Queer-e Vol. 1 no. 1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Lauren Wilson Copyright (c) 1995 by Author, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors of Queer-e . ----------------------------------------- (Dis) ordered Selves: Dangerous Transactions Lauren Wilson I'm defining another concept of queerness. queerness not centering on identity. queerness not centering on object. queerness not centering on act. Centering on - desire, For what? itself, the desire to be - other. queerness is a base state, one that is the result of a series of disassociations from successive groups, it is a position of power that is the culmination of multiple and continual disenfranchisements. Perhaps that which doesn't kill us (or that which deconstructs us) does make us stronger. Being queer in America is being queer to the nth degree. For all the protestations regarding the rights of the individual and freedom of expression, ours is a relentlessly conformist society. The result is that communities that identify as deviant, as outside, also demand conformity. The population of queers is solidified even as it proclaims its uncenter. I am identifying myself as queer even as I disassociate (or am disassociated) from that group. Where is my un-center? Is it in my blackness... Is it in my femaleness... Is it in my humaness... In a sexuality not centered - on identity on object on act, but on itself. There is a semi-linear history of chronological frameworks that interlock. I have reached queerness as I see it through a constant movement to the outside. At first I was placed outside. Now I step out voluntarily. I have been a child among adults who, no matter how well spoken, no matter how rational, no matter how true, had no voice. I have been a child with other children who did not wear the disguise of childishness well enough to "pass". I have been black amongst whites and personified the mark of difference that quieted them in their sameness. I have been black and loved women, and not loved men, and been the one to be ostracized to quiet black people in their sameness. I have been an Afro-Caribbean-American amongst African-Americans and seen my differences disallowed. When as a child designated to be made a girl you can not happily dissemble never ending childishness (when you can not even dissemble non-girl childishness) you know you are alien. How does anyone willingly become heterosexual? Not who you like to love or want to fuck, not the concentration on object but the distortion of subject, your own subject, that the heterosexual transformation requires? Is this ever a voluntary process? I can not remember ever being a heterosexual. I am a lesbian. But there was a time before I was a lesbian. I have traveled through various incarnations that fit but do not fit, Or that do not fit together because they can not possibly agree, To get back to that time, At least in part. If queerness resists sexual orientation, then who can be called queer? The queer as someone on the margins, who doesn't 'fit in', not only sexually but socially, politically and philosophically as well, is still a limited personification. One is still a satellite that circles a definitive center. I don't live on the margins - I live in them. The margins are not a cramped narrow place of disempowerment, as they have been characterized. They are where everyone is made. When you are the outside you enclose and define that which is inside. Queering identity, sexuality, subject positions, using them (or allowing them) to unsettle and undermine is the result of learning to follow the power of alienation rather than allowing that power to erase you. I am a woman I am an animal identified human I am black I am a lesbian I love and have sex with a man There is no one place where I belong. There will never be one place where I belong. I do not want that (not) place. If queerness is not merely an academic mirage rooted in post-modern theories of the subject, then it must be an ongoing melange created by unaligned (and sometimes warring) members of the non-community. Feminist groups, Act Up, Lesbian and Gay bars, sex clubs, Queer Nation, writers, homeless people, transsexual peoples, etc. control the evolution and devolution of the ethos of queerness. This means that the constant debate regarding membership is at once made moot. The vitriolic wars to protect the borders between neighboring "outcast" communities, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, or otherwise identified, are summarily outmoded. That these communities have reproduced the very xenophobia that helped to "marginalize" them in the first place is undeniable. So the issue is surpassed. No, you do not belong. There is nothing, you see, to belong to... What are my categories? My attempt to define them is not a move toward stabilization but one that seeks to destabilize that which I understand others to perceive as my (self), that which I understand to be (my) self. I define these compartments in order to explode them. This means that when I am in the company of a group in which I am ostensibly a member, I display the characteristics of alien groups. This is not perversity, or even the mechanics of some 'reverse discourse'. The perfect containment of 'dialogue', the original conformations of identity, do not signify for me. This display is the outward expression of what, in the beginning, was the oppression of my own alienation. I have since learned to trust that alienation, the outside, as that place in which I am perhaps not most comfortable, but most powerful. How do they see my categories? Which parts do they eliminate when they fit me in? The lesbians say I can not be one if I love/fuck a man. The black people say I can not be one if my sexuality deviates. The humans say that, since I am one, my first allegiances and primary relationships must be intra-species. How do I make them not fit me in? The first movement toward queer is understanding the absurdity of the process of categorization, even as that process has eclipsed the old one of blissfully sinking into the cocoon of the essential self. I categorize not to organize but to underscore my constant acts (deliberate and otherwise) of eliding the borders I still perceive emotionally even as I intellectually understand them to be figments of our imaginations. "But what _are_ you?," I can hear them asking me in tones echoing hostility, or exasperation, or mistrust, or plaintive, whining manipulation. I am queer. This assertion is not a dodge designed to avoid being definitively placed in the world. My place in the world is queer. Queerness is my place in the world. This is a posture of endless adjustment and re-adjustment - not to other's demands that my position constantly reassure them in regard to theirs - but adjustment to the inevitability of my own displacement. This in turn serves to displace those around me accustomed to using me as an outpost or marker that keeps them centered. In a queer universe there can be no marginilization since there is no center. Queer is, of course, a concept that is in direct opposition to most western concepts of the unified self (or unified selves for those post-modern babies) and with subsequent models of normalcy. So in a sense I'm saying that I'm in favor of being crazy. I am willing to accept the stress of my allied oppositions without the false comfort of what champions of psychological mental health would call overcoming denial, resolving my conflicts and becoming an integrated personality. The calm of resolution is the sleep of death. What creates and moves the ways in which we live are the areas of friction between, amongst and within us in which the energy builds and is released, thereby forging new connections even as the old ones dissolve. I can ally with you as we separate, are separated. The connection is made easier by our very understanding of its ephemeral nature. We will come together again when some other parts converge and that too will be a profitable delusion. We are all on the outside. That is where the world is made. About the Author: Lauren Wilson is a fifth-year graduate student in Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Currently on leave, she is working on writing grants for a feminist women's health center and on papers involving color relations in the African American community, women's life writing, and the mind/body conflict in academia. This piece is an adaptation of her section of a joint paper presented at _Inside & Out: The Third National Graduate Student Conference on Queer Studies_ at the University of Minnesota in April, 1993. The paper in its entirety was a collaboration of the feminist theory group Luce Lips (with Jill Holslin and Kate Burns).