Danny, tell me about the word "queer"

I'm not trying to be too in-depth with this piece so while I encourage you knowledgeable-types to make factual corrections, please don't quibble over every minor detail I got wrong. If you'd like to read a slightly better researched piece, go here.

That said, let's start at the beginning. There's the obvious origins of the word queer as a synonym for weird, strange, peculiar that because they were seen as such, was then applied to gays, lesbians, ad nauseum. In a lot of areas it has as much vehemence as the word "faggot."

Then around I want to say primarily the late-1980s with some of the bigger pro-gay movements, people started to reclaim it.

Nowadays it's used by more radically liberal activist and academic types as this really weird construction where it is used as a umbrella term. By that, I mean that queer is used to denote the entire LGBTQetc community. But these very same liberal activist/academics also often have a LOT of problems with that use since it kind of homogenizes the community. By having one word mean everything you erase the connotations and diversity inherent to such a community. There's more than one type of queer person. Queer used in that way tends to favor images of your standard college-educated, white, middle-class, gay male. Leaving out all those other types of queers.

An even more contemporary usage of the weird queer comes from the more radical academic-types as meaning something closer to "a non-normative political identity."

Basically what this means is that by this definition being queer isn't so much a sexual identity as a political affiliation. It's an outcrop of the postmodern rejection of binaries, be they gender, racial, sexual, etc. Queer in that sense tries to look at the intersectionality of those identity politics to kind of go "hey, that way of thinking is stupid and marginalizes a lot of people and doesn't really benefit everyone long run."

Which is why you find queer as a far more accepted term by younger, West coast (for lack of a better term) queers. Because we didn't grow up with queer as such a strongly derogatory term. We grew up in a world of Queer as Folk and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Here at Western, the LGBTA (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Alliance) Office recently changed its name to the Queer Resource Center. And there was the same kind of split on this decision as you see among most of the LGBTQ population. There are those (myself among them) who were for the decision. Queer Resource Center more accurately reflects what the office is and does. I still have issues with queer used as an umbrella term here, but I think the strength of the Bellingham queer community in particular is that enough of the people who claim the term as an identity come from a diverse range of backgrounds that disavow a lot of the marginalizing effect of that queer homogenization.

We queers are feminists, male and female, people of color, people with disabilities, of a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. For the most part we recognize where queer comes from (both good and bad) and often claim it as something beyond just the LGBT.

What do you think about reclaiming words? What do you think we can reclaim or can't reclaim?


I think some words can be reclaimed if they originally had a meaning, but you have to take into account their history. If they were created specifically as a derogatory term, then they can't ever really be reclaimed. Faggot for example originally meant a bundle of sticks... used to burn heretics and sodomites, though after a point the Church decided hanging was a better offense for those performing what would now be called homosexual acts. There's no way that can ever outlive its roots.

Queer on the other hand has much more tame roots and I for one embrace the idea of being a little peculiar or perhaps widdershins. Reclaiming queer, like reclaiming gay, is acceptable because it had a meaning prior to its use as a derogatory term.

When talking about reclaiming words, it's important here to mention the recent SlutWalk movement started in Toronto. Backstory: "On January 24th, 2011, a representative of the Toronto Police gave shocking insight into the Force’s view of sexual assault by stating: “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”."

I've talked with a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the SlutWalk movement because they see it as an attempt to reclaim the word "slut." Forgive my stretch into critical theory, I'm an English major, but as I understand it the idea behind slutwalk is to reclaim the signifieds of the word slut, not the signifier (the word s-l-u-t). The whole signifier/signified thing is basically splitting sound-image from meaning. Signifier is the words/pictures we use to represent concepts. Signifieds are the concepts themselves. If this doesn't make sense, read the first few paragraphs about semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) down to about the tree picture.

So dressing "slutty" does not make you a slut and does not mean you should get raped or deserve it. The SlutWalk campaign, especially street level, has problems communicating this complicated message though.

People get that it's a campaign to end violence against women, to end the rape culture mentality of blaming the victim. but they get lost by the word slut. It's a reclamation of the word slut as an ideological practice of sub-humanizing the feminine (because more than just women get called slut) and has, or at least should have, nothing to do with trying to enforce the thought that slutty is okay and lets start using this as a self-identification for everybody.

Slut started as a derogatory term and should stay a derogatory term that doesn't get used, but it should never be an excuse.