Queer

As an affirming personal identity, or worldview, queer takes many forms. One form is a personal refusal to adhere to, or identity with, static, essentialist categories such as woman/man, gay/straight, feminine/masculine, and more. Rather than adopt or appropriate these labls, a person might instead identify as queer. Identifying as queer, however, does not entail or suggest other identity categories "below the surface"; instead, queer serves as a decidedly ambiguous category. As an identity, queer is fluid, malleable, and transgresses boundaries as a way of establishing agency and unity. Queer refuses to be locked into any permanent state of identification. As a term, queer has mostly been engaged to describe those who transgress sex and gender categories, but many also appropriate queer as an identity for anyone who refuses normative ways of being and inacteracting in the world. In this way, queer-as-identity allows individuals to transcend or outright reject normative labels, or to carve out an identity that more accurately represents who they are and how they relate to others.

Cavanagh, 2010
de Lauretis, 1991
Goldman, 1996

Commentary

Queer the central concept in Queer Theory
Using the term is "strategic resistance"
Queer is that which is disruptive of normativities
Queer doesn't mean gay or weird - but means a desire to defy being normal and make the normal absurd/chauvinistic
Queer's association with homosexuality rendered it useless after acceptance of gay rights
Queer must be perpetual, lest it become status quo

Rights

To be content with expansion of rights/acceptance is seen as "selling out" queer activism
Normalness is still at large, causing oppression
Normalization of non-queer marginalizes queer - seen as injustice (nothing should be normalized)
Queer is the identity category to oppose what is considered normal, and is thus is always an identity for demanding power
Queer is strategic opposition to binaries: it is also a wildcard position against any use of logical and critical thinking

Authenticity

Queer is the only authentic identity
Identity-first
"I am queer" is more important than "I happen to be LGBT"
Queer means your life is political activism
Queer is the identity of activism against anything, hence why many LGB persons feel conflict with respect to the suggestion that they can't be legitimate LGBTQ unless they are also queer.

Performativity

All gendered/normal behaviour is performative
Queer activism is, in turn, a form of performance that must be accepted as authentic, unless it intentionally isn't (pastiche, parody, genderfucking)
Since you are only performative, you have to accept my performance as authentic

Targets

The primary target is heterosexuality and cisgenderism
Considered as forms of violence with the weight of society behind them
Acceptance of normality is tantamount to genocide of queer

Problematic Queer

Heterosexuals who consider themselves to defy gender norms are problematic queers up still uphold heteronormativity
Example: masculine woman with effminate man
Lots of useless scholarship borne of these problematics

Liberalism

Queer theory/activism inherently anti-liberal
Liberal approach: "get over it"
Queer activists resent liberal approach because it justifies normalcy, assuming queer is acceptable and not extra special

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