If asked what gender I am, I’d say I’m a demiboy. This answer is a halftruth, as informed by how I actually feel as it’s an accommodation to the fact that, for all intents and purposes, I appear to be “like other men”: I speak “like a man”, I behave “like a man”, I look “like a man”. Is there any point to me differentiating myself from “other men”?
But I can’t say that I’m a man, for I don’t feel like one. I can’t say that gender has a positive presence within me—rather, it’s something which to me is absent. Clearly, others do have some kind of feeling of gender, and in so far that they do, on this I differ.
Yet, this absence doesn’t make me ambivalent about gendercategories or what people (don’t) call me—more than my sexual and romantic orientations, my (lack of) gender makes me acutely aware of these categories.
Differentiation in straight society
In his essayanthology Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures (2014, Zero books),1 the late philosopher Mark Fisher wrote something striking: “It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves” (emphasis in original). To my interpretation, what he meant is not the mere (f)act of being, but to actively, consciously be oneself.
To be oneself comes naturally—indeed, how we behave naturally, without incessant conscious thought, is what we’d describe as “being oneself”—but to consciously be oneself is always a performance. To “play for the audience” is to placate others in their conception of who you are, to satisfy their expectations, their idea of what you should be like. Even if one doesn’t always “play to the audience”, it’s not so easy to be oblivious to the fact that those expectations are there.
These expectations are foundational to “straight society”. I’m confident in saying that despite progress demonstrably being made, even “progressive” countries such as the oft-cited Nordic countries are “straight”, in the sense that a cisgender, heterosexual and -romantic, allosexual and -romantic person is an assumed default. What varies is the general level of acceptance enjoyed by those who differ from the norm.
Thus, differentiation between people is inherent in straight society. Those who conform to the norm get to enjoy never having think about being cishetero and allosexual and alloromantic; it’s not for nothing that those who deviate from the norm are called “queer”—in straight society, we’re an other.
Indeed, at my previous job, I casually came out to my coworkers by mentioning in passing that I had a boyfriend, and while there weren’t any particular reactions at the time, later in the day one of them approached me and said that I had been brave for coming out. Also such displays of support is a reminder that you’re an other, fundamentally different from those around you. No straight person is sincerely said to be brave for “coming out” as straight, since that straightness is assumed.
Queer classconsciousness, nationalism, and identitarianism
Straight society is not necessarily oppressive of queer people, but it has been—still is—historically. Hence there’s a nationally and internationally constituted queer movement advocating for rights and highlighting injustices.
In order for there to be a queer movement, there must be a consciousness of class analogous to the socioeconomic classconsciousness socialists try to build up among the working class. As queer people, we have to recognise that we’re queer in some manner, and organise ourselves as a coherent political subject on that basis: go from being “a class in itself” to “a class for itself”, to use a bit of Marxist phraseology.
Queer pride is, in the current societal context, a defiance against straight society and all its prejudices, taboos, assumptions, myths, blind spots, and injustices. We’re not like you, we’re different—but that’s not a bad thing or anything we think is shameful. Yet, in emphasising and celebrating the differences between queers and straights, this is where queer classconsciousness shifts into being queer nationalism. It’s not merely a matter of having an awareness that there’s a distinction, but in holding this distinction to in itself be valuable.
It’s notable that whereas socialist movements downplay differences between individual workers, and regular nationalist movements downplay differences between nationals, the queer movement instead emphasises differences. Through the adoption of labels both wide and narrow, discrete and overlapping, not only are queer people different from straight people as a whole, individual queer people are different from each other. The politics of visibility, as a rejection of assimilation into either straight society-“normalcy” or a more nebulous queer mass, is essentially queer identitarianism in its emphasis on identitycategories.
On the more extreme end there’s the idea that queer people are fundamentally different to straight people (which isn’t strictly speaking wrong), and that queer people shouldn’t, can’t, be assimilated into a wider societal “people”. Queer history and culture are distinct, and there’s a degree of separation between straight and queer people due to a mutual inability to fully understand the other; this separation is historical, cultural, and social, but also physical, with the promotion of explicitly queer-only spaces offline as well as online.
The “revolutionary take” on queerness
In Ghosts of my life, Fisher wrote:
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are right when they say that the revolutionary take on race, gender and sexuality struggles goes far beyond the demand that different identities be recognised. Ultimately, it is about the dismantling of identity.
He then quoted Hardt and Negri:
[The] revolutionary process of the abolition of identity, we should keep in mind, is monstrous, violent, and traumatic. Don’t try to save yourself—in fact, your self has, to be sacrificed! This does not mean that liberation casts us into an indifferent sea with no objects of identification, but rather the existing identities will no longer serve as anchors.
— Commonwealth (2009, Harvard university press),A.t/Wm p. 339
There are reactionary straight people who question why there isn’t straight pride if there’s queer pride. Such questions ignore the history of queerness in society in favour of a (perceived) colourblindness, but also hint at the truth of these identitycategories: that they’re socially constituted, no more a fact of life than “people who like green” as a distinct class of people from people who like other colours. Straight, cisgender, allosexual, alloromantic people don’t have anything to be proud of as regards their sexual, romantic, or gendered orientations, but given that they are the societal default in straight society, one would expect that as queerness becomes more and more accepted, being queer would also become less and less notable. It ceases being interesting for either straights or queers to distinguish themselves as such, and straight society then gives way not to queer society, but to merely “society”; and with that, so too comes the abolishment of queer people as anything distinct from straight people.
Queer nationalism may for the moment be useful insofar as it allows queer people to have a selfconception and autonomy independent of straight society, but in the long run it—and queer identitarianism—is a conservative force that leaves the tenets of straight society intact: the fetishisation of identitycategories and thereby differentiation between people based on those categories.
If queerness should be anything, however, I believe that it ought to be about challenging those tenets. What our existence shows is not merely that there are additional categories to be thrown into the mix, but that such a rigid conception of humans is far too restrictive. There’s a fluidity to gender and attraction that cannot be captured by attaching fixed labels to people; indeed, those labels become but another set of identifiers to generalise by, and for us to chase after or be chased by.
This not to say people don’t have preferences, but rather that in as much as people are at liberty to have a preference, they’re also at liberty to not have a strict preference or any preference at all, and that contradicting a preference is no more notable than the preference itself. Being gay is okay, and only okay, much as it’s obviously not any better, more natural, or more notable to be straight.
What I feel in my depths is that I’m not a man, not a woman, not even “nonbinary”, but a human being. At least for me, adopting a label, whether it’s “demiboy” or “agender”, is prefigurative of escaping the inadequate notions, expectations, and generalisations imposed by straight society.
This cannot be achieved by integrating ourselves into straight society and disappearing back into the proverbial closet. Visibility is important—not for the sake of any one identity or even queer identity as a whole, but in contradiction of this sort of categorisation in general.
Footnotes
-
This book was recommended to me by a friend, and despite finding it thoroughly interesting I’ve regrettably not finished it yet. ↩
view source ⋆ discuss ⋆ archive: Archive.today / Wayback machine