on labels
The back and forth over the use of the word âqueerâ baffles and frustrates me. I think the arguments, and the term itself, are illustrative of a dialectic. Queer is simultaneously collective and individual, affiliation-group and self-identity, over-arching and specific, degrading and embracing. Until a time comes that all variations and expressions of gender and sexuality (and combinations thereof) are free from social and institutional stigma, queer will never mean just one thing.
Queer, as an over-arching term for anyone who is NOT cisgender, heterosexual, or perisex, acknowledges the overlap and interplay of gender assigned at birth, identified gender, gender expression, sexual attraction. A cisgender, butch dyke (a person assigned female at birth who aligns with that identity and is attracted to other women, while expressing her gender in a âmasculineâ manner) and a faggy, transgender man (a person assigned female at birth who ârejectsâ womanhood while dating men and expressing an âeffeminateâ masculinity) may seem very different from one another but can have MANY shared experiences of âqueerness.â Both may be targets of transphobia and misogyny â even when one of them isnât trans and one of them isnât a woman â and both may be targets of homophobia. âQueerâ (can, should) holds space for all of these aspects of self, even when they seem to contradict one another.
(How can a transgender man experience misogyny? When he is not perceived/treated as a man, but as a âfailed woman.â How can a cisgender woman experience transphobia? When she is perceived/treated as a ânon-passingâ transgender woman encroaching upon âwomenâs spaces.â)
When this hypothetical cis dyke and transfag both claim the word âqueer,â there is (or should be, in this umbrella interpretation of queer) an understanding that âyour fight is my fight.â We may not be the exact same flavor of queer, but our liberation is interconnected. My freedom, as a transgender man, cannot be won at the expense of womenâs freedom. I donât mean that just in the sense that I would be morally opposed to that situation; I mean it in the sense that the oppression of women WILL impact my own freedom.
The baroque complexities of queerness become further entangled when considering race, religion, and disability. Can âqueerâ hold the history of racialized gender in America? That black people have been hypersexualized/virilized and subsequently fetishized and denigrated for this projection. That East Asian women have been seen as seductresses or naturally submissive, while East Asian men are desexualized or objectified as seeming young and effeminate. The stereotypes of the hot blooded Latina and the macho Latino. Can âqueerâ encompass the deliberate destruction of Native gender identities and the subsequent (current) obfuscating mythologizing by white queers? Can âqueerâ be a place for people who see their gender and/or sexuality as a manifestation of/connection to the Divine while also being a place for those deeply harmed by religion because of their gender/sexuality? Can âqueerâ accept people with disabilities as people capable of eroticism even if their bodies donât allow for some forms of sex acts?
As a dialectic, rather than a static fact, queer can hold these things, and there are times that queer will be too broad for all these things and specificity is needed.
As a dialectic, queer is a slur and an academic term. Queer is an acceptable word in a peer-reviewed journal, and has the potential to be âfighting wordsâ interpersonally. What matters is the context and the individual interpretation. And itâs HIGHLY personal.
I was born and raised in Texas from the 90s to the 2010s. I never heard queer used as an insult, except in media from (or set in) the past. If I had heard someone use queer as an insult, my initial reaction would have been confusion. Are you fucking old? Is this the 70s? But I did hear gay used as an insult all the time. And faggot and dyke, if there werenât any teachers within hearing range. I didnât really encounter queer until undergrad, as an academic term, an area of study, and then as how my friends self-identified. Because of this, my associations with queer are largely positive.
But I know people who also grew up in Texas, only a 30-45min drive away from where I grew up, who did experience queer as a slur. For them, they may feel more comfortable reclaiming fag or dyke, rather than queer. And thatâs their decision to make. And yet, it would be reductive if they were to treat queer as only ever a slur, not as a word with decades of usage in academic and intracommunity contexts.
I like queer as a word that can veil meaning.
It can be a conversation stopper. You donât get to know the specifics of my gender history, my sexual partners, the roles I take in sex, the acts I enjoy during sex.
It can be a conversation starter. I see youâre different in a way that is similar to how Iâm different; let us now ask each other oblique and leading questions that the cis hets around us wonât understand.
I dislike how queer is increasingly absorbed into the corporate rainbow-washing of assimilationists. A company doesnât get to sell me Pride merch with one hand and donate to anti-trans politicians with the other hand.
I cannot say that queer retains its edge, nor can I say that it has been defanged. I cannot force others to reclaim the word, nor can I gatekeep the word. In the first âqueer studiesâ class I ever had, my professor explained âautonomyâ literally means âself-naming.â
There is no right or wrong answer, there is only ever-increasing nuance.
