💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › lex-b-queer-insurrection.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:59:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Queer Insurrection
Author: Lex B
Date: June 8, 2021
Language: en
Topics: Queer, insurrection
Source: Retrieved on 16th June 2021 from https://comradelex.medium.com/queer-insurrection-2e1cef422d6e

Lex B

Queer Insurrection

It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the

nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness.

The catastrophe is not coming it is here. We are already situated within

the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must

choose sides.

Queer liberation is a fraught subject within the broader “LGBT+”

community, arousing heated debates wherever it goes on the nature of

Queer existence and of course on the politics of radical

anti-assimilation. The mainstream of LGBT+ “culture” and politics is by

and large for cis and white assimilationists. In other words people

willing to throw their fellow queers under the bus for scraps of

lukewarm acceptance from a society deeply hostile to non-normative

social and sexual formations. This liberal mainstream actively pushes

away the uncomfortable and Queer, creating a social fringe on the

already existing social fringes that consists of people punished by

society for daring to exist. This punishment can take many forms but is

often an ostracization from “polite society” to borrow a euphemism. This

ostracization in capitalist society is a death knell for those

ostracized, preventing access to jobs, healthcare, and living spaces as

well as increasing the likelihood of attacks by police and civilians

alike.

This ostracization and rejection of Queerness is not a side effect when

we talk about the LGBT+ mainstream, it is rather the reason that some

percent of Queers have reached their current “accepted” assimilated

status. In order to achieve homogeneity with broader cisheteronormative

society, white gays have dissassociated themselves from Queerness and

from Queer existence, pushing away and punishing Queers who do not fit

into society and most critically those who have no wish to assimilate

have been pushed out of the movement and relegated to a dissident

fringe.

This brings me closer to my point, that in being a dissident fringe,

Queers are presented with a few options. We can either choose to join

the assimilationists and shun our Selves and our comrades, or we can

embrace the fringes and the dissidents and begin the work of Queer

radical action. This of course is no real choice, as assimilation will

only broaden the fringes and exclude more and more of the essence of

Queerness.

This cisheteronormative fringe has forced upon the Queer an

insurrectionary character. There is nowhere that the Queer can go

without being immediately placed at the societal fringe; pushed out or

treated as obscene spectacle. The Queer are presented their choices;

radical action or meek acceptance of violent cishetero norms that they

cannot adhere to. The Queer is made insurrectionary by existing and

betraying the norms of the society they must live within.

When we consider the insurrectionary Queer potential we cannot avoid

“destituent” politics, and in fact these should be at the heart of the

Queer insurrection. In the words of the Invisible Committee,

To destitute power is to deprive it of its foundation. That is precisely

what insurrections do. There the constituted appears as it is, with its

thousand maneuvers — clumsy or effective, crude or sophisticated. “The

king has no clothes,” one says then, because the constituent veil is in

tatters and everyone sees through it. To destitute power is to take away

its legitimacy, compel it to recognize its arbitrariness, reveal its

contingent dimension. It’s to show that it holds together only in

situation, through what it deploys in the way of strategems, methods,

tricks — to turn it into a temporary configuration of things which, like

so many others, have to fight and scheme in order to survive….To

destitute power is to bring it back down to earth.

This destitution of power is precisely what we aim to do as the Queer.

To pull the facade of assimilation and cisheteronormative society down

to it’s knees, and make sure everyone knows that the old ways are no

longer alive.

This Queer insurrection holds at its center an imaginative and

destructive politics, aiming to tear down the old social and sexual

forms and in their place build something new, something untested and

Queer, something revolutionary in it’s very existence. This Queer

becoming will radically reshape society, taking little of the forms that

came before and twisting others into unrecognizability.

This triumph from the fringes is not guaranteed, however, and if we wish

to make a vision of a Queer future reality, we must embrace our radical

purpose.

The Insurrection Is Now!