Mainly because makeup itself, the generic concept, is an integral part of human identity. People have always done it (even Neanderthals used makeup) and we’re always going to keep doing it. The concept of decorating our faces/bodies with colored pigments is practically hardwired and on a deep level just plain FUN (look at how much kids love to get their faces painted at fairs and carnivals and so on). The concept is also totally gender neutral. In some societies, men traditionally do it more than women, for example. Using your own body as a canvas for art taps into a mystical, childlike sense of wonder. First you look one way, then… another! Like magic.
But mainstream commercial makeup culture as it exists today is incredibly exploitative, misogynist, colonialist, colorist, and hurts women, especially poorer women and women who don’t fit the racial ideal as expressed by the mainstream corporate beauty industry. And a big part of that is pushing “natural” looks. All women are supposed to look “naturally” poreless, for example (which isn’t realistic or healthy) and are punished socially and often financially if we aren’t. Another example: contouring is supposed to accentuate the “natural” lines of your face but for me and a lot of other Asian women with moonfaces, it’s the furthest thing from natural! The further you are from the rich thin young lightskinned bigeyed straightsmallnosed highcheekboned look, the more weirdly artificial the word “natural” becomes. We’re supposed to sink all this time and money and resources into achieving this bullshit “natural” look until it all feels a bit like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill.
Putting a bright blue streak on your eyelids and walking out the door might take five seconds and probably makes you feel expressive and happy and good about yourself, even if it seems “tacky” through the lens of mainstream makeup culture. But taking an hour and trying soooo hard, using all the latest expensive products to make it seem like you’re not really trying at all, makes a lot of women feel worse about themselves, not better. In fact it leads to a lot of women feeling insecure about their real face and their real skin. There are many ways to look garish, but only ONE way to look “natural”. Instead of turning your own face into a canvas where you’re the creative artist, you’re following a ruthless set of instructions and doing a sort of strict paint-by-numbers that you’re never going to do right anyway. So it represents giving up more power over your own face/body than you’re actually getting back. Subjugation to the social norm, not creativity.
Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.
In fact, if we took it even further–growing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)–you only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.
“There is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.”
Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? It’s ten trillion. And the cut off isn’t space or resources–it’s waste heat. The things we’d have to do to get there aren’t exactly the sort of things we could do overnight–hell, we don’t actually know how to fusion yet–but they’re all well within the realm of the physically possible.
Listen guys, yesterday a huge fire began in Greece near Athens 74 people have been killed so far and almost 200 are injured, 50 of them are in critical condition.
The victims were greeks and tourists of every age. 26 were found hugging together in a circle because they couldn’t escape and some others tried to escape by diving to the sea but not all of them survived, some were swimming for four hours.
Can we stop pretending that being constantly negative about men and boys is cute, quirky or funny, because it’s really none of those things, it’s gross and mean.
Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.
See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.
Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.
What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride – yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.
Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table – taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”
(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)
In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.
I’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.
It’s nice being
Tumblr Old and having some recollection of the self-identifiers we
used before this website. The slogans alone should tell you the
motivators behind using “queer” as opposed to other terms. There
was “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” There was “queer
rage”. There was “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.”
That last one especially shows rejection of any neat essentialist
boxes – go away with your binaries, your easy categorization, and
last but not least your respectability politics.
I’ve never seen “q
slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two
years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a
trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost
uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer”
with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are
almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that
it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any
other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically
correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of
history. Which is just not true.
So anyway, here are
some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any
other term:
1) Wide relevance.
Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.
2) Opacity. It can
be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it
can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t
fully covered by any of those categories!
3) Queer could,
therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I
can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that).
Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only
sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all
the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention
straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in
casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style
language.
And you know what,
of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the
abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is
catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the
community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace
it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default
descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy
with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve
come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and
sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside
from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.
I could go on about
how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb
people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who
especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete
one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something
the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under
good old respectability politics.
TL;DR: You can’t
just take away a term that many, many people in the
community have been actively using for decades before your latest
iteration of SGA discourse and expect no meaning to be lost or
broken.
@outderon
I think, in part, the notion of “queer is a slur” comes from the comparative rarity of encountering it as far as younger people are concerned. Which, of course, makes it sound much more punchy on occasions when it is used. But you’re absolutely right about all of this.
queer is a slur. this isn’t up for debate. the whole point of queer nation and groups like it was that the word queer has a history of violence, and that’s why they chose it. it was meant to shock. it was meant to turn cishets’ weapons against them – but the word is still a weapon, and people who aren’t comfortable with it shouldn’t have it applied to them
yes, queer was central to anti-assimilationist groups like queer nation and act up, and yes, fighting against respectability politics is really important. but like, none of this negates queer’s history. its recent history was empowerment and reclamation in the late 80s/early 90s, but before that it was exclusively a slur, and it’s still used (particularly by and against older people) to dehumanise lgbt+ people.
there’s nothing wrong with using it as a self-identification (provided you’re not cishet), but using it as an umbrella term is shit because it forces a slur onto people who aren’t necessarily comfortable with it. for so many lgbt+ people the word is primarily associated with violence and hatred, and I shouldn’t need to say that referring to people by a slur without their permission is just downright terrible
Okay, I have several huge problems with this.
Who exactly made you the Grand Arbiter of our language? Why do you get to tell people who were in the community before you were born that they can no longer use their language?
Can you tell me another term that can be used in informal day-to-day speech that has never been a slur? Can you show me an “umbrella” term that hasn’t been used by people telling half the community they’re “not gay enough” or “too extreme” or otherwise not worthy of being One Of Us? (In informal speech, I hear a lot of reversion to “gay” or “gay and lesbian;” hopefully I don’t have to explain what’s wrong here?) Can you show me a term that I can use to include all of us, as a person whose disability includes memory issues that make it very difficult to keep track of the ever-increasing alphabet soup?
A large part of this post is a response to people telling others who are self-identifying as queer “um sweaty :)))) that’s a slur :)))” – the same people who made “LGBT” into a warning sign – coming to tell us that we can’t use that word either, in any capacity.
You say “was” like anti-assimilationism is a footnote in a dusty history volume – to someone who is pushing back against assimilationism and the very real harm it is doing to a lot of the community.
“queer as an umbrella term is ahistorical” Oh, my sweet summer child. The first use of “queer” by people in the community as a broad descriptor was a century ago. The first use of it in the sense that I’m using it here – as a deliberately radical (both “radical politics” and “radically inclusive”) umbrella term applied to the whole community – predates the last major battle of the “who’s queer enough to count?” war and the use of LGBT, let alone the rest of the alphabet soup. I can show you formal scholarly articles about as old as you are that uncontroversially use it. Has it ever been used by the entire community to refer to the entire community? No. But neither has anything else that even pretends to include us all, and it definitely does have a storied history.
I wrote that post in response to a movement I’ve seen a fair amount of lately – the use of “queer is a slur” against people who are using it in a sense it’s had for over a quarter of a century in a deliberate bid to silence those of us who are hurt by supercessionist, assimilationist policies and tactics.
You want ahistorical? There are a lot of people right now trying to redefine the boundaries of the “LGBT” community to exclude folks who have been there all along, and to silence the voices of anybody who isn’t gay enough for their liking.
You know what else is still used as a slur? Gay. Yet somehow, it’s completely uncontroversial. When people talk about how gay they are* or “gay rights” or “gay marriage,” nobody bats an eye. Nobody gives them the “um sweaty, that’s a slur” speech. Even if they’re straight.
Active slurs are apparently perfectly fine for straight people to use to discuss things that affect all of us. So you’ll pardon me for being extremely fucking skeptical of the singling out of this term, one that sees extremely strong usage by the segments of the community keep being marginalized within the community, as unacceptable or a step too far. I’ve heard “That’s a step too far” way too many times from “LGBT” people and organizations – usually when I, as a trans person, ask them to fight for my rights too, or when I, as a bi person, ask for a face and a voice and maybe some resources.
The only thing that makes “queer” unacceptable where “gay” is uncontroversial is who’s using it.
Am I going to call specific, individual people queer? Not unless I’ve seen them actively claim it. Am I going to talk about the queer community, queer issues, queer rights? Hell yes I am – because the community that wants me as a member, the community I want to be a member of, is queer.
“Queer is a slur” is doing damage to me. Queer community, queer politics, and being queer are liberating me.
I went looking for this post because no less than 4 posts about “the q slur” have come across my dash today.
@wetwareproblem says it much more articulately above than I could, but what I will say is this: I’m so over people telling me the word I choose to identify with is so offensive it should never even be typed.
I’m queer. I have been part of the queer community for almost twenty years. My identity is not a slur.
Kids.
Queers don’t let queers tell falsehoods about the word queer.
I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful and I even think it’s well-intentioned – and that’s the problem. Earnestly, with good intentions, kids half my age are railing about queer being a slur and claiming to know the gay history that I personally lived (not to mention the gay history that precedes me).
We had queer studies courses in our universities. There are books on queer art, cinema, and history. You know how I know queer isn’t a slur?
Because we never had fag studies.
Sorry, that was harsh, right? Well, that’s the nature of a slur. It retains a hard edge, even if you take ownership of it. You can’t use it in respectful institutions such as academia. A straight person cannot utter it – even in solidarity – without sounding as if they’ve crossed a boundary.
The attempts to change history here are not without purpose. Changing the language is an effort made by people with ill-will for the LGBT community (particularly against the T, but also the B – which doesn’t bode well for those letters in the extended acronym). Fewer umbrella terms means people getting pushed out from under the umbrella.
Please guys, ask yourselves who benefits from this division (hint: people that do not want us to unify). Don’t fight against queer, a word that by its nature includes more vulnerable members of the community, people whose identity is less easily defined.
Also, I’m just as angry as @audreyimpossible is, for some reason it’s coming out of me way softer than it is inside of me. But this queer is very tired of infighting. I’ve been here for a while and I can tell when we’re being manipulated.
I either didn’t see or didn’t remember this addition until it popped up in my notes again, but thank you so much. This is an extremely solid, well-made point.
This shit is why I get straight people at work telling me I can’t describe myself as queer.
Mothers with husbands who don’t fairly involve themselves in the childcare deserve to go out and have a social life. You’ll live through having to hear a baby in public.
Also babies are like, people too. They have the same right to be out in public that you do.
Let’s also not forget that babies are people who are growing. Their minds need the social interaction and stimuli. If you were forced to sit silently in a room where you could only interact with one person in a very specific way all day, you’d probably lose your shit. Babies are entitled to feeling, just like you. Remember: they’re small defenseless creatures who do not have a concept of what it means to inconvenience some jackass at a restaurant. Just grow up and stop pretending like your hatred of children is justified!
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
sldkfkgj and tbh……. tbhhhh…. if you’re so utterly obsessed with trying to keep tiny groups of people away unless they pass “sga or trans” check marks you will inevitably do far more damage to questioning people and trans people. you just will. you can’t put a gate on a community that requires you identify yourself to enter and think that’s safe for trans people or people who need community support to figure themselves out.
Wow, okay buddy, you’re BEGGING for a takedown here.
First world problems? Not a thing. People who say shit like “first world problems” are massive racist, imperialist, dismissive assholes.
If you’re ever tempted to say “first world problems,” do me a favor, and pull down a map. Tell me EXACTLY where the “third world” is. Make sure you correctly identify Switzerland as part of the third world, and Turkey as part of the First World. Don’t forget that Djibouti is a part of the first world.
Literally sit down and learn what “third world” means and why people from nonwestern nations think it’s a total bullshit term.
Second: you think people in the so-called third world don’t care about shit like makeup, and love, and technology? You think they don’t care about internet harassment? You think women over there don’t care about street harassment? You think they don’t care about fashion and clothes? You think they don’t care about music and video games?
Because THEY DO.
Right now, there is a woman in burundi teaching herself how to do a cut-crease eyeshadow look. Guaranteed.
“Third world” nations have fashion shows and fashion magazines. They care about street harassment. They care about the internet. They play video games. They know more about anime than your sorry ass every will. And the idea of “first world problems,” which makes it sound like all women in “third world” nations are dealing with starvation, rape, war, acid attacks etc.
Is bullshit.
Rank.
Bullshit.
Women in Iran spend shitloads of money on makeup. Women in the DRC don’t just care about rape. Rape – the ONE THING westerners can be expected to know about women in Congo-Kinshasa – ranks NUMBER FOUR on the list of issues women in Congo want addressed. Political participation is number 1. Economic empowerment is number 2. Women in India are passionate about information technology, and you know what they hate? Coming to the United States, where Indian women in STEM are suddenly considered LESS GOOD than their male colleagues. My friends in Senegal taught ME how to download movies off the internet. Zimbabwe has a fashion week.
As Teju Coal points out:
“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.
One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion’s technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is—quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.”
95% of the people who use bullshit expressions like “First world problems” have NO IDEA what life is like for people in the so-called third world. You just like sitting there derailing.
And for the record? As a white, western feminist, DAMN RIGHT I concentrate on issues in the United States. Because when white western feminists try to “save” women outside the west? We do a SHIT job of it. We’re the ones who bowl over actual congolese women, and what THEY want, and say that the #1 issue affecting them is rape. We become arms of the imperialist patriarchal complex.
Classic example: the guy who was ruling Egypt for the British got british feminists to help him in his anti-headscarf campaign in Egypt. Why did he hate headscarves? Because he wanted to *break the spirit* of Egyptians. Not because he gave a shit about women’s rights. How do I know that? Because he was the head of the anti-women’s-suffrage group in England.
When women who live outside the west do awesome things, I will signal-boost them, and I will do whatever they think I can do to help. But I follow their lead. Because these are THEIR issues, and THEY know what matters to them. Not me.
FINALLY: My problems are not trivial. My problems are not bullshit. My problems are not to be dismissed with your racist, imperialist logic. Dress codes and makeup and music and books and video games MATTER. They matter to me. They matter to my life.
So fuck you.
And fuck your assumptions.
And maybe consider that YOUR first world problem? Is that you can’t “see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”
::stands up and applauds this response::
Have I blogged this before? Still bears repeating.
“Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”
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