“Affect” names a conceptual problem as much as a tangible thing. As such, it is best understood as an umbrella term that includes related, and more familiar, words such as “feeling” and “emotion,” as well as efforts to make distinctions among them. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the history of the term to the seventeenth century, aligning it with “desire” or “passion” and opposing it to “reason.” Further specifying that “affect” is both a “mental” and a “bodily” disposition, the OED sets in place a persistent ambiguity that challenges distinctions between mind and body. More technical uses of the term emerge from mid-twentieth-century scientific psychology, where “affect” designates sensory processes or experiences prior to cognition and distinguishes such sensations from the cognitive processes that produce emotions (Damasio 1994)...

1. A sexual orientation where a person does not experience sexual attraction or desire to partner for the purposes of sexual stimulation.
2. A spectrum of sexual orientations where a person may be disinclined towards sexual behavior or sexual partnering.

As a term that designates the physical or material frame of human and other living beings, “body” has a long career in the language and a relatively brief one as a focus of critical engagement in the study of culture. For Christian theology as for speculative philosophy in the West, the body figures as the devalued term in a structuring dualism of body/soul (in sacred thought) and body/mind (in secular traditions). These dualisms apprehend the body as a material substrate of human life that is fundamentally distinct from and subordinated to the privileged term in the dichotomy (mind, soul), which alone comprehends the human capacity for knowledge and self-knowledge, as well as the repertoire of human sensibilities, dispositions, and affects on which the salvation, expression, or advancement of humanity is understood to depend. In Christian theology as in humanist philosophy, the body turns up on the side of animality or merely mechanical existence and so dwells outside the bounded domain of what is proper or essential to human culture, a domain which the exclusion of the body guarantees...

1. A person whose gender identity is aligned to what they were designated at birth, based on their physical sex.
2. A non-trans* person.

As a keyword in American studies and cultural studies, the site of a political movement, and the name of an interdisciplinary field, “disability” articulates vital connections across the many communities of people with disabilities, their public histories, and a range of cultural theories and practices. People with disabilities have too often been rendered invisible and powerless because of a mainstream tendency to valorize the normal body. As a result of disability activist work emerging from the civil rights movement, legal reforms, and grassroots activist work, the framing of disability has shifted from an emphasis on “disability” as a medical term to one of disability as a social construction. In the 1980s, disability activists began to move into the academy and to formulate a wide range of scholarship around the keyword. In the first phase, their work centered largely on the analysis and reform of public policy. By the early 1990s, a second phase in the humanities began to analyze the implications of representation on how people think about disability. In more recent years, disability scholarship has shifted to a focus on theories of intersectionality (the ways in which disability interacts with other modes of power and privilege) and transnationality (the ways in which nation-based frames of analysis misrecognize networks of affiliation that cross national borders)...

1. A person who identifies as a woman or female who dresses in masculine or gender-marked clothing, makeup, and mannerisms for the purpose of performance. Many drag kings perform by singing, dancing or lip-synching.
2. A person who feels connection to a male or masculine identity while wearing masculine clothing, either in a performance space or in everyday life.
3. A person of any gender identity that identifies with masculine drag “king” performance communities.

1. A person who identifies as a man or male who dresses in feminine or gender-marked clothing, makeup, and mannerisms for the purpose of theater or performance. Many drag queens perform by singing, dancing or lip-synching.
2. A person who feels connection to a female or feminine identity while wearing feminine clothing, either in a performance space or in everyday life.
3. A person of any gender identity that identifies with feminine drag “queen” performance communities.

1. A person who expresses and/or identifies with femininity.
2. A community label for people who identify with femininity specifically through a queer and/or politically radical and/or subversive context.
3. A feminine-identified person of any gender/sex.

1. neither or both female and male;
2. experiences a range of femaleness and maleness, with a denoted movement or flow between genders;
3. consistently experiences their gender identity outside of the gender binary.

1. Term used to refer to homosexual/same gender loving communities as a whole, or as an individual identity label for anyone who does not identify as heterosexual.
2. Term used in some cultural settings to specifically represent male identified people who are attracted to other male identified people in a romantic, erotic, and/or emotional sense.

1. The cultural insistence of two diametrically opposed, traditionally recognized genders - male and female.
2. The idea that there are only two genders: male and female. May include a sensed requirement that a person must be strictly gendered as either/or.

1. Gender expression or identity that is outside or beyond a specific culture or society’s gender expectations.
2. A term used to refer to individuals or communities who may not identify as transgender, but who do not conform to traditional gender norms. May be used in tandem with other identities.

1. An umbrella term for people whose gender identity is outside of, not included within, or beyond the binary of female and male.
2. Gender non-conformity through expression, behavior, social roles, and/or identity.

1. People whose gender identity and/or expressions are different from the societal norms.
2. Broad term used to describe or denote people who are outside or beyond culturally expected or required identities or expressions.

One of our most common terms, “identity” is rarely defined. In everyday language, its most common usages—“personal identity” and “social identity”—designate meanings not only distinct from one another but also hierarchically related. Personal identity is often assumed to mediate between social identities and make sense of them. Whereas our social identities shift throughout the day, what allows us to move coherently from one to another is often imagined to be our personal identity, or “who we are”—our constant.

Personal identity conventionally arbitrates taste and lifestyle. “It’s just not me,” a potential home buyer says to her realtor. “That’s so you,” a helpful friend appraises as the shopper steps out of the dressing room. An “identity crisis” is a crisis rather than an “identity opportunity” because personal identity demands proper and unimpeded expression. It is a value, something we prize. This sense of identity as ours implies an immutable essence unchanged by physical development or external circumstances. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the origins of this usage to the late sixteenth century, but it has recently been challenged by social theory and postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, and feminist theory has generated especially rich rethinkings of our notions of identity...

1. Describes a gender identity that is neither female nor male.
2. Gender identities that are outside of or beyond two traditional concepts of male or female.

1. A sexual orientation where a person desires sexual partners based on personalized attraction to specific physical traits, bodies, identities, and/or personality features which may or may not be aligned to the gender and sex binary.
2. A sexual orientation signifying a person who has potential emotional, physical, and/or sexual attraction to any sex, gender identity or gender expression.
3. Sexual orientation associated with desiring/loving a person's personality primarily, and specific bodily features secondarily.

1. The ability to present oneself as their chosen gender identity rather than one’s assigned gender.
2. Being normatively accepted as one’s promoted identity, as part of specific cultural expectations.
3. An individual’s desire or ability to be perceived as a member of a particular gender, race, or cultural group.

1. An umbrella term representative of the vast matrix of identities outside of the gender normative and heterosexual or monogamous majority. Reclaimed after a history of pejorative use, starting in the 1980s.
2. An umbrella term denoting a lack of normalcy in terms of one’s sexuality, gender, or political ideologies in direct relation to sex, sexuality, and gender.

The study of race incorporates a set of wide-ranging analyses of freedom and power. The scope of those analyses has much to do with the broad application of racial difference to academic and popular notions of epistemology, community, identity, and the body. With regard to economic and political formations, race has shaped the meaning and profile of citizenship and labor. In relation to corporeality, race has rendered the body into a text on which histories of racial differentiation, exclusion, and violence are inscribed. Analyzed in terms of subjectivity, race helps to locate the ways in which identities are constituted...

1. The fear, hatred, or intolerance of people who identify or are perceived as transgender.
2. Fear and hatred of all those individuals who transgress, violate or blur the dominant gender categories in a given society.

1. Native American term to describe person who embodies attributes of both masculine and feminine genders, have distinct gender and social roles in their tribes, and are often involved with rituals. Their dress is usually mixture of male and female articles and they are seen as a separate or third gender. The term two-spirit is sometimes considered specific to the Zuni tribe. Similar identity labels vary by tribe such as Wintke (Lakota), Hee-man-eh (Cheyenne), and Nedleeh (Navajo).
2. Native Americans who are queer or transgender.