Quote:
Originally Posted by Miss Tick
So what you mean is that defying the socially accepted categories of masculinity and femininity does not mean queering them but instead it means denying the existence of masculine and feminine at all in any content or context in queer identity or vocabulary? Have I got it yet?
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That's the thing, is that it really isn't an either/or answer. And I'm starting to think that that might be what's happening in how my posts are being read. When I'm trying to work through my own thought process I structure it in my head as going through every argument that I can think of that strengthens or weakens either side of the argument. In this case I'm finding a weakness in certain arguments surrounding butch and femme identity, and the butch/femme dynamic...namely the weight that's placed on the use of masculine and feminine as defining factors. So often I'm considering both sides of the argument and seeing merits in both.
So that means that when I'm looking at the question you posed above, I'm thinking something to the effect of: Yes, on the one hand "queering" masculinity and femininity serves an important purpose. Greater heteronormative western society still sees masculinity and femininity as very rigid and defined according to interests/characteristics and according to assigned sex at birth. Those categories need to be broken, and one way to do that is to make them limitless, and to push society to perceive them as limitless and encompassing of anyone who wishes to adopt them.
Similarly, it can be important to possess masculinity and femininity as queer. This allows us to see that masculinity and femininity in the current form that we understand them in the western world is derived from a certain period in Greco-Roman history, which was slightly altered but largely maintained throughout the subsequent periods in history. It allows us to insert ourselves into a history that denied or looked down upon those who did not properly fit these categories. It does not insert modern queers into that history, but it takes into account that deviation has always existed and that history and language were largely written by those who did not deviate, or strove to maintain a certain norm.
On the other hand, there is still that lingering history mentioned above. As much as I have embraced the above two modes of thinking in the past and part of me still wants to, I still see logical opposition to it. I think that using these terms or taking them for our own still presupposes an original.
So in that respect, no I am not denying the existence of masculine and feminine in a queer context, because that would require that masculine and feminine in the queer context be completely uniform...which was part of my original argument: that masculine and feminine are not uniform.
However, what I
am saying is that's it's worth considering that other words come to be used (simply butch and femme, for example, as I suggested earlier) in order to describe how exactly a butch is butch, and a femme is femme.
It's impossible for me to singlehandedly deny that masculine and feminine exist in any queer context. But I do still think there is a presupposition of a heteronormative original (which there is, given the origins of the words) even when we say that we "queer" these two terms. Like: "it was theirs, but now its ours." But that means that the "ours" did not exist before or at the same time as the creation of the "theirs." Which is incorrect, imo. It's just that language did not take it into account, and so I think we should strengthen our own language.