ABSTRACT
Serious dilemmas posed by the social, cultural, and political abjection queer informants suffer often discourage the scholarly consideration of moments of joy and attitudes of hopefulness. Queer theory, which emerged to analyse and explain the problems sexual minorities encounter, frequently suggests that melancholy and loss nurture a dominating, radicalised sense of alterity or ‘otherness’ among queer people, who are encouraged either to embrace their abjection or to pursue revolution through antagonistic social or political resistance. 1 Whereas a sense of alterity clearly motivates many queer people’s actions, anti-social politics is far from the only way to interpret and react to social exclusion.
