Homonationalism and Queer Resistance

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4649
Date Written:  2016-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21388

For most young queers today, still, the image of a "worker" is white, male and straight. You can't understand the realities of class without an intersectional approach - an intersectional approach fused with some of the key insights of contemporary radical queer theory.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

"Queer" is still often used today as a rough, irreverent term for LGBTIQ in general. But it also has a more specific connotation. Culturally, socially and politically, I think "queer" can usefully be defined - and is often defined, consciously or unconsciously, by self-identified queers, in opposition to homonormativity.

If we do that, we can start analyzing queer in terms of political economy - without being reductive, without positing any one-to-one correspondence between sexual self-identification and position in society. There is no such correspondence. But it can be useful, in fact vitally important, to see that there are correlations.

There are correlations between LGBTI people who identify as queer and particular societal positions - positions that make queers less likely to have middle-class lifestyles or the resources to support them. There are correlations between queer self-identification and forms of gender dissidence: the unwillingness or inability for men to be conventionally masculine or for women to be conventionally feminine.