Queer European Cinema', the theme of this Studies in European Cinema special issue, combines two complex constructs: Europe and Queer. Attempts to define 'Europe' are fraught with complexity, particularly when linked to identity, such as citizenship. 'Queer', too, isintentionallydifficult to define. The word first entered the English language in the sixteenth century to mean strange or eccentric and by the twentieth century was used as a derogatory term, especially to describe men perceived as 'effeminate', 'manly' women, and what later came to be known as 'gay' people in general. In the 1980s, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the word was reclaimed and used either neutrally or positively as an umbrella term by some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people, who came togetherin a way they never had before and have not done sincein order to care for those who were HIV+ and to protest against their treatment, particularly by the Reagan administration in the USA.From this grass-roots political reclamation, queer was then picked up in the academy: a seminal work in what came to be known as queer theory is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), in which Butler argues that gender is constructed through the repetition of the dominant conventions of gender so that it appears to be inherent or natural, which she terms 'gender performativity' and later distinguishes from the 'bounded act' of performance (1993, 234). Although gender performativity is a 'doing' rather than a 'being', Butler contests the idea of a 'doer' behind the 'deed ' (1990, 25). Where queer theory originally considered gender and sexuality, a noteworthy trend in the past decade is that of queer temporality, with a focus on non-normative life schedules either alongside or rather than queer gender or sexuality. Although queer space has been discussed and theorized by numerous scholars in recent years, notably J. Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, it is the focus on queer temporalities, rather than space, both of which were highlighted in Halberstam's A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), that has really been trending in queer scholarship, including work by Lee Edelman (2004), Elizabeth Freeman (2007) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009 to name just a few scholars who have contributed significantly to this area. Furthermore, queer is frequently used not only as an adjective or a noun, but also a verb: to queer can mean to read against the grain e.g. highlighting homoerotic or queer elements in film that is otherwise perceived as straight and is a technique long used by LGBT cinema-goers in order to identify more identities like, or similar to, their own, particularly in times when there was a dearth of homosexuality onscreen. More recently, it has been employed by academics whose queer readings aim to subvert a text.
