epistemic warning: I am complaining about something that is (and has deliberately been made) inaccessible to me. I am certain that I’ve ‘misunderstood’ it and that you can recommend a dozen academic papers that will fix this deficiency. If you tell me that, you are completely missing the point.

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I hate queer theory. It feels like something crawling underneath my skin. Reading queer theory is the only thing I have ever experienced that has made me wish I was straight.

'your relationship is inherently transgressive and erodes the structures of monogamous heteronormativity'

is

just

people used those concepts, if not those words, to decide I am a danger to their children. to decide my private experiences are a threat to their faith. those are the concepts used to justify killing people like me.

and what I learned in response was 'my private experiences are mine. my existence doesn’t destroy or negate or transform other peoples’ relationships. loving someone is not a violent act and doing it does not hurt my friends or family.’



I am a conservative - small c - at heart, and I do not like destroying institutions that are important to millions of people. I like fixing them, I like making them flexible enough to adapt to a new world, I like protecting the people who they hurt and using them to make sure fewer people hurt. if I am very sure about what purpose they serve, and that they do more harm than good, sometimes I will decide they need to be destroyed or altered beyond recognition. I try to treat this decision as seriously as I’d want from another person planning to destroy the traditions important to me.



telling me 'your relationship is inherently radical and transgressive’ is not liberating to me. it rips away all of the empowerment I built myself. it undermines my understanding of how I can work to reduce hurt and it tells me I cannot respect the traditions which I don’t yet understand enough to toy with casually.

I am against violence and when you redefine my relationships as an act of violence you are doing so without my consent.

I do not want you to define me as 'necessarily - definitionally - in opposition to the normative’. I would like the space to look at what counts as normative, and why, and who it hurts, and then to figure out if I oppose it and from which angle. I do not want to look to you for the background to do that work and instead read about how my place in the story has already been scripted.

the social categories you are 'denaturalizing and reducing’ are actually communities that exist in the real world and have helped support me. the project of 'recuperating social contingency’ does not bear any relationship to the project of 'not hurting people and respecting their experiences and values’. guess which one you told me I am (involuntarily) a part of?

do not draft my life experiences into your radical subversive crusade.

i am queer and i hate queer theory.