Despite queer theory’s attempts to maintain its theoretical malleability without compromising its critical edge, it has been harshly criticized for its compliant institutionalization and for becoming irrelevant, to the extent that some of its founders even declared it dead. How did queer theory lose the critical potential it once embodied, and is it possible to work with queer theory today? In order to approach a solution, we’ll consider the concept of “queer” as a response to the AIDS crisis in the United States during the 1980s and the 1990s, and queer theory as but one site which constitutes this response. Investigating the queer phenomenon in its historical-political context will enable us to study not only what queer theory actually did, but also what it is capable of doing today beyond the question of sexuality. To this end, the first half of the seminar will focus on the three principal sites which constitute the queer response to the ethico-political problems caused by the AIDS crisis: academia, activism, and cinema. Against the specificity of the queer response to the AIDS crisis, in the second half of the seminar we’ll enquire into contemporary trends in queer theory, such as the anti-social turn; queer affect theories; queerness and disability studies; the critique of homonationalism; and the problem of the Non-Human.