This article argues that, in contradistinction to its widely promoted ethical openness to its future, queer theory has been less scrupulous about its messy, flexible and multiple relations to its pasts, the critical and activist traditions from which it emerged and that continue to develop alongside in mutually informing ways. In particular, it assesses queer theory's tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory. Returning to the controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality that has been prominently theorized as key to distinguishing between feminist and queer theoretical projects, the article traces the influence of Gayle Rubin's 'Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality' through feminist and queer scholarship in order to demonstrate that, however different their projects, feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.

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© 2015 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies annamarie jagoseThe Trouble with Antinormativity It seems everyone knows-or no one much cares-what queer means these days. If, across the last twenty-five years, queer has acquired an appearance of semantic transparency such that its contemporary academic use routinely presumes a self-evident meaningfulness to the term, it wasn't always so.1 In the early years of the 1990s, queer's extraordinary discursive emergence was almost always in the register of the definitional, its rapid ascendency as a critical term-its coming to meaning-largely secured through iterative and often manifesto-like statements about what queer meant. These days it almost goes without saying that queer is conventionally understood to mean "antinormative," as can be seen in thumbnail definitions that manage to insist, despite being whittled down to epistemological minimalism, on the primacy of queer's opposition to normativity. Thus David L. Eng highlights as key to the queer project "the critique of the normative, which we might describe as queer studies' most important epistemic as well as political promise" (193).2 As Eng's definition makes clear, to rethink the conditions of the political for queer theory today necessitates a re-evaluation of the presumed centrality of antinormativity to the queer theoretic project.

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