#queer sitting

Love the meme!

Improperly sitting is one of many seemingly arbitrary traits (like walking fast and drinking ice coffee) that the queer community has claimed as part of queer culture. While it's generally discussed in light-hearted terms, it’s deeper than it seems.

Sitting etiquette is learned, not innate. Girls are often taught to sit like a lady, such as keeping their knees pressed together, therefore an act of rebellion can be a woman sitting incorrectly. Queer people already don’t fit societal expectations so we sit in unorthodox positions as a way to express our uniqueness as individuals.

Also, these unconventional sitting positions are a subtle way of communicating your queerness to other queer people.

For decades, censorship in movies & television worked to silence queer voices, and creators developed sophisticated ways of coding queerness through body language, such as the way a character sits.

Queer sitting challenges the dominant culture’s strict rules about how bodies exist in spaces (chairs are for sitting; floors are for standing; tables are for objects; men are for women). By not sitting properly, it's a way for queer folks to reject rules about what we can do with our bodies. Queer sitting says: do what feels right, do with your body what you would like, not what you are told is proper. It rejects the idea that there is only one natural, normal way for a body to exist, instead there's so many queer ways of sitting I couldn’t begin to show you all of them.