I feel very frustrated by @taylorswift​’s “You Need to Calm Down” (currently “#3 On Trending” on youtube). This is not a particularly hot take.

Corporate pride tends to be highly contested in general: on the one hand, some argue that it’s helpful to LGBT+ youth to see themselves represented in the hegemony and suggest that maybe it’s better that corporations are courting LGBT+ dollars over the money of homophobes; on the other, normalization (especially normalization through capitalist/corporate interests) has historically been complicit in the further marginalization of many queer folks–especially trans women of color. To some, “You Need to Calm Down” is simply one example of corporate pride, and therefore represents the same potential for an ambiguous reading. Personally, I have tried to imagine whether this song would have meant anything useful to me as a closeted queer teen; I remember looking desperately for queer themes in “straight” music, and I remember being slightly older (18, maybe?) watching Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls like Girls” on a loop and how much my first exposure to actually queer music produced by actually queer artists meant to me, and I don’t think even that version of me would have felt connected to Taylor Swift’s attempt to reconcile her experience as a celebrity who has literally capitalized off of internet drama to the harassment queer folks experience daily for existing as themselves.

The Onion’s article “Taylor Swift Inspires Teen To Come Out As Straight Woman Needing To Be At Center Of Gay Rights Narrative” does a great job of simplifying why exactly this video and song is so exhausting to me and many other LGBTQ+ folks: the author argues that Taylor Swift uses “LGBTQ iconography to advance her career” and that, rather than letting people speak for themselves and control their own narratives, she’s making Pride Month about herself. The AtlanticandVoxboth have run more in-depth articles breaking down the multitude of reasons why this song is deservedly coming under fire, which I highly recommend reading.

One counter argument I’ve seen here and there is that Taylor Swift is actuallynot a straight woman centering a gay rights narrative around herself–now that she’s said the word “gay” in a non-negative way in a song, its only a matter of time before she comes out! So one of the things I want to emphasize here is that while I personally don’t believe she’s queer (and per Swift’s own tumblr post explaining why she didn’t kiss Katy Perry in the music video where she says “To be an ally is to understand the difference between advocating and baiting. Anyone trying to twist this positivity into something it isn’t needs to calm down. It costs zero dollars to not step on our gowns.” she doesn’t seem to anticipate coming out either), regardless of whether or not she turns out not to be straight, this song and its lyrics areappropriating LGBTQ iconography to advance her career, and Swift isusing queer folks as accessories to perform “wokeness” and draw parallels between herself and actual marginalized communities for her own gain. She may end the music video with directions to sign her petition for Senate support of the Equality Act, but the links in the song description are all promotion for her song, her merch, and her social media accounts. She does not even follow through on the optics of social justice.

The main way I want to trace this argument is through her fundamental misunderstanding and, more significantly, misrepresentation of what homophobia is.Throughout the song/music video Swift is consistently trying to render compatible her own supposed experiences with being bullied/criticized on the internet to the violence of homophobia which is, quite frankly, fucking wild. She sings: “Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out / But you say it in a Tweet, that’s a cop-out.” What seems to be the intended interpretation of this line is that negative interactions online are cowardly, because people are “hiding” behind usernames and icons, rather than being “brave” enough to offer direct criticism and publicly/visibly own their words; I am not going to go into the potentials of this line of conversation, because I do think in another context (and said by other people) real conversations about the potentials and pitfalls of online culture in regards to purity/call-out culture, social activism/organizing, and bullying can be and are already being had. What I want to point out here is the cognitive dissonance: who can say anything in the street to someone as rich, privileged, and insulated as Taylor Swift? If Swift only accepts criticism delivered in person, she doesn’t accept criticism and she might as well own up to that. And when she is trying to tie this into a commentary on homophobia, maybe she should have considered for two seconds the kind of actual danger queer folks (especially trans and gender non-conforming) are actually in on the streets every day while she’s in a mansion/penthouse apartment (and to that extent, the gentrified trailer park imagery didn’t sit to well with me either, but I’ll get into the discussion of class later on). Queer folks really are getting knocked-out in the streets (1,2,3). Furthermore, in her desperate attempt to center her psuedo-discourse on homophobia and queer liberation around herself, she sings the lines: “But I’ve learned a lesson that stressin’ and obsessin’ / ‘bout somebody else is no fun / And snakes and stones never broke my bones”. I’m not really surprised that it doesn’t “break her bones,” given how successfully she has marketed and monetized her feuds and her own victimhood; this is just a newnother rebranding of said victimized persona, and even though she may not be bothered, there are real stakes to it beyond the “lack of fun”.

So let’s get into it. As I said before, Swift is dangerously misrepresenting what homophobia is and what it looks like, namely through the use of a progress “wrong side of history” narrative. The lines run “Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?…Sunshine on the street at the parade / But you would rather be in the dark ages” and the music video shows what Kornhaber, writing for The Atlantic, aptly describes as “an unwashed-looking mob” holding childish signs with misspellings and the all-time classic “Adam + Eve Not Adam + Steve.” Korhnaber points out the more common use of “God Hates Fags” signs; personally, I’ve also seen a lot of the “HolyBible” “After Death, the Judgement” signs. In Swift’s narrative, homophobia looks like the obvious, regressive, primitive villain; the already defeated. Perhaps worse, it looks like the rural poor, against the backdrop of rich queer celebrities. This narrative works to render invisible the poor-and-queer, and it undermines the real dangers homophobic violence poses by imagining homophobia has already lost. Imagining homophobia as thirteen unwashed rural poor people who can’t spell the word “moron” obscures the reality that there are also the Mike Pences and the Philip Anschutzs and the laundry list of other rich and connected anti-LGBT politicians, activists, and donors who have very real effects on the lives of the disabled, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, the poor, immigrants, and all the intersections thereof. This also ties into the way Swift puts forward the solution “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace / And control your urges to scream about all the people you hate.” As meaningless as these lines are overall, the insinuation that there is a “peace” that we can be “restored” to that would benefit the marginalized and oppressed is ridiculous and harmful, and again misrepresents the problem. Moreover, it suggests the problem could be understood as one of bodily discipline: if homophobes “controlled” themselves better, didn’t scream so much, there wouldn’t be a problem–this gets us back to the problematics of representing homophobia as exclusively the undisciplined poor, rather than the rich and connected. It also leaves room for the potential insinuation that everybodywho is angry on the internet needs to calm down; I’ve seen a lot of jokes that this Pride Month, the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, we’re returning to our rebel roots and also celebrating Wrath. I certainly don’t plan to calm down, thanks anyway, Taylor. 

In this same vein lets consider the much quoted line: “'Cause shade never made anybody less gay”. This was the first line I heard from the song, and my immediate problem with it was, as Korhnaber also points out, thatthrowing shade comes from queer communities of color, and “there are many ways to describe a parent who disowns a trans kid, or a lawmaker who tries to nullify same-sex marriages, or a church member who crashes a gay soldier’s funeral. Shadyisn’t one.”

Swift hides from potential criticism/backlash behind a psuedo-feminist “female solidarity” with lines such as: “And we see you over there on the internet / Comparing all the girls who are killing it / But we figured you out / We all know now we all got crowns.” While there certainly are people who try to pit women against each other on the internet, again this is something which Taylor Swift has directly utilized multiple times to make herself money. I’m glad celebrities know they’ve all got crowns, but in what world does this benefit the non-rich and famous?

Let’s be more than simply sad about or sympathetic for those now dead or injured in Orlando. We need solidarity over and above sympathy.

We need to dig to answer these questions:

How does it make perfect sense that a “security guard” is also a terrorist?

How does it make perfect sense that a murderer shot down BY police loved taking selfies in NYPD shirts?

How is it that a man spurred to violence in the face of male-male love can also be spurred to violence in the face of heterosexual love (c.f. his assault of his ex-wife)?

How does it make perfect sense that a secular and intolerant Islamaphobic discourse will be the right-wing, homophobic Christian’s response to this act of homophobic violence?

What kind of disavowal must happen here?

How do we figure that the security offered by more guns will remedy the insecurity highlighted by gun violence?

These contradictions aren’t very hard to work out, but we continue to sit back, aghast, and shocked by what we see. This perpetual naivete is perhaps best summed up by that Onion article on another mass shooting, the headline of which reads “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Or maybe Susan Sontag said it the best:

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Maturity will mean working out these ostensible contradictions, realizing how each pole in these oppositions is implicated and necessary to its other. This is, of course, what queer theory does every day.

darkshrimpemotions:

The reason SPN is both quintessentially queer and quintessentially homophobic is because it’s a straight man’s fanfiction of a queer text. That’s really it. It’s a straight man seeing the isolation and liminality and impermanence of queer life in the mid-20th century as told in On The Road and romanticizing it, and wanting to claim it for himself.

Which of course doesn’t work, because in positioning his main characters as protectors of the middle American heterosexual nuclear family, he has already fundamentally misunderstood them. Their very existence is something middle America views as a threat, and middle America is to these characters a trap, a prison, a slow death rather than a quick one for which they nevertheless yearn because we are all taught to do so. (Perhaps what they truly yearn for is to want that life, but I digress.)

The American road story, the drifter’s story, is a queer story. It is not compatible with the white picket fence, in fact the white picket fence’s primary purpose is to shut it out. The white picket fence is a symbol of stability, comfort, prosperity (conformity, stagnation). The road, on the other hand, is a symbol of upset, disquiet, transience (freedom, transformation). Adventure and uncertainty are the cornerstones of the road story. It simply makes no goddamn sense to take characters from the road story and position them as protectors of the middle American nuclear family when their very existence is positioned as a threat within the cultural context ofmiddle America.

Keep reading

undead-moth:

dumatsquiet:

bisexual-cryptid:

aeondeug:

renniequeer:

renniequeer:

Assimilationist gays repeat the same rhetoric as conservatives and that’s a fact.

If you’re making fun of the angry queers, the punk queers with funny hair, the ones who dress funny and augment their bodies, the ones who thrive through drag and kink and polyamory, the ones who reject the 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, then guess what?

You have sided with the status quo, and I do not trust you.

For the record, I’m getting really fucking tired of people deciding to read this as 

“Ren said wanting to have 2.5 kids and a white picket fence is bad!”

and

“Ren said you’re bad for not being Gay Enough!”

and

“Ren said kink is inherently queer!”

when the actual point of this post is that bootlickers mocking and tearing down all us freaks for being “too weird” and “too controversial” is assimilationist bullshit that needs to stop.

#but also#kink is an important part of queer history#so you can jot that down#you ain’t gotta be into it to acknowledge#that the kink scene was where we used to be the safest

“kink scene is where we used to be the safest” oh my god. literally oh my god. being sexualized and treated like a fucking fetish is not “safety.” please fucking go outside.

@renniequeer and the tags that @aeondeug posted are right though. Acting like they “did nothing but sexualise and fetishise” us is wrong and regressive.

During the AIDS crisis, the kink/leather community was one of the most important communities that helped.

In fact, during the AIDs crisis, the leather community was largely blamed because the majority within this community are queer men and women who were blamed by outsiders for spreading the disease and treated like how you’re treating them, despite practicing and being very adamant about safe sex. All of these links discuss the community’s outreach efforts which included becoming caregivers to those impacted by the virus, sexual education (as mentioned above) , even when non-leather queer people refused to.

(Ofc the links talk about sex/sex education so they are nsfw to an extent.)

I’m begging y’all to educate yourselves on the AIDS crisis and much of the activism that came before, during, and after it, because it would largely not exist without these people. Uneducated, arguably REG mindsets like this are harmful, and incorrect, and do nothing for anybody except allow cishets to continue acting the way they do.

Queer people voluntarily participating in kink or seeking and finding refuge in kink communities that were predominantly if not completely queer too is not “being sexualized and treated like a fucking fetish.” Kink communities were a place queerness was accepted, and specifically not sexualized and fetishized. Like it’s literally the opposite. Kink communities would have been one of the only places queerness wasn’t perceived as sexually deviant and predatory by default.

I’m starting my main research into my Masters dissertation now. 

At the minute I have three sort of key areas that I want to focus on: drag, feminist theory, iconic women’s “fashion equipment” (meaning things which are inherently part of a woman’s day to day life, not just clothes).

Reading a lot of general background texts to get me going at the moment. If you see anything you think is relevant or know any writers/artists/even drag artists, let me know. I’ll be forever grateful.

I’ll possibly start another dedicated blog for this project, so only the really relevant posts etc go there. Maybe, I haven’t decided yet. Only been working on this project for four days so far! 

“Punctuated by clues that repeatedly point to Rebecca’s, Danvers’s and Fontaine’s queer desires, the novel and film weave nonheterosexual lures into their narrative fabrics. Rebecca’s sapphic menace is constructed on the coattails of homophobic stereotyping: Rebecca is monstrous, diseased, nonreproductive, destructive, unnatural, masculine, and a man hater. She is also strikingly beautiful, powerful, and alluring enough to sustain the attentions of her housekeeper and her successor and to jeopardize the success of the film’s primary heterosexual union. That the queer’s most influential and engaging attributes belong to a character who is physically absent from the film underscore both the potency of her threat and the limitations of patriarchal structures of representation—structures in which queerness is relegated to discourses of invisibility and silence.”

—Rhona J. Berenstein, from “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock’s Rebecca”

Fear and Loathing: Phobia in Literature and Culture

Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing

School of English

University of Kent

Canterbury

9th-10th May 2014

http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/research/centres/phobiaconference2014.html 

Call for Papers

Focusing on the literary and historical representation of irrational emotions or phobias, Fear and Loathing seeks papers on topics and authors from any period, which aim to demonstrate the extent to which literary-historical study offers us unique insight into the cultural politics of emotions. Given the growth of both affect studies and historical enquiry into emotions over the past decade, Humanities scholarship has generated a rich and varied body of work on the representations and histories of emotions, sentiments, feelings and affects. This two-day international conference seeks to build upon this research and upon the relationship between the Humanities and the study of emotions more generally. Some key questions that we envisage animating the discussion at this conference include (1) how might we define phobia/fear/loathing within the context of the Humanities? (2) How have literary works been complicit with and/or reactive to dominant social phobias? (3) Can the archive be deployed to historicise feeling? (4) What role do the Humanities have in challenging contemporary phobias? We welcome proposals for individual papers and panels that address any of these core questions. Moreover, possible research topics for submission can include, but are by no means limited to:

Phobia & Academia

Archival Objects

Disability/Variability/ Disease

Bodies and Minds

Trans & Homophobia

Letters and Diaries

Propaganda

Outsiders/Others/Freaks

Religion/Theology

Human and Nonhuman Animals

The Monstrous

Borders and Territories  

Aesthetics

Science and Technologies

Please send title and abstracts (300 words) for proposed papers and panels, along with a short biographical note (100 words) to[email protected] Deadline for submissions is 31st January 2014.

Conference organising committee: Dr Declan Kavanagh, Dr Monica Mattfeld and Dr Sarah Horgan.

quousque:

[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]

Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.

The distinction between boy/man and girl/woman as societal genders is evident once you start understanding gender as an intersectional phenomenon. A boy of color who is forcibly assigned the incongruent role of “man” by institutions like the police has his very identity fundamentally undermined and a whole different set of societal expectations thrust upon him compared to what a boy-assigned-boy does. A disabled woman who is assigned an identity of “girl” through infantilization is barred from interacting with the world the way that women-assigned-women do.

Beyond just age, there are other lines along which the gender binary is revealed to actually be an amalgamation of multiple distinct social genders. “Frigid woman,” for example, has historically been treated as a separate gender phenomenon from “mother,” wherein mothers are “real” women and “frigid” women are failures who are barred from accessing true societal acceptance as women. Even among women who do fulfill the societal expectation of childrearing, the roles of “mother” and “grandmother” are different, and people fitting those roles will have very different experiences navigating the same world, both on an internal and an external level.

In cultures where there is high stigma against alcoholism, “alcoholic” is practically a removed gender from “man.” And when you consider the relationship that stigmatized perceptions of alcoholism have with traits like parenting ability, impotence, ability to work, aggression, attraction, etc, the link between consumption and gender becomes quite evident!

And it really wasn’t all that long ago when the functional framework for queer attraction within sexology was to understand homosexuality as a third (bio)sex assignment. Being gay and being trans used to be one and the same; “attraction to/has sex with men” was a core requirement of the “woman” gender and “attraction to/has sex with women” was a core requirement of the “man” gender, such that what we think of as a gay man of today would have been just as effectively conceptualized as a woman back then, and vice versa. The first known use of the word “bisexual” was to refer to somebody “possessing characteristics of both sexes,” ie somebody who could perform relationships with both men and women, ie somebody who could perform as both a man and a woman. The concept of gender being something distinct from attraction has only been a mainstream concept for a handful of decades now.

Basically, if an anthropologist with no bias towards binarism looked at how human society behaves, they would see quite a lot of genders, even among people who the binary system currently considers to be cis. They would see boys, girls, partnered mothers, single mothers, partnered fathers, single fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, twinks, bears, dykes, femmes, working women, homemakers, alcoholics, asexuals, manual laborers, white-collar workers, and so many others.

A poststructuralist lens specifically would tell you that all the lines in the sand are arbitrary, whether that’s the binary or any other taxonomy we come up with around any other criteria. At the end of the day, categories are what we use to try to make sense of the world, but challenging the supposed innateness of those categories through intersectional analysis is important and necessary work. The fact that the gender binary is so easy to deconstruct via the intersection of age demonstrates how flimsy of a model it is for describing real human diversity.

“According to Anzaldua (1987: 3), ‘borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.’ She also defined borderlands as 'vague and undetermined spaces created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition.’ Why do we set B/borders between the ways we love each other? Why do we keep forcing ourselves to love in limiting/limited ways? What formas de queremos could exist beyond the socially constructed B/borderlands that limit our experiences of 'radical interconnectedness/interconnectivity’ (Keating 2007: 44)? What are the borders we need (or not) to love?

"The notions 'affective B/borderlands’ and 'B/borderland affects’ can be theoretical tools that might serve as a starting point to envision and embody forms of relationality yet to be created, explored, and named. 'Affective B/borderlands’ are those contradictory, complicated, and blurred emotional locations that we have been taught to fear - to avoid like minefields. They are the residue of the unnatural boundaries established among the ways in which we love each other. We enter those borderlands when we start to reject hierarchical modes of relationality.”

- Krizia Puig, “The TransAlien Manifesto: Future Love(s), Sex Tech, and My Efforts to Re-member Your Embrace” (2019)

“My gender does not belong to my family or to the state or to the pharmaceutical industry. My gender does not belong to feminism or the lesbian community or to queer theory…I don’t recognize myself. Not when I’m on T, or when I’m not on T. I’m neither more nor less myself…It is fundamental not to recognize oneself.”

-Paul Preciado, from Testo Junkie

So fun fact, this is not a book about the word queer or queer community.   It’s a graphic novel explanation of academic Queer Theory.  

Which I didn’t know when I picked it up, so I wanted to make that super clear.  I just think the cover is a bit misleading.  It had me thinking this was more of a generalist work when really its highly academic.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it though!   Its a good introduction to Queer Theory.  I just didn’t know beforehand.  

I think Queer Theory works about as well as a graphic novel as it works as anything else.  Queer Theory is DENSE and difficult to understand (at least for me) and the graphic format allowed for some visual representation of complex ideas.  But there were also a lot of talking heads.   Quite literally.  Most queer theorists are shown with their most famous words in word bubbles above their heads.  

In my opinion, some of the best parts are when we see real queer people either illustrating or repudiating some of this theory, particularly the parts where cis gay men love to speak for all of us in deliberately confusing language (*coughcoughLeeEdelmancough*).  Barker and Scheele don’t let them skate on this, providing differing viewpoints and outright critiques.   I liked that.  

I also loved the way bisexuals are wholly and completely integrated into this book in a way I’ve never seen from a Queer Theory text.   Even when the examples are not strictly about bisexuality, we are still included.  There is a example that has nothing to do with bisexuality persay, but showed a researcher talking to bi communities, reading bi books, going to bi conferences, and HELPING BI PEOPLE.  Seriously this panel almost made me cry.   We never get this kind of consideration.  Usually the best I hope for in general queer/LGBTQ nonfiction is to not have any blatant biphobia.  I never hope for holistic inclusion.  Meg-John Barker is bisexual and perhaps that is why this book lacks the usual unchallenged monosexism.  

So if you’re looking for an introduction to Queer Theory that is bi-friendly, visually inclined, and about as accessible as this subject is ever going to get, I say pick this one up.  

- Sarah