The Queer I Run From

“My mother was not the queer one, but my father. Something got beat out of the man… But it is this queer I run from.” ( Moraga 2)

This particular phrase took my breath away when I first read it. Not only because of personal resonance but because it is so ripe for analysis in terms of sexuality and gender.

First starting out with Moraga’s clarification that her mother was not the queer, but rather her father was. I cannot say for certain why Moraga chooses to make this clarification but clarifying this is interesting because it implies that her mother would have been assumed to be more queer than her father for some reason. Whether that be because of cultural perceptions of masculinity and men in heterosexual relationships, or the way that Moraga views her own queer identity as being very related to her being a woman, or both, it’s an interesting choice. It begins to put into conversation gender and sexuality and their relationship which Moraga talks about several times in this particular reading.

Then, the idea that Moraga identifies her father as the “queer”, which one would assume would bring them closer in terms of identity, but then she rejects that preconceived notion by saying that he is the queer she runs from. It is his version of queerness which she rejects, which puts him in a sort of subcategory of queer.

In the context of our class this is relates to the complexity of queer identity and how we recognize queerness in ourselves and others. The idea that one person’s personification of queer can be very different from another’s is complex and hard to comprehend that one kind of queerness can be at odds with another.