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posi-pan · 4 years ago

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Okay so you seem hella educated in every post. So I have a question, what exactly does queer mean

first, thank you. second, what a question. this is probably gonna get rambly even though you were probably just looking for a "queer means people who are x, y, and/or z" answer lmao.

so. queer doesn't exactly have a definition. it's meant to be vague and inclusive, covering a broad spectrum of people. the most mainstream (and in my opinion, sanitized and reductive) understanding of queer is that it's basically interchangeable with "lgbt", that it simply means anyone who isn't cishet.

but for me, it's much more broad than that. for me, it's anyone who isn't periallocishet, and has room for things like questioning and experimenting and not knowing what the fuck you are, but knowing you aren't what amatonormative and cisheteronormative society expects/wants you to be. things like detragender, queerplatonic relationships, gender nonconformity, polyamory, and kink. i know the last two, especially the last one, will rile people up, but there's history of overlap and intertwined communities, and for a lot of people, those parts of themselves aren't in addition to their queerness, but are part of their queerness.

a lot of people love queer because it's such an inclusive and vague term. they don't have to get into specifics, stress about finding the perfect word(s) that captures everything, or rattle off multiple different labels if they don't want to. it's one word, inclusive, perfectly encompasses the weird and confusing and grey area, no hierarchy, and can be an umbrella or an identity in and of itself.

and of course, there's the aspect of queer that is radical and anti-assimilationist and angry and rebellious and liberating and whatever the fuck we want it to be. it was reclaimed as a rallying cry during the aids epidemic by people who were fed up and rejected the polished, mainstream approach to fighting for rights. which was basically "accept us because we're just like you" and queer was about embracing the difference; it's in the word. it's about being unabashedly yourself, because you have every right to, and fuck anyone who thinks you should hide it or down play it or play by someone else's rules in order to gain "acceptance".

and here are some quotes, because why not?

Queer Nation Manifesto, 1990

Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves.

Using “queer” is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It's a way of telling ourselves we don't have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world.

“What Is This Thing Called Queer?” by Cherry Smith, 1992

Each time the word “queer” is used it defines a strategy, an attitude, a reference to other identities and a new self-understanding. For many, the term marks a growing lack of faith in the institutions of the state, in political procedures, in the press, the education system, policing and the law. Both in culture and politics, queer articulates a radical questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the family. We are beginning to realize how much of our history and ideologies operate on a homo-hetero opposition, constantly privileging the hetero perspective as normative, positing the homo perspective as bad and annihilating the spectrum of sexualities that exists.

“From ‘Queer Nationality’” by Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, 1992

Assimilation refusal; the use of devalued forms of affect like longing, accusation, and embarrassment; reclamation and reterritorialization of public space; strategic use of other theoretical stances and rights movements like identity politics and the peace movement; exploitation of internal differences; deliberate incoherence or anti-logic; anger and rage; and surprise.

Women and Bisexuality by Sue George. 1993

“Proponents of queer believe that gay liberation has not achieved enough, and that rather than seeking acceptance, people who do not identify with the mainstream heterosexual world should fight back with anger. Adherents of queer are turning their backs on straight society and seek - at least in theory - to bring together people of both sexes and of all races whose sexuality is proscribed, actively including bisexuals, to participate in the struggle. Queer activists set out to challenge all proscriptions on sexual behaviour and can be as critical of feminist sexual norms as of any others. And they believe in having fun with their politics, with demonstrations that include wink-ins, kiss-ins and the outing of army generals. Queer is fighting a society in which homophobia is endemic and is actively promoted by legislation and most of the media.”

Gay New York by George Chauncey, 1994

“Queer wasn’t derogatory,” one man active in New York’s gay world in the 1920s recalled. “...It just meant you were different.” While some men regretted the supposed aberration in their character that queer denoted, others regarded their difference positively and took pleasure in being different from the norm. (As one associate of the writer Carl Van Vechten quipped, “Who wanted to be ‘normal’ and boring?”

Before the war, many men had been content to call themselves ‘queer’ because they regarded themselves as self-evidently different from the men they usually called ‘normal.’ Some of them were unhappy with this state of affairs, but others saw themselves as ‘special’--more sophisticated, more knowing--and took pleasure in being different from the mass. The term gay began to catch on in the 1930s, and its primacy was consolidated during the war. By the late 1940s, younger gay men were chastising older men who still used queer, which the younger men now regarded as demeaning. As Will Finch, who came out into the gay world of Times Square in the 1930s, noted in his diary in 1951, “The word ‘queer’ is becoming [or coming to be regarded as] more and more derogatory and [is] less and less used by hustlers and trade and the homosexual, especially the younger ones, and the term ‘gay’ [is] taking its place. I loathe the word, and stick to ‘queer’ but am constantly being reproved, especially in so denominating myself.”

Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions edited by Naomi Tucker, 1995

The use of “queer” can be empowering. It refers to a radical tendency in our community to seek liberation and self-determination, not assimilation into the white, male-dominated, heterosexual culture.

New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader edited by Michele Aaron, 2004

Queer’s most basic function is as an umbrella term or catch-all for uniting various forms of non-straight sexual identity. But it means much more than this. Queer represents the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression - that masculine men sleep with feminine women - but also to the restrictive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality - that only men sleep with men, and women sleep with women. In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality.

To be queer now, then, means to be untethered from “conventional” codes of behavior.

i hope this helps you understand queer a little more!

#asks #anonymous #reference #long post

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