20 October, 2010

disabling queerness

People are always talking about queering stuff but I'm interested in disabling stuff. Specifically, mind-disabling it...um, DD-ing it, mainly.

What do I mean?

Well, I guess I have posted a bit about how when I was younger, I saw other people less destroyed by being queer than I was, in similar situations. And I had a feeling of guilt--of not just being able to say, this is awful--because other people were more okay than I was. But I was less socially and emotionally stable than they were, to begin with, so I couldn't just ride it out as easily, if that makes sense.

This is a reason I don't like "strong queer characters" (or strong anything characters, really). They're like the supercrips of queerness. If these people can be so "sassy" and brave and resilient, then "we" (the straight people watching) don't really need to try to make the world safer and more welcoming for them; just tolerating them is enough. And "we" (queer people) don't try that hard to support people, or think that people who are having a really rough time have a right to, because we managed so they should be able to.

I got distracted while I was writing this and now I'm going to take a nap, but I was mainly thinking about Alistair from Huge because he had such a powerful effect on me. He obviously isn't a helpless person--that is not what I mean by saying I want disabledness--but he is not like the other kids for other reasons than being queer/gender-variant. And one imagines that if he was just queer/gender-variant, it wouldn't be as big a deal.

More on this later.

7 comments:

  1. I wrote some of my thoughts to reply to you, but they kind of turned into their own post:

    http://cereus-sphinx.livejournal.com/16670.html

    *blushes*

    But I do like what you are saying and have to go think about it for a while more.

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  2. A lot of what you say here resonates with me -- I actually wrote a post about how notions of queerness and my sense of myself as being "different" (probably due to undiagnosed HFA) intersect in my own life:

    Sitting "On the Gay Side": Ruminations on Identity

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  3. (This will probably have a lot of Glee spoilers.)

    This kind of reminded me of the last episode of Glee I saw. Kurt

    And when Finn tells Sam he shouldn't have tried to kiss Quinn, it seems like it's meant to parallel Kurt coming on too strong with Sam. But unlike Kurt, Sam is sweet and apologetic.

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  4. Uh, I just meant to preview that.

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  5. (Sorry, I accidentally posted that before I finished writing. Also, this will probably have a lot of Glee spoilers.)

    This kind of reminded me of the last episode of Glee I saw (the duets one). Kurt does get angry at things being unfair for a little bit, which I liked, but then all his dad says is that he needs to be strong and deal with it, and in particular deal with it without making things any harder for other people. For the most part that's what Kurt does.

    Also, when Finn tells Sam he shouldn't have tried to kiss Quinn, it seems like it's meant to parallel Kurt coming on too strong with Sam. But unlike Kurt, Sam is sweet and apologetic right afterwards, *and* eventually it does work out with Quinn. So the focus sort of remains on Kurt hitting on people who don't like him back, and how he's kind of an asshole for doing that. Not that that's really a good thing to do, but I kept hoping there'd be something to show that, hey, it's a little more understandable for him to do that considering that basically the only way for him to act appropriately (at least according to the other characters) is to never show that he's interested in anyone. Of course there wasn't.

    Anyway, the whole storyline with Kurt in that episode pretty much revolved around "just dealing with things".

    And I do think a lot of the time people assume that gay people, at least once they're past their early teens, should be able to just deal with it unless people are being really, really horrible to them. I mean, sometimes that's all you can do, but then you're pretty screwed if you can't.

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  6. I'm interested to see the continuation of this. makes my fingers wiggle.

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