Genderqueer

Genderqueer is a term that began to circulate within sexual and gender minority communities in the late 1990s and encompasses nonbinary gender expressions and identities. While gender is commonly conceptualized as feminine or masculine, with binary identities of women and men, genderqueer individuals defy and reconstruct these notions of gender and generate nonbinary gender identities and gender expressions. Being an umbrella term, genderqueer can take on different [Page 807]meanings for different individuals. For some people, genderqueer means having a shifting gender—sometimes being more aligned with femininity, other times with masculinity. Other individuals may experience their gender as some combination of the more traditional notions of what it means to be a woman or a man, as somewhere on a spectrum between these identities, or as ...