—River Page, “Fake Gay History”
Anglophone academic queer theory was founded by someone who, by her own avowal, was a straight woman in a vanilla marriage. She understood the term to signify universally:
That's one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies)
To whom could this possibly not apply? Why give such patent normality of the human condition, so well known to Athens and Jerusalem, a label like “queer”? It’s a term of political (not sexual or gender) identity. In the name of absolute difference, the difference Stein said was spreading, it paradoxically signifies allegiance to the technological and economic abolition of every difference and hierarchy that would make sexual or gender difference meaningful. It is as much the antonym to gay as to straight, to trans as to cis. It is, for better and for worse, the watchword of Hegel-Kojève-Fukuyama’s universal homogenous state. And Sedgwick—a student, like Fukuyama, of Allan Bloom’s—knew this perfectly well, I’m sure.
