\u201cBefore I left, I was a rural, mixed-class, queer child in a straight, rural, working-class town. Afterward, I was an urban-transplanted, mixed-class, dyke activist in an urban, mostly middle-class, queer community. Occasionally I simply feel as if I\u2019ve traded one displacement for another and lost home to boot.\u201d \u2013 (Eli Clare, p46)<\/p>\n
The word \u201ctraded\u201d here is really revealing. What is the author wants to trade for? He wanted to use family and home to trade for acceptance and a feeling of not being \u201cqueer\u201d. However, the list of adjectives that are full of contradictions shows that he failed. \u201cMixed-class\u201d vs. \u201cworking-class\u201d vs. \u201cmiddle-class\u201d. \u201cRural\u201d vs. \u201curban\u201d. This long list of words is like \u201ctags\u201d on him that show how alien he is to the environment he lives in, either before or after, nothing changed. More heartfelt is the word \u201clost\u201d: he doesn\u2019t get what he wants, but lost something that is really important to him.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the word \u201ctraded\u201d also reminds us of the cruel fact that for queer people, acceptance is something we need to \u201ctrade\u201d for. We can\u2019t be easily accepted by just being ourselves. We must give up something, for most of the time the family, to get what other people are born with. This reminds me of the \u201cChristmas effect\u201d which is also caused by the conflict between family and identity. Without family, we lost the place to \u201cboot\u201d, and most people, like the author, failed to find another place to be home and thus being haunted by loneliness and isolation all the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cBefore I left, I was a rural, mixed-class, queer child in a straight, rural, working-class town. Afterward, I was an urban-transplanted, mixed-class, dyke activist in an urban, mostly middle-class, queer community. Occasionally I simply feel as if I\u2019ve traded one displacement for another and lost home to boot.\u201d \u2013 (Eli Clare, p46) The word \u201ctraded\u201d … Continue reading Trade for what?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5011,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","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\/5011"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}