Queering "Queer"

“Camp is a weapon, a means, an attack on the norm,” asserted the triumphant drag queen (or should I say ‘quean’?) with a stamp of her platform-clad foot, a defiant flash of her three-inch-long, glittering lashes. And then the “Confessions of a Dance Whore” star stripped herself slowly of her costume, grating away layers of camp - her weapon, as though scraping iron from iron with a peeler. Even as I write this description, I find myself stumbling over pronouns, for moments later, he stood in front of us in a school-boy uniform, pondering, and asking us to ponder, "Is there an essential me under all these me's or are we always performing?"

I am down to my last blog entry in London, and I find myself distilling the entire course down to that exact question. After all, where does an identity end and a being begin? We have spent the past two weeks traipsing about a city that has no idea whether it wants to be ancient or modern, Greek-classicist or Orientalist, monarchy or democracy, and so-on and so-forth, etcetera, etcetera … until London has finally run out of conflicting dichotomies from which to suspend our question marks. We have spent the past two weeks deconstructing discourse while creating a discourse of our own – one that exists in the loops and holes of a spiral bound notebook, that is – in the margins outside the margins. We have learned to “queer” (that scrumptious adjective/noun-turned-verb) just about everything – queering architecture, queering time, queering literary aesthetics, queering legal systems, queering responses to modern art; but what happens when we turn the verb “queer” on itself? Have we wielded the word “queer” as a weapon for attack on the norm, much like Will’s favorite dance whore wields camp? And in doing so have we created an anti-norm that exists for its own sake, thereby becoming a norm unto itself? I realize I am speaking in abstracts; allow me to “queer” my abstractions with anecdotes …

Earlier this evening, dropping by our fully-applianced apartments to collect his laundry, our professor Jason couldn’t resist a chat with his delightful, A+ students; and being the brilliant interlocutors that we are, the conversation slowly drifted to the cliché binary between academia and activism, and naturally, to the LGBT community’s grand assimilation project: same-sex marriage. And while I have NEVER wanted to get married, and while I would personally like to pull the marble columns out from under the friezes of this aging temple of an institution, I find myself committed to defending the rights of those who seek its security to be free to do so. And if you want to know why, let Jason tell you his story of adoption legalities. Let my roommate Carrie, whose partner was killed, tell you her story of funeral arrangements that excluded her entirely, deference given to “family” who refused to acknowledge that their only daughter was gay, even in death. And what about the average Tom and Dick, or Sally and Sue who genuinely want the rings, the cake, the “till death do us part” shebang?

Yes, I am all about questioning the norm. It is what I want to spend my life doing, and that is why I must question the norm of “queer”? How can we critique binaries that suspend genders and sexualities across taut lines, if we are not willing to recognize the normative/anti-normative binary that we are creating ourselves? Is queerness a kind of camp, a performance of its own? A wig to don and doff when we are on or off a stage? Is queerness about an attack, a weapon we use to destroy? Or is it about an embrace, a tool we use to create? Is queerness about always making a statement or always asking a question - a kind of ever percolating ellipses that forever trails off the end of the page?

To reconcile these binaries of queerness, I would like to take both ends, loop them around till they meet in the center of a skater’s figure 8, then fold the 8 in half to create a queer sort-of imbricated, diamond-drop circle with plenty of nooks and grooves for norms and anti-norms and everything in between. I am interested in existing in the gaps between deconstructed brick walls, where discourse can lose its power structures and become two people talking to each other about how they feel. I want it to be okay for someone who wants patches of norm to stitch those patches into their own quilted queerness. Can’t we exist in the interstices between the iron rails without actually hopping on the train? Can this poly-lesbian, femme-top, academic-activist-artist person find a space in the gaps between her various anti-norms, lay down her weapon, and just be?

Yes, I will admit: if I had to choose (and thanks to Foucault, I don’t), I would privilege a world of beings over identities. Because beings are the essential me under the me’s. Because beings happen in the intersections where identities X away from each other. Because any real queer knows each one of those identities is constructed in the first place. (And after “Love the Sinner,” we all know a bad performance when we see one.)