Who and What is “Queer”?

Abstract

As I suggested at the beginning of my last chapter, the imposition of a neat “timeline” onto the complexity of lesbian- and gay-relevant “histories” through the millennia and across the globe would be reductive indeed. And as we turn now to the last two decades of the twentieth century, we see an unprecedented jumble of both oppressive and progressive activities across Anglo-American society, and a sometimes muted, sometimes deafening cacophony of voices within the community formed by gays, lesbians, and other sexual nonconformists. To a certain extent, the 1980s provide stunning evidence of the ability of an oppressed and internally divided group to come together to work on certain, discretely defined political agenda items, while the next decade (discussed here and in Chapter 3) shows just how difficult — really, impossible — it is to sustain political cohesion when a moment of piqued crisis settles into longterm worry and when short-term, clear-cut goals give way to far differing visions of a less oppressive future or alternative system of sociosexual valuation. In this chapter and the next, I will explore those sometimes smoothed-over fissures and enduring fractures, before moving on to our literary textual applications of “queer theories” in Chapters 4–6.