Sunday, May 24, 2015

Sketchy

I just drank a beer.....and this isn't a new feeling--but...I am suspicious of Queer epistemology.
It strikes me as, for many--not all, never all--a great way to avoid coming out, to ever fully confront
difference and its insane glorious pain and isolation.  I think it's through Queerness that Heterosexuality will succeed in, again, subsuming all sexuality such that it's status as baseline, normative, unmarked, never fritzes.  As far as I can tell, queer wants to erode boundaries twixt Homo and Hetero.  I certainly see how abrading a major binary has appeal--but I think this is the wrong tactic in service of an appealing ideal.  My, arguably, number one beef with Heterosexuality is that it's un-marked--there's no need to declare it unless one's in a scenario where there's any risk of being identified as otherwise.  This un-marked status wreaks hell for Homos, puts the potential stress of coming out on them and them only (though them only never makes complete sense), thus any episteme which wants to contribute to further un-marking Heterosexuality (by positing that Hetero and Homo limn rather than separate, that they should not be distinguished, be seen as operating with radically different power valences) seems dubious to me.  In somewhat redundant conclusion--via Queerness I have a hunch Hetero-Hegemony's perpetuity will be guaranteed, as there's no greater power than maximally un-marked dynamics: there is no questionable power rigging, only element as necessary as thoroughly oxygenated air.   However, if one is willing to abandon, in all "real world" instances,  genitals defining biological sex, then I am so cool with Queer: no more demographic tallies asking M/F; no more being born a sex rather than a human--as currently one more often than not has to have a sex to qualify as human.  So my revamped conclusion is--Queer epistemes are awesome if they're willing to be as radical as their implications already are...but blah to those strains that seem mostly to locate salvation through evasion. 

Warrant for the above: Judith Butler's claim, in Gender Trouble, that Heterosexuality predicates sex distinctions.

Note: I don't think it's practical to wholly disavow Queer as world-view, and I don't believe it will always engine what I suggest are its likely results.  Hopefully I'm really wrong--Homosexuals won't go extinct as recognizable demographic and Queer epistemes will brilliantly retard its ebbing wholly outside legibility. 

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