For more than a decade, queer theories and politics have spread across many Western countries. The incorporation of dominant gay culture into the capitalist market, the AIDS crisis, and the struggles initiated by lesbians and transgender people, Chicanas and Black women in the late 80s gave rise to a series of radical social and political movements that were later developed by academia into what is called "queer theory." This book reflects the complexity of this movement, which has been closely linked to the sociopolitical reality of the gay, lesbian, and transgender movements in the Spanish state (groups like LSD or La Radical Gai represented this type of queer activism in the 90s). Based on the UNED Open Teaching Course "Introduction to Queer Theory" organized by Paco Vidarte and Javier Sáez between 2003 and 2005, this collective work gathers the various analytical approaches that queer politics have produced in recent years. Queer is not a theory; it is marginalized, excluded multitudes—people who have been expelled from their homes or places of origin and who live in difficult social and economic situations. The analysis of these exclusion processes gave rise to what we call queer theory, which is not a closed theory or a body of knowledge but a set of critical tools for political intervention: critiques of heterosexual normativity, of the biopolitical practices of medicine and the state over sick and healthy bodies, of the mutilations suffered by intersex people, of the colonial gaze on immigrant lesbians, trans people, or gay men, of the academic appropriation of popular struggles, and of the rigidity of gender markers that exclude transgender people. Queer incorporates new readings of literature, architecture, and cinema, and proliferates bodies and practices that are unclassifiable by the sexuality apparatus: sadomasochism
