We no more create from nothing the political terms which come to represent our 'freedom' than we are responsible for the terms that carry the pain of social injury. And yet, neither of those terms are as a result any less necessary to work and rework within political discourse. In this sense, it remains politically necessary to lay claim to 'women,' 'queer,' 'gay,' and 'lesbian,' precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing. Laying claim to such terms in reverse will be necessary to refute homophobic deployments of the terms in law, public policy, on the street in 'private' life. But the necessity to mobilize 'the necessary error' of identity will always be in tension with the democratic contestation of the term which works against its deployments in racist and misogynist discursive regimes. If 'queer' politics postures independently of these other modalities of power, it will lose its democratizing force. The political deconstruction of 'queer' ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range, to make us consider as what expense and for what purposes the terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have been wrought.
Judith Butler, Critically Queer