The Freedom of Queerness, by Andrea Trevino

Learning from Hall’s remarks on queer theories, I believe we – students at a university who are free and privileged in learning about these topics – should indeed embrace the term queer especially in how it has commenced a conversation about LGBT justice. We have immense power in writing posts like these due to our education. Posts that share ideas and begin learning from each other about how we can individually begin a proper conversation and active change for those who are oppressed. A key point to begin a discussion such as Hall does is knowing how to define a word like queer while understanding how powerful language could be. All language is specialized language that anodes the interest of a specialized group. The definition that impacted me the most came from Hall’s chapter 2, more specifically David Halperin’s definition in Saint Foucalt: Towards a Gay Hagiography, “queer as a theoretical, activist, and identificatory position…queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality… queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. It is an identity without an essence” (Hall 67). This definition is the perfect example of why we should support the LGBT community if they wish to use this word. After long years and making of history in which this community has been at crossroads with how to define themselves, this word provides a kind of breakthrough and own characterization.

A main reason I decided to take this class derived from how my Intro to Women’s and Genders Studies class opened my eyes to my own individualism and how intersectionality plays a big part in our lives. Looking back at my life, I didn’t have much connection to or education about the LGBTQ community. I believe this is a shortcoming of attending a private Catholic school my whole life. Hall speaks of Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’ work of What Nietzsche Really Said stating, “knowledge is always constrained by one’s perspective…and that perspective depends on our physiological constitution, our skills of inquiring and interpreting, our culture, and our language” (Hall 58). This goes hand in hand with how, where, and in what way we grew up along with all other experiences shape our way of viewing the world.

We, now speaking from a gender and racial minority standpoint which I strongly identify with and care for, can gain inspiration from what the term represents. It represents an umbrella, a term that brings community together while embracing intersectionality but more importantly being activists and calling out the faults within the community to which we associate with. Robert F. Reid-Pharr calls for an explicit ‘queer’ discussion of cross-racial sexual desire when stating, “lest we allow for the articulation of a queer subjectivity that never recognizes the differences we create and carry in our bodies, including not only race but gender, health, and age, to name only the most obvious categories” (Hall 93). With this in action, a greater group who takes on an additional identity will have the freedom and comfort to express all of themselves.

 In chapter 2, Hall states “ A critic may powerfully and accurately analyze the economic or gender-based oppression and still be thoroughly heterocentric or even explicitly homophobic” (Hall 90). It fosters justice in a way that reminds me of the third way of feminism. Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill’s Riot Grrrl Manifesto explains through a language of queer sexual sensibility and anarchist feminism how American media’s depiction of women is built upon capitalism and internalized sexism. It states “Because we are interested in creating non-hierarchical ways of being and making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good / bad categorizations” (Hanna 396). Who are we to decide how to group things in good/bad categorizations? These ideas come from a rejection of limitations experienced even if we embrace this term. The simple fact of how the word queer was once meant to be derogatory and now serves as a word that fits no box but allows for those to choose it because it is filled with understanding and communication is how it fosters justice and prideful representation.