The photos on this blog are cute, and the stories are very sweet. But there’s a lot about it that is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I am wary of a politic that authenticates queerness by rooting it in nature and biology. I recognize that this photo project might be coming from a desire to feel legitimated in a world that wants to destroy you. I also recognize that many people might feel comforted looking at photos of themselves and feeling like, “this has always been my experience and nobody can take that away from me.” I, personally, feel, however, like that way of conceptualizing queerness can also be limiting, exclusive, and universalizing. There also seems to be a conflation here with gender presentation and sexuality, which, as many of us know, can be a frustrating and confusing experience.
Queerness, for me, is my choice. I am an active agent in choosing who I want to sleep with, who I want to have relationships with, and how I politicize my life. Being queer is not something that just accidentally happened for me while I was deep in utero. I spent a good portion of my young adult life having relationships with heterosexual men, and there is a good chance that will happen again in my life some time. Also, as someone who presents in a very fem(me)inine way, I am actually really offended at the suggestion that an experience of queerness can only be authentic if it is visible (in photos of a childhood that depict a little girl acting and dressing in a masculine way).
This blog sets up and subscribes to the idea that our sexual identities and gender presentations are static, unshifting, and inexctricably linked. It’s just not enough for me. - AA
***click on the title for the link
