productive tension. Simultaneously produced as they are consumed, queer spaces, bodies and identities are defined by process rather than location. Queer history is about queer experience, not about straight attitudes; queer history is about love among queers, not about laws against queers; queer history relies more on information from queers than information about queers. [Norton p.132] In his 1997 book, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, Rictor Norton takes exception to the authoritative status that Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality seems to have amongst many contemporary Queer Theorists. Refuting the notion that the homosexual might be a modern invention, he insists that 'historical research tends to support the essentialist position that queer desire is congenital and then constituted into a meaningful queer identity during childhood.' [14] Condemning Foucault’s work as “slovenly” [71], Norton argues that a "Queer History properly considered is the attempt to recover the authentic voice of queer experience rather than simply to document suppression or oppression." [11] Whilst Foucault argues the purpose of history, "is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation" [Nietzsche Genealogy, History. Foucault Reader p95], Norton warns that "queers can be trapped by a historical straitjacket unless we believe that not all forms of our past are

14 products of colonization, but that some constitute part of a genuine authentic self or core". [132] 1998 During 1997 and 1998, the academic status of queer theorising was analysed in a number of books including Academic Outlaws by William Tierney, Queer Theory in Education by William Pinar and Inside the Academy and Out by Janice Ristock and Catherine Taylor. In A Queer 28 World Martin Duberman describes the term queer as marking a 'rapidly emerging field of inquiry'[3], and in American Homo, Jeffrey Escoffier specifically associates the term with significant developments within the field of lesbian and gay studies. Taking Escoffier's account for example, he argues that '[until the mid-1980s, knowledge production and intellectual activity about lesbian and gay life largely took place outside the university' [100], and suggests that the emergence of the term queer during the 1990s marks the formal institutionalisation of lesbian and gay theorising within universities and other centres of knowledge production. For Escoffier, the term queer marks two distinct generations of lesbian and gay academic. The first, emerging from what he describes as the 'euphoria of Stonewall' [105], were forced to fight hard to gain tenure at, usually, less prestigious universities, and largely remained dependent upon a wider lesbian and gay community for intellectual and commercial support. The second, emerging towards the end of the 1980s from the maelstrom that became Queer Theory, were, he argues, more likely to occupy secure positions within elite institutions. With research funding and status assured, Escoffier suggests that, no longer reliant on community support, many of these new professionally queer academics may have lost touch with the lived experiences of most lesbians and gay men. While visible differences contest a stifling regime of sameness, they also problematize identity politics which often rest upon notions of commonalties and stable identities. Lesbian identity politics, for example, were organized around the concept of an essential, common difference of sexual identity upon which political communities could be built. Investigating differences challenges the essentialism of these lesbian identity politics. It seems clear that it is partly from this complication of lesbian and feminist identity politics around issues of difference that queer politics and theory have grown. 29 [Laura Harris and Liz Crocker, p.93] 1998 Whilst influential thinkers such as Mary McIntosh have suggested that queer theory can operate as a positive supplement to other forms of gender analysis and “provides a useful critique of the heterosexual assumptions of some feminist theory”, others like Julia Parnaby have interpreted Queer as a depolitisation of feminist theory that “fails seriously to address the ways in which men oppress women” [9]. Queer girls are, according to Laura Harris and Liz Crocker, Bad Girls. They are those women who, despite their knowledge of the oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy, persistently choose to conduct their lives beyond the strictures of political feminism. They are those lesbians who enjoy the butch-femme aesthetic and those dykes who play with sadomasochism, they are those women who used to be men, those men who used to be women and those lesbians who switch to mix and match. Sometimes used to describe energising developments within feminist thought, sometimes used to described a new form of self oppression, the word queer enjoys a multiply informed and often confusing relationship with feminist theory. Queer girls are those women who, according to Sheila Jeffreys, are in danger of “embracing their oppression with slavish obedience and compulsive 30 repetition” , and yet they are the same women who, according to Sue-Ellen Case, provide 31 feminism with “precisely the strong subject position the movement requires” . Depicted in Della Grace’s photography [ref] and Pat Califia’s accounts of Public Sex [Ref], they are women who celebrate their right to be different and yet they are, according to Laura Cottingham, those women who are silenced and erased 'under the masculine referent offered 32 by "Queer" '. In 1998, Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright edited a collection of essays that variously explored the uneasy relationship between feminist and queer forms of theorising. Entitled Coming Out of Feminism, the book not only uses the term coming out as an obvious reference to themes of sexual liberation, but, as the authors explain, it also uses the term to indicate two alternative visions of how feminism and queer theory might relate to each other. The first, using the term coming out in order to express emergence, development and growth, suggests that queer theory was born of feminism and inherited many of its activist

15 characteristics and intellectual premises. Consider for example the Guerrilla Girls who, drawing their inspiration from the suffragette movement, had, since the mid 1980s, engaged in highly stylised acts of public subversion and ironic deconstruction. The second, using the term coming out to suggest supersession and divergence, emphasises difference rather than commonality. Drawing feminism as 'older, but not necessarily wiser'[3], than queer theory, this second version of coming out of feminism conceives of queer theory as critique rather than supplement. As intimated by the violently diverging opinions of Jeffreys, Parnaby, Harris and Crocker, the concept of queer coming out of feminism has often been represented and rehearsed in voices and themes of confrontation. In Coming Out of Feminism however, the editors suggest an alternative analysis. Describing queer as a complex emergent phenomenon, they argue that the points of friction that lie between the two fields of study need not be dismissed as destructive backbiting, but might instead be viewed as stimulating moments of creative potential. 1999 While Merck et al were exploring how certain strands of feminist thinking may or may not have contributed towards a queer theory of sexuality, the performer, theorist, and occasional bad girl, Kate Bornstein was innovatively exploring the chaotic routes through which the biological sciences might point towards a queer understanding of gender performance. Science has not usually been associated with queering the concept of gender. Quite the opposite, scientific forms of analysis First produced in 1985, the TITLE represents something or other of the Guerrilla Girls have traditionally been productive output. Tactics of subversion, infiltration and corruption were subsequently adopted by Queer activists. If there is room for something else associated with the enforcement of a strict gender division. Described by Foucault as the basis of a specifically western conception of sexuality, the doctrines espoused by the rational sciences have overwhelmingly tended to explain the naturalness and inevitability of a world divided neatly and completely in two. In My Gender Workbook however, Bornstein emphasises the existence of slipstreams within the mainstream. Arguing that scientific enquiry cannot be regarded as a monolithic evil, she demonstrates how 33 biological research is able to identify gender confusion as well as gender conformity. 34 Drawing on the recent deployment of Chaos Theory within the more heretic strands of scientific theorising, she argues that the study of gender, like the study of weather patterns or the evolution of viral epidemics, cannot take place in a vacuum. Moving beyond and explicitly critiquing the traditional scientific techniques of extraction and isolation, Bornstein argues that the study of gender can only meaningfully take place within the noise of its own production. Very few physical scientists factor in age, race, the economy, beauty and ugliness, and all the other factors that truly make up gender. And no old-guard scientists that I know of as this writing has taken the politics of choice into account: not a bit. So, while science may in fact have some very good notions about parts of gender, to date there is no scientific theory that explores gender as part of a system. And that is simply what gender is turning out to be; part of a system. [Bornstein, p.119] 1999 Until the turn of the 1990s very few nice people used the word queer. From 1990 onwards however, the word queer seems to have become a publishers' as well as a theorists' favourite. During 1999, alongside dozens of books, academic papers and arts festivals the

16 word queer continued to name increasing numbers of Internet sites, dance clubs, magazines and in February named a new Channel Four drama set in Manchester's gay village. Ten years on from its first eruptions on the streets of New York, the word queer continued to be used in a wide variety of settings and with at least as many inferences and implications. Amongst the books published during 1999 for example, the word queer was used to name 35 36 themes ranging from popular detective fiction to Wittgenstein's eccentric philosophy . It was 37 used to describe a critique of the nuclear family , a guide to the lesbian and gay press/ 38 39 40 publishing industry and histories of homosexuality in Spain , Russia and the Southern 41 States of America . In Camp - Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, Fabio Cleto discovers strong parallels between the sign of camp and the sign of queer. Arguing that ‘the two terms have in fact shared the critical stage we might say, since their very coming into (discursive) being’[12], Cleto explains how both words enjoy fuzzy and disputed etymologies, both operate as noun, adjective and verb, and both point toward the parodic, the inauthentic and the sceptical. Queer thinking thus promotes a sabotage - or, in an appropriate British English phrasing, a stonewalling - of the manifold binarisms (masculine/feminine, original/copy, identity/difference, natural/artificial, private/public, etc.) on which bourgeois epistemic and ontological order arranges and perpetuates itself. [Cleto,15] In Foucault and Queer Theory, Tamsin Spargo explicitly places Michel Foucault as a, if not the, primary intellectual inspiration behind Queer Theory. Citing Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Halperin, Moe Meyer and Teresa de Lauretis as some of the key initiators of Queer Theory, Spargo argues that the queer suspicion of identity categories is drawn directly from Foucault’s historicisation of the classification of sexual desire. In Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, Calvin Thomas explores his simultaneous allegiances to the labels heterosexual and queer. Male heterosexual identity is, according to Thomas, a delicate construction that cannot survive without being constantly bolstered through exact performance. The wrong clothes, the wrong way of walking, the wrong job or the wrong sympathies can mark a man as less than a man. For Thomas, the fear of being different and the fear of potentially being mistaken for a queer robustly police the boundaries of heterosexual masculinity. Although Thomas privileges same-sex desire as the most effective critique of heteronormativity, he ventures the possibility that queerness may not merely be a matter of sexual desire. Rather than being defined by a sexual partner, queerness could be about the risk of being ambivalent, confusing, strange or in some other way unidentifiable. In The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner specifically defines queerness beyond sexual desire. Written partly in response to Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually 2 Normal, Warner’s book critiques the contemporary idea of normality and argues that queerness is about exposing and challenging those discursive binaries that endeavour to present the world in terms of good and evil, healthy and sick, or normal and abnormal. One of the reasons why so many people have started using the word “queer” is that it is a way of saying: “We’re not pathological, but don’t think that for that reason that we want to be normal.” [Warner 1999, p.59] Queer Themes. When the word queer was first adopted by activist groups in the UK during the early 1990s, it was deployed to indicate a critical distance from those theories and forms of politics that had, over the previous twenty years, been associated with, the words lesbian and gay. For many queer theorists and activists, queer was a response to a form of identity politics that had either become paralysed by internal battles, stifled by political correctness or else overly obsessed with the need for mainstream recognition. According to commentators such as Keith Alcorn for example, the word queer marked the potential re-ignition of the sort of radical sexual politics that had given rise to the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Front during 2 For Warner, “normal” technically describes a statistical distribution of deviations. Its current populist equation with an ideal is the result of a nineteenth century commitment to a biblical good and evil and the conviction that modern statistical methods would scientifically reveal those inevitable distinctions.

17 the early 1970s. When I first started this piece of research, my aim was to explore this rediscovered radicalism and define the meaning of queer. As illustrated above, that task proved to be impossible. Whilst it was certainly used by some activists as a critique of the assimilatory tendencies within more established forms of lesbian and gay politics, for others the word queer merely operated as a simple synonym for “lesbian and gay” and for others still, queer was used to mark theories that fundamentally problematised the very possibility of politically organising around sexualised identity. Although coalescing around the early part of the 1990s, the re-emergence of the word queer into popular vocabularies cannot be easily decoded as a singular event with a specific cause or a particular aim. Instead, queer appears to present multiple meanings, significances and effects that are variously and discretely informed by the specifics of location, constituency and circumstance. Through representing everything from Marxian styled oppositional politics through to capitalist inspired consumerist spending, the deployment of queer during the 1990s appears to stand for a whole series of contradictory forms of socio-political analysis. For some, like Queer Nation in the United States or OutRage! in the United Kingdom, queer activism seems to have been primarily about securing minority rights within a society dominated by heterosexuals. For others however, like Homocult or Kate Bornstein it was about more fundamentally destabilising the distinction currently drawn between gay and straight. Whilst some commentators such as Cherry Smyth have read queer as a multifaceted response to the dysfunctionalities of a lesbian and gay politics, other writers have suggested that queer reflects a more fundamental dissatisfaction with the basic concept of sexual politics. In essays by theorists such as Kobena Mercer and Jennifer Terry for example, the philosophical assumptions that informed various forms of oppositional politics are examined, problematised and largely rejected in favour of a set of more pragmatically conceived subversive tactics. Simultaneously representing Larry Krammer's impassioned repolitisisation of homosexuality, Sheila Jeffrey's feared depolitisisation of identity, and Michel Foucault's problematisation of identity politics per se, the word queer not only troubles the future of a politics based on sexualised identity, but invites further examination of the philosophies and discursive mechanisms through which notions such as power, politics and agency are conceived. Although the word queer cannot be neatly defined as either a moment of class-like radicalism, or as a particular kind of aesthetic, or as a new form of post-modern philosophy, there are a number of themes and resonances that persistently play around its various contemporary deployments. Although queer cannot be defined, in the sense that it stands for or symbolises a consistent idea or stance, that does not necessarily reduce it to, as Teresa de Lauretis feared, ‘a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry'. As Steven Epstein notes, the word queer has developed more connotations than one word can reasonably be expected to bear, however, amidst those connotations there are a number of associations and effects that do give queer a peculiar flavour that might start to feel like significance. Certainly not “a meaning” in the conventional sense, the themes listed below operate more like circumstantial evidence than proof. My aim is not to claim that queer means something, caused something or did anything else, instead, I wish to illustrate that its linguistic re-emergence during the early 1990s reflects and is coexistent with a set of themes and nuances that variously problematise and challenge many of the assumptions upon which notions such as identity, authority and desire have previously been understood. Sexual Identity: Partly as a result of its fashionable status and the publishing industry’s “vacuous” deployment, the word queer found itself attached to almost anything and everything that was, or could be, associated with same-sex desire. As a result, by the end of the decade, queer seemed to simultaneously evoke a whole series of apparently contradictory theories about the nature and status of homosexuality. Whilst, for LeVay, in Queer Science, queer marks progress towards biological certainty, for Stephen Whittle, in Gender Fucking or Fucking Gender?, the deployment of the word queer emphasises the instabilities and contingent nature of biologised gender. In The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, Norton uses the word queer to describe essential identities that transcend historical specificity, meanwhile in Fear of a Queer Planet, Warner uses queer to fundamentally destabilise the heterosexual/homosexual binary and, in so doing, interrogates the modern discourses through which sexualised identities emerge. At the heart of most populist (and other) discourses on sexuality lies a nature/nurture binary; a belief that sexuality is a specific

18 condition that must be caused by innate biological factors, or acquired socio-cultural factors or some blend of the two. By apparently simultaneously standing for both the predominantly genetic and the predominantly constructed, the word queer problematises the nature/nurture binary and invites its critical examination and reappraisal. Process: One of the most insistent themes associated with queer’s linguistic re-emergence is the notion that identities are constantly reconstructed rather than formed at a particular point at time and immediately cast in stone. In her seminal text, Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick critiques the possibility, and therefore political efficacy, of publicly revealing a previously hidden sexuality. As Sedgwick points out, coming out of the closet can never actually be a once and for all event, but must necessarily be a constant process of telling and retelling in new circumstances and to new constituencies. In a similar vein, Kate Bornstein argues that gender is also a performance that demands constant re-inscription and careful maintenance. Rather than being an either/or accident of birth, Bornstein argues that gender, as it is currently understood, demands the persistent re-presentation of a whole series of culturally defined performances. In Richard Cornwall’s queer economics, Affrica Taylor’s queer geography, Moe Meyer’s queer politics, Lawrence Schimel’s queer diaspora, and a vast array of other queer theories, sexual identities cease to be the consistent properties of particular bodies and become, instead, bodily performances that are produced and reproduced according to the specifics of particular cultural, historical, technological and philosophical circumstances. Marginality: As Eric Partridge illustrates in his Dictionary of the Underworld, the word queer has been associated with social, legal and geographical marginality for many centuries. During the 1990s, queer’s relationship with borders, edges, and the mechanisms that construct or police them, was reconfirmed as one of its most immediately apparent flavours. Queer Nation and other activist groups sought to challenge the boundries between “gay” and “straight” spaces. Theorists such as Patribha Parmar and Teresa de Lauretis reconceived the political potential of forms of identification that irritate the lines that border categories defined by race, class, gender and nationality. Typified, perhaps inspired, by Fuss’s problematisation of insides, outsides, their boundaries and correlations, queer theorists persistently sought out established spaces, alliances and knowledges in order to explore the alternative possibilities that might exist between or around the orthodox, the unsaid and the taken for granted. As seems often the case with queer phenomena of the 1990s, queer’s relationship to marginality is far from straightforward. In terms of its academic credentials, for example, queer enjoys a certain ambiguity. Whilst many queer writers espouse the radical potential of margins, as Jeffrey Escoffier points out in American Homo, the opportunities of being a misfit, an outlaw or an heretic are most often explored from the relative safety of academic tenure. Power: The examination of power, where it resides and how it moves, is a central theme of many examples of queer writing, experimentation and activism. Queer sex, queer money, queer cinema and queer philosophy all use and explore the complex power dynamics of domination, opposition, reaction and creativity. In terms of political power for example, groups such as Homocult rejected traditional models of oppositional politics and, in their place, championed alternative tactics that incorporated notions of transgression, infiltration, subversion and corruption. For queer writers such as Alexander Doty, Gayle Rubin and David Halperin, the authority traditionally derived from being the first, the authentic or the majority demands reassessment and critical analysis. In terms of the production of popular cultural texts for example, Doty emphasises how meaning is produced at the complex interface of production and consumption rather than simply at the insistence of the author’s pen. Although there is no single queer analysis of power, and, as usual, wholly paradoxical notions of the mechanisms and effects of the operations of power emerge from between the lines of differently informed queer texts, Michel Foucault’s complex articulation of power beyond the oppression/resistance binary appears to resonate with the sympathies of many queer theorists. According to Tamsin Sparago, Foucault’s ‘analysis of the interrelationships of 3 knowledge, power and sexuality was the most important intellectual catalyst of queer theory.’ 3 Tamsin Spargo, Foucault and Queer Theory. P.8

19 Cause and Effect: At an abstract level, most deployments of the word queer during the 1990s addressed, in some way, the lines that are drawn between causes and their effects. Although by no means exclusively about the supposed cause of homosexuality, for many queer writers the various discourses that claim to describe sexuality in terms of cause and effect stand, at least, as starting points. Whilst, for writers such as Simon LeVay, the notion that sexual identity is an identifiable effect with a specific cause seems to be an irrefutable biological fact, other theorists such as Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee argue that the causes of homosexuality are, themselves, only ever imagined in response to the preexistence of same-sex desire. For some writers effects are rarely the product of a single cause whilst for others a single cause can often have multiple effects. In Martin Duberman’s A Queer World, authors like Jonathan Ned Katz and Diana E. Long demonstrate how the lines that seemingly connect causes with their effects are necessarily the discursive products of particular philosophies, histories and paradigms. In How Do I Look , the co-authors explain how they chose the title to reflect the intricate feedback loops that exist between the causes and effects of production and consumption, and in his book, Material Queer, Donald Morton asks whether there might be some strange unanticipated causal relationship between the emergence of Queer Theory and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Trouble: When used as a verb, the word queer most often means to spoil, to frustrate, to unsettle or to trouble and it is in this sense that queer most often performed in academic and other texts during the 1990s. The concept of queer trouble was initially formulated by writers such as Judith Butler and Kobena Mercer as an acknowledgement to, and possible route beyond, the frustrations and complexities presented by those binary identity categories (male/female, gay/straight, black/white, good/bad etc.) through which liberation strategies have traditionally been formulated. In Imitation and Gender Insubordination, Butler explains why she is suspicious of all identity categories and consequently recommends that the paradoxes and discontinuities within them should be exposed and used to excite suspicion in the discourses through which universalising categories are constructed. “I’m permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary trouble.” [308]. During the course of the 1990s an increasing number of queer writers, artists and other performers started to address and explore the disparities between identities drawn by political idealism 42 and those derived from lived experience. In Looking for Trouble , for example, Kobena Mercer uses his troubled, multiple and contradictory reactions to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Males as an occasion to problematise the discourses through which binaries such as producer/consumer, progressive/reactive, and oppressor/subjected are constructed. Spotting and/or exciting trouble within any kind of universalising category became one of the main tools of queer analysis. Whilst gay liberation strategies had attempted to replace a gay=bad formulation with gay=good, queer theorists and activists sought to disrupt any neat, potentially reductive, formulations and instead excite interest in, and analysis of, the discursive stories through which those formulations find life. I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. [Butler 1990, p.vii] Long before Judith Butler's theorising started queering the concept of identity or Michelangelo Signorile's activism started to queer the conventions of politics, the word queer was already amply endowed with connotation and suggestion.. Partially discussed in Stephen Epstein's Queer Encounter, queer's contemporary deployments variously circulate around the concept of sexual identity and the discourses sciences and theories through which sexualised identities are drawn. As has been illustrated above, a queer label has been attached to branches of art, politics, economics, theology, biology and cultural studies. Used by authors, artists and activists to name almost any theory, representation or event that relates in some way to same sex desire, the word queer often appears to owe more to fashion than philosophy. Existing predominantly as slang or cant for most of its history, the word queer seems to have largely escaped the regulatory impulse of lexicographical approval. Flowing, instead, in and out of popularity on the margins of English society, the exact meaning of queer has historically remained just out of reach. Marking a whole series of phenomena that were in

20 some way unmarkable, the word queer, certainly until the latter half of the nineteenth century, seems to have behaved more like a flavour or sensation than a formally codified sign. According to Cleto and Chauncey however, queer's flexibility diminished during the twentieth century. Locked into specificity by some imperceptible linguistic process, the word queer appears to have increasingly marked particular identities and precise characteristics. Honed on the therapist's couch and through the rhetoric of McCarthyite insecurities, queer specifically became the disease, the disruption and disquiet of the antisocial uncivilised homosexual. During the 1990s however, new deployments of the word queer seem to have taken it back to its more wayward past. Relubricated and rejuvinated, the word queer seems to have slipped the shackles of definition and returned to its former troubling ways. Rife with contradiction [Epstein] and more slippery than KY [Richard Smith] the new sensations of queer re-emphasised its ability to pass amongst populations of bodies, picking up nuances here, dropping inferences there. Queer can neither be comfortably described as old or new. Simultaneously archaic and completely contemporary, the word queer appears to operate like a flexible vessel whose general proportions seem vaguely familiar and yet whose precise contents can constantly surprise. 1 Define Outing Edward Ward, The Second Part of the London Clubs; Containing: The No Nose Club. The Beaus Club, The Mollies Club, The Quacks Club. London, c.1709. p.28 in Thomas A. King Performing "Akimbo" - Queer pride and epistemological prejudice, in Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p.41 3 John Casper Lavater, Essays in Physiognomy, Trans. Henry Hunter, H. Hunter and T. Holloway, London, 1789, vol.3 p.213 in Thomas A. King Performing "Akimbo" - Queer pride and epistemological prejudice, in Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p.39 4 Neil McKenna, 1991. p. 23 5 See Howes for notes on Victim 6 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out , Quartet Books Limited, London, 1990. p.190 7 The word gay, like queer, actually has quite a long and varied history. Often associated with frivolity, immodesty and sexual immorality since the seventeenth century [McConville and Shearlaw p.116], it was also commonly used during the nineteenth century to describe female prostitution [Norton p.121 and McConville and Shearlaw p.116] According to Chauncey's account of gay's emergence as a sign of homosexuality during the second half of the twentieth century, some queers appear to have been disquieted by gay's rising popularity. Equating, for them, more closely with terms like fairy and consequently effeminacy, many were unwilling to replace queer with a term that they believed to be more derogatory. 2 8 Neil Miller, Out Of The Past, Vintage Books, London, 1995, p. 370 QUEERS READ THIS, A Leaflet Distributed at Pride March in New York, Published anonymously by Queers, June 1990. 10 Establishment of Queer Nation 11 Find Ref - 1985 - mentioned in Inventing AIDS p.117 12 List a few examples of where these works became queer ie - Warner, 13 in Inside/Out 14 see Week's Coming Out for a good discription of coming out 15 Chris Woods State of the Queer Nation - A Critique of Gay and Lesbian Politics in 1990s Britain, Cassell, London and New York, 1995.p.29 16 define IN YOUR FACE 17 Neil McKenna, 1991, p.23 18 Clause 28 definition 19 Operation Spanner 20 Critique of the normal is a common theme in Queer Theory - it does not just imply a critique of the normalising effect of heterosexuality, but, more broadly it critically engages with many of the disciplining regimes of normality. 21 Opposite to procreative sex. 22 Which according to Sinfield developed at least in part, in response to Wilde becoming the love that dare not speak its name. 23 Define Manchester's Gay Village 24 de Lauretis, Teresa (1994a) 'Habit Changes' differences: AJournal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, 2-3, p313. 25 GLQ - A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 2 No. 4, December 1995 26 Zoe Schramm-Evans and Laurence Jaugey-Paget, Making Out - The Book of Lesbian Sex and Sexuality, Pandora, London and San Francisco, 1995 27 [Science Vol. 253, (30.8.1991) ,pp.1034-1037] 28 A Queer World. 9

21 29 Laura Harris and Liz Crocker, Bad Girls - Sex, Class, and Feminist Agency, in Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker (eds), Femme - Feminists Lesbians & Bad Girls, Routledge, New York and London, 1997 30 [p.94] 31 lesbian and gay studies reader, p.295 32 [Lesbians are so chic p.7] 33 Kate's fishy example 34 Define Chaos Theory - see Bornstein p.118 35 Capitol Queer 36 Clear and Queer Thinking 37 Queer Family Values 38 The Queer Press Guide 2000 39 Queer Iberia 40 Queer in Russia 41 Men Like That: A Southern Queer History 42 Abelove pp.350-359