#like literally there are so many cultures that include polyamory and yet eurocentric values so ROUNDLY exclude it that polyam people

[im-the-punk-who]

I know many, many people have said this before but I was talking with a friend last night and she brought up how different cultures have different standards for what ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sexuality and gender look like.

It’s something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while now about why exclusionary practices are based in eurocentrism and racism and xenophobia, and i’m not sure i have it totally thought out but I’m gonna give it a go.

She(a black woman) brought up how ingrained into the Black experience white heteronormativity is, and how if the Black idea of what ‘queerness’ is was expanded, a lot more Black people would likely be comfortable identifying as some sort of queer. Because queer only really means, ‘differing in some way from what is usual or normal : odd, strange, weird.‘

She brought up how a lot of the expectations of both Black men and women are based either in conforming to whiteness or conforming to the Black community’s rejection of it, and how these are seen as ‘straight’ identities even though they are completely separate and often restrictive in their actualization. That so many of the body-image issues POC have are due to eurocentric beauty standards.

If you take a ‘cis man’ and a ‘cis woman’ who identify completely within their cultural genders (say, a Sikh man or an Indigenous woman or a Black American woman or a Mexican man or a Hassidic Jewish man or a Korean woman etc etc etc) all of those presentations of what ‘gender’ means to that culture are completely different. (Not to mention the .... incalculable different phenotypical  presentations of ‘cis’ gender that exist.)

And then of course add in that many cultures already *have* identities that under a colonialist lens are viewed as ‘queer’. The entire umbrella of Indigenous two-spirit identities is in and of itself a colonial conglomeration of hundreds of distinct cultural identities, all of which are ‘queer’ only in the sense that they are not definable by western gender norms. But within their own cultures these people are not viewed as ‘different’ or ‘queer’ but just another way to present an identity.

So, basically, the point that I’m trying to make is that there is no real way to define ‘queer’ - or even being Gay or Lesbian to be completely exclusinist - that does not racialize gender, because gender as white people understand it is already racialized and based on a perception of gender that conforms only to white standards of physical presentation. And so in truth I think the pushback against queer inclusivity cannot be separated from the pushback against normalizing non-white perceptions of gender, and from the expected assimilation by people of color.

Because once you recognize that there are literally millions of different ways to present even a cis-heterosexual gender, culturally(and this isn’t even getting into mixed race people or people who grew up in culturally diverse areas!), it becomes clear that there cannot be a single way to define what someone is, or what someone can identify as or present as, and therefore what people can be ‘attracted’ to in order to identify as a thing.

Saying that there is one ‘true’ experience of womanhood, or maleness, or gayness, or lesbianism, based on who or what people are attracted to is invalidating the millions of different ways sex, gender, and selfhood can be expressed.

To say that someone ‘cannot’ identify as part of the LGBT+ community because they are gender or socially nonconforming but don’t necessarily experience same-sex attraction (and yes I specifically left room for this to include trans, intersex, and polyam/leather/BDSM heterosexuals) is to invalidate the experiences of gender and society that fall outside the white perception.