The End of Queerness?
You can’t stop the rain from falling. The cycle will always continue, as it has always been.
Although surely man would try.
You can’t stop the waves from pounding the shore. Another wave will always come.
Although surely man would try.
You can’t stop the Earth from spinning. As it has been, it will continue to be.
Although surely man would try.
In the future, queerness may come to an end, not because queer people will vanish, but because queer people will no longer be queer. This is a possibility, a dream? If queerness is to become re-absorbed into the realm of ‘everything’ (only in the minds of those who oppose this framework, not in actuality where queerness or queer people are and have always been ‘natural’ - that is, as naturally formed like all other beings), then the dream of queerness is its eventual end, when the horizon is finally met. Yet, is this possible? Yes, in theory, because we know that such times have already existed in history in various contexts throughout the world.
When queer liberation is achieved, will queerness reach its end? As it always was, so it shall continue to be. When that suppression has finally ceased, it seems that the queer will no longer need to be queer. I was inspired to write this brief reflection after hearing the words of Yvette Abrahams on queerness: “Our very precolonial culture was so diverse and so accepting that the notion of queerness in fact didn’t exist. We didn’t think of gender as a binary because we were people very closely related to nature and located in nature….” [1] Here, Abrahams points to the fact that queerness did not need to exist, because queerness was always already accepted as part of nature. In this regard, can queerness ever return to state where it does not need to exist? And how does nature play a role in that transformation?
In other words, as Abrahams suggests, queerness became necessary with the naturalization of heteronormativity and the colonial gender binary as well as the disconnection of humanity from nature. In early Modern England, Calvinists began to frame nature as Man’s dominion, a feminine domain that should be tamed through masculine ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ [2]. Queerness functions today as a tool that can resist categorization and conjoin liberation struggles, and this extends to movements established on interconnectedness with the Earth as a guiding principle, which contradicts Calvinist thought. As queer people living in a time where queer liberation is not achieved, we are hybrids. We are both ancient and of the future, both who we have been and who we are becoming. We are who we are, even if Man’s dominion attempts to deny us the right to exist and live a good life where our needs are met and where we can live in interconnectedness with nature.
Despite Man claiming dominion over nature, it has become increasingly obvious that Man cannot control nature or its forces. Since what we now call queerness is a force of nature itself, queerness is eternal to humanity, and thus it is eternal to nature. The term itself is not, but the practices which defy the false logics of heteronormativity and the gender binary have existed since immemorial, since there was no arbitrary line drawn in the sand. As Yvette Abrahams states, “to attempt to draw lines where nature does not draw them is abusing the very concept of knowledge” [3]. Precolonial communities which defy colonial cisheteropatriarchy have been well documented by research and continue to persist even after hundreds of years of targeted violence and attempts at eradication. Some communities have even maintained the continuity of gender variance after hundreds of years of colonial persecution and violence that has occurred on a physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychic level:
“Muxes – Mexico's third gender”
“Gender in Pre-Columbian Cultures and Native Communities Today”
“Fa’afafine: the widely accepted third gender in Samoa”
“The Third Gender: Documentary on Thailand's Trans Community”
At the same time, many have not survived to the point that they can be identified, even if the truth rests within our souls. As such, these are the histories and stories that should be upheld as sacred to us who are queer. We must continue to tell these histories over and over again. When queerness becomes acknowledged and respected across the world as inherent to nature, then might come queer liberation. This, of course, would also require a newfound respect for nature that has been absent since the rise of the aforementioned Calvinist ideology and its dissemination through colonialism. For now, queerness remains always on the horizon, as “something that is not yet here” [4]. It remains always in a process of emerging. Yet, if it is possible, when we have finally reached that horizon, will queerness then come to an end? And what might come of that ending?
From Nothing
We are Becoming
What Always Was
Without the Noise
Without Doubt
The Hypnotism
Is Wearing Off
The Artificial
Is Falling Down
An Ancient Future
What Always Was
Is Emerging
All we want
Is to know
That we are
Loved
References
Yvette Abrahams, "Precolonial Societies on Gender and Sexuality: A Hindu, Muslim and Indigenous Peoples' Perspective," YouTube, Muslims For Progressive Values, October 12, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvQlNIQYbwc.
Allerd Stikker, Closing the Gap: Exploring the History of Gender Relations (Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 163.
Abrahams, “Precolonial Societies”
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009), 22.
