When Queerness Is Not Enough
A friend of mine recounted a story in which they were attending a seminar about the queer body – a topic they were studying as part of their comparative literature paper. Their peer, a white woman, offered that in her reading of Hortense Spillers (a declaration which raised my friend’s brows) she had been fascinated by the idea put forward about the de-gendering of the Black female body. Moreover, she added, she wished that she could pinpoint the exact moment in American history wherein they had been re-gendered, given that they had subsequently been hyper-sexualised. As my friend described this story, I was not sure what was more concerning: that the white woman had not actually read Spillers and was referencing her from snippets of Twitter threads she had seen, or that she had, in fact, read Spillers and that this was genuinely what she had gleaned from the text. The latter troubled me more, I decided: how had she engaged with the text to have drawn such a conclusion? How in her mind did sexualisation equate to personhood? With what intention had she approached Spillers? As a practice in theory? A morbid curiosity? A genuine attempt to ground her understanding of Blackness and ‘the female body’?
None of these answers satisfied me. And even though this anecdote was not my own, I have no lack of similar experiences. There is something deeply angering about sitting through a seminar where others discuss gender or the body, and by extension, Blackness, and by extension, your personhood, and are so blissfully ignorant of these connections which our minds naturally make as we navigate daily life – as Black people, as Black queer people, as Black trans people. They talk about this writer or that one in abstract, prescribe texts as ‘fascinating’, theory as ‘challenging,’ and say with confidence, ‘I thought it was really interesting how…’, entirely unaware of how the things they are ruminating – perhaps that level of thought even conveys too much credit – are things we can never escape by virtue of merely existing. Their thought begins and ends in the classroom, in the lecture hall, the words they read never extending beyond the end of the page, firmly fixed until some time when they might choose to read it again. Yet the irreverent invocation and subsequent mangling of our theorising – our loving and intentional attempts at survival through languaging our realities – is constant in the mouths of those who, to put it simply, do not have the range.
But stasis cannot beget understanding. Nor does this static thinking, if such a thing even exists, stop within the theoretical realms of Blackness and the body. It unfolds uncomfortably and invasively into every aspect of life. The aestheticisation of queerness by white queers in particular has seen identities packed into boxes which allow no room for fluidity or even the potential of change.
Everything works identity inwards; you are X identity therefore you do X thing, dress in X manner, speak with X words. You behave in this manner because that is what a true [insert sexuality here] does, and you must constantly endeavour to the right way, prescribed for you in the ancient Tumblr texts of the queer ancestors who have gone before you.
More recently, countless TikTok trends have contributed to the reification of this non-verbal language; carabiners, many proudly claim, are the identifying mark of lesbians; if you are adorned in froggy garb – hats, scarves, onesies – this is a signal of your non-binary-ness; bisexuals can reject their traditional flag because a wall poster of ‘Loki’ is sufficient to declare your allegiance. This is what these identities quickly spiral into: visible allegiances, houses reminiscent of the transphobe-authored franchise they refuse to let go of. The ‘house’ you are sorted into must dictate your preferences, your hobbies, your interests, and there are several choice phrases to surreptitiously ascertain whether somebody else belongs to the same house as you. (‘Do you listen to Girl in Red?’ littered the comment sections of women on TikTok, later evolving to include King Princess and Phoebe Bridges - all artists who I had never heard of, let alone listened to).
How can you exist outside of these bounds? You can’t, is the obvious answer. The problem is that the narrowness of these boundaries necessarily require a contortion of self which collapses identity into neat, prescriptive labels. These labels, again, are static. What of a lesbian whose partner, following their marriage, came out as a trans man and transitioned? According to certain (il)logics behind white queerness, they must denounce their lesbianism; she was told as much by random internet strangers in the comment section of her video. Another lamented the fact that her partner was in the process of transitioning: how was she to sustain her allegiance? She would have to break up with him, she decided, validated in this decision by her followers. (Well done, good and faithful servant: you have maintained the sanctity of lesbianism and will live to see another day.)
Everything works identity inwards; you are X identity therefore you do X thing, dress in X manner, speak with X words. You behave in this manner because that is what a true [insert sexuality here] does, and you must constantly endeavour to the right way, prescribed for you in the ancient Tumblr texts of the queer ancestors who have gone before you. You must ally yourself with people who are Like You (identifiable through the pre-taught methods) and you must loudly and at all times declare what and who you are, if not in literal word then in appearance. Walk in the way, and never turn from it ever, the warning resounds, or you shall be cast in disgrace from your house into oblivion!
The problem here is obvious. Queerness in this light becomes stating, not being. It parades as something you profess, not something you are. It embroils you in a carefully-cultivated, manufactured sense of community which has at its core, not liberty, or self-expression, but conformity to a label; a single term, or perhaps a stack of terms, which above all, must be preserved.
When queerness becomes declaration beyond person, when it sits in social recognition, validation, acceptance, queer women feel obliged to prove their queerness whilst in long-term and fulfilling relationships with men. Gay men declare with pride how ‘diverse’ their circle is despite consisting solely of olive-skinned muscular mascs and jock-strap-and-harness-wearing twinks, and engage in repetitive debates: yes, I am both masculine and gay, no, being gay does not mean I have to be ‘effeminate’ (lesser, the implication is here, of course). And, in one story told to me on a date, drab-looking white queer people get tattooed with a ‘symbol’ to be recognised publicly as such, lamenting “not feeling queer enough”.
There is a fetishization of suffering. Visibility is integral for white queers not only to find your kin but also to ensure you are marked as the Chosen Ones, different from your otherwise cisgender or heterosexual white peers. Oppression is a kind of martyrdom: they have watched how Black people have borne our suffering with what they perceive as a sense of dignity, a sort of strength which is aspirational. In a pseudo-Christian manner, they uplift this suffering as part of the experience, a soul-building exercise which will fit them for the white queer heaven they seek. But – and any Black person could tell them this, if indeed they ever deigned to speak to us – there is no freedom to be found in suffering, only pain.
They understand gate-keeping, because many have experienced social rejection – a feeling so evocative precisely because it is so novel to them – but they do not move away from this and into new connections or community. They erect new walls and fences and begin gate-keeping amongst themselves. Lesbians turn up their noses scornfully at bisexual women – an ingrained sense of superiority based in their non-attraction to men. Transgender people declare with an awful sort of finality that in order to truly be trans, you must experience dysphoria. White queers do not address Black people or consider you within their realm of relevance until they learn that you share the same pronouns or preferences as them and are suddenly all sunshine and smiles, where only moments ago were grimaces and sharp looks.
Legislative violence, particularly in Babylon, works overtime to prevent access to much needed healthcare of trans people, all races included. But let us not pretend that the queer violence meted out against us is not also infused with that quintessentially-British flavour of racism inherent in every institution and system.
And so, if whiteness is a never-ending quest for access and power, white queerness is a failed experiment in the potential of liberation. Again, perhaps this is assigning them credit where little – if any – is due. It is the image of an angry child who, ousted from the others playing with the building blocks, gathers as many as they can in their arms as they make a hasty retreat. If I can’t play with them, then neither can you! They sit sadly in the corner as they attempt to replicate the towering structures of their exclusionary peers, ultimately unable to do so with their measly few blocks. White queers do not share the plight of their Black counterparts: Black queers seek solace in community for we have been forced to forge spaces for survival outside of both Black spaces and white queer spaces. White queers, angry at being rejected by those who they believe owe them community, forge spaces in defiance, seeking to imitate an exclusionary hierarchy and doing nothing more than echoing the policing they claim to be intrinsically opposed to. They do not embrace the liberatory potential of their existences, eschewing it in favour of assimilation, attempts to create a ‘new normal’ where they are accepted by the white peers they unknowingly crave acceptance from.
An inconvenient reality prickles: How should they know any better? They have not lived as Black queer or trans people. Of course, this is where my annoyance is seated. The same manner in which my friend’s peer could so casually invoke the thoughts of Spillers and then return to her day as if she had not called into reminder the question of my friend’s ontology is the same way in which white queers who are chronically-online tangle themselves in meaningless and repetitive discourse about who can adopt which micro-label but at once be so critically unaware of their own racism. (“People are dying, Kim!” I interject here.) And while these frilly (if not wholly unnecessary) conversations about preservation of labels and the sanctity of identity continue, many of us remain in fear for loved ones in our countries here and back home: inaccessible healthcare pushing us beyond the margins of living, family uncontactable amid national rebellions; economies reeling from US or other imperial intervention; unable to venture into certain places for fear of death by virtue of their identity; at constant risk of climate disasters, homelessness, joblessness, poverty. ‘How should they know any better?’ feels like an easy out, an excuse relegating their ignorance to their ignorance in a cyclical and distasteful manner.
I do not scream into the void because I am unsatisfied with the balance of suffering – why must I suffer and they should not? – for in all of this, there is no attempt to invalidate or undermine the reality or violence of existing beyond cisheteronormative bounds. Legislative violence, particularly in Babylon, works overtime to prevent access to much needed healthcare of trans people, all races included. But let us not pretend that the queer violence meted out against us is not also infused with that quintessentially-British flavour of racism inherent in every institution and system.
There is also a deep sadness because this embrace of stasis is ultimately a rejection of freedom. I am not wholly captured within my body, nor my preferences, nor my hobbies or interests; these all form a part of me, yes, but such a small fraction that it almost seems unnecessary to recall. Who I am is not seated in my ability to prove who I am. It is not a strange dance I do for the whites who would devour any performance of mine hungrily, nor does it rest in validation of who I am via a recognition of kinship through how I dress, walk, or talk. For, despite the best efforts of restrictive white queerness to rend our agency from us, we exist beyond it, for we seek a freedom, undiscoverable within these brands of queerness, in white womanhood or femininity.
I have never been under any illusion of the access granted me. Any shred of that was roughly stripped from me as a child aged four when I asked my mother why I was Black, and at five when I drew myself a white girl with blonde hair and freckles, and at six when a boy in the park called me a nigger. Only naturally, then, there is a deep-seated frustration towards the defensive responses to the experiences of Black queer/trans people. The indignation, or the “Not all white queers!” The calls to consider how somebody’s neurodivergence means that they aren’t being racist or exclusionary but rather responding to happenings from a purely neurological stance. I am tired of waiting for ‘Perhaps the things we fight for or about are inconsequential to everybody but us’, for introspection, or a critical reflection of the behaviour they manifest against the groups they leech from, plastering BLM and ACAB in their Tinder bios whilst quote tweeting a cop’s selfie “Obvs ACAB but like he could get it.”
My rejection of these types of stasis is my embrace of freedom; my refusal to become trapped in terrariums. My joy and identity continues to be found in the depth of community that has been offered to me, gently and openly, spaces where I have been loved as myself and nurtured. These deep grounds make space for me, for all the inevitable versions of myself I will cycle through as I bloom again and again.
