Term Queer Research Articles

Intuition and Vulnerability: A Queer Approach to Museum Education

ABSTRACT This article explores vulnerability and intuition through Stay Gold, an intergenerational arts program developed specifically for the LGBTQIA+ community and its relationship to museum education. Our bodies are subjugated by normative ideologies at birth, and certain bodies (I use the term queer for these bodies, which encompasses sexualities, gender identities, and gender expressions which fall outside of the normative) are inevitably made vulnerable as soon as there is a conscious acknowledgement of somatic, emotional, or sexual dissidence from applied hetero and cis-normative values. This article seeks to examine how queerness is connected to vulnerability and intuition and how the museum education program, Stay Gold, impacts the lives of LGBTQIA+ participants through this lens.

“As a Sort of Blanket Term”: Qualitative Analysis of Queer Sexual Identity Marking

Recent research has considered how individuals mark and/or make their sexual identity known to others. Previous research has specifically considered sexuality marking of heterosexual and bisexual individuals. The current study addresses how queer-identified individuals linguistically mark their sexual identity. Participants were 98 self-identified queer adults living within the U.S. recruited online through SurveyMonkey. Preliminary analysis of demographic data revealed that individuals with both monosexual and plurisexual attractions self-identify as queer, with higher rates for the latter. We conducted a thematic analysis of participants’ responses to an open-ended question asking them to describe a setting or situation in which they would choose to use the term queer to self-identify their sexual identity. Four themes emerged related to queer identity marking: (1) Using Queer as an Encompassing Label, (2) Using Queer to Avoid Explanation, (3) Using Queer Based on Who is Present and (4) Avoiding Using Queer. Discussion focuses on the way queer sexual identity marking is both similar to and distinct from other forms of sexuality marking.

Thinking the Feminist Vegetal Turn in the Shadow of Douglas-Firs: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands

This is an interview with Catriona Sandilands, an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. She coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. The concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. An intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. Cate is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) as well as over 80 essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. She edited, with Bruce Erickson, the much-celebrated scholarly volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times will be published in September, 2019. Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka caught up with Cate on Galiano Island, BC, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us.

Research of the Czech language from the perspective of Queer Linguistics

The aim of this minireview is to analyse the existing Czech research in the field of Queer Linguistics with the use of the meta-linguistic perspective. After a short introduction of Queer Theory ideas and ideas of Queer Linguistics focusing on the terms queer and heteronormativity, the author deals with the Czech denomination of this field. Against the backdrop of the state of Czech Gender Linguistics, additional circumstances of the current state of Czech Queer Linguistics are presented. Those include (apart from the unavailability of relevant literature in Czech libraries) a limited number of experts dealing with the topic, offering queer-linguistic lectures and seminars at Czech universities. In the next part of the article, the existing publications dealing with various topics from the field of Czech Queer Linguistics are analysed. In the final part of the article, some topics which may extend the publication basis of the field are outlined as they also may help to reflect the current social topics in the Czech Republic.

A Queer Eye for Gilman’s Text: The Yellow Wallpaper, A Film by PBS

This article puts forward a queer interpretation of PBS’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1989), adapted from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s canonical story. It is structured in three parts: an approach to the term queer, a reading of the queerness (and feminism) of Gilman’s text and an analysis of the queer (and feminist) aspects of the film. The third part also responds to the only academic essay about PBS’s production, by Janet Beer, which ignores the movie’s queer character. This section discusses the queer treatment of topics—the instability of identity, autoeroticism, lesbian tendencies, mental illness, women’s solidarity, and gender and class inequalities—while dialoguing with film critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Laura Mulvey. The queer use of formal resources—light, shots, sound, music, symbolism and scene-motifs—is also highlighted. My ultimate aim is to demonstrate that The Yellow Wallpaper is an innovative queer adaptation of Gilman’s piece for a modern audience. Keywords: queer theory; film studies; feminist literary criticism; Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Social Justice for Gender and Sexual Minorities: A Discussion with Paisley Currah and Aeyal Gross

This is a discussion between Professors Aeyal Gross and Paisley Currah, moderated by Joseph Fischel, about how we configure law, legal theory, state recognition, and institutionalized sex classifications in our pursuit of sexual and gender justice. Fischel asks what the terms queer, legal, and studies mean for the scholarship and political commitments of Currah and Gross, whose responses generate a broader discussion about, among other questions: the identitarianism and anti-identitarianism of progressive world-building; the meanings of violence for our movements; state apparatuses’ definitions and delimitations of sex; and why legalization and regulation may present different problems for gender minorities than sexual minorities.

The hypercultural universe of Chen Tianzhuo

Chen Tianzhuo’s theatre performances, video installations and sculptures are infused with the iconographic vocabulary of divinities, ceremonies and rituals of a variety of cultures. His puzzling and immersive installations, surroundings and creatures question belief systems in the Post-Internet Era, mingling Buddhist cosmology and the visual language of corporate identities with the ecstasy of club nights at Berlin’s Berghain. The artist creates experiential spaces that are equipped with creatures that seem to be in a constant state of transformation, a state of in-betweenness. Chen Tianzhuo is a master of sampling and his oeuvre is often labelled as queer, especially in a western context. As stated by scholars (Zhao, Engebretsen) when discussing the term queer in the context of China, this needs to be done in the complex and dynamic political and cultural context of the country. Chen Tianzhuo’s work discusses non-heteronormativity throughout the country’s history and how it has shaped what it means today, in the age of the Internet. Byung-Chul Han and his writings on hyperculturality seem to be an appropriate approach when reviewing Chen Tianzhuo’s oeuvre. Han claims that through forms of new media (particularly the Internet), the exchange of information and forms of expression are exponentially dispersed. He sees hyperculturality as the dissolving of previously defined cultural boundaries; celebrating the newfound freedom with which interconnected works can be passed through an unlimited network. This article aims to investigate Chen Tianzhuo’s artistic practice, focusing on his stage performances An Atpyical Brain Damage and Ishvara, and zoom into the hypercultural universe he opens up to create queer, hybrid and often godlike figures and surroundings.

Beside Women

This essay traces a lesbian literary history from the works of Charles Dickens and Algernon Charles Swinburne through the 1950s and 1960s. In discussing the former’s Bleak House (1853) and the latter’s 1866 volume Poems and Ballads, the essay demonstrates the emergence of a structure of lesbian literary and erotic practices that is useful for thinking about lesbian literary history as well as its future. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading and the school of queer optimism exemplified by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia undergird the approach to Victorian literature that allows for its reclamation for lesbian use. Furthermore, the essay demands a return to the terminology associated with lesbianism, rather than queerness, because of the woman-centeredness of the texts at hand, structural elements drawn from lesbian sexual and relational practices, and the insufficiency of the term queer in attending to the relationship between these texts and normativity. I suggest that the lesbian reparative ethical, aesthetic, and erotic character of these texts can be seen in their focus on intersubjectivity and radical empathy that blurs the boundaries between self and other. The essay focuses on three primary structures—death and disease (“lesbian bed death”), “the urge to merge,” and “possession”—in authors ranging from Dickens and Swinburne to Patricia Highsmith and Elizabeth Bishop to articulate the ethics of the lesbian merge as well as its potential dangers and, moreover, to argue that the risk of subsuming oneself in another is at the heart of reparative reading.

Queering the Sociology Curriculum: The Case of Belief, Spirituality, and Religion

Queering the Sociology Curriculum:The Case of Belief, Spirituality, and Religion Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip (bio) Keyword belief, queer, religion, sociology, spirituality In the past twenty years or so, I have been teaching—first in the Division of Politics and Sociology, Nottingham Trent University (1995–2007) and then the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham (from 2007)—a second-year undergraduate elective course called Belief, Spirituality, and Religion, currently taught over an eleven-week term. In this brief piece, I share my reflections on how, in designing the curriculum, I uphold, to a certain extent, the conventional curriculum of sociology of religion1—by which many students expect this course to be framed—but also to queer this presumption. I often jokingly tell students who have pursued sociology of religion on pre-university level that this course is sociology of religion "with a queer twist." Therefore, they—who are predominantly white, middle class, and secular—should expect to emerge from the learning process disoriented, but, hopefully, intellectually and emotionally stimulated. The term queer, which is variantly deployed in literature, needs to be explicated and delineated at the outset. To me, queer is about positionality: a position vis-à-vis the normative, the established, the hegemonic. In this case, it is a position I deliberately situate the course in relation to the conventional curriculum of sociology of religion. Queer is also action. Once [End Page 111] the counternormative position is anchored, from there disrupting energies are unleashed, leading not only to the interrogation of the conventional curriculum but also to some form of paradigm shift. Queering, therefore, aims to deconstruct supposedly stable and normalized disciplinary contents and boundaries. In my course, this queering manifests itself in three ways, which I think, based on student feedback, enriches the learning experience. I discuss these queering strategies in turn. Decentering Christianity, the Institutional, and the Collective What we habitually conceive as sociology of religion in the United Kingdom is, in essence, sociology of British (Western) Christianity. From a historical and sociocultural point of view, this focus is understandable indeed. However, this taken-for-granted and powerful underpinning often leads to the unhelpful academic habit of using Christianity as the template for the study of religions in general. The secularization theory—which, broadly, argues that modernization leads to the decline of religion—is an example par excellence. For decades, this theory assumed a hegemonic status in the sociology of religion. However, on closer inspection, its empirical foundation, primarily underpinned by the development of institutional Christianity in the United Kingdom (and Western Europe more broadly), is rather specific. This theory, for a long time, was seemingly blind to the growth of Christianity in other parts of the world, and the proliferation of some other religions (for example, Islam) in the West and across the world. Therefore, in my course, I encourage students to be critical about the cultural and geographical specificities of this theory and to take a more nuanced and global look at the relationship between modernity and religion, envisioning multiple trajectories and outcomes. Even strictly within the UK context, students often find it fascinating to explore the complex religious landscape, with, for instance, the decline of "traditional" Christianity alongside the rise of non-Western migrant churches as well as Islam. In my effort to decenter Christianity in the learning of religion, I expand the learning of classical perspectives which conventionally focus on the works of Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, to include also the works of Ibn Khaldūn, the fourteenth-century North African Arab historiographer, historian, and philosopher. I was fortunate to have started my journey with sociology of religion in the 1980s in Malaysia (a predominantly Muslim but significantly multireligious country), where the sociocultural context enabled the learning of non-Western and non-Christian perspectives of religion. Over three decades later, I still recall my excitement of learning about Khaldūn, whose work neutralized the sociocultural disconnect I often felt in relation to the works of [End Page 112] sociology's other three "founding fathers." Since I have been on the other side of the fence, so to speak, I have been deeply committed to expanding my students...

"Queer avant la lettre": sobre sapas, tangerinas, jacarés e lobisomens

If the term queer has emerged and established itself as a critical device since the 1990s, certain textual, corporal and aesthetic procedures adopted by authors such as Al Berto (Portugal), Hebert Daniel and Leila Miccolis (Brazil), still in the 1970s, seem to anticipate the substantive conformation that that English adjective assumes in the field of studies on sexual and gender identities in the present time. It follows, therefore, from the premise that there was in Portuguese a queer aesthetic expression before the queer itself had – or had been – named as such. Thus, the present essay proposes to describe and analyze, from a comparatist perspective, some examples taken from the literary works of the previous authors, fragments that seem to foreshadow the signs of freedom and liberation that are now being defended by queer theory.

Bisexuality, pansexuality, queer identity, and kink identity

ABSTRACTSexual desires, behaviors and identities that focus on intense sensation, eroticized power exchange, or sensual experiences labeled fetishes, have important intersectionalities with bisexual or pansexual orientations, at least for some people. This raises some important considerations for therapy and counseling, and kink-aware therapists might bring a special set of skills and approaches to working with bisexual or pansexual clients. A qualitative analysis of 25 interviews with kink-identified, bisexual/pansexual/queer identified people highlighted the following patterns: the term queer, for some people, includes kink or BDSM sexualities; kink activities can be avenues for exploring gender identity and sexual orientation; and kink activities and community can be important elements in healing from shame, isolation, grief, and loss. Discussions of possible elements of competent care are reviewed in relation to kink sexuality and identity.

‘Queer(y)ing methodologies: doing fieldwork and becoming queer’ – guest editorial

This themed issue contributes to discussions of queer positionalities in the context of doing fieldwork on/with queer-identified subjects. The point of departure being that the term queer has emerged to qualify a specific scholarship that contests normative orders in gender and sexuality, and that queering is a form of critique of multiple power relations that informs knowledge production. Normative sex and gender orders are reflected in the power-knowledge relations that produce ‘queerness’ as outsider, abnormal and subaltern. In order to challenge these normativities, the production of knowledge must be contested in its conception. Here we present the theoretical framework that grounds our themed issue as well a short summary of the articles in this series.

Inventing Queer: Portals, Hauntings, and Other Fantastic Tricks in the Collected Folklore of Joel Chandler Harris and Charles Chesnutt

Abstract Through an analysis of Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) by Joel Chandler Harris and The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899) by Charles Chesnutt, this essay attempts to account for a late nineteenth-century genre termed the queer fantastic. In so doing, it suggests that in the late nineteenth century, the term queer, as a signifier of distorted time, became central to debates over race and the nature of folkloric belonging.

How Do I Understand the Term Queer? Preservice Teachers, LGBTQ Knowledge, and LGBTQ Self-Efficacy

This article describes a study that investigated preservice teachers' understandings and self-efficacy related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) students and families. The preservice teachers indicated a broad range of understandings in relation to LGBTQ terms. They reported a relatively high sense of self-efficacy in working with LGBTQ students, with slightly lower self–efficacy in identifying biases in curricular materials and school contexts and in teaching LGBTQ content in their classrooms.

Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories

Through case studies of key texts across history of inquiry, this article analyzes temporality, affectivity, and politicization of term in its academic usages. My goal is to lay bare inarticulate and opaque method that orients what objects, processes, and relations count as within studies. For if is singularly mobile and mutable term, capable of adjectivally modifying range of phenomena-from sex practices, to social formations, temporalities, affects, diasporas, and inhumanisms-it is, nevertheless, not equally capable of being applied to anything nonnormative or boundary crossing. The method that orients what may be felicitously named is, I propose, fundamentally affective: it is matter of sensing some resonance between ones object of study and inchoate cluster of feelings that inhabit and animate term queer. These feelings, I propose, must be understood as in origin. Specifically, I argue that despite frequency with which inquiry has described itself as uncommitted to its pasts and by definition attuned to questions of immediate political urgency, it remains affectively haunted by histori- cal and political moment of U.S. 1990s in which it emerged. Ultimately, I propose that future of field of studies-and its relevance for scholarship on prior periods, racialized populations, and areas outside of United States-requires reckoning with field's affective haunting hy inaugural moment of U.S. 1990s. This reckoning may take form of re- rather than dehistoricization. That is, whereas scholars have tended to gesture toward unbounded future as domain in which can have renewed life hy becoming other to what it has been so far, it may he more efficacious to engage queer's multiple pasts-including those prior to its explicit deployment as political and theoretical term in 1990s-in order to differently animate queer's dense affective histories. I close hy offering attachment genealogy as method of exposing, fragmenting, and reworking queer's inheritances to enable to do different work in new contexts.Queer and NowBefore elaborating on significance of 1990s, I want to begin with text that marks an important moment in studies scholarship: introduction to 2005 special issue of Social Text edited hy David Eng, J. Jack Halherstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz titled What's Queer about Queer Studies Now? Published as field intervention that markedly highlighted work of a younger generation of scholars, this special issue, as described in its introduction, sought to foreground question of the political utility of queer in its assessment of what's queer about contemporary studies scholarship (Eng, Halherstam, and Munoz 2005, l). The antennae of political utility, in turn, orients editors to identify target of critical intervention as series of late-twentieth-century global crises which they describe, quoting Walter Benjamin, as historical (l). Their list of emergencies to which this special issue responds includes:[T]he triumph of neoliberalism and collapse of welfare state; Bush administration's infinite war on terrorism and acute militarization of state violence; escalation of U.S. empire building and clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; devolution of civil society and erosion of civil rights; pathologizing of immigrant communities as terrorist and racialized popula- tions as criminal; shifting forms of citizenship and migration in putatively postidentity and postracial age; politics of intimacy and liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and return to moral values and family values as prophylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. …

Queer or Cripped? An Analysis of Ability in Stone Butch Blues

The relationship between the term queer and cripped is deeply reliant on compulsory structures that sanction hetero-normative and able-bodied precedents in society. The similarities between the two terms can be seen in queer narratives (and real lives) exemplified by the character of Jess in Stone Butch Blues. In this essay, I read Feinberg’s text through a disability studies/Crip Theory lens to show the extent to which both queer and cripped individuals’ identities rely on compulsory structures in society. I cite Robert McRuer in multiple scene analyses. The sexual practices Jess participates in throughout Stone Butch Blues are very similar, if not identical, to the theories and practices Siebers writes about in his essay. For Feinberg, and Jess, the point is to show how people do not need to be fixed for there to be a happily ever after, but in fact, “the primary target for intervention should be social norms and practices rather than individuals.” **Keywords**: Queer, Crip theory, Cripped, Hetro-normative

X. Stresses and contradictions of trying to ‘do feminisms’ within the (neo)liberal academy

hooks (1994, p. 59) ‘came to theory because [she] was hurting’. As a child, she found comfort in theorising the world around her. Whilst frustrating and often uncomfortable, school for me was just what I had to do. I found the work easy enough and if I kept my mouth shut and head down, I could get along. At home putting the world to rights (‘doing critical theory’) was all around me. I came to understand the conversations, arguments and anger that I was allowed at home, but not at school, ‘as theory’ because I was born into a family where going to university was possible and considered ‘a good idea’. So, I went to university and through some particularly important pedagogical relationships, worked out that ‘theory’ meant trying to make some ‘sense out of what was happening’ (hooks, 1994, p. 61) in the world. It was a revelation that unlike at school, at university critical questioning was not only allowed but praised! I write this now with the conviction that we all do theory yet, as I will come onto, only some of us are rendered powerful enough to call it ‘theory’, speak it and be heard. Gibson-Graham (1999) uses the term queer(y)ing to describe questioning to seek out possibility and change. The disability and queer theory that I found at university was different from the class politics we talked about at home, and a world away from anything I was introduced to at school. This shook up the way I thought about things. I began to understand my own sexuality as queer, and recognise the disablist and homophobic violence in the lives of my family and friends as resulting from ableist and heteronormative systems. The relative privilege I was in receipt of,

Introduction: Queer(ing) Fairy Tales

IntroductionQueer(ing) Fairy Tales Lewis C. Seifert (bio) In May 2014 the Lithuanian Office of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics banned Gintariné širdis (Amber Heart), a collection of fairy tales for children about minorities. At issue were two tales depicting same-sex love, which according to the Office amounted to “harmful, primitive, and purposeful propaganda of homosexuality,” in violation of a 2010 law that prohibits the “promotion of sexual relations or other conceptions of concluding a marriage or creating a family other than established in the Constitution or the Civil Code” (European Parliament, Intergroup on LGBT Rights). As appalling as this decision was, though, it was at least based on a profound understanding of how fairy tales work. The Lithuanian censors fully grasped that the genre not only represents sexuality and kinship but also plays a crucial role in defining those representations as normal, especially for children. When confronted with fairy tales that dared to present desires and relationships they deemed to be abnormal—because they did not conform to the heteronormative Constitution and the Civil Code—they had little choice but to ban them. For the Lithuanian authorities, then, the magic of the fairy tales in Amber Heart was all too threatening and all too real because they had the power to reshape their readers’ understanding of what constituted sexual relations, marriage, and family. As an example of anxiety about the socializing role of fairy tales, the recent Lithuanian incident is not unprecedented, of course. Such debates have swirled around fairy tales from the moment they entered the canon of children’s literature—debates about the effects of fantasy, violence, and more recently, gender stereotypes. But what makes the recent Lithuanian case different and [End Page 15] noteworthy is the way it foregrounds homosexuality in relation to a genre that has been overwhelmingly perceived as heterosexual.1 What is at stake, then, is whether fairy tales are inextricably bound up with the pursuit and fulfillment of heternormativity. Beyond the example of Amber Heart, recent developments indicate that this is not the case: a small but growing body of contemporary queer fairy-tale adaptations use nonnormative representations of gender and sexuality,2 and a small but growing body of queer scholarship brings critical attention to those adaptations and, increasingly, to their precursors. The five essays in this special issue of Marvels and Tales are another contribution to what is taking shape as an exciting (and long overdue) new subfield within fairy-tale studies, namely, queer fairy-tale studies. The term queer is multivalent, and necessarily so, because its proponents insist on keeping its meanings open.3 In the broadest sense, queer involves the questioning of dominant forms of social and political relationships while deliberately resisting any prescription of what those relationships should look like. More specifically, though, queer is frequently used to qualify what Annamarie Jagose calls “those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire” (3). In other words, queer designates the practices and concepts showing that gender and sexuality do not derive in any straightforward way from a “natural” essence but necessarily involve social and cultural factors, which in turn create normative constructions. The term queer designates those genders and sexualities that resist these normative constructions, including not only gay male and lesbian sexualities but also nonnormative heterosexualities and the range of gender expressions often classified as transgender. As forms of resistance to the heteronormative order, queer genders and sexualities aim to destabilize the binaries (such as masculine-feminine, heterosexual-homosexual, dominant-submissive, active-passive) that are so central to upholding normative categories. Queer erotic and affective relationships also contest the privilege granted to the nuclear heterosexual family unit and seek to expand the spectrum of relational arrangements. If there are no such things as a natural gender and a natural sexuality, then affective and kinship relationships are likewise not determined by any natural order. As a practice, queer is also a verb, in addition to being a noun and an adjective. “To queer,” in this sense, is to make strange by accentuating what departs from normative social expectations about gender and sexuality, thus exposing the...

For the Future, the Past: LGBT2Q Theatre, Performance, and Scholarship in Canada

In her introduction to Queer Theatre in Canada, Roz Kerr notes the dearth of historical work in the field: “It is really only in the mid-nineties that articles dealing with queer theatre pertaining to English Canadian scholars and theatre practitioners/spectators begin to appear” (viii). The extant scholarship on queer Canadian theatre and performance in English, which Kerr brings together admirably in her anthology, coincides with the rise of queer politics and theory as social and political formations, and, importantly, as a scholarly approach in the early 1990s. The essays in her anthology are a testament to this academic trend. Of the twenty-one articles only two were published before 1994, and among these at least eleven are “queer” in their methodology, theoretical framework, or focus—including my own contribution. Kerr suggests that her “volume has a heavy concentration on the last fifteen years in recognition that queer theatre really only begins during the 1990s” (viii). This point is important. Kerr differentiates “queer” theatre from earlier gay and lesbian theatre, noting: “By the early 1990s the term queer replaced gay and lesbian in recognition of the need to move beyond the identity politics they implied” (viii). While queer did not exactly replace gay and lesbian, the need for the term and the political and theoretical positionality it denoted was brought about by a set of historical forces: in the late-1980s and early 1990s, inspired by post-structuralist theories of identity, debates about the limits of identity politics, and in the wake of the AIDS crisis, the term was reclaimed and redeployed within specific social, political, and scholarly contexts in the Anglo-American world (queer theory and politics did not, for example, take firm hold in francophone Quebec). Similarly, in a number of scholarly fields, but especially in literary, theatre, and performance studies, queer theory became a highly productive rubric and approach in the 1990s, precipitating a wide array of important research. But what of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, and queer (LGBT2Q) theatre and performance produced in Canada before the 1990s? 1 Without sounding cliché, how are Canada’s LGBT2Q theatre and performing artists, as well as its scholars and students, to understand the present, and to map out the future, when so very little is known about our individualized and collective pasts?

Queer in Europe :

The term queer is much contested and forms certain ripples around it when thrown in any sphere of any society. The book ‘Queer in Europe’ thus, tries to explain with what connotation did the term settle in the periphery of Europe. ‘Queer in Europe’ clears a lot of misconceptions that one has about the concept of queer. It is not a set of instructions or directions; rather it’s an in-depth analysis about the concept of Queer in Europe. The book deals with the progress of sexuality and culture in Europe. The main purpose of its text is to highlight and observe the divisions between one clear line of consistent antiquity, regulation, lived experience and the cultural change of European queer culture.