5 points that I have learned so far

At the onset of this semester, I fought the urge to overly intellectualize queer theory. I thought that by setting a frame atop the few semesters of queer theory that I have studied, that I would be defining the main concepts of queer theory and thus making it somehow less queer. The process of stripping away the cultural and societal conventions husks that envelope the most basic of things such as gender, sex, and sexuality, has been quite enlightening.

There are so many ideas that I have learned in our short time together so far, but the concepts that kept me awake at night thinking about them were as follows:

1.     Timelines: Foucault’s text The History of Sexuality has changed the timeline that I formerly believed to have simply existed since time began. I had always had the understanding that there have always been persons who had “abnormal” behaviors such as same-sex desires, gender incongruence and what society had fed me since birth which is what I should see as normal versus abnormal. What I discovered however, was that although there have been documented behaviors that mirror those same behaviors of today they are still different. In Foucault’s text, he traced the speciation of homosexual back to the 19^th century (p, 43). Homosexuality as we know of it, didn’t exist until Westphal wrote his article in 1870 (p. 43).

2.     “Queer Theory is what you make of it: Reading Jagose’s text Queer Theory just made so many things click into place for me. In my mind map of queer theory’s history such as what happened and where did our culture get so sucked into gender norms, and titles; there was a huge void that has now been at least lined with information. On page 59, Seidman writes “Liberation politics aimed at freeing individuals from the constraints of a sex/gender system that locked them into mutually exclusive homo/hetero and feminine/masculine roles”. This is exactly the piece that I needed to figure out why it is that today in black lgb culture (that I am aware of) there is an absolute unwritten rule that feminine “femmes” can date either, femmes or studs (“masculine” role). The role is however, reversed for what are considered masculine women “studs”, who can date femmes but are looked down upon by their peers if they date another “stud” because that is then being “double-gay”. So it now clicks for me that when (p.59) the liberationist collectives began to form a more community-based culture, that it washed upstream to the black lgb community just as many “honest-American” values have done over time, and they stuck for reasons to deep to continue writing about with the expectation of completing my blog. So back to the community that was then created, within communities or societies, there exist certain rules and expectations that accompany belonging. If someone behaves against this ideal, they are then “othered” and have accomplished queering of themselves.

3.     “Queer anything is more frightening than the most terrifying non-queer” : We have discussed in class how queering things is and can be considered a threat to heteronormative (and to an extent homonormative) groups. The queer identity along with the fact that it just bounces around all willy-nilly without a definition, threatens people. I have been in Butler heaven all week and wanted to share a snip from her Undoing Gender text. On page 34, Butler writes about queer bodies and those whose sexual desires do not fit neatly into a heteronormative world. Butler talks about the violence that queerness breeds in some people when they cannot determine upon visual inspection what another person’s gender is, or if that person’s gender happens to be different than what they expected. Butler states that “the negation, through violence, of that body is a vain and violent effort to restore order, to renew the social world on the basis of intelligible gender, and to refuse the challenge to rethink that world as something other than natural or necessary”. Watching her on youtube really helped me to appreciate and understand Butler so much more.

4.     Gender and performance: Gender and sexuality seem to constantly be lumped together. Butler spoke about gender as constructed and performed, as something that it done. Although originally, Butler was very difficult to read, it began to make more sense when you just look at it differently. I took an adapted approach to understanding Bulter, I just took my night meds and voila, I started following along. The notion that we are all in drag seems weird initially, and then it makes more sense if you look at it from a comfort level. I would feel completely out of my element in make-up, heels and what-not, but I have always loved clothes that I could get dirty, would last forever, and that are generally comfy to wear. Perhaps that is how we all feel about our drag. I don’t know.

5.      Gender and sexuality: These two terms for me have always stood on their own respective platforms. It is not until I began hearing the views of others that I understood that it takes some people a long time to “get it”. Gender is fluid, as Butler would say, Sexuality is…well, it just is, says Foucault. It isn’t until I thought about both of these things together, that I began to understand that no matter how close to the subject I am, that even I have lots to learn. What I have learned so far is that gender and sexuality are as queer as they can get, regardless of how you perform either; they are both as fluid as the Niagara Falls and constantly evolve.