The big difference between liberal LGBT identity politics and revolutionary queer politics is:
That the goal of liberal LGBT identity politics is to present four (or 5, 6, 7, depending on the acronym) clearly defined LGBT identities with an easily digestable narrative to them to so that LGBT people may be understood, incorporated into societies notions of normalcy and turned into respectable citizens under capitalism.
While the goal of revolutionary queer politics is to complicate identity, to defy definition, to disrupt clear narratives, to continue to be confusing and paradoxical, so that queer people can not be incorporated or turned into respectable citizens and can continue on their struggle to destroy normalcy and respectability, which is a struggle that connects us to all struggles against oppression.
If we seem blatantly sexual or grotesquely unfuckable, if we make polite company uncomfortable, if we seem self-contradicting, if we wear slurs like badges of honor, if we’re bad rolemodels, if we seem weird or dangerous, that’s the point.
This also intersects with neurodiversity. The goal of neurodiversity is not to make autistics fit in neatly into the system where everyone “tolerates” us, it is to dismantle the ableist system entirely.
Cool this post was for and about queer people tho. Please make a new post.
Actually, I was very happy to see the comment by autpunq. It’s valuable to talk about the similarities in our struggles and the choice between assimilation and radical liberation is one many groups face.
Queer neurodiverse people have done a lot to challenge the concept of normal and it’s vital that we keep talking about how our struggles connect and mirror each other.As a queer neurodiverse person, I still think it would have been more appropriate as a separate post.
As another queer neurodiverse person, I found it a useful addition and I find that always making your own post runs the risk of overlooking the interconnectedness and similarity of our struggles under the same oppressive systems. So I’d love to see more conversations about how radical queer, neurodiverse and mad struggles intersect and interact and if any folks wanna talk about that, I think they can comment on this post.
To add on to this, the history of queer people and neurodivergent people have largely been connected in that the system labeled us as mentally ill or freaks or abnormal. Homosexuality used to be a mental illness and GED/GD (read: transsexuality) still is a mental illness. In order to transition, you still have to go through a ridiculous amount of psychotherapy to make sure that that’s really the thing for you. By separating the two communities, you’re separating centuries of combined struggle within the two communities
Yup. AND the radical Mad communities for that matter. We need to resist the temptation to focus only on those groups that can claim that they are not medically ill, both LGBT and neurodiverse communities have had a tendency to focus on the ‘not mentally ill’ narrative at the expense of community members that are mentally ill.
Our story absolutely includes people that are mentally ill and we need to acknowledge that as queer people we are also disproportionately struggling with mental health because of how violent the world treats us and as people labelled mad we are disproportionately queer because it makes no sense to many of us to follow societies messed up ideas about sex and gender.
Our focus should never be “we were labelled mentally ill and freaks when we’re actually sane and normal”. No no no no. We may look back with horror to times when we were forcibly locked up in institutions for being gay and bi and trans, but we should look with the same horror at the now where we are forcibly locked up in institutions for experiencing the world in a ‘mad’ way. It’s the same violence.
It should be “we were labelled mentally ill and freaks and abnormal and regardless of whether that was true, that made us the target of violence. Fuck that. We’ll be freaks and mad and queer all we want. We’ll be whatever the fuck we are and we want the violence to stop”.
We’re united in the struggle against the violence we face when we are branded ‘not-normal’ and in knowing the potential for liberation in being not-normal.
Also add in the fact that neurodiverse/disabled people are routinely de-sexualized by society.
Indeed, many queer neurodiverse people are told ‘oh, you can’t be gay/lesbian/bi/trans/etc, clearly this is just part of your autism/bpd/did, etc’.
So not only are neurodivergent people stripped of their sexuality, their identity is blamed upon their neurodivergence (this happens more often with those who are considered ‘high needs’, etc), and this ignored entirely.
And queer people, neurodiverse people, disabled people and mentally ill people are also routinely presented as sexual predators, which result in a dynamic where any sexuality they have is treated as inherently suspicious and dangerous and something of which the existence should be hidden from from children.
Where words like ‘freak’ are used, words like ‘pervert’ are always just around the corner, as is the intense violence and dehumanization that comes with them.
All these groups have had their sexual autonomy limited by society. All these groups have been the target of fetishisation. All these groups have disproportionately experienced sexual violence, especially within institutions. As the ‘transphobes trying to see trans peoples genitals’ illustrates, we’re often sexually assaulted by the exact people that claim that we are predators.
And all these groups have been the target of forced sterlisation both due to societies discomfort with our existence as sexual beings and to stop us from spreading our ‘condition’ to the rest of humanity.
QueerAnarchism 