Queer Lessons
A second book, on social fear, is planned.
Excerpt
By the time we become adults we believe we know something about our choices and our reasons for them. We know our compromises with life and the paths we select, including those we don’t always prefer. We are less candid, however, about our motives or reasoning for choosing, and the conditions that create them. Reasons are surface validations. Motives are quieter, subtler impulses. Our actions and decisions, however, are not always bolstered by an astute understanding of their foundations.
Our daily lives follow familiar grooves of living, even if based on mistaken assumptions or conclusions. When we follow patterns that harm or hamper us, one consequence is social amnesia or aphasia. We forget, or don’t quite realize, how entangled we are in bargaining with life.
Early in our existence we try to fit in, to become recognized as beings with talent, skill, imagination, desires, and ambitions. Social expectations or definitions, however, do not invariably coincide with ours. We may be forced to overlook distortion and inaccuracy in society’s reactions to us. Queer Lessons is an account of the ‘we’ in these encounters. They are not prescriptive. They are not lessons like math lessons. They represent gestures of wariness and openness.
Life in our contemporary world is a jostle of publicity and advocacy and negotiating, We connect with, but also dispute, culture and power. Especially regarding forces surrounding sexuality and gender. As some societies move legally or socially toward sexual and gender openness, others reinforce or create exclusion. But this is not the outer limit of containment. Every common reference in regular interactions, of every type, imprints us. Every reference to ‘at-risk’ populations, any paradigm that establishes some populations as dangerous to regular and secure life, gives us a reasoning that justifies discrimination and stigma.
Most of us think about the conditions of our lives. But we rarely think about why they develop, or what ideas about a better future led to their emergence. Less often do we do a deep dive into the failure of some of them. A vision of a better future may rest simply on a random list of impressions of ‘the present’, and how they should be improved. Some are organized around an ideology, or a philosophy, of living. We live out, even if unmindful of the fact we’re doing so, whatever ideas and rhythms of life we enter at birth. Later, we might notice inconsistencies between the postulate of an idealized existence, and the reality of its effects. Between that idealized rapture, and the social customs and personal interests that weaken it. Between the honest pursuit by some of social goals according to the rules of the social game, and the rewards given to others who pursue underhandedly or hypocritically. In all our suppositions about life and social order, there lie numerous instances of a society not working as we think it should. Regardless of our morality, politics, hopes, or expectations. Society’s momentum induces us to overlook inconsistencies.
In this book you have met people whose conjectures referred to identity, and institutional impact. Specifically, sexual and gender identity. Specifically, schooling. Both areas confront the stability of our assumptions of effect, and therefore of inconsistency. Given its purpose in society, it would be unrealistic to expect an education system to turn away from established cultural principles and attitudes. At the same time we need more than solo journeys into life. We need to question how orientations of sexuality and gender become secure in any social order. How, and why, order seeks normalization and around what purposes. We need to slice through assumptions that move us from normalization to demand for conformity, and then to large-scale control. We must learn to confront, and compete with, numerous vectors of power. Those that inhabit us personally, and those that become the drivers of institutions. Not all control is insidious, but neither is social control naturally open and benevolent.
Secession from a damaging or hampering orbit of life is possible. Engaging and demanding, without seceding, is possible. But we can’t easily avoid our intellectual, moral, and social climate. If avoidance is difficult to impossible, however, we are not doomed to be forever held back by its consequences. If schools help to make us visages of a conforming life, are there queer lessons that might undermine what makes us a residual effect of their effect? What makes us intelligible to each other? And, especially, to ourselves?
If ever there was a time to reject the categories into which human populations are relentlessly classified, we are alive in it. Controversies flourish over which fundamental understandings define human existence. We have not rejected the perpetual slicing of life. We still do not, and apparently cannot, conceptualize a social order without stigma.