queering

what is queering ?

queering our relationship to the rest of the world is not about how we have sex, although it can be. queering is about seeing each of our identities as uniquely placed, located, in larger structures and seeing each and every other person in the world as also uniquely located, as gendered bodies, as sexually oriented bodies, as bodies uniquely affected by our skin colour, by our ethnicity, by our class. Each of us are in unique relationship with the rest of the world. This is a “queer paradigm” because it is not uniformly binary, as was considered “heterosexuality”, but neither is it the same, as was considered “homosexuality.” A queer paradigm or queer perspective, or the act of queering means that we understand these positionalities and these relationalities as unique and dynamic.

When we really explore all the ways that humans have and have had sex, queer is and has been always there (though only some people and cultures may have seen it or had language to name it). Heterosexuality was never binary (how could it really be if each of us are so different?) and homosexuality was never really sameness (because how could it be if each of us are so different?). We have been living in the mirage of these ideas but neither are “true;” they are only one way of seeing things. And we might say that queer is one way of seeing things too. But if a queer imagination helps us to see the world as complex and moreover to consider all lives as important, worthwhile, stories worth telling, it might serve our sustainability and future. For this reason I accept and hope that we will all queer our relationships and understand our world as queerness and not hold on to “queerness” as a jewel which cannot be shared.

That queerness is being capitalized upon, branded and strangled by market forces is as sad as it ever was–for parenthood, for poetry, for music, for sexuality. But queer’s appropriation by capitalism is the problem of the way that capitalism operates, not the problem of queer’s popularity or its relevance to all of our lives. The things that we love, we should share, in their most precious forms, and welcome each other to take part in.