I just read and really enjoyed a Friday post from The New Gay called “What a Queer Woman Looks Like,” which was written by Katrina, who apparently hasn’t published there before. There were two things I especially enjoyed about the essay. First, it was a good encapsulation of what TNG is and attempts to bring to its readership: an “over the rainbow” perspective on being a homo who’s more of a hipster; writers who are either tired of identity politics or who came out in a time and place where they weren’t quite so necessary. Secondly, it was a woman’s perspective that represented how queer womanhood is part of an array of activism and values as well as a social life, and how there is both community and loneliness in being a gay lady.
What does a queer woman look like? There are three reasons that I think it’s important to ask. First, when we ask the question it reminds everyone how many different answers there are and how little can be presupposed. Second, asking begs response, which helps to increase our visibility within wider society. Finally, when we ask the question of ourselves individually, it helps us keep our perspective and be aware of how our identities as people and, specifically, as queer women have developed. After reading Katrina’s piece for TNG I’ve been thinking about what my personal queer woman looks like, what that means to me, and how it’s changed.
flowing golden tresses and pink lips, 2005
This queer woman loves being a tomboy. I am most comfortable in jeans, a women’s cut t-shirt with a hoodie, and sneakers. Cutting all my hair off was the most freeing and satisfying decision I’ve ever made regarding my appearance.
more my speed, 2009
At the same time, I wear a necklace and a bracelet every day, and usually a little bit of makeup, but I want to be comfortable and unfussy, so I tend to look pretty casual. When I dress up, I tend to go fairly femme, but it’s mostly because that’s what looks best on my hour glass-shaped body. My inner self conception would project itself wearing boy shorts below my tees or a loosely fitted button down tucked into my slacks, but neither looks good on my body, so I stick to jeans and blouses and sometimes even skirts and heels.
Being a queer woman means that I am different than the majority of my female peers and usually ignored by the gay men who set our cultural agenda. I try to change that when I can. I’m a queer lady feminist geek news junkie, and I prefer to be known by the sum of those parts rather than as any one of them individually. I have a strangely clear, intense memory of reading David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes in college and really struggling with his preface. The preface, added upon the tenth anniversary edition of the book, said
Does a love object, particularly an unconventional one, confer identity upon the person who loves it? (Or him? Or her?) When I wrote the novel, I believed that the answer was yes, that an erotic attraction to men was, as Philip puts it to his mother, by necessity, “the most crucial, most elemental force” in a gay man’s life. “Whatever it is that we love, that is who we are”… Perhaps the line should read, whoever it is that we love, that is what we are.
Leavitt said that he no longer singles out the gay as the central characteristic of his persona. I struggled with this because I, too, felt that queer was a “what” rather than a “who.” And yet, I didn’t like reading that when Leavitt wrote his first novel, homosexuality had pride of place as the most important component in his constellation of self identity, but he felt that this position was reflective of his youth, and as he had aged other components came to the fore. I talked this out with friends gay, straight, and bi. The straights didn’t get the whole sexuality has pride of place thing at all, and the gays, while with me on that, agreed with Leavitt that it was likely the place we were at in life, destined to be supplanted as we aged.
The place I was at happened to be one where I identified very strongly as queer. While I was out as bi/more interested in women in high school, I had a boyfriend through most of it. When I arrived at college, I shed the boyfriend, joined the rugby team, and developed my first gay social network. It was powerful and fun. What was I? I would have told you that I was a big gay nerd overachiever. In that order. And I didn’t want to believe that I was probably going to outgrow that.
Like I said, I’m a queer lady feminist geek news junkie. Altogether. That’s important to me, these days, not trying to parse it. I bring who I am to everything I do, whether it’s writing or working, exercising or hanging out at a bar, talking politics or talking sci-fi. One thing that I am these days that I wasn’t few years ago is accepting of the fact that how I assess and understand who I am will continue to change.
