Making It Perfectly Queer

Abstract

The notion of a can work somewhat differently. It is often used to construct a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members' sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender. But not every individual or group that adopts the name means to invoke these altered boundaries. Many members of Queer Nation, a highly decentralized militant organization, use the term only as a synonym for lesbian or gay. Queer Nation, for some, is quite simply a gay nationalist organization. Queer theories do their ghetto-busting work by placing the production and circulation of sexualities at the core of Western cultures, defining the emergence of the homosexual/heterosexual dyad as an issue that no cultural theory can afford to ignore. Within the field defined by queer literary theory, lesbian visions remain profoundly ghettoized, though they are gaining ground from within feminist theory.