Beyond queer

Queer emerged in the late twentieth century in protest against an identity politics that ascribed and assumed heterogeneity amongst women, against the pathologisation and political marginalization of homosexuality and the proscription of all but heteronormative sex. The history of hysteria has also been read as a particularly feminine questioning and protest, a subversion of an established order through a radical questioning of sex, sexuality and desire. This essay investigates the resonances of hysteria within queer theory and practice, and suggests that queer is the site of today’s, today post-psychoanalysis, articulation of the questions and protest of hysteria.