The big difference between liberal LGBT identity politics and revolutionary queer politics is:
That the goal of liberal LGBT identity politics is to present four (or 5, 6, 7, depending on the acronym) clearly defined LGBT identities with an easily digestable narrative to them to so that LGBT people may be understood, incorporated into societies notions of normalcy and turned into respectable citizens under capitalism.
While the goal of revolutionary queer politics is to complicate identity, to defy definition, to disrupt clear narratives, to continue to be confusing and paradoxical, so that queer people can not be incorporated or turned into respectable citizens and can continue on their struggle to destroy normalcy and respectability, which is a struggle that connects us to all struggles against oppression.
If we seem blatantly sexual or grotesquely unfuckable, if we make polite company uncomfortable, if we seem self-contradicting, if we wear slurs like badges of honor, if we’re bad rolemodels, if we seem weird or dangerous, that’s the point.
“For part of queer’s semantic clout, part of its political efficacy, depends on its resistance to definition, and the way in which it refuses to stake its claim, since ‘the more it verges on becoming a normative academic discipline,by he less queer “queer theory” can plausibly claim to be.’“
Annamarie Jagose, Introduction to Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York, Melbourne University Press, 1996), 1."If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futures imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, quested from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes….”
Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993): 18.
complicated and inaccessible but on point.
