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"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer?"
"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer?" was an article written by Cathy Cohen and published in 1997 for the GLQ Journal, a journal of Lesbian and Gay studies that is published by the Duke University Press.

Summary
In "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer?", Cohen calls into question the use of the term queer simply as an individual identity and challenges the notion that queer and straight are necessarily homogenous and oppositional categories. Her argument is one that centers the concept of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, as foundational to queer political movements and queer activism. At the time Cohen was writing, social and material realities such as the HIV/AIDS crisis and the proposed changes in welfare policies heavily, both of which she argues disproportionately affect black communities, influenced her work. Cohen asserts throughout the article that one's relationship to state sanctioned power and privilege is just as important, if not more important, in understanding the liberatory potential of queer politics than is one's individual sexual identity. She calls for attention to the ways in which identity categories like race, class, and gender may situate a person or group of people in a position of diminished power regardless of their sexual identity. Cohen uses examples of people who engage in non-normative heterosexual practices, such as "single mothers, teen mothers, and, primarily, poor women of color dependent on state assistance," as examples of subjects who might be read as queer despite their observed heterosexual behavior. Cohen credits radical black activists as well as black lesbian and women of color feminists with being some of the first to challenge dominant notions of queerness and to enact radical queer politics thus far. For Cohen, the danger in ignoring the heterogenous nature of the LGBTQ+ community by homogenizing under the label "queer" is that it far too often misses the potential for coalitional activism with folks who are may not be read as queer by dominant society, but who nonetheless push the limits of what dominant society understands as straight.

Additional Reading
In 2019, Cohen followed up her influential article with, "The Radical Potential of Queer: 20 Years Later" which acted as a reassessment of her argument and the ways in which queer politics have and have not taken up the "radical potential of queer" to form coalitional movements.

Cathy Cohen; The Radical Potential Of Queer?: Twenty Years Later. GLQ 1 January 2019; 25 (1): 140–144.