Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) communities as being oppressive or assimilationist.
This term is controversial because it was reappropriated only to an extent two decades ago from its use as an anti-gay epithet. Furthermore, some LGBT people disapprove of using queer as a catch-all because they consider it offensive, derisive or self-deprecating given its continuous use as a form of hate speech. Other LGBT people may avoid queer because they associate it with political radicalism, or simply because they perceive it as the faddish slang of a "younger generation."
Read more about Queer: Inclusivity and Scope
Famous quotes containing the word queer:
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“When every Sunday afternoon
On the Green Lands I walk
And wear a coat in fashion,
Memories of the talk
Of hen wives and of queer old men
Brace me and make me strong....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)