A Bit About Queer

When I told my novice director that I was a big queer, I actually wasn’t referring to my physical size at all.  It’s true that I’m tall, and for many years I was overweight.   I take up space.  But that’s not what makes me a big queer.

No, when I said I was a big queer, I meant that I was a highly public queer person.  I was not contrasting myself to a smaller lesbian, but to the many people who live their lives quietly, in varying degrees of freedom and peace.  I made a career out of being queer, at a time when not so many did.  I wasn’t as public as other academic queers, but then political theory was not a sexy field.  And I may have been a big queer, but I was not, am not, a particularly sexy one.  So I was sort of a mid-level big queer.

I didn’t set out to be a big queer.  I actually didn’t set out to be queer at all.  But there are so many ways to be queer, I couldn’t help myself.

There’s sex, of course.  “Queer” has often been used to refer to lesbians and gays, and later bisexuals and (sometimes) transgendered, sometimes intersexed people.  “Queer” was an epithet, a one-syllable word for “abomination.”  But a funny thing happened to queer.  A queer thing happened, and happens over and over.

All sorts of things have been called queer over time, and more would be now if the word didn’t have sexual overtones for us.  Anything unusual, eerie, strange, “off,” can be queer.  Anything that deviates from norms can be queer.  

“Queer” seems to derive from the Old German for “off-center,” “oblique.”  It can be an adjective – “that seems queer” – or it can be a verb – “that queers things for us” – as well as a noun – “you queer!”  In every usage, it seems to refer not to itself, but to something else that it decenters, destabilizes, problematizes, unhinges – you get the idea.  Queer is not a location, but a deviation.  Queer is never the center, but acts on the center or addresses the center.  Queer mucks up the ordinary, the central, the way things should be.

Now, if you try to make this mucking-up thing the center, it turns out to just keep moving around.  We tried this a lot, gays and lesbians: we celebrated gay culture, lesbian feminism,  “women’s community,” all kinds of things.  But it seemed that the energy in the thing was so often in what it wasn’t, rather than in what it was.  As soon as we decided that something was this way – that women were egalitarian and loving, or that gay men were free and non-patriarchal, or pretty much anything – as soon as we decided that, counterexamples would mushroom among us and within us.   So it turns out that it’s even possible to be a queer lesbian!  

Queer just keeps multiplying.  For every norm, there’s a queering.

Now, I may not be particularly big anymore, and I may not be too queer sexually, but when you throw in the nun part: that’s queer.   It doesn’t take much to be queer when you’re a nun.  Being a nun sort of lowers the bar, because the social norms around nuns are so tight.   It doesn’t take much to surprise people: all we have to do is act like human beings, and we “queer” being nun.

In the end, it’s about wholeness.  Being all of me, you being all of you, us belonging together in our queernesses.  That’s the journey we’re on.  Ready?