{"id":839,"date":"2022-09-29T18:16:06","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T22:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=839"},"modified":"2022-09-29T18:16:06","modified_gmt":"2022-09-29T22:16:06","slug":"questioning-conventional-queerness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2022\/09\/29\/questioning-conventional-queerness\/","title":{"rendered":"Questioning Conventional Queerness"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Why does the money that creates Stonewall 25 and events like it rarely find its way to working-class and poor queers? […] Have we collectively turned our backs on the small towns in Oregon that one by one are passing local anti-gay ordinances?” (Clare 43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This entire paragraph on p. 43 is much too long to fully type out for this post, but effectively serves as a prime example of how Clare evokes a lot of his own frustration\/confusion\/complex internal monologue of navigating our heteronormative, ability-normative, elitist world as a trans, queer, impaired writer that grew up in the working class. He gets the reader to question the perceptions of normalcy that show up in our lives as we live them through contextualizing his nuanced perspective by asking questions. As seen in the aforementioned paragraph, as well as many times throughout the text as a whole, Clare poses the questions he has grappled with so as to logically progress us through how he came to seek dismantling conventions of normal.<\/p>\n

In the two questions I included from that paragraph, you can see that he poses a more broad question (which translates to: ‘why are we not equally distributing our resources\/predominantly funding queer organizations that are already well represented?’) followed by a tangentially specific yet related question (translating to: ‘have we abandoned queer people in local communities because they don’t fit the metropolitan agenda?’). The other questions in this paragraph branch into various other relevant discourses. This not only paints us a clear picture of Clare’s inquisitive nature, but in doing so prompts the reader to recognize just how pervasive and far-reaching class, race, and ability are in the realm of queer issues. We can see that once he began to question the big concept, more niche questions about how our systems impact our daily lives arose. In doing this, Clare doesn’t just argue his conclusion that we need to dismantle the normalization of white, able-bodied queer struggles to include other intersectional factors, but rather leads the reader through how he got there. Clare makes abstract, complex concepts digestible by laying out his own thought processes, which makes what he is trying to say much more tangible to his audience.<\/p>\n

This theme of systemic issues having nuanced local impacts for those left out of the majority in Clare’s work directly bolsters our class theme of defining queerness by its multiplicity. It is clear from this excerpt that people advocating for LGBTQ+ issues are finally garnering public attention, but a large portion (if not all) of this advocacy leaves out gender\/sexual minorities of color, lower socioeconomic status, impairment, etc. We’ve discussed throughout this course how multidimensional the term ‘queer’ is as a facet of identity. The way Clare points to all of the far-reaching corners of other identities that conflate with queer identity reinforces our argument that queerness encompasses so many things beyond sexuality and gender identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Why does the money that creates Stonewall 25 and events like it rarely find its way to working-class and poor queers? […] Have we collectively turned our backs on the small towns in Oregon that one by one are passing local anti-gay ordinances?” (Clare 43) This entire paragraph on p. 43 is much too long … Continue reading Questioning Conventional Queerness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4994,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4994"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}