I’m not bold enough to write this as a “Speculative Queerness Manifesto”

(reposting because I want to be able to link to this somewhere other than Tumblr)

I don’t really write or talk about being genderqueer or queerness in general. It’s hard to talk about things I haven’t really figured out, I guess. I don’t really have self-consensus on much.

But in some ways, the story I’m the right person to tell should be based on who I am, I guess. (Technically I’ve written more with DID representation than genderqueer representation, but that just sorta happened.)

Anyways, a while back Jennachat folks, largely @geostatonary and @laenan, had some discourse about what a Queer Narrative might be, as distinct from queer representation. I won’t try to present their perspectives; I’m sure I’d get it wrong. But that, in combination with some other stuff like @templeofshame‘s Flying V JoCo show, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, and my continual desire to figure out what a non-fanfic response to Hitherby would look like, has had me thinking about this stuff a lot.

The way I’m seeing it right now, there are different “levels” a… non-defaulting, or whatever, work can operate on. (I’m primarily thinking about queerness, but hypothetical distinctly queer examples are also hard for me to think of and insert concisely, and I feel like this same analysis also applies to other things like “feminist” gender-role subversions as well as other types of marginalization I’m less well-situated to speak on. I’m gonna mostly say “queer” here and handwave the fact that some of my examples are more properly gay, because it’s my party, but I think the same analysis applies to other forms of non-defaulting to varying extents.)

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