#SORRY THIS SOMEHOW DIDNT POST AS A READMORE INITIALLY

[gothprentiss]

i know this (the whole post i’ve screenshotted) is like probably, as discourse goes, quite helpful and compelling, if we assume that anyone still participating in the Queer vs Q Slur Discourse is doing so in good faith rather than to merely spell out their immovable beliefs in increasingly condescending terms but every time i see this i do think— are you sure this is what’s at stake?

like yes, sure, on one hand queerness is a great way to explore how difference is constructed against a nonexistent but enforced ideal. every oversimplified intro to theory book will tell you this— we’re all a little bit queer, proclaims some self professed Theory Expert who then will go on to say shit which wouldn’t pass even the most glancing homophobia smell test in the vacuum of space. and it’s true that some dude who only learned about bisexuality last year can also confidently describe himself as queer and claim that you are, too, because plenty of straight men very fruitily think strong women are hot. i promise i’m not making this up. any disability studies intro of any theoretical complexity should make the same central point: the normative body is not one which is actually common to all abled people, and the categories of the different and the other are constructed and enforced. i agree with this principle and am not trying to be dismissive but i do also want to point out that a lot of the time this is not being treated as an ethos or a political impetus but rather as an analytic. now you might say the three overlap— sure— but largely what’s going on here forms a larger scale deconstructionist project, which strikes me as being its own underlying ethic.

but my actual beeves are two.

first, i’m wary of the practice of— even just as an offhand comment— aligning queer as a broad term of identity— and now, irrevocably, of demographic— with queer theory. there are the obvious problems (which in this context are, i think, kind of beside the point but still relevant) of accessibility and anti-intellectualism. there is also the problem of what queer theory largely does. this is of course malleable and debatable but it is genuinely a project of deconstruction, which does not seek, ultimately, to assert difference as a unifying factor, except to the extent that it unifies all as different. this creates quite a notable difficulty as a way of stating or claiming an identity, because the binary of “normal” and “different” being invoked here is what this strand of theory is a useful tool for undermining. treating queer theory as synonymous with queer as a term of identity is like the new electric hummer (i’m being flippant). obviously there is also the fact of like— queerness means different things for different people. queer theory has different aims and philosophies. in all settings you run into the problem of a universal which also atomizes. this is probably a very useful thought process for a lot of people! as i’ve said, the capacity to accept difference without articulating frankly arbitrary ‘bad’ kinds of difference (i mean ‘don’t talk to me if you support he/him lesbians’ not like ‘i block pedos and terfs’, these being two distinct kinds of policing the conceptualization and expression of gender and sexuality, i have zero probz with the latter) is one that is really underdeveloped even among the Different community. but the problem is that that’s not the trajectory of queer theory— it’s a singular basic assumption for its practice.

the second thing isn’t really a beef so much as like… a thing to say. it’s that, okay, we’re articulating ourselves as different. we do so in order to insist on the importance, value, and normality of that difference. there is a widespread societal construct of normal, which is Good and Right and Moral. we seek to assert that we, too, are Good and Right and Moral, or that Good and Right and Moral do not meaningfully inhere in the practice or performance of sexuality and gender, or other things about these categories. does this identity have any meaning or coherence outside of that? now you might be like, jesus christ, who cares, this is our political reality and the discourse is still too much of a shitshow to be spitballing about our utopian gender and sexuality future. which is true! but think of it this way: out of gay and lesbian studies, out of gender and sexuality studies, we get the largely deconstructionist tool of queer theory. queer theory itself comes from a history of sexuality (both in the general sense that it’s enabled by the capacity to construct one, and it’s heavily enabled by foucault’s), and specifically from the fact that sexuality’s history is one which precedes and exceeds our labels and our capacity to assign them. so the question of what outcomes we imagine and desire in this coalition is also the question of our ability to articulate, beyond what we are, what the parameters of that we are. like this is just blah blah can we call sappho a lesbian-style discourse but at a more annoying lexile level. like if, and when, i call myself a lesbian, and queer, those are two different labels, with two different sets of implications for me and how i find community. how am i to conceptualize those identities beyond how they relate to me and my world? what sorts of histories can i construct or claim for myself and my community as a result? i’m kind of unconcerned with the issue of labeling as it relates to the past and the consent of those who we now perceive as voiceless, insofar as the problem there isn’t merely of labelling but of the ethics of historiography as a whole, on one hand, and the ethics and articulation of that label on the other.

and the other thing is that, like, are we required across history to identify ourselves in the negative space of society’s various enforced norms, and only ever by the impacts of its cudgel? (not conflating the two but) an interesting point of comparison is the work of someone like saidiya hartman, who i think would identify her work as african american studies well before calling it critical race theory, but also whose work is extremely formative in both fields and their intersections + collisions + entanglements(?). the legacy of enslavement is a historical record which extends in its effacement beyond the typical one-sidedness inherent in all historiography, and the critical practice hartman develops in response to the violent construction of this archive is fabulation, which is creative and generalizing. again, not conflating race and sexuality. different tools and methods and histories. the point really is just that theory produces histories in ways which are extremely important to how we conceptualize both community & justice, and what futures we imagine for those concepts, & i think hartman’s one of the more important examples of this.

this is long bc i’ve always kind of thought queer as in identity and queer as in theory are functionally different terms but with obvious and far-reaching interconnections, and i’m trying to substantiate that. maybe my point is that i don’t see the point of being like “i’m queer and that entails theory” when what you seem to mean is that, like, all labels have an underlying theory, rather than like, actual queer theory, or the obligation to engage in/with theory. arguably the point here is that in practice is not in theory, and the problem with theory is always of moving between the general to the particular, which i think is too rarely considered as a matter of time/history as well. what does articulating queerness mean going forward, and looking back? and if you’re like this Literally doesn’t matter then like, cool, awesome, so we agree they’re separate concepts because the question of history is inextricable from our capacity to engage in queer theory. as you were