Queer in Practice

'Queer' was reclaimed by members of the AIDS activist community during the late 1980s as a sign under which to organise politically. Within these recent histories of gay and lesbian struggle, queer also became a means for some to trouble the hard and fast categories implied by naming either of those orientations. Functioning as a kind of umbrella under which it is possible to assemble a plethora of identifications, queer simultaneously disturbs the logic that binds a subject to a fixed identity. Given this, how does one reconcile something so unstable as queer with something as amorphous as photography? Through consideration of historic and contemporary examples, this article foregrounds moments of correspondence between photographic practice and articulations of queerness in the UK and Ireland