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 indifferent wire mother, the Great Society, is not a warm place for real humans, not in general. We, or at least I, prefer to live somewhere with a warm fuzzy veneer and a sense of place, rather than in the raw commoditised marketplace of ideas. And yet, who in this atomised world carves out spaces for oddities and weirdness?
Blessings, then, to the queer communities, the stalwart creators of weird, interesting, compelling, and supportive local communities 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.
