Guest post: The worst word
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Will we be queering queer?
Queer in the queer theory/new queer movement sense is the worst word, because it represents self-contradiction. It implies a confusing, a muddying, a cognitive dissonance built right into it. To queer a concept isn’t to prove it or disprove it; it’s neither hardening the rules nor softening them; it’s neither clarifying the boundaries nor eliminating them; it’s neither respectful or disrespectful. It’s putting something in almost a quantum state exactly so that it can’t be inspected accurately.
“Queer” is applied to sexual orientation by straight people most of all, because they both want to be a part of the gay rights movement (which would make them imposters), and they simultaneously want to respect the rights of gay people. “Queer” is the sharp, jarring word that blares over that hypocrisy so nobody quite notices it.
“Queer” is applied to sex (which they of course call “gender”, as in “genderqueer”) to cover over the fact there are two completely contradictory impulses behind transgender ideology: the belief that gender stereotypes are unimportant and completely unrelated to sex, and the belief that gender roles are the most important things in the world and they completely define what sex we all are. Sex is everywhere you look and nowhere at all; it both doesn’t exist and exists, simultaneously. “Schrödinger’s dick” is a wisecrack often made about gender identity ideology for this reason.
I dislike the word queer for a number of reasons, but mostly because it represents a social idealism that is supposed to be a reaction against the strict social hierarchies and rules espoused by social conservatism — sexism, homophobia, etc. But in practice the outcome is no different than social conservatism. It’s a fact that humans come in two sexes and three sexual orientations which can’t be changed; to try and blur these facts doesn’t eliminate discrimination along these “axes of oppression”, it just makes it impossible to measure or talk about the ways women and gays face oppression.
You couldn’t possibly make up a worse way to try to improve inequality than Queer Theory. It’s so bad at what it’s supposedly intended to do I can’t help but suspect a deliberate con job. Every time I hear someone use the word “queer” I feel a little frisson of distrust. It’s an obfuscation; it’s a diversion. Someone’s trying to slip something past my radar.
“Queer Theory” seems to me, on the face of it, to be a bullies’ charter with an attempt at plausible deniability; “We’re taking away all your rights to safety, dignity, and autonomy, and doing whatever we want to do right now! Ummm… so that your grandchildren will be born into a world where there’s no inequality” isn’t a particularly easy sell. They have to obfuscate the first part with dense and faux-academic language, hoping that the rest of the world won’t look into it too deeply ‘because it’s complicated’, but instead focus on the easy, tempting second part Then they accuse anyone of objecting to the first part (assuming, possibly correctly, that anyone who hasn’t worked out what the first part really means won’t understand the objection) of trying to prevent the second.
Like all those chocolate adverts which promise candle-lit baths in beautiful apartments to the consumer, whilst hiding the producers making massive profits off the back of child slave labour. If you object to the way cocoa is harvested, obviously your objections can be drowned out by accusations that you are someone who wants to deny a whole lot of pleasure to ordinary folk.
Don’t look behind the curtain.
This is a good point, Arty. If someone is “queering” gayness, then they are muddling and obfuscating the matter of same-sex attraction so that we can’t say anymore who is and who isn’t gay. This has two functions: allowing people who aren’t actually gay to count themselves in the in-group of “queer,” and disallowing people who are gay from speaking for themselves without the interjection of the former. This is how straight women who like to think of themselves as “queer” can presume to speak for gay men, and how trans-identifying men can presume to speak for lesbians. And this is how gay pride organizations can be cancelled for not including enough non-gay people. “Queer” is a big tent, and gays and lesbians are not the most powerful people in that tent.