Will we be queering queer?
Via What a Maroon I read a review by Jacob Brogan of a novel about lesbians which (as WaM noted) doesn’t use the word “lesbian” once. The word “queer” on the other hand appears nine times. I get that the word “queer” has been, according to some people, reclaimed or repurposed or seized or whatever you want to call it. There’s a parallel, I think, to the way the word “Negro” went out of favor to be replaced by its English language equivalent, “Black.” It was a move from the weirdly euphemistic to the blunt, because what the hell was there to be euphemistic about anyway? “Negro” came to seem tellingly squeamish. There’s also of course a parallel to the reclaiming (or claiming) of “dyke,” helped along by Alison Bechdel.
But…not all “queer” people endorse the reclaiming of “queer.” Many of them in fact hate it. I don’t really know what to think about it, myself.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s first novel follows a meandering course through the late 19th century into the early 20th, focusing on the lives and overlapping connections of an array of real women. Many of them are boldface names from the queer and feminist cultural past — Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt and Colette, to name just a few — while others are less famous.
…
For generations of queer writers, including many of the women who appear in “After Sappho,” deliberately composing in fragmentary styles — breaking their work into discrete, discontinuous chunks through grammatical, visual or narrative eccentricities — became a way to build new, more welcoming forms of community…
Sappho is an apt avatar for Schwartz’s project: The totalizing excess of queer art can overwhelm you with laughter or longing, blotting out the painful experiences it sometimes describes. But queer thought has most often thrived in fragments, its practitioners taking the world to pieces, the better to re-center those who’ve been pushed to the margins.
I wonder why the Washington Post decided to get a man to review this book. Maybe we could start queering that kind of thing a little?
The use of the word “queer” to mean gay, homosexual, or lesbian, is stupid, stupid, stupid, and adolescent as well. To call an adult writer a “queer writer” is demeaning beyond words.
I’m also pissed off that a perfectly good New England word is now lost forever.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near (Frost)
COUNTY ATTORNEY: What—was she doing?
HALE: She was rockin’ back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and was kind of—pleating it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: And how did she—look?
HALE: Well, she looked queer.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: How do you mean—queer?
HALE: Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of done up.
“Trifles” by Susan Glaspell
Ya that’s a good point. The word is not so much a perfectly good word in the sense of useful, serviceable, handy, but in the sense of resonant, perfect, and the like. It’s a really good word.
Well “lesbian” is so woman-centred, isn’t it? That just won’t do. Can’t have women off on their own, unaccompanied, unsupervised, and unobserved, can we? They’re part of the “community.” The “community” does everything together, but most importantly it keeps the feelings of men front and centre. “Lesbian” is just a red flag, a needless and hurtful provocation that is telling the most vulnerable and marginalized portion of the “community” that This is not about you, this is not for you. We’re excluding you deliberately. STAY OUT. This will not do. This is just rubbing it in the noses of trans identified male “lesbians.” Using the gentler and less confrontational “queer” helps to soothe those feelings of exclusion and gatekeeping which “lesbian” inevitably elicits. My review is doing you a favour by making your work sound less objectionable and off-putting than it might otherwise come across as. It also widens potential interest. After all, who wants to read stuff that’s just by-and for- women.
Mike B.,
The word you’re looking for is “quee-ah”. It’s a pissah word.
And as I noted in the other thread, what really struck me is that the book is named after Sappho, the original Lesbian.
“Queer” in its alphabet soup sense doesn’t even have a specific meaning. Ace people are queer. An ex-Facebook friend of mine, a heterosexual woman, started styling herself “queer” after her live-in boyfriend transitioned.* I’m queer! You’re queer!
As I keep saying, if everybody’s queer, nobody is. But that’s the point: Queer Theory aims to obliterate binaries like “straight/gay”, “male/female”, “normal/abnormal”.
It’s a never-ending struggle.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-queer/
* That relationship didn’t last long. Imagine my surprise when I heard. Still calling herself “queer,” though.
Well sometimes the weirdness is pretty well hidden. I remember a post some here at B&W some time ago, where Ophelia featured a “queer” couple who, when you looked at their photo, just looked like a run-of-the-mill hetero couple. Not a blue hair or GNC bit of wardrobe between them. I can only guess that in their case, their “weirdness” manifested in the nature of their demands to be treated as if they weren’t boring, straight, White people. At least Laurie Penny puts some colour in her hair in an effort, however minimal or half-hearted, to display some sort of signal indicating her Special Status as Someone More Interesting Than You.
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 supposedly 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.
IIRC, “queer” was the slur used by heterosexuals to refer to gays and lesbians, then defiantly claimed by homosexuals: “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” Blacks of course adopted “n****r” among themselves, as formerly scorned White ethnics embraced their epithets; my parents’ generation cheerfully called each other dagos and wops, and sufficiently close friends of other ethnicities could be Polacks or Micks with no problem.
Being an old white straight cis suburban man who mostly only knows about gender and such what he reads here, I only recently learned that “queer” now means… something else. Kids these days. Just don’t understand ’em.
There is a scene in the brilliant children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth in which our hero Milo is told to go ask the giant for advice. The man who answers the door is normal-sized. “I’m the smallest giant in the world”, he says. He can’t resolve the problem, so he sends Milo around the corner to the midget. The same man answers the door; he’s the tallest midget in the world. He, too, can’t resolve the problem, so Milo is sent around the corner to the fat man. The same man is now the thinnest fat man in the world. Milo is sent around the corner yet again to the thin man, which is of course the same man being the fattest thin man in the world. Milo sees what’s going on, and the man asks him not to ruin everything. He can hold four jobs at once, and everyone comes to him for advice, while there are so many ordinary men and no one asks their opinion on anything. “If you need any more advice, go ask the giant.”
Maybe today one of the doors would say “queer”.
IIRC when there was a discussion here along similar lines previously one of the commenters said “queer” is what people had called him when beating him up when he was younger, so he’d never accept that word.
Black people may have adopted the n-word for their own use, but they’ve not going to change the NAACP to the NAAN. Likewise, I wouldn’t call lesbians “dykes”. “Queer” seems somewhat unique in that it’s now apparently OK for the outgroup to use (such as in “LGBTQ”).
I wish the LGB Alliance well, but they’re really swimming upstream. As many others have said, in retrospect adding T, Q, and more should have been nipped in the bud (“that may be* a good cause, but it’s not what we’re doing here”’).
* or may not be
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Skeletor @ 11 has an inaccurate memory, but that’s okay. One of the founders of Stonewall, the UK group, said in an interview that he eschews the word “queer” because, and these may not be his exact words but they are close enough, “that’s what they called me when they broke my ribs”. Additionally, an historian of gay America once said in an interview that he did not like the word because it was “the last word a gay man would hear before his face was smashed in with a brick”. Again, the words may not be an exact quote, but “the last word” is accurate, “his face” is accurate, “with a brick” is accurate. The second was for sure an interview conducted by Andrew Sullivan, and the first might also have been, though it could have been with Josh Szeps on “Uncomfortable Conversations”. It was definitely one or the other. I apologize for not having taken more careful notes.
Not only was ‘queer’ a slur against homosexuals (mostly gay men–I don’t really recall hearing women/girls called ‘queer’ in the same way), but it was, in the early-mid seventies, a term used as follows: A game called “Smear the Queer”, played by a large mob of boys. One kid (the “Queer”) would start with the ball. He’d be given a head-start, then have to run. If he got caught by the mob before getting rid of the ball, he’d be dogpiled; if he managed to throw it to another player, then the title of “the Queer” passed with the ball. However, if you were “the Queer” at the end of recess without getting dogpiled, you won.
So, yeah, it’s a strange word with a strange etymology.
The disappearance of the word “lesbian” has a lot to do with creepy straight men who fetishise lesbians. It’s not a good word to use for SEO reasons because it’s become so heavily associated with porn.
When they came for the word “gay” I didn’t speak out, so when they came for the word “queer” there was no one left to speak for me; I have a dream of a world in which our speech is judged on the content of its substance, not the tribalistic colour of its choice of words.