logicp_writings/queer/Queer_quotes.md

Estaban Munoz

"Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been Queer, yet Queerness exists as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and is used to imagine a future. The future is Queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house."

• Esteban Munoz, 2009 in Cruising Utopia

Describes a gnostic, historicist vision of queerness as an eschatological mode of being.

"If the goal of queerness is to challenge the reproduction of the social order, then the Native child may already by queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre at Sand Creek, charged his followers to not only kill Native adults by to manipulate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because “nits make lice.”"

Demonstrates how Queer Theorists "colonize" any identity (in this case, Indigenous identity) and use it as a means of proliferating theory.

David Halperin

Defining Queer

"To shift the position of the homosexual from that of object to subject is therefore to make available to Lesbians and Gay men a new kind of sexual identity - one that is characterized by its lack of a clear definitional content. The homosexual subject can now claim an identity without an essence."

"Homosexuality can now be constituted not substantively but oppositionally. Not by what it is, but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly operate such a marginal location to assume a de-essentialized identity that is purely positional in character are properly speaking not gay but queer".

"Queer does not name some natural kind, or refer to some determinate object. It acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is, by definition, whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers - it is an identity without an essence."

• David Halperin, 1995 in St. Foucault

Queer is, by virtue of one's knowledge of oppressive structural forces, intentionally operating a marginal location to assume a political identity.

We Are All Queer

"Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative. A positionality that is not restricted to Lesbians and Gay men but is, in fact, available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices". Does not refer specifically to Gay and Lesbian identities. In fact, modern critiques have formulated the concept of Homonormativity whereby homosexual persons are assimilated into analogous heterosexual roles which subverts capacity for expression of fluid gender and sexual identities.

"It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among…forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community-for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire."

• David Halperin, 1995 in St. Foucault

Transformation

"Homosexuality, for Foucault, is a spiritual exercise, insofar as it consists in an art or style of life in which individuals transform their modes of existence and ultimately themselves."

"Homosexuality is not a psychological condition that we discover but a way of Being that we practice in order to redefine the meaning of who we are and what we do, in order to make ourselves and our world more gay! As such, it constitutes a modern form of ascesis."

"Foucault proposes to us, then, instead of treating homosexuality as an occasion to articulate the secret truth of our own desires, we might ask ourselves: “What sorts of relations can be established, invented, multiplied, modulated through our homosexuality. The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but rather to use, from now on, one's sexuality to achieve a multiplicity of types of relations”"

"Foucault insisted that homosexuality did not name an already existing form of desire but was rather something to be desired. Our task is therefore to become homosexual, not to persist in acknowledging that we are."

"To put it more precisely, what Foucault meant was that our task is to become Queer."

"For his remarks make sense only if he understood his term homosexuality according to my definition of Queer. As an identity without an essence not a given condition but a horizon of possibility, an opportunity for self-transformation, a Queer potential."

• David Halperin, 1995 in St. Foucault

It isn't simply the attempt for one to self-beget, but the means of liberating all the world through one's sexuality.

Hanah Dyer

"The child has become both a limit and a hope for queer theory. As the literature in this field has revealed, the child is a dense site of meaning for both queer sociality and alienation. It is a locus of anxiety for homophobic culture because on it rests the reproduction of a heteronormative future. Queer theory is now bursting with debates about the status of the child in relation to futurity, politics, and sexual subjectivity, but the field of Early Childhood Education largely resists learning from and carefully attending to these conversations. There remains a palpable nervousness and discomfort in this field of thought and practice when childhood comes into contact with sexuality. Despite embattled resistance, conversations about how queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) studies might enhance childhood studies have slowly begun to emerge (Davies and Robinson, 2010; Janmohamed, 2010; Robinson, 2005, 2008; Ruffolo, 2009). Many of the arguments made in the field of childhood education concerning children’s sexualities, though, tend to stabilize queerness as identity, instead of preserving something contingent, a “site of collective contestation” (Butler, 1993: 228)."

• Hannah Dyer, 2017 in Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence: Beyond the injury of development

"there is a dilemma in administering education and rights to material children while revising a theory of childhood that encompasses its queer dynamics. ... I wonder if and how thought surrounding childhood might be sufficiently queered so that it resists being constrained by normative developmentalism and productively challenges how national, racial, classed, and gendered affiliations and identifications impact the distribution of rights and administration of education to children."

• Hannah Dyer, 2017 in Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence: Beyond the injury of development

Problematization of education as "normative developmentalism" which impacts distribution of rights and suggestion that queering "thought surrounding childhood" as a means of resisting this.