This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

One girl laughs at skinny guys
Someone else points out a queer
Well, they’re all jocks, both guys and girls
Press the button, take your cue

from Jane Siberry’s “Mimi on the Beach”, 1984, when ‘queer’ was still a slur in some places. Jane herself is a Canadian gay-lesbian musical icon, although she is not really a publicly declared lesbian, or rather, her sexuality is not part of her public identity. I admire her for this, as I have issues with sexual labels since we don’t understand much about women’s natural sexuality. I only care that she isn’t fucking dudes, and that is not the same thing as identity or labels 😉

I think it is interesting to follow issues across generations. Sometimes, feelings on a topic or event will endure across generations despite the young having no true understanding of or real connection to what has happened. For example, I experienced this when I lived in Nanjing, China. My students had a deep and aggressive hatred of the Japanese despite the atrocities committed in their city having occurred two generations prior, despite currently living in prosperity and despite most to all never having met a Japanese person in their lives. But there is a collective memory of the event that is kept alive across generations in places where the Japanese did their worst, so you don’t experience this anti-Japanese sentiment in other parts of China.

You can also witness the opposite – newer generations exhibiting neither understanding of nor sympathy nor empathy for past violence or oppressive acts and thus acting in a very dismissive or flip way due to ignorance. I suppose this can happen when the oppression or oppressed group is not taken seriously by society, there is no collective memory formed, and the impact is not conveyed across time through intergenerational discussion. A good example of this is the long history of the oppression of women. Women don’t acknowledge a shared worldwide trauma due to male violence, and often don’t even know their own class history. Instead, they promote collusion with and subservience to the male oppressor class to new generations of females and punish rebellion. Talk of reality is stigmatized as ‘too negative’.

Likewise with the long oppression of homosexuals. While that oppression still exists, how it manifests has changed in some, but not all, ways. The past use of the word ‘queer’ as a slur that folks from the Baby Boomer generation can still recall, doesn’t resonate at all with today’s youth as there is little to no acknowledgment nor intergenerational discussion of gay and lesbian oppression. And consequently, the slur has, with little consideration, been ‘reclaimed’ and turned into an identity used and abused by many who are not gay or lesbian at all.

So my questions are these: where is the balance between acknowledging and respecting the violence and inequality of the past and being able to move on and be better as a society? And with specific regard to the topic today, can and should historic slurs be reclaimed, and if so, who should be allowed to do so? And can reclamation be considered appropriation, if the ones doing the reclaiming are not members of the historically slurred group?

Now I do have my own opinion regarding the reclamation of slurs and other hate speech. But I’m not going to tell you what to think until the end, as this is a topic of debate and I’m not sure if there is an objective right or wrong answer. There are probably points to be made on the various sides. What I will say is that what is objectively true is that society is not uniform in the application of their opinion to different groups, and I think it is a matter of respect-giving due to the presence of males in oppressed groups. Groups focused on females only or mixed groups that don’t conform to patriarchal gender expectations are universally discounted, censored and disrespected, while racial and religious groups, which have macho males and compliant females within its ranks are respected and allowed to have and talk about a shared history. As a result, we are still dealing with supposedly reclaimed and repurposed slurs against women and homosexuals, while this is never an issue for racial and religious groups.

So, I’m not going to go through a whole history of queerdom here. This has been done elsewhere in numerous places, although not always very well. I’ll briefly touch on the whens and whys of the repurposing of the term queer, and I’ll spend more time talking about why queer identity might be so popular amongst younger people today even though they are not themselves the creators. And then you can make up your mind about the whole thing yourself.

The Reclamation of Queer

At the risk of oversimplifying a development in thinking that is needlessly convoluted, I’ll say the following: I believe the reclamation of ‘queer’ came out of the academic thinking on the ways of knowing and being posited by poststructuralism and postmodernism coupled with a typical, youthful, cultural rebellion against the norms of society. The former talked about there being no real truth. All reality is subjective. Everything is socially constructed and rooted in power dynamics and systems. Nothing, including words or language, has a singular meaning that we can all understand. And the latter did what all generational rebellions do – they challenged what was mainstream at the time and proposed an opposing way of living life and finding one’s place in the world. But remember that all rebellious movements end up the same way – in their efforts to ‘not conform’, they end up being very conformist. It is very much like how oppressed groups that rise up aggressively and even violently end up becoming oppressors eventually. We’ve seen both trends in counter-culture movements throughout time.

Anyhow, when applied to sexuality, we ended up with queer theory and the development of queer as an identity. It challenged the idea of ‘fixed identity’, especially fixed sexual, gender and sexuality identities, and it attacked the use of what was considered to be constructed binary categories, including male/female and gay/straight. Everything is socially constructed, even the things scientists know are biologically based and objectively true, so everything is open to interpretation and is fluid in its existence. Basically, nothing means anything, and we have nothing to anchor our understanding and communication.

But, the movement and theory offered people who didn’t feel they fit in the means and permission to create their own way of knowing and being that was unique and special and to house it under the umbrella term ‘queer’. Using the former slur to describe a new identity caught on in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and despite the passage of time, it is still as undefinable and hard to understand as it was in the beginning – perhaps even moreso with the development of more and more and more micro-identities and associated jargon and labels. There are million of examples of people trying to explain their queer identities online, and I’ll provide one here to illustrate how unuseful all of this is.

“Bisexuality it doesn’t encapsulate the nuance of my sexuality – Here’s what that means. While I find cisgender men attractive, I am not authentically me when I date them. For me, “bisexual” means being sexually attracted to all genders and gender expressions, but “homoromantic” means I only have romantic feelings in queer relationships. Because this is a little complex, I just say “queer.”

Okay, so I had to read that a few times, and in the end, I still didn’t understand who this person was, or not that I care, whom they are willing to date. I have found with the queer that ironically, in trying to ‘identify’, they end up being completely unidentifiable – in other words, extremely hard to pin down and get to know. How can you make a substantive friendship with someone if you don’t understand who and what they are and what they think and what the hell their words even mean?

Now, personally, I don’t care about people’s constructed identities. As far as I’m concerned, you can call yourself whatever you want in your private life, and I oppose constructed categories for women as a rule. With males, I’m fine putting them in a single box called ‘predator class’ and then staying the hell away from them as much as possible. But I am invested in females finding and developing their natural selves apart from male oppression. But postmodernism, queer theory and queer identities don’t solve this problem for women. Rather, they make the problem worse by taking meaning away from things that actually mean something historically, and politically, and sometimes, objectively. When you’re talking about things concerning historically oppressed groups, the personal is always political. So the actions of the so-called queer have had massive sociopolitical effects on those for whom the slur, queer, was originally intended: gays and lesbians. For example, queer studies has taken over gay and lesbian studies departments and courses, which were initially rather difficult to establish due to homophobia, and this has served to erase the long oppression of homosexuality and to refocus on the queer, many of whom are not oppressed or whose proclaimed ‘oppression’ usually just ends up being bullied because of having pink hair. Further, Pride and other extremely important cultural and political groups and events have also been infiltrated and taken over by the queer, which has served to alienate the very people who started the groups and movements. Gays and lesbians who refuse the queer label and who oppose the takeover of queers, institutionally and culturally, are then labelled exclusive, bigoted, phobic of one form or another, and experience, yet again, the censorship and even violence that they’ve struggled with throughout history. The ‘inclusive’ focus of the queer has served to erase historic oppression and to impose a ‘join or die’ ultimatum on people who have very secure and easily definable sexual identities and have fought hard to have them recognized.

The Rise of Queer Identities Among Youth

It’s interesting to note that queer wasn’t born during the Millennial or Gen Z generations, but has taken hold with them and is perpetuated, or maybe ‘marketed’ is the better word, through their social media personas. Why would something that came from from theory proposed by members of the Silent and Baby Boomer Generations, and peddled to members of Gen X – my generation – be so appealing to today’s young people? I’ll propose some thoughts and if you have any of your own, I’m happy to hear them.

1. Queer has something very adolescent about it that hasn’t matured over the years. In essence, it comes across as youthful identity-seeking, which is a normal part of growing up. Every generation has its counter-culture. And if it weren’t queer, it would be something else. It actually doesn’t matter what the identity is, as long as it goes against the mainstream. And while a minority might actually understand the sociopolitical origins of this identity, most don’t and only cling to the identity to feel like they are opposing something bad, and perhaps to find some superficial pleasure in the required fashion and its shock value in the general public. In my generation, although queer was finding a foothold, the trendy, counter-culture identity was punk. Most punkers at the time didn’t really understand what the movement was about in a deep way, but revelled in the fashion, the reactions they received, and the false feeling that they were changing the world. And I think you can say the same about the queer movement. But regardless of counter-culture identity, all you need to do is to ask adherents what they believe, and you’ll find out where they’re coming from. Most will be unable to provide a coherent answer, a contingent will have memorized all the talking points and will come across as militant robots who will kill you if you oppose them, and a tiny minority will actually be able to speak with intelligence and nuance about their beliefs and their actions that support their beliefs.
2. Coupled with 1), many people identify as queer due to social contagion, peer pressure and the need to conform and belong while ironically feeling like they are nonconformist and renegade. At this point, there is almost a cult-like recruitment aspect of the queer identity, and like a snowball rolling down a steep hill, it is hard to avoid getting caught up in the slogans and self-righteousness of queers pretending to fight along social justice lines.
3. We are living in the most narcissistic period in history, and I don’t mean clinical narcissism, I just mean an overblown self-centredness or egotism. This current time period is marked by a need to be a) special and liked coupled with a need to publicly and widely advertise one’s real and, if need be, newly minted, oppressions. Queer is notoriously inclusive, which allows people with extremely easy lives the chance to take on an oppression identity and use it as a weapon against targeted enemies. The funny thing is that queer people with actual, but socially unacceptable, oppressions will often overlook or fail to acknowledge them in favour of a made-up oppression that is more fashionable or accepted. A good example of this is women who refuse to acknowledge that they are oppressed as females because the world refuses to do anything about this longest-running human rights issue, but will latch onto undefinable and meaningless queer identities that give them a highly supported whining oppression platform.
4. It allows people to escape gender conformity without actually naming the real problem and suffering the consequences of truth-telling. The real problem is male domination of females, but it is much easier to shave your head or stop wearing dresses, call yourself queer and drop barrels full of shit onto radical feminists or non-queer gays and lesbians. You can’t make progress on social issues if you don’t understand why the issues exist to begin with and who is actually responsible for creating and maintaining them. So many rebellions and movements arise without deep analysis or understanding on the part of the soldiers fighting the war. This is nothing new.
5. If you are a lesbian, you will get more approval calling yourself queer than lesbian. These days, many things that are seen as ‘exclusive’ are the target of eradication. Inclusivity, even if it erases small, but significant, oppressed groups, is the goal of today’s movements. And when we talk about exclusivity, let’s face it, we are talking about excluding men from women’s lives and allowing females to be free from male violence and oppression. Racial groups (except whites) are still allowed to be exclusive, of course, because males are still part of those groups and still run the show in all cases. But any group that excludes males is deemed oppressive and must be destroyed. This is a relatively recent development in Western culture and it represents a backward slide in human rights, in particular, women’s rights, and even more particularly, in lesbians’ rights. There are a few people still fighting eradication. The Get the L Out group based in the UK is one such group, and they are the targets of heaps of abuse.
6. It still supports the established power structure while feeling like positive social change. Queer is a male-dominance movement if you strip it down and look at it honestly. A lot of today’s queer fuel comes from the trans cult, which is as pro-male, pro-gender, pro-female-submission, and pro-lesbian-erasure as any conservative or macho movement. I’m still convinced that groups that have sociopolitical power and make changes that happen relatively quickly are, under the surface, not changing anything at all, but supporting the existing power structures and systems.

Conclusion

To come back to my initial questions. I’m a big fan of balance, but I think it is really hard to find in this world. We either cling to the past with irrational, unanalyzed emotionality in order to maintain oppressive systems, or we erase the past and replace it with something looks different, but still doesn’t change those oppressive systems. What would it look like to actually acknowledge what is going on…?

Finally, with regard to slur reclamation, I’m of the opinion that we should treat slurs like any museum exhibit. Preserve the memory and meaning, and then leave it in the past, but under glass for all to see if they choose. I don’t think keeping something in active circulation strips it of its former power, and I think it is a mark of disrespect to attempt this. In the case of the queer slur-turned-identity, I don’t think anything has been achieved. While initial reclamation was by gays and lesbians in the 1980’s – the actual targets of this slur – today, it is used by people with no historic claim to it. I think that is disrespect and a demonstration of ignorance. But you can make up your own minds, of course. As I said earlier, this is a topic of debate, not a mathematical proof with a clear, correct answer.

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