The erasure of LGB: just Q and T in the future?

[Shedbuilder]

I've noticed an increasing number of young academics 'queering' lesbians and gay men. The most glaring example I can lay my hands on was on Radio 4 recently, when an interesting Front Row feature on the Scottish artist Joan Eardley was dominated by a young female academic who mentioned Earley's female 'life partner' without using the word lesbian and then went on to tell us, and her fellow expert, that we should look at her through a 'queer lens'.

I've no idea what a 'queer lens' is. Does it just mean acknowledging that being an out lesbian in the 40s and 50s was a brave and unusual thing and influenced her art? If so, why not talk about her as a lesbian?
By making queer and not lesbian her female response to children and landscape (she painted mainly children and landscapes). This is a real suppression of male and female homosexual experience.

I've since heard other academics queering other LGB people on Radio 4 without correction. As I'm usually driving when it's on I'm not always aware of what programme it is or able to locate it, but here's the Front Row with Eardley:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y7tr

I think the Eardley discussion starts at around 20 minutes in. The Scottish voices are a clue.

R4 has become almost unlistenable due to the preponderance of Critical Theory/Critical Social Justice/Queer Theory perspectives that it pushes in all manor of programming.

They will almost always have academics and experts with this perspective and often with no alternative way of viewing things presented so it looks like this is the "correct" way to think about things.

I've also noticed that often the "experts" are American so the perspective is even more skewed, culturally.

I've listened to R4 every day since I was in my early 20s and I've never found myself eye rolling and switching it off as often as I do these days.

It makes me sad and infuriates me at the same time.

I was giving this some thought last night, and putting aside the fact that and many other LGB people will always consider the Q word as an unacceptable slur, I still don't buy the internal logic that it's a positive identity umbrella term.

According to the proponents it means 'different', pulling from the original (and still not complimentary) meaning of 'odd or peculiar', and thus not 'normal or regular'.

So tell me, bright, young, jargon-fixated things: how do you justify using a word for yourself that simply reinforces the concept of 'normal'?

How does even fit with your own stated desire to celebrate diversity and inclusion to start from a position of calling diversity odd or peculiar or queer?

Because that looks to me like people who have no desire to celebrate difference, but instead want to keep it in a bracket away from what you are still content to call 'normal'.

By insisting on 'queer' you are, by very definition, solidifying 'normal'.

Which, of course, is exactly what the T does by reinforcing gender as a concrete box, instead of actually challenging it.

So I guess my point is that Q slur proponents are essentially the new conservative activists, determined to keep difference and diversity as constantly outside the 'norm'.

It is merely the establishment in a new outfit.

Frankly the next generation are going to be forced to rebel by being right wing extremely conservative conservatives, but pro women's rights and critical thinking. Since this is being painted as the current 'evil', that's where they will have to go.

@terryleather

R4 has become almost unlistenable due to the preponderance of Critical Theory/Critical Social Justice/Queer Theory perspectives that it pushes in all manor of programming.

They will almost always have academics and experts with this perspective and often with no alternative way of viewing things presented so it looks like this is the "correct" way to think about things.

I've also noticed that often the "experts" are American so the perspective is even more skewed, culturally.

I've listened to R4 every day since I was in my early 20s and I've never found myself eye rolling and switching it off as often as I do these days.

It makes me sad and infuriates me at the same time.

Same here, terryleather, 40+ years of Radio 4 as my default radio setting and these days I barely bother — and when I do I all-too-frequently turn it off or to another channel.

I mangled my OP by taking a phone call in the middle of it, but my main concern about Queer is that it denies the female. Being lesbian is all about being female and in Eardley's case that may well affect her choice of subject matter and also her approach. Do many men paint regularly paint children?

I think Queer is anti lesbian and more specifically anti-feminist. I'm going to Tweet Tom Sutcliffe about it.

So I guess my point is that Q slur proponents are essentially the new conservative activists, determined to keep difference and diversity as constantly outside the 'norm'.

If my limited understanding of QT is correct Floral, then I think this has to be the case as all "norms"are by definition oppressive under QT hence all the queering of everything...so if QT was itself the orthodox position surely it would be oppressive...?

Jane Clare Jones has written a bit on the contradictory mess that raises from trying to make the "queer" normative - part of the establishment.

Here's a something on it in a from 2018 .

... what strikes me as particularly interesting about the refraction of these two moments with each other, is that the CFP belies a critical contradiction. While the discourse of ‘exclusive’ homosexuality is ‘normative’ (in queer-theory speak this is synonymous with ‘disciplinary’ and ‘oppressive’ – i.e. ‘bad’), queer perspectives, they admit, have now assumed a ‘hegemonic status.’

Quite how the people writing this thought they could parse ‘ bad normativity’ from ‘ good hegemony’ is anyone’s guess – if ‘normative’ or ‘hegemonic’ discourses are ‘disciplinary’ or ‘bad’ by virtue of being hegemonic, then there is no reason why ‘queer’ discourses should get a free pass. (There is a paradox in the centre of queer thought here – at the point at which queer theory becomes a form of academic normativity, it is no longer, by its own definitions, queer). Indeed, what I want to suggest here, is that Rachel’s behaviour to Martina is exactly a demonstration of the way in which the moral logic of queer ‘inclusivity’ has now become a hegemonic, punitive, and profoundly disciplinary discourse. As we have all been noting over the last months, trans and radical queer activism is animated by a deeply authoritarian and coercive political impulse which leads it to behave like the bastard child of Stalinism and the Medieval Catholic Church. It has produced a generation of aesthetically and discursively identikit activists who are utterly in thrall to their own moral righteousness, the categorical ‘evil’ of anyone who questions their sacred axioms, and their divine inquisitorial right to school and punish heretics. That is, the very fact that a mediocre philosopher and mediocre cyclist considers themselves in a position to discipline someone as widely and rightfully respected as Martina Navratilova for heresy, tells us everything we need to know about which discourse is dominant here, the hegemonic normativity of ‘queer’ inclusivity, and the fact that there is pretty much nothing ‘anti-disciplinary,’ ‘diverse,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘open,’ or strictly speaking, ‘queer’ about trans activism. ‘In Queer Times’ we find ourselves. Indeed.

I think I understand that. I particularly liked:

As we have all been noting over the last months, trans and radical queer activism is animated by a deeply authoritarian and coercive political impulse which leads it to behave like the bastard child of Stalinism and the Medieval Catholic Church.

Hell, yes.

@FloralBunting

I was giving this some thought last night, and putting aside the fact that and many other LGB people will always consider the Q word as an unacceptable slur, I still don't buy the internal logic that it's a positive identity umbrella term.

According to the proponents it means 'different', pulling from the original (and still not complimentary) meaning of 'odd or peculiar', and thus not 'normal or regular'.

So tell me, bright, young, jargon-fixated things: how do you justify using a word for yourself that simply reinforces the concept of 'normal'?

How does even fit with your own stated desire to celebrate diversity and inclusion to start from a position of calling diversity odd or peculiar or queer?

Because that looks to me like people who have no desire to celebrate difference, but instead want to keep it in a bracket away from what you are still content to call 'normal'.

By insisting on 'queer' you are, by very definition, solidifying 'normal'.

Which, of course, is exactly what the T does by reinforcing gender as a concrete box, instead of actually challenging it.

So I guess my point is that Q slur proponents are essentially the new conservative activists, determined to keep difference and diversity as constantly outside the 'norm'.

Exactly this. “Queer” just relocates and creates a new binary somewhere else - but by doing so, it privileges those who have the (usually class and financial) luxury of thinking about themselves as “anti-normal/non-normies” when it suits them (but often not when it doesn’t).

Things that LGB people who didn’t identify as “queer” prized and fought for in the past - and still do - get chucked over the side of the boat as a result. All those boring, “normal” type things like equal pension rights; not being thought of as sexual deviant just for having a same sex partner; being able to have a quiet life with a joint bank account and next of kin rights and not being thumped in the street. Those kind of things, that “queerness” isn’t much interested in but quite a lot of actual LGB people really are.

I’m not “queer”, thanks. Same sex love and desire is normal, not some kind of fetishised play acting of being too cool for social norms.

There’s nothing more predictable and “normie” than a kind of silly performative teenage rejection of everyone else, in order to brand yourself as more special, cool and oppositional.

This is the second time I've come across Joan Eardley being retrospectively reassigned.

Previous thread about the last incident.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4171054-Glasgow-Museums

Many years ago I sat on a Stonewall committee and we were researched by a guy doing his PhD who described himself as Queer. At the end of meetings he was often collected by his Queer girlfriend in her car (he didn't drive) and a couple of years later I encountered them out with their presumably Queer baby. Quite what was Queer about a straight white young couple I don't know. I assume they are both now running diversity and inclusion departments and trying to erase lesbians, gay men and anyone of a feminist disposition.

trans and radical queer activism is animated by a deeply authoritarian and coercive political impulse which leads it to behave like the bastard child of Stalinism and the Medieval Catholic Church. It has produced a generation of aesthetically and discursively identikit activists who are utterly in thrall to their own moral righteousness

Very acute indeed.

Quite what was Queer about a straight white young couple I don't know.

We're back to that idea from the article about woke public schools aren't we? When white, straight, affluent, educated, able bodied, middle class people are taught that they are the oppressors and wrong and that all righteousness is in other groups - all they are left with is to try to find a way to belong to the interesting, morally virtuous groups to escape. And yet from a background of privilege, all they can be is voyeurs rather than participators first hand, and they bring the belief of their privilege that they naturally will know best and be best qualified to lead and organise and speak for the group they have taken over - and what we have is a kind of forced colonisation. Ostensibly 'for' those people and in the name of doing good to them whilst vigorously speaking over and shunning any from those groups who want to speak for themselves and have something different to say than the orthodoxy.

Hence the trans people who are shunned for being the wrong kind of trans and 'truscum', the women who won't wheesht and are witches, the Goldsmith students trying to teach homeless people proper social justice jargon and to prioritise the oppression of wealthy middle class trans students over their own basic survival needs and taking over their support groups as described in the Deptford Women's Project letter.....

Its a mess.

And again is classic of liberal labour, who love to speak for their special pets of current groups they have decided to patronise. But being very annoyed if their patronised, condescended to groups actually disagree with them, want to speak for themselves, or have ideas above their station about what they want and need instead of meekly filling the space their betters have decreed for them. Hence the women and the huge red wall who won't vote for them, and all Labour have is anger and 'well we don't want your vote anyway because you think all wrong if you don't agree with us'. We've learned absolutely nothing from the last century at all. This is the exact same blind do gooding that led to children taken from 'feckless' families and shipped abroad, and the stripping out of indigenous communities and the stolen generations to try and prevent all the backward thinking and old fashionedness and enforce new and better modern thinking on everyone for conformity.

I've never understand why LGB and T are lumped together anyway, LGB is about sexuality and T is about identity, it's two completely different categories.
I can't think of anything else where things are categorised in 'one group' and then '2 seperate things in the other group'. It would be like trying to categorise a lifestyle difference such as 'adults living alone' and 'adults living with children or pets' rather than having it as 3 categories to acknowledge that pets and children are completely different.

@FloralBunting "So I guess my point is that Q slur proponents are essentially the new conservative activists, determined to keep difference and diversity as constantly outside the 'norm'."

I think there's a strong desire from a younger generation to cosplay the largely successful (and exciting) political campaigns of the 20thc that they missed out on, and to do that, they have to cut society up all over again. "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" "What have you got?". And of course in these fame-hungry days it can all be monetised, 'activist' is a career in itself, with your name on speed-dial to the TV studios, book deals and a nice office with an ergonomic chair. 'Qu**r' is a useful term now it's so vague: any privileged teenager or college tutor wanting to feel a bit edgy can opt into it (I loved the tweet a few days ago that called Laurie Penny a 'dreary oppression farmer'). It's also highly offensive to many who actually lived through the period when it was accompanied with a kick in the head (and sometimes still is).

twitter.com/TidyStewart/status/1424682563931672576?s=19

You are well within your rights to push this word back into the dustbin of history with all the other nasty words that have never had any good meaning, most especially when they are used by a movement that tells homosexuals to be open to straight sex or conceal their sexuality.

Good thread floral

Yes I’d noticed this on Front Row too. It’s tiresome. I hear the otherwise fantastic Samira Ahmed mentioning the q word a lot.

I also heard it on Loose Ends. Not Clive Anderson but another man and he was saying how much he admired Munroe Bergdorf so I had to switch off. I don’t think MB is even in the arts so I don’t know why they were mentioned.

Just listened. FFS. I didn't catch the name of the young woman talking about Joan Eardley as 'queer', but she clearly knew nothing about Eardley.

She describes Lady Audrey Walker as Eardley's 'life partner', which I am pretty sure would have come as a surprise to both of them, as Audrey was at that time (and for the rest of her life) married to and living with her husband, who was a judge in Glasgow.

There was definitely a romantic and possibly a sexual element to their friendship (Audrey's letters to Joan have been lost, so it is hard to tell how one-sided the romantic and sexual feelings were), but it was not a 'life partnership' and I cannot imagine either of the women would have described themselves as queer. Or non-binary, come to that.

I was giving this some thought last night, and putting aside the fact that and many other LGB people will always consider the Q word as an unacceptable slur, I still don't buy the internal logic that it's a positive identity umbrella term.

I am not LGB but I also consider the Q word as an unacceptable slur, I'd rather be on the "wrong side of history" with this, then use it.

I have been listening to R 4 multiple times every day for over 60 years. I also have to keep turning off due to the non science, bias and general nonsense about women. I am ready to stop paying BBC license. For ever. Unfortunately DH disagrees about license although seemingly right behind women and girls' issues. Is it worth divorcing him? ( married 50 years)

@Shedbuilder

Many years ago I sat on a Stonewall committee and we were researched by a guy doing his PhD who described himself as Queer. At the end of meetings he was often collected by his Queer girlfriend in her car (he didn't drive) and a couple of years later I encountered them out with their presumably Queer baby. Quite what was Queer about a straight white young couple I don't know. I assume they are both now running diversity and inclusion departments and trying to erase lesbians, gay men and anyone of a feminist disposition.

You might appreciate this thread then. twitter.com/SeahorseLt/status/1424169188302671881

We've just had the 'let's not pay the licence' conversation in this household. It's due at the end of the month. I think we may take a stand and cancel it. It's one of the few concrete things one can actually do. I've been complaining to the BBC about their wholesale adoption of gender ideology for years and all I get are shruggy 'no problem here' responses. But money does talk. So maybe we'll forsake Newsnight and the occasional documentary in order to give the Beeb a £159 quid poke.

People, both cis and trans, will continue to identify as gay, bi, and lesbian. And they will all be considered to fall under the queer umbrella.

What we will try to move past is the notion that sexuality must be strictly based on the "observed sex" at birth.

That's a great thread, Ova. Yup: load of white middle class dudes with MAs and PhDs telling women and working class and black and disabled people how they should think and what they should do. It's the same-old-same-old patriarchal authoritarian bollocks, isn't it?

I'm a 60-year-old second waver and I'm surrounded by young libfems who rebel by dying their hair blue but would never dream of leaving the house with hairy legs or without doing their eyebrows. They are the straightest (in every sense) people I know. It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous.