Queer Theory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22964483 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kathryn Bond Stockton (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 85-106 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Year s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1077-4254 • E-ISSN: 1471-681X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ywcct/mbw005 |
| OpenAlex | W2809639011 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
Where is queer? In the neighbourhood, the gesture, the drug, or the word? Enter the slipstream, liquid and labile, of the elusive contours of queer. It's the strange we like, if we're for the queer. It's the fissure-force, cracking what we know. It's a plea for pleasure, however ephemeral—nuanced or shattering—it may be. It's (forbidden) candy, which we give ourselves and extend to ... children. (A child, after all, echoes Willy Wonka—the Wildean, utterly strange, family-fissuring, pleasure-seeking creature that Wonka seems to be—when he asserts: ‘Candy doesn’t have to have a point, that’s why it’s candy’.) 1 So it's said of queer. It doesn't have a sex point. It's a broader strange, always on the move. But despite these removals from sex acts, identities, transitions, and things marked Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT), queer is at most only two-degrees-of-separation separated from the denotation always haunting ‘queer’: ‘homosexual’, making ‘queer’ ‘a term of contempt or derision’, says my dictionary. Sure, the derision has grandly been slipping from the shoulders of queer, but not all the ties, not even most ties to LGBT have fully loosened and slipped as well, despite what may be claimed. ‘Fully’ is the key here, the most instructive word. ‘Fully’ implies how a concept of two-degrees-of-separation explains how ‘queer’ breaks away from ‘homosexual’, giving the slip to the ‘B’ and the ‘T’ in the process as well, but only lives conceptually a few thoughts away. Indeed, I'll return to words as the locus of queer these days, something I'll tie to lesbian barebacking, however supremely improbable that seems. Barebackers, even so, must wait. (Or you must wait for them.) First, I'll consider where ‘queer’ stays tethered to LGBT, even as theory steps into new spaces, new cities, new ’hoods. Then, we'll slide from spaces to gestures, from gestures to drugs, before we arrive at words, as a where.
Aesthetics · Lesbian · Pleasure · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Transgender · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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