The term Queer

What is "queer"?

The beginning of the term "queer"
"Queer" was originally an adjective used to describe things that are strange, odd, peculiar. It was first used in print with this meaning attached to it in 1508.[1]  Thus, there is nothing "gay" about Virginia Woolf's frequent use of the word in Mrs. Dalloway from 1925:

"Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought. Everything seemed very queer. In London for the first time, come to take up a post at her uncle's in Leadenhall Street, and now walking through Regent's Park in the morning, this couple on the chairs gave her quite a turn; the young woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent's Park on a fine summer's morning fifty years ago. For she was only nineteen and had got her way at last, to come to London; and now how queer it was, this couple she had asked the way of [...]"[2]

The use of the word "queer" in this text points towards the strange, even on the edge of the uncanny, the eerie – the unknown. That the word should later assume the meaning of "homosexual" in homophobic terms is then, perhaps, not so surprising.

"Queer" turns gay
The first time the word "queer" was printed with the meaning of "homosexual" was in 1922, a couple of years before Woolf's novel. It was printed in a report entitled "The Practical Value of the Scientific Study of Juvenile Delinquents", and read:

"A young man, easily ascertainable to be unusually fine in the other characteristics, is probably "queer" in sexual tendency." [3]

Thus, "queer" became a word used to describe the perceived peculiar "otherness" of homosexuals. Homosexuality was looked upon as a disease; it even expressed itself in the body ("unusually fine in other characteristics").

"Queer" becomes dangerous
For the next 70 years – or more – "queer" gained currency as a derogatory term for – usually male – homosexuals; combined with "coot"; queer as a coot – and in the 1960s and 1970s, it was also used in the turn of phrase "queer bashing", made to legitimize and promote physical violence against those who were – or were perceived to be – homosexual.

Reclaiming queerness and Pride in the 1980s and early 1990s
In the 1980s, the gay community was faced with a great tragedy; AIDS was spreading among gay men and claiming their lives. The AIDS epidemic was probably among the reasons why the gay community reclaimed the term "queer" and made it a term of pride. It became a term for celebrating differences. The gay community embraced their difference from straight people, and celebrated it as a source of power and pride.

Queer today
Being queer today usually means being part of the LGBT community, and the negative denotations that used to be attached to the words are no longer present, at least that is what most LGBTs seem to feel. "Queer" has become an embracing term to describe anyone who is a part of the LGBT(etc) community.

Apart from this use, the term has also taken on another gender political meaning. Gender queer is a new term for those who do not feel satisfied within the gender norms, society has inflicted upon them.

Judith Butler – the mother of queer feminism
In 1990, Judith Butler wrote her extremely controversial (but just as interesting and awesome, if you ask me) book Gender Trouble. In it, she focuses on the gender binary and how it is incapable of describing a reality that also includes transgendered folk, intersexuals, drags, gender queers, the act of homosexuality, etc.

Following Butler's publications, queer has become part of a new form of queer theory and queer feminism, which seeks to include queer people in the discussions of equal rights and the freedom to be who ever you are – regardless of your sex and gender.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?
- Judith Butler.

Sources

[1] : Bennett & Royle: "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory", fourth edition. Chapter 24: "Queer". Pearson and Longman. Great Britain 2009.

[2] : Woolf, Virginia: "Mrs. Dalloway". Wordsworth Classics. Great Britain 2003.

[3] : Bennett & Royle: "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory", fourth edition. Chapter 24: "Queer". Pearson and Longman. Great Britain 2009.