bashana-haba-ah-deactivated2017:
Well of course “queer” has been used as a slur. If you’d actually read my comment, you’d notice I said “it wasn’t treated like one until this decade,” not that it, well, wasn’t ever used as one.
Really? So are you saying when I, a bi person, refer to myself queer, I’m oppressing myself?
Honestly, I’ve read enough of oudeteron and @wetwareproblem’s posts to get an inkling of what the word queer used to really mean.
Sadly, you’re one of the kinder identity policers I’ve crossed paths with. At least you keep it real; you didn’t accuse me of using the word with the intention of making people who don’t like it uncomfortable.
That would’ve been a grave mistake on your part, as I can give you ten reasons why “same-gender attracted” should be considered a worse slur than “queer,” and half of them have to do with this community forcing the label on us.
Anon, you might want to look up reappropriation sometime. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Or, well, has happened – “queer” is the most complete and successful case of reappropriation I can think of, and it’s been happening for 30 years.
Have you ever heard of people chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”? Would it surprise you to know that this chant originates with a militant antiassimilationist organization that proudly called itself Queer Nation in 1990? And that they were building on earlier work in reclaiming the word? No really, here’s one of their early fliers.
It is not “recently” that it has been used as an umbrella term – unless by “recently” you mean “for about half the life of the modern rights movement.” It is not “by people who don’t know better” – it is by people who have deliberately chosen to identify as queer because of its connotations and implications.
Actual lived experience: I have never in my life heard Queer used as a slur.
Words I have experienced used as a slur, either directed at me or others, in my actual presence:
- Gay
- Dyke
- Tranny
- Sissy
- Fag
- Faggot
- Nancy boy
Why does this lived experience matter? I am 45 and I have lived in 9 states.
Does it mean Queer was never a slur? Of course not. Does it mean it hasn’t been used to hurt people in the last 30 years? Of course not.
But I think we can say that, over the last 30-40 years, it’s mostly not at the top of anybody’s angry ranting. It’s far from the first (or most widely used) negative term you grab for when you want to mock or shame or discriminate. And it’s not widely used as a negative slur anymore because it’s been reclaimed. By us. By the active work of our community. To use as an umbrella term for that community.
Wow, that’s so disgusting of you, honestly.
Just because the people YOU come into contact with don’t use it, doesn’t mean people elsewhere don’t.
In the UK, it’s most definitely used as a negative slur. Much more than “sissy” or “nancy boy” is. Christ, I hear it as much as I hear the f slur. Once again, America isn’t the entire world.
The point of reclaiming a slur is that you get to reclaim it to use for yourself, on yourself. Not to assign to everyone else.
I’m well aware that the US isn’t the entire world. My mother is from Norway. I have family in Canada.
But, as a citizen of the US who has travelled only very lightly internationally, I have a US-centric perspective. I do not know what slurs are in common usage in the UK or in Australia or indeed in most of the English speaking world, let alone the world as a whole.
There are a lot of differences in terms of slang and slurs between the UK and the US, some of which I’m aware of, some of which I’m not.
The fact that to most folks in the US a ‘rubber’ is a condom, and therefore slightly naughty, doesn’t mean that nobody in the UK is allowed to use that term to refer to an eraser.
If you don’t want to reclaim ‘queer’ for yourself, then don’t. If you want to make it known that ‘queer’ is a slur to you or to you and your community, then you should absolutely do so.
But you need to know that this opinion, this usage, isn’t universal. And because it isn’t universal, you can’t expect it to be honored everywhere by everybody.
In the approximately 1/5th of the US I’ve lived in over the roughly half-century I’ve been alive, ‘Queer’ was not an active slur in active use by bigots. Quite the contrary, it was most commonly used in my experience as an umbrella term for the MOGAI community by the MOGAI community, as well as being used in such terms as ‘Queer Studies’ and ‘Queer Literature’.
I’m sorry if those facts, and my personal decision (as well as the decision of a large number of my peers) to use the term ‘queer’ to describe the US communities I’m a member of in a non-stigmatizing way, is disgusting to you.
I’m not going to stop, however, and your disgust at that fact is going to make exactly zero difference.
It seems to be that this seems to be a generational thing, now. Most of the older (over 35) members of the MOGAI group have long used Queer for self-identification. There’s a lot of history behind it, and it’s reclamation, and right now the only people who are using it as a slur are the younger MOGAI generation, and frankly, this baffles me. I don’t really have the time or energy to get into it but if you search @vaspider‘s blog, she has a lot of information of the history of it.
It baffles me too, and it absolutely seems generational. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s related to the fact that – at least in the US – an entire generation+ was decimated by the AIDS crisis, which has lead to a certain amount of history loss and loss of continuity in the community.
And it’s not like I don’t care at all – I am absolutely curious how, in the US, we seem to be seeing a return to the idea of queer being a slur, without an uptick in usage of it as a slur by bigots. Where is that coming from, and why is it happening?
Because all the justifications for not using it seem to boil down to “it’s a slur and always has been, case closed.” And that’s just not true here in the US. Like at all.
And you know what other word is used as a slur that the community has zero desire to reject or stop using? Gay. I hear ‘gay’ weaponized all the damn time, and I have never once heard a community member tell me that it’s always been a slur and we should stop using it.
Also also – @vaspider is always worth listening to, in my experience. They do an amazing amount of fact checking and is an awesome person on top of that.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been carefully watching the recent upswing in ‘queer is a violent slur!’ rhetoric among young activits and I’ve noticed a few things in regard to it.
It’s recent (we’re talking just a few years old here – around twelve-thirteen years ago, when I first started exploring my Not-Straightness online and began figuring myself out, people in the large, popular LGBTQIAP+ Internet groups I’d frequent would overwhelmingly use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term / self-identify as queer and it was uncontroversial and accepted).
It started its propagation on Tumblr. How deeply it’s penetrated into real-life communities, I can’t really say, but the place where it began to spread online like a wildfire among young activists is Tumblr. This will be relevant shortly.
It’s heavily based on a lack of knowledge and refusal to accept community history, with detractors often denying the widespread reclamation of the term/denying the lived experiences of the people who reclaimed the term.
Yes, there is a generational gap and there’s something very interesting about it. Many detractors are LGBTQIAP+ teenagers, starting at thirteen (the minimum cutoff age for being a Tumblr user, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even younger people involved in this who are lying about their age). This is in direct opposition to every instance of controversy around the term over the last thirty years or so, when it was much older members of the community who had understandable issues with it / didn’t wish to reclaim it because of how it had been weaponized against them so often.
Among both the teenagers and the older people who engage in this rhetoric I’ve also noted blogs whose owners describe themselves as ‘radical feminists’, enough of them for the overlap to be noticeable. Again, keep this in mind for relevancy.
There are other overlaps to take note of. There’s an enormous overlap between the ‘queer is a violent slur!’ crowd and the ‘cishet aces aren’t LGBT’ lot. Controlling access to the community via gatekeeping goes hand-in-hand with policing the community’s language. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a deep wellspring of biphobia, panphobia and transphobia underneath the blatant aphobia that many of the people so vehemently against ‘queer’ also engage in.
Something that’s been repeatedly discussed by @vaspider and @wetwareproblem is the fact that the attack on ‘queer’ as an umbrella term means specifically that a term predominantly used by bi/pan/non-binary/genderqueer/intersex people is targeted, as opposed to any other. This ties in to the fact that far too many of the most vocal attackers identity as cis gays or lesbians. The fact that a term most often used by marginalized sections of the community is being targeted for elimination by people who have been repeatedly centered in everything from discussions and official history to activism and resources should set some massive warning flags waving.
Looking at all of this, I have a very dark suspicion. What conclusion can you draw when you see a very recent social phenomenon, popping up in a very specific place, with its rank-and-file made up of young, nominally well-meaning but generally inexperienced and uneducated activists, who have shown that they are ready to believe any claims if they come from a source they consider trustworthy? Add in the involvement of radical feminists, among whom panphobia, transphobia, hostility toward nonbinary people and the term ‘queer’ have been noted time and time again and the picture is a horrifying one.
Here it is: I suspect the backlash against ‘queer’ as an umbrella term and even a self-identifier was engineered and is currently spearheaded by a small and very specific group of people, who took advantage of the fact that Tumblr gave them everything they could have ever needed.
- unfettered access to very young, inexperienced LGBTQIAP+ people
- the ability to build high levels of trust among these people and influence everything from their opinions to their activism
- Tumblr’s very design, where based on who you follow, you can end up seeing only what confirms everything you believe
What kept nagging at me was the complete switch of who was most vehemently against ‘queer’ as self-identifier and/or umbrella term. You don’t have decades where the pattern is one way (reservations or rejection among older activists, generalized popularity among younger ones) only for it to completely reverse within the span of a few years, in one particular place. The whole thing feels artificial. Add in everything above and it absolutely reeks.
Are there young people whose rejection of ‘queer’ comes from the fact that they’ve been personally and directly victimized by it? No doubt. But what I’m talking about here aren’t individual cases, but rather a concerted, well-orchestrated campaign to control the language of marginalized sections of the LGBTQIAP+ community and to expunge ‘queer’, both as self-identifier and as an umbrella term. There are many other words which have been constantly used and are still used as bludgeons against us, ‘gay’ chief among them, yet there is no similar campaign to expunge ‘gay’ as umbrella term, regardless of how many people have been victimized by its usage as a slur.
So what you end up with is a group of people, radfems/cis gays & lesbians among them – also heavily involved in the aphobic backlash now – with an ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’, who figured quickly enough that turning young adult activists against it wasn’t going to work, not when we’d spent a decade or more using it, not when the people before us were instrumental in reclaiming it. So instead they focused on Tumblr and on the youths they could influence here. Inexperience combined with too much uncritical trust led us to where we are and it was a simple thing: if the blogger Person A trusts to Be Right says something, then it must Be Right. All you need then is a sufficient number of people convinced that they’re In The Right passing this on to others with a similar lack of experience and knowledge. Picture an out-of-control forest fire, with the instigators fanning the flames / setting new fires when needed.
This is why I am DONE with concessions on this whole thing. I refused to bow my head and fired right back at the transphobic, biphobic/panphobic and aphobic backlashes both in the physical world and on this goddamn website. This thing is no different, with largely the same people behind it and a better smokescreen. To anyone genuinely hurt by my usage of ‘queer’: I also use LGBTQIAP+ as umbrella term, when needed. Also, I have no problems if you need to unfollow/block me. Prioritizing your well-being is important and I don’t begrudge that,
However, what I DO begrudge is the existence of a concerted campaign meant to completely deny the history and usage of the term most often used by me/people like me and as an identifier for our community, aiming for its demonization and elimination.
all of this. I grew up in America, born in 1963, aware that I was some flavor of not-het since I was 11, and I’ve only rarely heard “queer” used as a disparaging term. I’ve heard “gay” used as a slur for decades and no one’s demanding we stop using that word. The same with “butch”. Suspicious, that the word singled out for re-determination as a slur no one must use ever is the one umbrella term that covers everyone who isn’t cishet.
Also, telling someone they’re disgusting for claiming for themselves a word you’ve been told is bad is a pretty nasty thing to do.
see also: you will take “queer” out of my cold, dead hands.
Reblogging because this same phenomenon – a small number of relatively privileged adults using tumblr to convince a large number of teenagers to send people hatemail – has also shown up in fandom and other places, and we need to talk about it more.
The q slur has been a slur for much much more than a decade, and has only recently been used as an umbrella term by people who don’t know better.
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