This essay examines Queer Nation’s “Queers Read This” flyer, combining a textual analysis of the flyer with an exploration of its uptake in print media. The author contends that the flyer rhetorically constitutes a queer identity by establishing unity among disparate individuals through a shared relationship to violence and anger while defining them against a seemingly dissimilar “gay and lesbian” identity. This queer identity, the author argues, is always necessarily contingent and internally contradictory and therefore enables a proliferation of discourses that both negotiate and exploit the fundamental contradictions of the resignification of queer.
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