Why I Love Queer Women
It seems as though people today, both within and outside the LGBT community, are attached to the idea of “women” without marking the brilliant and embraceable differences between them, opting instead to tether them to the shorthand of stereotypes.
For example, a lot of my gay male friends espouse many of these stereotypes when the women in their lives come up: Their straight-girl pals talk to them about boys, the latest smoothie fast, and clothes exclusively; their gay-girl pals “mother” them (a term I’m borrowing verbatim from a recent conversation) by way of introduction to/mentoring in feminist/queer politics, theory, and activism. But, as with minority politics in general, stereotypes are dangerous and limiting. They’re also incredibly boring and predictable when you start to deal with everyone around you through the tunnel vision of tropes.
I don’t like engaging the “straight girls vs. gay girls” debate much, because the experiences I’ve had with the women in my life have been far too textured and complicated to be accurately encapsulated by the words straight and gay. After all, there is a third category we’re not considering: “queer” girls.
Straight and gay are terms that directly reference sexual orientations and practices, but “queer” (although defined differently by different people and in different time periods) refers to a much broader sense of outsiderness that can never be reduced to the kinds of genitals that get you off. Queer is a political orientation that (explicitly or implicitly) considers sexuality, of course, but also equally takes to task economics, history, social order, labor, politics, and other citadels of normative consciousness in infinitely productive ways. It’s not, as many would have it (including my mother), an ideology that is anti-convention just for the sake of flying in the face of “tradition” and what’s “normal” (although that’s totally enough of a reason to be queer), but rather one that is anti-convention for the sake of flying in the face of “normal” because for so many people, the notion of “normal” is equivalent to a “tradition” of oppression.
You can exclusively enjoy having straight sex and still be queer. You can also be queer and not really interested in straight sex. To put that into context, there are, the way I see it, four kinds of women I’ve interacted with the most over the course of my life (that is, of course, not to say that this is meant to be a comprehensive breakdown; it is, rather, meant to be an examination of a cross-section I believe I am familiar with): Queer Women who are Straight, Queer Women who aren’t Straight, Non-Queer Women who are Straight, Non-Queer Women who aren’t Straight.
Disclaimer: What follows is a slightly fictionalized account of four of my friends, Abby, Beth, Christine, and Dahlia (names have been changed to protect privacy). Each roughly falls under one of the above four makeshift (and admittedly insufficient) permutations. Here goes nothing.
Abby is a queer woman who isn’t straight. Abby is my best friend from all my friend groups because we’re both queer and experience same-sex attraction, in addition to both being immigrants. Abby is someone with whom I can talk about so many different (yet intersecting) elements in my life, like being a person of color and an immigrant and a homosexual and never having quite as much money as is necessary, all at the same time, because while she shares many of those identities and circumstances, she’s also committed to living in ways that don’t just accept and reify these terms at face value, but that fundamentally question their very nature constantly.
Beth is a queer woman who is straight. I love Beth tremendously, because she is an anarchist, a squatter, and an artist at heart. Her filter is always absent, which makes her a joy to be around. However, she sometimes approaches me about guys in a way that makes me really uncomfortable, like talking about Nietzsche and Rancière are appetizers and “15 reasons why I hate boys but oh my god X is so cute, isn’t he?” is the main course. Beth often uses the phrase “letting our hair down” when she talks to me about guys. I’m not a fan of that one, because Nietzsche and Rancière are guys, but apparently not the kinds of guys Beth really wants to talk to me about because (I’m guessing that) as a practicing homosexual, men are my specialty. (I think this is funny because I call myself asexual in earnest more often than I call myself homosexual.) I talked to Beth last week about how unsettled those moments make me feel, and she gave me her word that she’d keep mindful during those moments because “genitality isn’t worth a whole lot when it comes to our friendship and how each of us should interact with male bodies.” I’m completely convinced that the profound nature of that conversation was made possible because of her queerness, and the fact that “fetishization” and “othering” are now catchphrases in our friendship.
Christine is not queer, but she’s pansexual. I love Christine for how much she teaches me about how sex, gender, and sexuality intersect powerfully in romantic/sexual situations. She catches me on a lot of the biases society has injected us all with, and the rapidity of a lot of my radical sexual unlearning is thanks to Christine giving me advice and sharing her own experiences. However, I often argue heatedly with Christine because she openly expresses her “irritation with feminine men.” She once told me she stopped talking to a guy she thought was hot because “the moment he opened his mouth he sounded like a f*cking twink.” She also loves to remind me “a man isn’t really a man unless he’s a man’s man.” Speaking with Christine can, as I’m sure you can imagine, be a pain in the ass a lot of the time. The luminescence she obviously has when it comes to gender is made precarious by how she despises men in particular whose sex/gender/gender comportment/sexuality combo doesn’t fall in line with Butler’s “heterosexual matrix” (male = man = masculine = heterosexual). I have, at different points in my life, identified as “femme,” and that’s a part of my identity I can’t introduce to my relationship with Christine, and I don’t really deal with that well. If only she were queer …
Dahlia is perhaps the friend who resembles society’s ideal woman the most (not queer, straight as an arrow, very feminine, etc., etc., etc.), but instead of being equal parts infuriating and triggering, she (perhaps paradoxically) is the friend with whom I have the simplest relationship. We just don’t talk about much of anything. We have what many people call a “superficial relationship.” We seem to get along fine and have enough fun, but it’s all really just filler. When she found out I was from Africa, though, she told me I barely have an accent when I speak English, and how wonderful that is, which is the one and only time anything she’s ever said to me has made me feel something more intense than a virulent apathy, which I guess is a good thing?
Where dominant idioms of being leave us high and dry (especially when some or all of our conformities to them are effortless), queer idioms have an interesting and introspective solution to very real lapses in meaning that “normal” will never be able to rid itself of. Queerness is life-giving, but queerness and non-heterosexuality is just unbeatable.
