ABSTRACT
Queer is quite a distinctive academic project and only partly because it is predicated upon a reverse discourse of discreditable desires. What we are engaged with, we dykes, faggots, fairies, queens, trannies, bulldaggers, bisexuals, polysexuals, sodomites, cunnilinguists and queer-straights, is not only what people do in bed – and researchers have always found that challenging enough – we are engaged with what we do in bed. Our scholarship partakes of the marginalised and abject nature of our own bodies, selves and desires. That we are prepared to do this is, of course, powerful and empowering. As feminists discovered in the 1960s, researching and theorising your own oppression may itself be emancipatory (Collins 1990; Stanley 1990).
