ABSTRACT
You probably already know the story: in the early 1990s, academic and activist lesbian and gay studies had become co-implicated with (or, some would say, co-opted by) poststructuralist analysis and radical social constructionism; ‘identity politics’ takes it on the chin; the word ‘queer’, which has ‘torque’ and ‘twist’ in its etymological background, is itself torqued and twisted, promoted from slur to affirmation, productively reworked into a transitive, transformative verb, and the infinitive phrase ‘to queer’ emerges to take on a newly performative ‘labor of ambiguating categories of identity’ (Berlant and Warner 1995, 345). Thus ‘queer’ gets queered into ‘theory’.
