Queer (酷儿)

In English, queer — originally “strange, odd” — spent most of the twentieth century as a slur thrown at gay people. From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, activists and scholars deliberately took it back (“you say we’re not normal? Correct. So what?”), turning an insult into a banner and, in the academy, into queer theory.

What makes the word fascinating in Chinese is its transliteration history. In the 1990s, Taiwan’s literary and academic circles rendered queer phonetically as 酷儿 (ku’er) — and the first character, 酷, happens to be the Chinese transliteration of “cool.” The result: the Chinese word never inherited the English word’s barb. Where English queer grew out of a wound, ku’er arrived sounding confident, even stylish, and spread through the Chinese-speaking world via scholarship and pop culture.

Register note: in English the wound is not fully healed — for some older people the word still lands as the slur it was. The working etiquette: use it for yourself freely, but don’t label others with it unless they use it themselves. Chinese ku’er carries little of that baggage and is common in both academic (酷儿理论, queer theory) and community settings; for the community as a whole, tongzhi is the warmer umbrella.

Common misuse: treating “queer” as a synonym for “weird” or as a fancier word for “gay” — it is often chosen precisely by people who don’t want any narrower label, including many nonbinary people.