Introduction - To the Reader

• Teleological: if everything has an inherent purpose and a final cause.
• regarding intersectionality: “A working-class Asian American lesbian, for instance, may have her queer identification overlooked by a dominant culture that sees her primarily as not white, whereas some in her ethnic community may find her queerness disgraceful to herself, to her family, and to Asian Americans in general.”
• Fin de siècle: French for “end of the century”; a term referring to the last decade of the 19th century.

Perverse Presentism

• Jack Halberstam
• avoid imposing contemporary notions and structures of desire and identity on history and historical analysis; “[avoid] the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time […] apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past”
• When we write about the past, we do not assume that contemporary labels are necessarily useful in describing past desires. What looks like a gay, lesbian, bi, or trans identity or community from our current perspective may have meant something quite different to people in the past.

Variance in Terminology

• carrying from perverse presentism and using different terms to accurately describe the period
• Lesbian: a geographical term → a poetic style → an identity marker
• Gay: (female) prostitute (slang) → “since slipped to delineate a sexually transgressive subculture, a Black lesbian, and a homosexual man”
• Bisexual: old synonym for heterosexual — nonprocreative sexuality between men and women
• transgender, transsexual, transman, tranny boi, FtM, MtF: varieties of identities that register gender roles and/or deeply felt experiences of gender
• queer, homosexual, transvestite

Queer Theory

“Resistance to normativity is not purely negative or reactive or destructive; it is also positive and dynamic and creative. It is by resisting the discursive and institutional practices which, in their scattered and diffuse functioning, contribute to the operation of heteronormativity that queer identities can open a social space for the construction of different identities, for the elaboration of several types of relationships, for the development of new cultural forms.”

• branched from feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and postmodern literary theory
• gay and lesbian studies: 1970–1980s: homosexuality in canon
• queer shift in 1990s against normative constructs
• challenges structural monogamy, gender, sexuality; normative structures of belief and morality
• gay and lesbian studies impose a contemporary identity onto affection within historical works and media, while queer theory notes affection within historical works and studies it wrt the power structures and society in place at the time, not contemporary identities (which have been influenced by modern structures); avoidance of perverse presentism