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tonyglowheart · 3 years

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I genuinely don’t understand people who say aspecs are queer BUT NOT kinky people. If you’re into BDSM, if you’re polyamorous, if you’re celibate, if you’re hypersexual, if you’re in an interracial relationship. It’s all related. These are sexuality/relationship/lifestyles that don’t meet our society’s standards and are underrepresented or represented negatively and so i think they are all queer

Anon I am having thinky thoughts but also I lowkey don’t want to get into this too majorly bc I got into this several years back during said campaign I mentioned in the tags on that rb post lmfao and it resulted in a whole Thing and I like... don’t have the energy to get into internet arguments with people anymore because I’m old and tired and can’t deal with the back and forth of me making points, them ignoring the majority of my points in favor of some strawmen or appeal to extremes, me addressing that and also some points including maybe where they DO have a point about some facet I failed to consider but have now, them ignoring that and repeating their same talking points, me addressing their points again & pointing out their ad hominems that usually have come out at this point and other logical fallacies, them ignoring that to repeat- and ultimately, we’re kind of talking past each other and I’m mostly appealing to whatever audience might be around. (I think I might have priv’ed or deleted a bunch of posts from back then but some may still be up somewhere in my archive lmao.....).

So on that kind of note I don’t... necessarily want to get into an argument or debate (not necessarily with you, possibly by some other anon passing through who is much more inclined to picking a fight with me about the Affront to Them Personally as well as the sanctity of the movement) on whether or not being kinky itself constitutes being “queer” per se bc I think the terminology is a sticking point and I do kind of see the perspective of “kink doesn’t make you automatically queer” **HOWEVER** yes I do also agree with that post I rbed that like kink/fur do rather constitute “queer subcultures” even though not every single person in there is LGBT+ in a more “traditional” sense - such as speaking more towards like sexual orientation & gender identity - and that these kinds of “alternative” lifestyles do present a “queering” (*a* queering) of ^ sexuality/relationships/lifestyles or whatever we might term that. And maybe that’s what I was struggling to articulate all those yrs ago lmao, when I was young and full of the energy of the Youthe and could get into internet arguments with ppl. The like respectability politics of trying to be sanitized enough to be “acceptable” to a hostile and rigid mainstream while alienating queer subcultures, which just results in the queer community at large cutting off parts of itself to try to be/remain “acceptable” but that just leads to self-harm to the community at large vs addressing more global/bigger picture issues.

Hrmmm okay I think what this whole issue of terminology and what gets to be called “queer” kind of gets to: they’re related, as you say, but that being varying shades or scopes of marginalized, but that doesn’t necessarily make it all “queer”? Because.... tbh I can see why the full-stop is a sticking point for people, and I do kind of think operationalized terms have more value when they ARE applied with scope instead of trying to generalize it too broadly, and queer does mean something quite specific (or.. maybe not specific, but rather that “queer” DOES have parameters, tho they may be more of like a soft-shaded parameter as opposed to some kind of hard fence)?

But I do agree that usually a lot of the language people against various other kinds of marginalized identity aspects uses, mirrors, & parallels language used against other things, like language against queer people/queer relationships & interracial relationships, and that communities would be served better with solidarity rather than trying to excise or disavow other communities - ESPECIALLY communities which have a lot of overlap with the queer community and also are historical and current allies - in a futile attempt to be “respectable” enough for the hostile mainstream and its evermoving goalposts.

..But maybe I’m just quibbling a point here, because while I don’t know if I’d call kink/fur/etc “queer” and the term “queer subcultures” seems to fit better for me, this does point to “these subcultures have room within queer spaces and in fact were there at the inception of ‘queer spaces’ as we kind of conceive of it today in USmerica” (idk fur but the kink community was definitely there). And then this gets into a more philosophical question of “well if it belongs in queer spaces is it not then ‘queer.’” This may be a “this topic is complicated and multifaceted an these different arguments based on different needs and with different axes of foci can coexist.” Ultimately, I think it does come down to “exclusionary rhetoric against a marginalized identity/community - especially one that is aligned, if not overlapping or otherwise part of the “core community” at the heart of this issue - is more harmful than helpful because the goalposts of respectability will never stay put and the language used by the hegemony against one group often is reused/paralleled/mirrored in language against another marginalized group, and can very easily be turned again back against you.”

Speaking more towards the arguments re: the 'coming out' campaign backlash, like back then I was fairly active in the m/m romance GR community & more in touch with ppl who were part of kink communities who were part of the m/m GR comm, and like based on what they told me/we talked abt following the whole backlash against “coming out kinky,” is that ppl DO in fact lose their jobs get disowned get evicted etc if they're 'outed' as kinky. Which then directly parallels the vanilla queer experience. I think a sticking point back then was that 'born this way' rhetoric was more prevalent back then, and ppl see kink as more of a 'lifestyle choice' and less about something 'inherent', and also some ppl were just flat-out like 'um ew it's sexual harassment'. But I think if you look at various dynamics of kink there's like lifestyle kink which isn't necessarily inherently or always sexual so like I don't think it's automatically a sexual harassment thing, ig for me it's like... ppl reacting with SUCH backlash against the idea that kink could/should be allowed within the concept of queer spaces and that echoes that post about assassination of queer subcultures, and like coming out isn’t always “I fuck xx” or “I fuck in xx way,” like if you come out as gay you’re not necessarily describing in explicit detail to your mother the ways fuck, you know? I think for me the “coming out” thing also was kind of like... is it safe for you for people to find out x aspect about you? And I do rather think there’s greater hostility towards these kinds of subcultures, which would then perhaps elicit or illustrate a reason why we might want to normalize or educate people better on what exactly constitutes the precepts of the subculture, vs whatever popular idea of it is prevailing at the time?

..I think ultimately we go back again to “this topic is complicated because there’s many intersectional issues as well as competing needs so there’s not a one-size-fits-all ‘answer’ to the questions/issues brought up”

#queer tag #Anonymous #asks answered #long post

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