Placeholder.
I think queer communities are fascinating, and society’s relationship to sexuality categories is wildly odd, and I feel deeply indebted to queer culture, especially the weird bits.
But I have too many vague thoughts and not enough concrete ideas to share, so this is just a placeholder.
cf sexual institutions and feminism/gender identities?
1 As community
Our personally-indifferent wire mother, the Great Society does not induce feelings for warmth in individual humans. Thus we live in smaller and more personable bubble communities, furnished with a warm fuzzy veneer and a sense of place, rather than in the raw commoditised marketplace of ideas. Blessings, then, to the queer communities, the stalwarts of weird, interesting, compelling, and supportive local scenes that I would otherwise need to join an organised religion to access.
2 In recent western history
3 Ballroom/vogue stuff
IMO one of the crowning art-forms of the human species.
- 20 Tracks That Defined the Sound of Ballroom
- Red Bull Music Academy Daily, Key Tracks: “The Ha Dance”
- Red Bull Music Academy Daily, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Vogue and Ballroom
4 Classification/legibility
The alphabet-soup model (eg 2SLGBTQQIAAP+) of queer identity is in tension with the don’t-label-me-man model of queer classic queer theory, and both of these present challenges to traditional classification systems and legibility. This is a fascinating phenomenon but also a cheap talk sideshow so I will restrain myself from going down that rabbit hole.
5 Incoming
Dan Simpson, What if it’s never decorative gourd season? delivers a perfect DanSimpsonism:
When I lived in Norway as a newly minted gay (so shiny) I remember once taking a side trip to Gay’s The Word, the LGBTQIA+ bookshop in London and buying (among many many others) a book called Queering Anarchism. […]
The thing I remember most about this book […] was its idea of anarchism as a creative force. Because after tearing down existing structures, anarchists need to have a vision of a new reality that isn’t simply an inversion of the existing hierarchy (you know. Reducing the significance threshold. Using Bayes Factors instead of p-values. Pre-registering without substantive theory.) A true anarchist, the book suggested, needs to queer rather than invert the existing structures and build a more equitable version of the world.
So let’s build open and reproducible science as a queer reimagining of science and not a small perturbation of the world that is. Such a system will never be perfect. Just lusting to be better.