This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.

The work of Guy Hocquenghem is at the beginning of modern theorization of sexuality: it is part of the wave of theory that emerges in France after May 1968; and it is republished as the second title in the first year of Duke UP’s ‘Series Q’ in 1993. This chapter considers the affective charge of his writing, as it is located in his style and its mannered affectedness, and in its historical context within the French left as it attempts to articulate class, race, and gender in 1970s France. His queerness inheres less in a particular kind of affect, such as a particular relation to shame, than in the division between feeling mutually with others and feeling ‘in relation’. Feeling back into the affective intensity of Hocquenghem’s moment may offer resources for contemporary queer thought, in ways that thinking about queer theory does not.