Acts of Gaiety, LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure, LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure

Author

Warner; Sara ; Warner; Sara

Year

2012

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Language

English

Pages

Link

Last Update

31-May-2026

Keywords

Gender Studies

Description

Once an sobriquet for eccentrics and a slur for sexual deviants, queer became, in the 1990s, a diacritical term for a wide-ranging political movement and nuanced scholarly critique of normative regimes, phobic policies, and structural inequalities. Queer theory and activism dramatized, often in a spectacularly theatrical fashion, the instabilities and incoherencies inherent in the purportedly stable alignment of biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation. An aggressive, confrontational, and media-savvy mode of engagement, queer stood for dissent against the oppressive mechanisms of normativity and normalization. Very quickly, however, queer came to be defined in opposition to the identity politics of earlier...