{"id":1284,"date":"2018-10-03T16:41:47","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T20:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=1284"},"modified":"2018-10-04T13:48:53","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T17:48:53","slug":"what-is-queer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2018\/10\/03\/what-is-queer\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Queer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf we think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault\u2019s comment in \u201cFriendship as a Way of Life\u201d that \u201chomosexuality threatens people as a \u2018way of life\u2019 rather than as a way of having sex\u201d (310)\u201d (Halberstam, 1).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My first thought is Sedgwick\u2019s Tendencies, specifically Sedgwick\u2019s definition of queer, as well as the exercise we did on the first day of class of what queer means. Sedgwick describes queer as \u201cthe open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone\u2019s gender, of anyone\u2019s sexuality, aren\u2019t made (or can\u2019t be made) to signify monolithically\u201d (Sedgwick, 8). While Sedgwick is referring to queer as elements of sexuality or family that differs from the \u201clist\u201d society has made as acceptable; Halberstam define queerness as abnormalities or as something differs from the norm, but not just family and sexual identity but everything, like time and space. Their core definition is similar, not sticking to the norm or the status quo in whatever way (this also reminds me of the song \u201cStick to the Status Quo\u201d from the first High School Musical). What is truly interesting is that on the first day of class before we read anything, we talked about what does queer mean. We used many words and phrases to describe this word, including one particular phrase, something different than \u201ccis\u201d. In Sedgwick\u2019s Tendencies, she has two lists that describe elements that makeup, in the first list, what a family is, and sexual identity in the second list. The elements listed are what we would consider being \u201ccis\u201d, just a bit fancier.<\/p>\n

My second thought is about the quote from Friendship as a Way of Life that Halbustam uses, \u201chomosexuality threatens people as a \u2018way of life\u2019 rather than as a way of having sex\u201d. This is interesting because a lot of people use words like \u201clifestyle\u201d and \u201cchoice\u201d when talking about homosexuality. In their minds, people are making the conscious decision to stray from the list of what is acceptable. That these people are more afraid of their lives being upturned than of how a couple or group likes to have sex. If people start turning away from what is \u201cright\u201d and \u201cacceptable\u201d then what does that mean for the people that have structured their lives around it. We see this is Lisa Dordal\u2019s Mosaic of the Dark in the poem Intersection, \u201cHave you ever thought you might be\u2026 – \/ \u2026It wasn\u2019t an option, you said. \/ Your head never turning, both of us looking straight…\u201d (Dordal, 11). Dordal\u2019s mother tells us in this snippet that being anything other than a heterosexual woman, that being attracted to anyone other than a man was not possible. What is more terrifying, two people of the same sex having sex? Or the timeline people are brainwashed into believing is the only is not the only way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf we think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault\u2019s comment in \u201cFriendship as a Way of Life\u201d that \u201chomosexuality threatens people as a \u2018way of life\u2019 rather than as a way of having sex\u201d … Continue reading What is Queer?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3887,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[169378,93546,135976],"class_list":["post-1284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post","tag-definition-of-queer","tag-queer","tag-sexual-identity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3887"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}