What's in a Word: Queer

Strange, peculiar, odd, perverse ... how queer!

 

"Queer is a term that desires that you don't have to present an identity card ..." [1]

 

 

I.

 

Originally meaning strange or peculiar, the word queer now serves either as a synonym for homosexual - having been reclaimed as a term of pride by gay activists - or as a wider umbrella term for anyone who locates themselves on a colourful spectrum of non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities, but which, nevertheless, remain precisely that; i.e., identities, or expressions of self-sameness by which one wishes to be known. 

 

As someone who finds the empty secret of non-identity philosophically more interesting than the open secret of same-sex desire, I find this problematic and would challenge those who use queer as an overarching, unifying, or trendy academic label for what are often distinct forms of practice and behaviour that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender.  

 

For me, the appeal of queerness is precisely that it deconstructs all categories (particularly those that rest upon binary opposition) and offers a form of resistance to the idea of essential identities as if these were natural givens and thus afforded a privileged relationship to truth and being, rather than contingent cultural-historical formations belonging to an insubstantial world of free-foating and accidental attributes and disappearing cats who leave only a smile behind (to be queer is to be not quite here or there).

 

 

II.

 

Now, I appreciate that some people who assemble beneath a rainbow flag and delight in adding more letters to the ever-extending initialism they repeat like a mantra, will vehemently object to my use of the term queer. They consider this to be at best a dubious reappropriation and, at worst, an offensive misappropriation on behalf of someone who hasn't experienced oppression, discrimination, or violence for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

 

And so, they will argue that as a cisgender heterosexual - their terms, not mine - I have no right to a word which now belongs in their vocabulary and which, whatever its past meanings or etymology, now only means what they say it means. Almost, it laughably becomes a question of intellectual property rights, with queer trademarked as a kind of communal identifier.   

 

But, as I hope to have made clear above, I do not accept that there can be a queer community; nor indeed that any individual can ever say I am queer as a way of informing others who and what they are; queerness is a form of not-being (neither this nor that, or even the other).     

And so, whilst (as a theorist and critic) I feel at perfect liberty to continue using the word, I'm not doing so in order to self-identify, nor am I trying to place myself on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum simply for the cultural and political cachet. 

 

On the other hand, nor am I trying to be gratuitously offensive. I'm simply trying to suggest that queerness is primarily about what Judith Butler terms contestation and it should never be something that is clearly defined, or tied to just one area of life (or one set of life experiences), or owned by one group of people; for to do so is, ironically, to normalise it in some sense (i.e., rob it of its very queerness). 

 

Notes

 

[1] Judith Butler, 'The Desire for Philosophy', an interview conducted by Regina Michalik, Lola 2, (Lola Press,  May 2001). 

      As Butler makes clear, when queerness as a movement first emerged it was very much about suspending the question of identity and challenging the politics of such; it was an argument against normativity.  

Philosophy on the Catwalk

Nunzia Garoffolo: fashionbeyondfashion.wordpress.com

Six reasons why fashion is fabulous and the question of style is philosophically crucial:

1) Because Professor Teufelsdröckh, despite being a typical German Idealist in many respects, is right to suggest that in the "one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [Sartor Resartus].

2) With its obsessive desire for the New as a value in and of itself, the logic of fashion is the determining principle of modernity. To his credit, Kant, who was often mocked by his friends for his fine silk shirts and  silver-buckled shoes, was one of the first to identify this irrational principle and note that fashion therefore has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. it's not a striving after beauty, but novelty, innovation, and constant change). Designers seek to make their own creations as superfluous as quickly as possible; they don't seek to improve on anything and there is no progress, purpose, or ultimate goal within the world of fashion (a short skirt is not an advance on a long dress). If it can be said to have any aim at all, it is to be a potentially endless proliferation of forms and colours.

3) It's true that many philosophers regard fashion as something trivial and beneath their attention. Doubtless this is why the most interesting work written on the subject has tended to come from the pens of our poets and novelists including Baudelaire, Wilde, Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, and D. H. Lawrence. But there are notable exceptions to this: Nietzsche, Barthes, and Baudrillard, for example, all concerned themselves with the language of fashion and the question of style. And they did so because they understood that once the playful and promiscuous indeterminacy of fashion begins to affect the 'heavy sphere of signs' then the liquidation of values associated with the order of referential reason is accelerated to a point of rupture. Fashion, in other words, is a method for the consummation of nihilism. 

4) Closely associated with fashion is the practice of dandyism: whilst primarily thought of as a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century phenomenon, dandyism can in fact be traced back as an ethos or way of living to the Classical world of ancient Greece, where techniques of the self and arts of existence were accorded singular importance amongst all those who wished to give style to their lives (i.e. that one needful thing which, in all matters, is the essential thing rather than sincerity).

5) The world of fashion also understands and perpetuates ideas of camp and queer. The first of these things, thought of somewhat problematically as a sensibility by Susan Sontag, taught us how to place quotation marks around certain artefacts and actions and thereby magically transform things with previously little or no worth into things with ironic value and perversely sophisticated appeal. Camp thus challenges conventional notions of good taste and high art and also comes to the defence of those forms and, indeed, those individuals, traditionally marginalized and despised.

As for queer, it's never easy or advisable to try and summarize this notion; it's a necessarily mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed definition. Indeed, it's technically impossible to say what queerness 'is' as isness is precisely what's at issue in its rejection of all forms of onto-essentialism: it refers to nothing in particular and demarcates a transpositional positionality in relation to the normative. In other words, queer is a critical movement of resistance at odds with the legitimate and the dominant; it challenges the authority of those who would keep us all on the straight and narrow and wearing sensible shoes.

6) Finally, fashion matters because, without it, figures such as Nunzia Garoffolo would not exist and without women such as this in the world, clothed in the colours of the rainbow, life would be as ugly and as dull as it would be without flowers. We do not need priests all in black, or politicians all in grey. But we do need those individuals who bring a little splendour and gorgeousness into the world, otherwise there is only boredom and uniformity.