ABSTRACT
The term queer emerges as an interpellation that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and variability, within performativity. The term queer has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation. The contemporary redeployment enacts a prohibition and a degradation against itself, spawning a different order of values, a political affirmation from and through the very term which in a prior usage had as it final aim the eradication of precisely such an affirmation. Gender is neither a purely psychic truth, conceived as internal and hidden, nor is it reducible to a surface appearance; on the contrary, its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance. The emergence of collective institutions for grieving are thus crucial to survival, to the reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations.
