Very Queer Indeed

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING SHIFTS IN U.S. SEXUAL POLITICS HAS TAKEN place over the past few years as the lesbian and gay movement, approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary in its present form, has given way, not always without a fight, to a queer politics. In part, this shift can be seen as typically generational: the children of Stonewall rising up to kill, or at least shunt aside, those who first took to the streets. This new wave, as Michael Warner calls it, takes place as an older generation's energies and talents are sapped by AIDS and in the context of postmodernism. Within the story of this change, or revolution as some would see it, there are significant inner contradictions. One of the most important has to do with the relation between theory and practice. Queers like to emphasize the relatively untheorized nature of liberationist criticism while at the same time reproaching liberationists with being insufficiently political. Elements of this latter charge are of course justified: early liberationist writing was centered on middle-class whites, claimed a kind of unity between gay men and lesbians that concealed the real differences of women's

Queer · Sociology · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society

• Academic Viagra

  Open Access•Bryce Traister•American Quarterly•2000

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• Gender Trouble

  Judith Butler•Gender Trouble•2011

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