Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.
See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.
Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.
What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride – yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.
Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table – taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”
(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)
In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.
I’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.
It’s nice being
Tumblr Old and having some recollection of the self-identifiers we
used before this website. The slogans alone should tell you the
motivators behind using “queer” as opposed to other terms. There
was “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” There was “queer
rage”. There was “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.”
That last one especially shows rejection of any neat essentialist
boxes – go away with your binaries, your easy categorization, and
last but not least your respectability politics.I’ve never seen “q
slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two
years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a
trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost
uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer”
with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are
almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that
it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any
other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically
correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of
history. Which is just not true.So anyway, here are
some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any
other term:1) Wide relevance.
Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.2) Opacity. It can
be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it
can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t
fully covered by any of those categories!3) Queer could,
therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I
can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that).
Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only
sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all
the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention
straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in
casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style
language.And you know what,
of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the
abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is
catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the
community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does
actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace
it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default
descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy
with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve
come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and
sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside
from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.I could go on about
how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb
people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who
especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete
one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something
the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under
good old respectability politics.TL;DR: You can’t
just take away a term that many, many people in the
community have been actively using for decades before your latest
iteration of SGA discourse and expect no meaning to be lost or
broken.@outderon
I think, in part, the notion of “queer is a slur” comes from the comparative rarity of encountering it as far as younger people are concerned. Which, of course, makes it sound much more punchy on occasions when it is used. But you’re absolutely right about all of this.
queer is a slur. this isn’t up for debate. the whole point of queer nation and groups like it was that the word queer has a history of violence, and that’s why they chose it. it was meant to shock. it was meant to turn cishets’ weapons against them – but the word is still a weapon, and people who aren’t comfortable with it shouldn’t have it applied to them
yes, queer was central to anti-assimilationist groups like queer nation and act up, and yes, fighting against respectability politics is really important. but like, none of this negates queer’s history. its recent history was empowerment and reclamation in the late 80s/early 90s, but before that it was exclusively a slur, and it’s still used (particularly by and against older people) to dehumanise lgbt+ people.
there’s nothing wrong with using it as a self-identification (provided you’re not cishet), but using it as an umbrella term is shit because it forces a slur onto people who aren’t necessarily comfortable with it. for so many lgbt+ people the word is primarily associated with violence and hatred, and I shouldn’t need to say that referring to people by a slur without their permission is just downright terrible
Okay, I have several huge problems with this.
- Who exactly made you the Grand Arbiter of our language? Why do you get to tell people who were in the community before you were born that they can no longer use their language?
- Can you tell me another term that can be used in informal day-to-day speech that has never been a slur? Can you show me an “umbrella” term that hasn’t been used by people telling half the community they’re “not gay enough” or “too extreme” or otherwise not worthy of being One Of Us? (In informal speech, I hear a lot of reversion to “gay” or “gay and lesbian;” hopefully I don’t have to explain what’s wrong here?) Can you show me a term that I can use to include all of us, as a person whose disability includes memory issues that make it very difficult to keep track of the ever-increasing alphabet soup?
- A large part of this post is a response to people telling others who are self-identifying as queer “um sweaty :)))) that’s a slur :)))” – the same people who made “LGBT” into a warning sign – coming to tell us that we can’t use that word either, in any capacity.
- You say “was” like anti-assimilationism is a footnote in a dusty history volume – to someone who is pushing back against assimilationism and the very real harm it is doing to a lot of the community.
- “queer as an umbrella term is ahistorical” Oh, my sweet summer child. The first use of “queer” by people in the community as a broad descriptor was a century ago. The first use of it in the sense that I’m using it here – as a deliberately radical (both “radical politics” and “radically inclusive”) umbrella term applied to the whole community – predates the last major battle of the “who’s queer enough to count?” war and the use of LGBT, let alone the rest of the alphabet soup. I can show you formal scholarly articles about as old as you are that uncontroversially use it. Has it ever been used by the entire community to refer to the entire community? No. But neither has anything else that even pretends to include us all, and it definitely does have a storied history.
I wrote that post in response to a movement I’ve seen a fair amount of lately – the use of “queer is a slur” against people who are using it in a sense it’s had for over a quarter of a century in a deliberate bid to silence those of us who are hurt by supercessionist, assimilationist policies and tactics.
You want ahistorical? There are a lot of people right now trying to redefine the boundaries of the “LGBT” community to exclude folks who have been there all along, and to silence the voices of anybody who isn’t gay enough for their liking.
You know what else is still used as a slur? Gay. Yet somehow, it’s completely uncontroversial. When people talk about how gay they are* or “gay rights” or “gay marriage,” nobody bats an eye. Nobody gives them the “um sweaty, that’s a slur” speech. Even if they’re straight.
Active slurs are apparently perfectly fine for straight people to use to discuss things that affect all of us. So you’ll pardon me for being extremely fucking skeptical of the singling out of this term, one that sees extremely strong usage by the segments of the community keep being marginalized within the community, as unacceptable or a step too far. I’ve heard “That’s a step too far” way too many times from “LGBT” people and organizations – usually when I, as a trans person, ask them to fight for my rights too, or when I, as a bi person, ask for a face and a voice and maybe some resources.
The only thing that makes “queer” unacceptable where “gay” is uncontroversial is who’s using it.
Am I going to call specific, individual people queer? Not unless I’ve seen them actively claim it. Am I going to talk about the queer community, queer issues, queer rights? Hell yes I am – because the community that wants me as a member, the community I want to be a member of, is queer.
“Queer is a slur” is doing damage to me. Queer community, queer politics, and being queer are liberating me.
I went looking for this post because no less than 4 posts about “the q slur” have come across my dash today.
@wetwareproblem says it much more articulately above than I could, but what I will say is this: I’m so over people telling me the word I choose to identify with is so offensive it should never even be typed.
I’m queer. I have been part of the queer community for almost twenty years. My identity is not a slur.
Kids.
Queers don’t let queers tell falsehoods about the word queer.
I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful and I even think it’s well-intentioned – and that’s the problem. Earnestly, with good intentions, kids half my age are railing about queer being a slur and claiming to know the gay history that I personally lived (not to mention the gay history that precedes me).
We had queer studies courses in our universities. There are books on queer art, cinema, and history. You know how I know queer isn’t a slur?
Because we never had fag studies.
Sorry, that was harsh, right? Well, that’s the nature of a slur. It retains a hard edge, even if you take ownership of it. You can’t use it in respectful institutions such as academia. A straight person cannot utter it – even in solidarity – without sounding as if they’ve crossed a boundary.
The attempts to change history here are not without purpose. Changing the language is an effort made by people with ill-will for the LGBT community (particularly against the T, but also the B – which doesn’t bode well for those letters in the extended acronym). Fewer umbrella terms means people getting pushed out from under the umbrella.
Please guys, ask yourselves who benefits from this division (hint: people that do not want us to unify). Don’t fight against queer, a word that by its nature includes more vulnerable members of the community, people whose identity is less easily defined.
Also, I’m just as angry as @audreyimpossible is, for some reason it’s coming out of me way softer than it is inside of me. But this queer is very tired of infighting. I’ve been here for a while and I can tell when we’re being manipulated.
I either didn’t see or didn’t remember this addition until it popped up in my notes again, but thank you so much. This is an extremely solid, well-made point.
This shit is why I get straight people at work telling me I can’t describe myself as queer.
Queer is not a slur.
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