Comments Elsewhere

Sally: ‘“Queer” is a much broader category than “gay and lesbian”: it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you’re less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.’

Well, no it doesn’t—not really. There are lots of forms of sexuality that are non-normative, in this society or in past societies, but which aren’t part of what “queer” is commonly accepted to mean: e.g. paedophilia, bestiality, incest, polyandry, liasons between black men and white women, etc. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I doubt that Hugo’s class is going to cover all of these topics in any particular depth, and I also doubt that it should. (I know that I, for one, would be quietly puzzled if interracial relationships were being considered under the same heading of “queer” and furious if paedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. were.)

Generally I think it’s pretty well understood that when people say “queer” it means something like “gay” in the broad sense or the ever-expanding alphabet soup (on a recent trip to a college campus I noticed that the “community” had now expanded to “LGBTIQ”) — that is sexualities that differ from the norm mainly in regard to the sex or the gender identity of the people involved. Of course there are problems with each of these ways of trying to say what you mean — sticking to words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “sexual orientation” reifies categories that are actually very specific to our own times; using words like “gay” can do the same thing and also prioritizes the experience of gay men; using the alphabet soup is unwieldy, falls back on the same reified categories, and creates expectations of false universality; but I think “queer” is just as bad in creating the impression of false universality (although the sort of universality it suggests may be different) and also, frankly, hard to give any coherent definition to whatsoever that doesn’t just fall back on one or more of the terms that it’s supposedly trying to replace.

None of this is an argument against using any of these forms of speech, incidentally. I just don’t think that there’s any good one-size-fits-all solution to the linguistic problem and that we are better off keeping things simple while being critical of the terms we use than finding some “right” word to use.