Queerness

[Colinfromaccounts]

Is anyone else bothered by this becoming a catch-all term?

I’ve had relationships with both men and women, but never felt the need to define myself that way, I feel my sexual and romantic life is fairly private. I suppose in a way I feel both straight and gay rather than one or the other so never wanted to claim the term bisexual either as I then felt hemmed in by the LGBTQ+ label, when for all functional purposes I move through the world as a straight woman.

I’m not anti gay culture, loved a gay bar in my youth and still love gay books and films etc.

I just feel queer has come to define everything, either you’re in the gay and trans soup or you’re not, and it’s quite flattening to the multiplicity of the human experience. I have basically nothing in common with a man who has only been in sexual and romantic relationships with men.

It seems to me that the queer world itself wants to ungender everything. But try asking a gay man on Grindr to fuck a “man” with a vagina and see how far you get.

can anyone relate?

Yes, and yet find Tim Curry in Rocky Horror the sexiest thing ever, but he was still pretty masculine, I suppose. It’s complicated! All I know is I’ve never met a trans person I’ve been attractive to, so far. Plenty of men in eyeliner and more feminine clothing though!

With you there!

lol, of course not! 😂
Gender is about prescribed social roles, behaviour and expression, etc. There's a reason you can do "gender studies" at uni, its complex and changeable and informed by different societies... That's why i'm describing certain aspects of gender expression that i find attractive, i'm not in any way assigning gender identity to anyone

Eh no because they have redefined bisexual to mean 'attracted to two or more genders' rather than attracted to both sexes. So you can be attracted to women and transmen and by queer ideologist rules you can be bisexual.

But how is that different to personality? Genuine question.

There are two reasons you can do gender studies at university.

1. Because fools and their money are easily parted.
2. Because people like Judith Butler and Sally Hines would otherwise be completely unemployable.

I agree. To quote my son's godfather "As a gay man, it was usually the last word you heard before the fist hit you."

Exactly. I'm not one to normally be precious about words, but the Q word is despicable for that reason.

And to see it adopted by everyone - from spicy straights and Gen Z to the publishing industry and universities, etc. It makes me think I've slid into a deranged alternate universe, where no one knows the history of anything.

the simplest answer is that living in a society has conditioned us all to "perform" gender to varying degrees (e.g girls wearing skirts is a simplistic one, also men not crying, etc)
So most people unconsciously have gendered expression through clothes, behaviour, language, etc. This is where sexist stereotyping is so harmful and pervasive, when people are "punished" for stepping out of these expectations.

When anyone is in conflict with societal expectations of their gender they tend to be noticed and seen as "different".

Its different to personality because you can be, eg, a "masculine" woman/ or "feminine" man based on those societal expectations, but you could also be shy or outgoing or introvert or extrovert, etc.

I find the outward expression of those "masculine" gender norms attractive for reasons i dont think i could even explain (can anyone explain why they find certain people's appearance attractive??)

i think its about realising that gender is a set of rules that we are free to accept or reject (is that 3rd wave feminism? i might have that wrong! sorry) And for some reason i find women who have chosen to reject gender norms more attractive

thats the best i could explain it...

Feminists reject all that bullshit, instead of defining ourselves and everyone else according to it.

We REALLY need the "laugh" emoji back 😁

Thanks for trying, but I honestly don't still don't see how it's different from just having a personality.

I certainly don't think I'm "performing" any sort of gender expression if I say, wear a pink dress one day and my DMs and baggy jeans another. I'm just wearing things I like and things that are appropriate for the kind of day I'm having. Same for my likes and interests - gender doesn't come into it - I'm just doing what I like.

If you can accept or reject gender norms, then they're pretty meaningless anyway. Surely, it's your personality that dictates if you conform to them or not, so again, it's basically just the same as personality, no?

fair enough, that's how you see it and thats cool. i was just trying to answer your question.

FWIW, i also agree that gender norms are pretty meaningless, lol. Unfortunately lots of other people do judge people based on them

i agree, and also think its meaningless and reject it, but we live in a society where we have those ideals impressed upon us.
I'm a childless 42 year old (by choice), you think i haven't had gendered expectations put upon me by family and friends?? lol. We dont have to agree/sign up to it for it to impact us unfortunately

Sure, but they're based on your sex. Trans women don't live with the same expectations.

Reading the last few pages has helped me realise that actually I find individuality and talent massively attractive- Adam Ant, Annie Lennox, anyone dressed outside the norm and rocking their own look. Thing is, those people didn't claim an identity or demand special treatment.
So I ought to like ‘queer’ but it really doesn’t give joyful freedom of expression vibes!

There’s something here.
Maybe as if white people dressed up as indigenous Americans, with totems and headdresses, claimed they were in tune with their ancestors and the earth spirits, so happier than all the ordinary white people, but also in need the protections offered to racial minorities.

No respect for anyone else at all.

The word people is 'othering'?

First wave feminism was all about women's fight to be recognised as people. Suffrage, property rights, access to education and the professions - women repeatedly went to court and were told that where the law said 'persons shall have the right to ...' it didn't mean them because women were not people.

'Folk' makes me think of beardy blokes with guitars and smelly sweaters. Or maybe some kind of magical woodland creatures like elves or something.

Also because in the early 80s women like Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin became completely enamoured with gay men's S/M leather culture and imported it back into what was women's studies, thus precipitating the 'sex wars', replacing feminism with man-friendly 'sex-positive' 'feminism' and replacing women's studies with gender studies.

Yes that does sound very 3rd wavey, choosy choosy choice 'feminism'.

In reality we're not that free to accept or reject 'gender' because it is imposed on us from birth. It's not just how we express ourselves, it's what is done to us and the ways in which we are punished for failure to comply.

These are some excerpts from Julia Long's talk in 2017 where I think she really nails what gender is:

It kind of annoys me when people talk about 'gender is a social construct' because I think that's very wishy-washy - it's not just about a social construct that affects men and affects women. It's about relations of power between women and men, obviously. We do not live in an equal world of power relations between women and men. So gender is about cementing and embedding and maintaining and reproducing the particular power relations between women and men.

... when we think about masculinity what we're thinking about are all the kind of behaviours, so-called attributes, maybe styles of clothing, certainly status, position, a sense of potential and possibility in terms of your power and what you can achieve. But what we're talking about is a whole collection of things which together form ritualised male domination. That is what masculinity is, it's not an individual gender identity trait, it is a set of different kinds of practices and codified behaviours and systems that ritualise male domination. By contrast, femininity is ritualised female subordination ...

So, as Lierre Keith says, it is a real mistake, and this is such a kind of foundational point of the whole transactivist narrative, that gender is a binary, or gender is a spectrum and then you can be non-binary or anywhere along the spectrum. Gender is certainly not a binary it is a hierarchy because it's cementing those power relations with men on top and women on the bottom and it is the means by which those power relations are naturalised, institutionalised and eroticised. So it seems to be natural, through things like religious or scientific texts, it's institutionalised in all these institutions that we can think about, and it's eroticised because it is key to heterosexuality as well, that this relationship with subordination and domination is seen to be somehow sort of intrinsically linked to sexual desire and - yes, it's seen as desireable in that sense.

So as I say then, what gender is, is a political system of male domination and female subordination. That's what it is. I don't think we should use the term gender, I think it would be good to just abandon it and when we're talking about patriarchy, which is what we are talking about, we need to talk about male domination and female subordination. Gender is just a very unhelpful word that serves to obscure the reality of what's going on and to set up other kinds of really meaningless categories. So it's a means of institutionalising, naturalising and eroticising male supremacy and what I'm arguing here is that what gender is not is some kind of innate property of the individual, as in terms like gender identity or gender expression.

The reason that you can do 'gender studies' is because the Womens Studies departments were taken over and renamed.

I'm a straight woman. I have friends and relatives who are lesbians. I also have friends who are "queer" Without fail these women are married to men and have been for a long time, and have either kissed another female once (possibly while drunk as a teen) or had a "girl crush" on a celebrity, or they are totes genderqueer/nonbinary/enter whatever the latest fad is. And they usually have one or more trans/enby teen.

In contrast to the lesbians I know they are very loud about how utterly different and queer they are, not like the rest of us boring people. They are down with the youth, not like us bitter middle aged bigots.

I see it as an appropriation of oppression. They actually have pretty boring normal lives like us but are desperate to be seen as "quirky" (see also self identifying as autistic and/or adhd, which many of the same people also do.) I'm autistic, I rarely mention it, post on social media about etc. It's not my whole personality.

Folk means...people. Like folk music. It's a pretty common word. Are you being disingenuous?

No, but you clearly are. It's a topic that has been frequently brought up and addressed in Reddit's LGBT communities.

It's really not frequently brought up and addressed on Reddit in the context of LGBTQ. Posts about use of the word folk on Reddit are about how it's another word for people, and sometimes seen as a friendlier or warmer word.