Through exploration of the classic work from scholars such as Jack Halberstam, this chapter outlines that queer theory has been strongly influenced by feminist critiques of gender as well as the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. With LGBTQIA+ groups marginalised (indeed, often criminalised and/or medicalised) until relatively recently, subcultural formations have offered a ‘natural’ space in which leisure activities, collective organisation and forms of resistance can take place. Thus, one important strand of research since the 1970s has focused on how LGBTQIA+ communities have engaged with popular culture at the subterranean level, including the study of SM dikes and drag king subcultures. Influenced by subcultural work as well as the writings of Foucault and Butler, it is discussed how more recent queer theorists have come to focus more fully on the body and sexuality as explicit sites of political resistance, where the politics of desire has the potential (particularly through social and digital media) to ‘queer’ traditional heterosexual spaces (for example through the production of ‘slash fan fiction’ and the ‘queering’ of heterosexual narratives). However, with the mainstream seemingly supporting a greater number of LGBTQIA+ popular cultural texts (for instance, the popular streamed series Transparent, Queer Eye, I am Cait and Ru Paul’s Drag Race), the chapter returns to the question of whether this signals a greater acceptance of queer communities within society or, rather as some scholars have implied, an appropriation and commodification of gay and trans lifestyles, which are sold back to the (heterosexual) masses as ‘dangerous’ and ‘edgy’ entertainment.