What is queer in 300 words?
Queer Self-Understanding Michael Warner
A queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body”
Queer is refusing the script! Queerness is the defiance of Marsha P. Johnson and the conscious resistance of Lorde, Baldwin, and the Combahee. Being queer is a political act and often is met with the violence and surveillance of policing and state institutions. Queerness is about refusing the dominant narratives and understandings of sexuality and sexual expression. Queerness is understanding that sexuality is a fluid concept not restricted by categories that make up dominant society. Since the 1980s, queerness has been characterized by concepts of mobility, placelessness, and organized resistance. Queerness implies (maybe even requires) rejecting normative structures and institutions like welfare, marriage, family, and heterosexism. This rejection of normative structures calls into question the heteronormative structures that are embedded in society. Queerness is refusing the script! Queerness is not limited to those in the LGBT community but is also encompassing those ungendered who society has deemed as deviant and others like the Black single mother. Political Scholar Cathy Cohen aligns queerness with deviance and helps us see how queerness is actively opposed to the dominant systems of domination that seek to reify capital and property. Drawing from Cathy Cohen’s work, queer is living on the (out) side of the dominant conceptions of identity. Identity in the global north is embedded in notions of class privilege, white supremacy, and “male heterosexuality” (Cohen 2004). Deviant Queerness is simply a binary opposition to heterosexuality, but encompasses concepts of intersectionality understanding that identity is layered. Queerness is refusing the script! Queerness is deviance, not simply defiance, but strategic and intentional opposition to everyday conceptions of normal. Queerness lives in the un-normal and rejects restrictive categories that are structurally imbedded within our society.
