ABSTRACT
Early in 1990 a fresh usage of the word "queer" entered scholarly and activist lexicons in the United States and traveled globally along the two vectors we are familiar: "queer" can stand in as a shorthand for an alphabet soup of gender and sexual identities such as LGBT or LGBTTIQ or it can contest the stability of identity categories by drawing attention to the socially constructed and contingent character of any social identity, be it sexual, gendered, transgendered, racial, national and religious. In the context of the United States, it is possible to sketch very quickly some of the forces that have led queerness to speak the language of human rights by noting the appearance of "human rights" in the names of two historically significant political organizations. Queer rights were conceived in the language of human rights before the discourse of international human rights as we began to be negotiated via the United Nations.
