"Queers" as/is a Noun

I spent years and years taking graduate courses on LGBTQ issues/theory outside of my home department (or via independent study), but this Fall my department is finally offering a topical course in this area. I'm a little sad that it's come now--when I'm past the point that I should be taking classes--but I am glad to see it (and other topical courses) being offered in my department.

I'm even more excited that the professor teaching the course has decided to try having a course blog because now I can eavesdrop on some of the class' conversations--definitely not as good as being there, but better than nothing.

Check out the syllabus for the course, entitled "Queers and Theory: willfully eccentric modes of being," or the class' blog yourself.

One of the recent questions posed to the class was "Why Queers and Theory rather than Queer Theory?"

In response to this prompt there was a lot of discussion about how the former suggested fluidity, boundary breaking, multiplicity, and a process of being.

When I saw this question, I quickly became fixated on "queers" as a noun.

While it did strike me that decoupling "queer" from "theory" opened up spaces of possibility for what "counts" as queer/theory, I just kept going back to "queers" as a noun that served as an identity marker for particular individuals.

Okay, okay...so part of my fixation on identities is most likely due to having recently read several essays in Identity Politics Reconsidered edited by Linda Martin Alcoff, Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M.L. Moya (Palgrave, 2006).

Outside of that, I think I'm gravitating towards "queers" as a noun because: (1) it seems such the fashion currently to use "queer(s)" as a verb in a way that's almost becoming tiresome to me; and (2) "queers" as a noun foregrounds the people who not only write theory, but also (when not one in the same) the people who live/use/practice it, thereby collapsing any illusion that there ever was a distance between theory and practice.

"Queering" as a project of disrupting (hetero)normativity is certainly admirable, and I'd even go so far as to say at times necessary. I know I've definitely benefited from others doing the work of queering...challenging norms of not just sex and sexuality, but of so many realms of identity and beyond. Still, I worry about the (postmodern) tendency towards deconstruction decoupled from (re)construction, and the part that "queering" has played in maintaining this very dynamic.

I've always been rooted in/by my identities and by identity politics--I think because I came to know myself in, with, and through identities.

Has this been, and sometimes continues to be, difficult/challenging/problematic? Of course. That hasn't meant, however, that I've wanted to distance myself from those identities. In fact, if anything, it's had quite the opposite effect, making me want to hold identities closer.

Could it be that my reluctance to relinquish identities as such is a result of fear? Undoubtedly possibly. But this isn't a court of law, reasonable doubt doesn't lead to acquittal.

In any case, thinking of "queers" as a noun reaffirms my sense of self, and my soul. Instead of only always in the process of becoming, I also get to (just) be. Okay, so this is possibly backwards thinking in some folks' eyes since "becoming" is often understood (by myself included) as so much more fluid and progressive than "being". I fully acknowledge that there is power at play in who has the privilege to just "be." Still, I also think that it can be downright tiring to be in a perpetual state of "becoming," and frankly I'm tired of just that.

"Queers" as a noun is something I take up as a moment of rest for the weary.

(On a lighter note, "'queer' is a noun" is also my own play on the forthcoming book Butch is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman.)