The HBS hosts chat with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter about the evolution of “queer” as an identity category and a verb.
Once only used as a slur with unambiguously negative valences, the noun “queer” has been reappropriated by (many) members of the LGBTQIA+ community as referring to a positive, even celebrated, notion of self-identity…. but the history and use of the term “queer” is complicated. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Ladelle McWhorter about that complicated history, including how “queer” as a social/political identity category may (or may not?) be in tension with its philosophical/theoretical origins, including and especially the notion of “queer-ing” (verb) to indicate the very disruption of stable categories of identity themselves.
Our guest for this episode, Dr. Ladelle McWhorter, is the author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (1999), Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (2009), and Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy (2009). You can follow Dr. McWhorter on Twitter at @lmcwhort!
In this episode, we reference the following thinkers/artists/texts/ideas:
- Sam Cooke supermix on YouTube
- ACT UP (New York) historical Archive
- Timeline of the AIDS crisis
- “From gay Nazis to ‘we’re here, we’re queer’: A century of arguing about gay pride”
- Emma Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (2014)
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“9 LGBTQ+ People Explain How They Love, Hate, and Understand the Word “Queer”
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
- Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993)
- “Man Opens Fire on Gay Bar” (Roanoke, 2000)
- “America’s lesbian bars are barely hanging on” (2021)
- “Old Things That Are Tough to Explain: Playing a Game Called Smear the Queer” (Dysfunctional Library, 2001)
- Tasmin Spargo, Foucault and Queer Theory (1995)
