ABSTRACT
Queer theory had its genesis in the 1990s within western discourses of sexuality, although queer politics, arguably, can be traced back to the later 1960s and early 1970s. Queer theory’s origins are elusive and are likely to be identified according to the particular interests of the person speaking or writing. JAGOSE indicates a movement between gay and lesbian studies and queer theory through the 1980s and into the 1990s. For Jagose, this movement with all its ambiguities is signified by the reissue, in 1992, with a new preface, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s study of the historical discourse of “homosexual desire,” Between Men (1985). Sedgwick’s title epitomises a central difficulty that queer theory poses to a determinedly women’s studies perspective: it is a theory founded on a challenge to sex-specific categories.
