A Queer and Active Danger, by Regi Worles

In my constant wondering surrounding my own use of the word queer, I have come across a variety of opinions about the word. In my own naïve understanding of the history of the word, I thought that perhaps it was being frozen in time, not being allowed to grow. In my understanding of the word after a serious encounter with Hall, the author of Queer Theories I think that my thinking was too narrow, not allowing the word queer to do what it was doing for me for others. My own use of the word has been one of revolution, allowing me to explore the relationships between gender, sexuality, and race. To me, the word built consciousness as I used it. I became aware of the ways that I felt claimed by queer and was able to explore my own relations and connections to the concepts of gender, sexuality, and race. I considered queer to have the capacity to be “raced” in a way that gay could not. Still, the way I see it, queer as a word is not something that should or even could be accessible to everyone.

While there are many appropriations of the word from its original purpose to create sites of continuous pain and trauma towards people branching and deviating from norms of sexuality and gender, throughout the development of a queer consciousness, people have found home in the word (Hall23). I think that this has everything to do with how people come to understand queer. If the word serves holistically as an adjective, we open ourselves to being appropriated by people who see themselves reflected in the descriptive use. An article from the New York Times written by Jenna Wortham, describes this phenomenon as being made possible by its inclusive nature, but that inclusivity being the very thing that opens possibilities to dominant groups and offers false promises to the people living life on the margins.

            Reading Hall, it seems that when queer was used as a framing mechanism and less of a determinate dichotomy of identification, the communities that were building themselves around queerness were more focused on an active acceptance and rejection of what proper sexual behavior could be in their society. Another New York Times article written by Jamal Jordan described this with similar thought by saying, “how can you believe in something that you’ve never seen.” While the context there was rooted in seeing queerness as something that could hold space for people of color who loved each other, the question really set me out to think about the same idea surrounding queerness in general.

            This is what I think that queerness has to offer us, and when I say us I do in fact mean people that are figuring out or navigating their own “non-normative” sexual or gender identities. Queer allows us to identify, it allows us to create community, it is a framework for understanding yourself and the people around you; queer serves as an opportunity to transcend from individual to community while recognizing your own role in that process Hall 54).

            Perhaps then, the question is not who or what is queer, but rather, when and where do we use/push queer. If we use it as a framework and not a definition, then we actually get to engage in defiant and creativity identity, not just forcing ourselves to fit within the box of an umbrella term. Hall uses Foucault to dive into this thought as well, welcoming Foucault’s understanding of the role of discourse to affect the way that the word is used. Hall says that in Foucault’s mind discourse occurs when the word queer is populated with multiple meanings. In that way it cannot serve as a mere definition and as Hall puts it change the ways that people could relate to the word itself. As history continues and more ideas and identities relate to the term, it does not have to become meaningless unless we shackle the word down and do not allow for growth. Because at the root, the context of the identity is not so much as important as one’s own ability to understand themselves and the world around them using such a framework.

            While that historical starting point is quite powerful and often creates a visceral reaction to those who have had the word used on them for hatred, I believe that the word queer as a framework and not a definition has the potential to serve any member of the community with a place to plug themselves in. This, and only this is how I see queer as useful to individuals as well as society. The active use of queering a space does this too, it provides a framework that one can use in order to build a space for them in the fabric of the space itself. We have to be careful of how we use this word. It has a history that is powerful and potent, yet if we do not use it, we lose a generation of folks beginning to understand that sexuality and gender are things that do not have to exist in line with norms. By creating queer consciousness, we can understand that a queer individual’s identity functions as a greater tool to create widespread understanding and change, but only if we use it correctly.