The History Of The Queer Community

In a structured society, as one we’ve continued to create today, has raised concerns over the way society uses the term queer. Queer was a term used to describe “odd” “peculiar” or “strange” beings or things alike, but over the centuries societies began to adapt and incorporate the term into their vocabulary. Many authors such as Natalie Kouri-Towe, Siobhan B. Somerville, and Nikki Sullivan have distinct ways of describing the way the word queer has been shaped over the years and how society has viewed it as a whole. In effect, to talk about the term queer one must understand the hardship and struggle someone from the community faces in their everyday lives. My goal in this paper is to bring attention to the history of the term queer, how different

As Fritsch et al. states, “even as ‘queer’ became an established identity in the LGBTQ rainbow acronym, it also worked against the normalization of gender and sexuality by challenging the presumption of a two-gender system” (336). A majority of the queer community had/have conflicting thoughts about whether the term queer must be used as a way to distinguish or rather alienate oneself with from binary system. Many of the people within the community don’t like to separate themselves, believing that by doing so will push them further away from society when in reality this will result in losing their loved ones and friends. Others argued that by doing so they break apart the binary structure and in order everyone in a sense is queer; there is no set standard for what normal is. Moreover, people believe that with trying to embrace and embody the term queer, there will be negative emotions and actions made towards them which puts them at an even higher risk of being victimized. Being in the center staged of the whole movement not only brings conflict but it can in the long run off put people from overall trying to identify with the queer movement or the term queer