So many discourses on queerness as an identity and this vague notion of "the queer community" lately so starting a thread to dissect some of that.

(And because nothing in the world is truly objective my world view & education is that of a Viet person living in the US West Coast, college ed, reading in English, Vietnamese & French. I primarily do community organizing work w trans women who are Black, Indigenous, and Asian.)

"Queer" is Anglo-Saxon from the 1500s meaning "strange, peculiar, eccentric," from German "oblique, off-center, perverse" from Proto-Indo-European root *terkw– meaning "to twist."

*terkw– can be seen today in words like contort, distort, torque, etc. sth to do with rotating

If "queer" is "twisted," then what are we twisting from? To deviate one needs a "default" point to deviate from. Similar to patriarchy, where maleness is defined in opposition to femaleness, for queerness to be defined, heteroness/heterosexuality had to be invented.

Contrary to whatever conventional belief, heterosexuality is not universal, it's not a given, and it's not as old as dirt. It is a *very* modern invention, only dating back to the late 19th century. There's plum sauce in my kitchen that's older than heterosexuality lol.

Speaking of universal, there are white westerners coming into the GL/BL fandoms superimposing their own ideas of what's queer. It's a kind of homo-imperialism. Please, queerness is not ahistorical, it's cultural-specific and time-bound. It has context, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

But ok, let's talk about western hetero and homosexuality for a minute. in the early to mid 1800s, the US and Europe were obsessed with "purity," bc Puritanism and the church and the pope etc. Purity meant no sex! Freedom from things that are sensual, even. No silk pjs for sure!

Romantic relations in this era largely defined Things That Are Proper: you were a True Woman if you were not thirsty, like, ever. You were a True Man if you could controllll your lust. The only legitimate horrrrneee was for procreation.

From this era, the West began to get Correctly Gendered Women & Correctly Gendered Men, since Victorian True Love was confined within the legalization of marriage and proper procreation. Pen*s and vag*na were meant to make babies, not to be "wasted" in railing or getting railed.

This stems from the *very specific western Victorian belief* that the human body is a "closed system" and human energy only flowed within it. Contrast this with broadly East, Southeast, and South Asian concepts of qi/chi or prana, which is vital energy that animates all things.

To guard the human body and to remain "pure," the Victorian men and women must be protected from the demons of erotic lust, including masturbation, promiscuity, and prostitution.

(There is a class connotation here too but I won't go into it.)

In E/SE/S Asian schools of thought there are also notions of guarding one's "precious energy" but specifically for spiritual attainment and/or for cultivation purposes.

The idea, broadly, is that energy can be transmuted, and sexual energy being one of the strongest forms of energy, that it can be controlled, harnessed and directed towards superhuman feats.

A break to play Who Said This?

“Spiritual energy is energy; resentful energy is energy as well. Spiritual energy is stored in the dantian. It can split mountains and fill oceans, available for human use. If so, then why can’t resentful energy also be used by humans?"

To recap, early Victorian era (1800-1860) notions of gender and relationships were:

- True Womanhood: inherently less lustful, defined by distance from lust
- True Manhood: more lustful, but aspire to also be free from it
- True Love: romantic, not corporeal

Sexuality and carnal desire *in all directions* –– not just exclusive to the other sex –– were not part of one's identity.

Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester were thought of as procreators, not erotic beings seeking pleasures from ppp.

Back later for late Victorian sex-love and how US American and German ideas of eroticism began to develop after the 1860s.

Before I go on it's important that I mention Europe colonization of E/SE Asia in the 1800s. The British "founded" Singapore in 1819 & occupied Hong Kong in 1841. Opium Wars went from 1839 to 1860. The French, Dutch, & British took turns colonizing Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Philippines were under Spanish rule until 1898 and then the U.S. took over. French missionaries began coming in the 1600s and officially colonized Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1887.

All this is to say all these Victorian ideas came WITH the colonizers wherever they went. Europeans would assign hypersexual characteristics onto Asian women, and feminized the men, bc a common tactic of colonization is to dehumanize the local population to justify subjugation.

ok back to 1860s in western middle class and how eroticism became part of their consciousness and identity.

content warning: slavery

As cotton became a valuable trade good, white westerns became richer, and went from being producers to consumers. Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to 1937. That made the U.S. the world power and New York City the financial center it is today.

Britain, the most powerful empire in the world at this time, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80% of its textile raw material which made up 40% of its exports. 1/5 of Britain’s population were directly or indirectly involved w cotton.

This created a consumer economy for middle to upper class white people, and it brought on... dun dun dun... new ideas about pleasure.

Early Victorian ethic was about the virtue of work and procreation. Late Victorian ethic was about the pleasures of consuming.

Around 1880s, eroticism was the raw material for this new consumer culture. I dunno if they had danmei/yuri but printed materials started to mention sex. Male doctors started to prescribe what is "normal" and "healthy" for engaging in sex and between whom. (OF COURSE.)

These MFs, who used to refer to women enjoying sex as "nymphomaniac", would now MEDICALLY DIAGNOSE women who don't enjoy sex as having mental illnesses or being "frigid."

So now we are in the late 1880s, and these assholes are going around defining Normal Love and Real Woman and Real Man as people with strong libido. They of course used medical terms and morality to create what they considered "deviant," so that they could define what is "normal."

(back later with the first years of heterosexuality and homosexuality as invented by U.S. doctors)

Ok another recap: From the mid 1850s, cotton produced by enslaved African people made white middle class people rich in the US & Europe, giving rise to the consumer economy with new perspective towards bodily pleasure and eroticism.

Medical doctors as a prestigious and upwardly mobile class was forming. In the name of "science," they prescribed a new ideal male-female relationship that included "normal sex."

What is "normal" tho? They needed something to call abnormal or deviant sex first.

That takes us to 1892 w the earliest known use of the word "heterosexual" in medical journal published by James Kiernan.

"Heterosexual" did not mean "normal sex," however. Kiernan's heterosexuals were associated with a mental condition called "psychical hermaphroditism."

"psychi- what???" you say?

"Hermaphroditism" means having both male and female reproductive organs.

"Psychical hermaphroditism" is... get ready for this, a made-up syndrome that assumed that feelings had a biological sex.

I KNOW. I AM SCREAMING WITH YOU.

In 1892, a heterosexual was someone who experienced:

1. so-called male erotic attraction towards women
and
2. so-called female erotic attraction to men

"male erotic attraction" and "female erotic attraction" being feelings, not gender.

Essentially, heterosexuals would occasionally feel "inclinations to both sexes."

The "hetero" part referred not to interest in a different sex, but to desire for two different sexes (they were also stuck in that binary back then.)

If they had desire that was "inappropriate" for their sex, these heterosexuals were guilty of being deviant.

They were also guilty of another kind of deviance if they had sex only for pleasure without procreating. That is, "normal sexual appetite" meant a desire to reproduce.

This cursed article also introduced the earliest-known English publication of the word "homosexual."

The "pure homosexuals" were people whose "general mental state is that of the opposite sex."

(This was 1892 and really in the history of humans NOT THAT LONG AGO.)

Ok, again.

Heterosexuals were deviant bc they would occasionally wanna papapa w someone of the same sex

AND

if they wanna do it w someone of the opposite sex but NOT to make babies.

Homosexuals were deviant bc their "mental state" is as if they were the opposite sex.

Also in 1892, *another* doctor, Krafft-Ebing, published Psychopathia Sexualis.

In it, he defined:

- Heterosexual: erotic feelings for a different sex
- Homosexual: erotic feeling for a same sex
- Psycho-sexual hermaphroditism: thirsty for both sexes

Krafft-Ebing thought that all humans (bc white people always think their experience is universal) have an inborn "sexual instinct" to get in bed with the "opposite sex" for the INHERENT PURPOSE of procreation

Even though procreation was still there, this view of human sexual relations marked a new way of categorizing humans, and this way of classifying us would dominate the western world and influence the whole world over to this day.

The shift went from sex as a reproductive imperative to it being a pleasure that gets consumed and institutionalized.

These doctors were confused AF but upper middle class whiteness allowed them to publish w authority and it became socially accepted and enforced and here we are.

Over time other doctors began to accept that hetero = normal = sex with opposite sex.

It became the default to regulate who can have sex with whom, and heterosexuality became "the master sex" (like the fictional idea of "the master race" lol.)

With doctors normalizing medically that normal/natural sex = hetero, the sexual abnormals or "perverts" emerged. And because this came from the western medical world, all that was not "normal" was classified as pathology.

ok now we're squarely in the 1900s in the US and I need a break but here’s Viet singer Văn Mai Hương in her MV “Nghe Nói Anh Sắp Kết Hôn.” Check it out!

I'm back (stretch fingers) for more on the invention of heterosexuality and early 1900s fledging notions of sex & gender norms.

(This thread has turned out to be the history of white western queer ideologies. But as white ppl colonize the world they bring the ideologies w them.)

An early justification for heteroness being the norm was that humans have innate instincts for procreation. So the drive to make babies and the drive to papaya were strongly linked and justified heterosexuality as the default.

Later, in the US, the combination of falling birth rate, rising divorce rate, and women demanding rights caused anxiety for the public and white patriarchal ruling class.

Heterosexuality was then used as the thing promised to make "good marriages."

A part of normalizing hetero as normal/natural is to create two opposite sexes, or genders, which wasn't just about pen*s and vag*na biology.

A major distinction had to be made about maleness and femaleness in every way bc... wait for it... male insecurity, of course. In the early 1900s, men were getting anxious about changing ideas of womanhood, manhood, social roles, and the power men had over women.

In 1930, "heterosexual" and "homosexual" appeared for the first time in the New York Times, coming out of the medical realm and into mainstream middle-upper-class white US American consciousness.

THIS WAS LESS THAN 100 YEARS AGO.

Hello I am back for more on the white western invention of heterosexuality, the exaggerated distinction between male and female, how recent it is, and how it stems from factors like male insecurity, conservative christian values, and capitalism.

After WWII, white women in the US were working more than before, and they became increasingly more independent of men economically and socially. This created further insecurities in the upper ruling class, and one solution was to create & reinforce traditional gender roles.

There was also anxiety in the white ruling class about the equality that Black and Latino men were demanding coming back from WWII with housing and educational vouchers.

One solution was the creation of the US suburbs (which is abhorrent even if only aesthetically). The suburbs pushed whites into privatized, anti-communal living, and boxed women in housewives and men as breadwinners roles. The burbs also kept white people from other racial groups

Been consumed w workey work but lrt and all that ignorance and disrespect of Southeast Asians gave me some rage motivation to continue this thread so here we go.

Gonna backtrack in time a bit and mention a couple more ways white people literally INVENTED heterosexuality and then enforced it in the US and then the world via imperialism.

Calling it "science," US doctors propagated the idea that "a normal individual is heterosexual.”

They wrote stuff like this: "The endocrinologists and the psychologists maintain that a normal individual is heterosexual only because his or her homosexual tendencies were arrested

THEY LITERALLY SAID SH*T LIKE THIS:

"The endocrinological or physiological view is that there is a certain amount of masculine ductless gland structure and hormone or internal secretion and a certain amount of feminine in every individual."

Then the US army began to classify and regulate draftees in the 1940s. It defined and codified "the homosexual" and the "normal" person and who was fit to be drafted.

The "normal" man was defined as:

1. stereotypically "masculine" in physical characteristics
2. dressed and acted in a masculine manner
3. had a tight a**hole

and

4. "his sexual relations with women rejected any act that could possibly be perceived as passive"

LMAO LOLOLOL

The media began running sh*t articles on how men can get along with women.

They began crafting the narrative that you can "tell" if a man is gay if he had a hard time getting along with women.

The heterosexual men, then, had no problems & just *knew* how to do it innately.

In 1948, the famous Kinsey report came out and said,

"Males do not represent two discrete populations, homosexual and heterosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white....

"Only the human mind invents categories to force facts into separate pigeonholes. The living world is a continuum in each & every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understandng of the realities of sex"

After WWII, w the Kinsey report challenging ideas of sexuality, the Cold War, more white women working, Black people demanding education & housing rights, the U.S. gov had to figure out how to maintain a hyper-capitalistic, individualistic, patriarchal, and racist society.

It developed the suburbs to create racial segregation for whites. Corporations began reinforcing gender roles to sell home appliances, flooding magazines w ads showing "happy housewives" cooking, baking, and cleaning.

The US media & film industry and especially Disney and Hollywood play a major role in spreading US propaganda (like the Rosie the Riveter poster).

Disney and Hollywood produced films showing the "normal" and idealized characteristics of masculinity.

The US is deeply invested in producing and controlling what is considered "conventional masculine," because conventional masculinity enables war and perpetual wars reinforce conventional masculinity.

(The US has been at war 93% of the time, 222 out of 239 Years, since 1776.)

Meanwhile the white scientists kept putting out sh*tty takes:

A psychoanalyst named Edmund Bergler (who came up w the term "writer's block") wrote: "The amount of conflict, of jealousy between homosexuals surpasses everything known even in bad heterosexual relationships."

Homo people were deemed as narcissists "who fail to reach sexual maturity (hetero-sexuality)" and are the products "of heredity, of glandular dysfunction."

This was published in The Journal of Mental Abnormality and Crime, btw.

So like, truly, be gay, do crime.

And when they weren't criminalizing us, they were attacking our mental & emotional health:

"It is granted that heterosexuality per se does not guarantee emotional health.... But there also exist healthy heterosexuals, and there are no healthy homosexuals...."

Up until now i've been talking about sexuality and gender w/o defining them, but then I saw a tweet that was like, "my gender is lesbian," so I'm gonna add definitions here real quick.

• Sex: anatomical classification based on sexual organs. Sex is the literal physical body.

• Gender identity: a person's experience of gender that is INTERNAL and PERSONAL. If someone identifies the same as the sex they're assigned at birth they are cis, if not they are trans.

• Gender expression: how a person expresses or presents their gender based on certain gendered attributes, like name, clothing, hair, make-up, body language, etc.

Gender expression is a way we perceive gender. It can be really limiting bc if you have eyes, you can wear eyeliner, if you have lips, you can wear lipsticks, if you have a waist, you can wear a dress.

It's limiting bc it got some dude on YouTube mad that Hongjun is male.

• Gender role: social roles assigned by a society according to gender. This can change depending on a bunch of factors, like time, place, culture, situation, etc. This gets reinforced by family and society, like "women are caretakers," and "men are good w mechanical tools."

You don't have to get a PhD on gender & queer theory to know that gender expression is super absurd, like the fact that a color is considered "masculine" or "feminine."

But I'm gonna tell you an example anyway to show how totally ridiculous it is. I'M DOING THIS FOR HONGJUN!

This is the story of how pink became "a girly color."

Before WWI, babies wore white bc white cotton can be bleached.

Then pastels became a thing, but pink was for boys and blue for girls because pink was a "more decisive and stronger color," which meant suitable for boys, obvi

Blue was considered "more delicate and dainty," so naturally blue was for girls.

Also, since everything is for white people <SARCASM>, blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes. Or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies.

(lmao when I started this thread I was mad at white queers in the fandoms w no historical & cultural context. thought I was gonna write like just ten tweets but now I'm deep in it and I can't leave half way, so gonna put on some sapphic v-pop and write some more)

Continuing the gendering of colors, in the 40s department stores decided that pink is more "feminine" and marketed it for girls & blue for boys. If I remember correctly Sears started the trend and now it's bankrupt but we're still stuck with sh*tty gender reveal pink/blue parties

US media during WWII also exaggerated the idea of who a "manly man" is bc the US needed men to go to war. So, Hollywood made lots of war-themed movies –– and a lot of money –– bc there was lots of profit to be made from anything related to the war.

Because of these movies, soldiers were the predominant representation of masculinity. Hollywood redefined and in some cases created what is considered masculine, or "male behavior." Since these movies get exported around the world, these ideas get implanted around the world too.

The US government gave the studios the freedom to portray violence onscreen, so violence became perceived as a uniquely natural male trait. "Real men" were portrayed as emotional, rational, not afraid of death, chivalrous, protective, tough, aggressive, decisive, etc.

On top of that, as it's Hollywood + the US military, the hegemonic masculinity was defined as white Anglo-Saxon, Christian, able-bodied, and yeah, you guessed it, straaaaight as a ruler.

After the war, the ideal masculinity included all those traits, and now instead of fighting they're supposed to be the breadwinner of the stereotypical white middle class suburban Leave It to Beaver American nuclear family.

If i were in a face to face IRL convo, the usual pushback I would get is like, "but cat, men being in hetero relationships have existed for thousands of years and the stereotype of men being strong and stoic is also an eastern concept too"

And I would affirm that yes, hetero and homosexuality have always been a thing, and gender roles and stereotypes have always existed across time and cultures (and patriarchy is the oldest oppressive system in the world).

The naming and codifying of heterosexuality into legal and medical institutions, however, gave people approval and validation of how "normal" they are if they follow the prescribed gender roles and het expectations. It pathologized those who do not, ie. us queers.

Ok I'm running out of steam so I will be back to close out this thread bc I PROMISE I AM GETTING TO THE POINT, lol, which is that over time, queer identity in the west becomes used as a kind of weapon to justify western neo-colonization & Orientalism (pink imperialism).

In the meantime please enjoy my beautiful sapphic v-pop queen Gil Lê's latest MV Sao Người Ta Nỡ Làm Mình Đau/ How Did They Have the Heart to Hurt Me.