As someone who pretty much exclusively describes themselves using the word “queer” in anglophone settings, I really like this line. Negation isn’t naturally negative (I say, as Wittgenstein rolls...
“queer is a material reminder of one’s relation to an unequal structure of power.”
As someone who pretty much exclusively describes themselves using the word “queer” in anglophone settings, I really like this line.
Negation isn’t naturally negative (I say, as Wittgenstein rolls in his grave), by which I mean so much of my social life is defined by what I cannot do and cannot be: in the eyes of my society, I am not so much X as I am not-Y, etc. So to me, instead of accepting my “wrongness” as depicted and decided by the normalized societies in which I live as something negative, I can and do choose to see my “wrongnesses” as points of pride: I am not wrong, but queer.
I think a lot about Jasbir Puar’s writings on homonationalism, when she speaks of the kinds of bodies and peoples that are allowed to be normal, and how new groups are “normalized” at the expense of others. There are parts of who I am and what my life entails that will never be folded into homonationalistic acceptability. That is functionally what it means to be queer.
As someone who pretty much exclusively describes themselves using the word “queer” in anglophone settings, I really like this line.
Negation isn’t naturally negative (I say, as Wittgenstein rolls in his grave), by which I mean so much of my social life is defined by what I cannot do and cannot be: in the eyes of my society, I am not so much X as I am not-Y, etc. So to me, instead of accepting my “wrongness” as depicted and decided by the normalized societies in which I live as something negative, I can and do choose to see my “wrongnesses” as points of pride: I am not wrong, but queer.
I think a lot about Jasbir Puar’s writings on homonationalism, when she speaks of the kinds of bodies and peoples that are allowed to be normal, and how new groups are “normalized” at the expense of others. There are parts of who I am and what my life entails that will never be folded into homonationalistic acceptability. That is functionally what it means to be queer.