Questions of Difficulty

During the inaugural lesson of my course on Literary Theory, my professor passed out a list of critical theories she hoped we would come to master. “Let’s get interactive!” she cried, bouncing on the same pair of heels she has worn to every single class since. They’re wedges. She pointed at the girl to my left, “You’ll represent New Criticism.” She looked across the room at another face. “You be Structuralism.” This continued… Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Psychoanalytic Theory....

“Gabe,” she goes, eventually. “Why don’t you represent Queer Theory?” Why don’t I?

Maybe it’s because I am so immersed in this sort of atmosphere, where everything I encounter appears to be shaded by colors of justice and injustice, that I so am primed to notice moments like these. I stepped to the front of the class and wondered: Did she give me this role on purpose? What would that mean if she had, and what would it mean if she hadn’t? I thought maybe it would be useful to ask, but I couldn’t ask in the middle of a lesson, and I worried that bringing it up later would send the message I was angry, which I wasn’t. I couldn’t email her, because my tone could be lost, and I couldn’t approach her face to face, because I have always had a problem with being looked at and feeling seen. So! I did what I normally do with things that make me uncomfortable: I ignored it.

I ignored my sexuality for a very long time as well. This is curious, knowing now that I can hold a bit of a snobbish attitude over people who make deliberate choices not to think about things. I’m always like, “Stop being lazy! Just think!” And, when you spend your whole life being you, it hardly makes sense to never think of who you are and how you think of yourself.

Annamarie Jagose references psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan when she writes “identity is an effect of identification with and against others: being ongoing, and always incomplete, it is a process rather than a property.” My mind developed in an environment where there were hardly any others, where everyone was just like their neighbor. Everyone I knew was white and Conservative, and they worked on farms and went to church every Sunday. Any comparison against others seemed to be much more important, more massive, more hefty, then, and the weight of my growing inclinations toward other boys came in a bucket with no handles. The threat of what it meant to identify as something other than straight, to be gay or queer, was too emotionally, intellectually, and physically demanding for me to bear. I denied, I repressed, I ignored, I forced myself – often unconsciously – into a closet whose dimensions could not accommodate me. For a while, I was content in there.

Now, I grow anxious whenever people act in a way that appears to circumvent my own agency and ownership of the situation. I know when my professor asked me to act out the part of Queer Theory in a makeshift literary production that she was not being malicious. Her intentions, if she even had them, were probably to put me in a comfortable, gay chair that she knows I’ve sat in before. She knows I am studying Women and Gender, she knows that I consider myself an advocate for intersectional feminism and the struggle against patriarchy, she knows that I am concerned with deep questions of justice and injustice in the world. And she knows that I will, no matter what, be gravitating toward Queer Theory when the time comes that we learn about it because I recognize the importance of being critical about gender and sexuality in life and in literature. 

Still, though, I was conditioned from a very early age to recognize the hazards of assuming roles assigned to you, roles you don’t choose voluntarily, and my assumption of Queer Theory’s identity for a few minutes made me uncomfortable. Though I often identify as queer, as gay, as something not straight, and very recently I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about gender identity and my maleness, I cannot get past this uncomfortability that comes with prescription.

I can say queer, and you can call me queer thereafter, and that’s okay. But when you call me queer first, before I’ve made my own moves, it seems insincere, accusatory, maybe even a smidge judgmental. I know the history of the word queer is complex, that it has been leveraged against entire communities in efforts to disenfranchise, to subjugate, to ridicule and disempower. Even in a collegiate classroom, where I give everyone the benefit of the doubt in assuming they’re decent human beings with decent beliefs, the opportunity to feel scrutiny exists and pervades my thinking about how I am existing. This is really difficult.

But if there’s anything I know for certain, it’s this: when something is difficult, it is worth your attention. It is worth your time, your wondering, your reflection. For now, I might identify as queer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the entirety of the word’s textures. If anything, it makes them all the more visible.