so you get a lot of context-appropriate looseness about what you associate with your culture very quickly being reified into very inflexible, almost mandatory? identity markers, despite their totally arbitrary nature. but im also interested in why people seem to like this?

think there's lots to be said here, about how presenting yourself online inherently involves having to deliberately choose which parts of self to share, which can slip into a sort of self branding exercise, how brands encourage this, how online discourse demands self declaration

but im also really interested in this trade off that seemed to happen at some point in the last few decades (?) where 'being queer isn't sexual' became an accepted sort of rallying cry. but it is

homosexuality is of course about sex. being trans is hugely defined by the way your transness disrupts and interacts with the expectations of existing reproductive orders. even asexuality stands in relation to a sexual mainstream. sex/uality is formative to these positions

the 90s respectability wars (that in many analyses basically won - homosexuality is fully compatible with nuclear family, love is love, we're just like you etc) have sort of been picked up by a new generation? who seem equally keen to disavow how sex figures in their selves

and i reckon that's probably why stuff like 'cake is queer!' 'knitting is queer!' 'frogs are queer!', whatever the platform-related reasons that come about, are so popular, because that de-sexed compromise was so successful queerness isn't defacto sex-related in many many circles

like, obviously all such categories have very fuzzy edges, but they're also not internally homogenous, and i do feel extremely alienated from a view of queerness that doesn't have some disruptive relation to sex and reproduction as its prototypical centre

ive been quite careful here partly to sincerely not upset anyone but also because i have been screamed at for days on here for saying that *overtly* sexual spaces are important in queer culture, and screamed at by people who thought they were far more radical queers than i

and you sort of think 'wow, how does that happen?!' but, if you think that most of those people have grown up with an accepted mainstream queerness defined by marriage, where ~radical language comes out of the mouths of corporate brands, then it makes more sense!

then it's possible to say reactionary things in ~progressive language, it is absolutely possible to position liberated sexuality as a threat to queers as much as to a dominant cishet reproductive order; it all relies on the primary site of queerness being outside of gender + sex

anyway i'm gonna shut up now (get a blog! no) bye

(please don't yell at me, i'm just some guy, i have zero say in how you live)