Queering Being

I believe in a conception of queerness as a vessel for fluidity and possibility. One that doesn’t negate the validity and importance of labels and of adhering to specific orientations, but one that holds space and celebrates our capacity to be complex and expansive, challenging the rigidity of the cisheteropatriarchy.

Yet it’s difficult to be fluid and in transitory states of who you are when you have to memorialize and concretize every moment and state of being through social media. There is no state of flux, there is only knowing and not knowing, with an emphasis on knowing. This dichotomy leads to stricter rules of being and a sense of accountability to exterior systems and institutions and how they regulate people’s responses to each other, rather than a freedom to be and to experiment within our complexity. I think this is what boxes in gender, sexuality and queerness, and they end up being regulated even by our own communities to fit the needs of the platforms we ‘show up’ on, the spaces we ‘curate’ ourselves for, which are mirrored in irl spaces too. The online informs the lived and the lived becomes a curation for the online. And then the lived becomes much more restricted, much less nuanced, with much less freedom and imagination.

Let me be clear, I think online spaces have done wonders for queerness and queer community, allowing us reprieve and sometimes even facilitating escape from isolation and the lack of accepting irl spaces. But we tend to forget the modalities of commodified online spaces and the fact that these spaces were/are designed to alienate us, especially marginalized queer people. You think El0n Mu$k or any of those other goons want queer people on their platforms? No. Unless they can monetize us. And monetizing means commodifying means little regulated boxes that don't actually disrupt norms but rather profit from false exceptionalism. And we fall into those traps – they fuel a consistent policing of labels, of presentations, of ways of being. Who gets to be called what, the discourses that surround that, fuel online queer spaces, restricting our ability to form truly liberatory, counter-normative queer community.

We have to be conscious of the fact that the ways in which these platforms were/are built, and the reasons they exist, modulate our behaviours and our capacity to be, fully. A capacity that is not limited to specific parameters of what is known, to commodified exceptionalist normativity, but that exists within expansivity, within fluidity, within being comfortable with not needing to always have a rigid image of ourselves and our selves. Knowing who we are in the sense of our identities is different from holding ourselves to strict representations of our being. There’s power in knowing; there’s also power in existing beyond images and fixed moments immortalized. There’s power in being expansive and being opaque, not readily readable, not easily digestible. In embracing possibility, complexity, and fluidity. In disrupting the norms that keep us locked within these oppressive systems and their digital and irl institutions. In rejecting digestibility and one size fits all boxes. In being authentic in ways that are revolutionary. That’s the true power of queerness.