Section I:Introduction
We’re gender traitors.
We’re whores.
Faithful to no one but each other.
If as Jose Estaban Munoz says, that “here and now is a prison house”, then me and the homies are the inmates taking over. We burn the plantation, set fire to the cage that is heteronormativity.
We’re multiple. Like a hydra spiraling out of control, regenerating head after head, we’re unstoppable.
A gargantuan force of unparalleled energy.
We are queer but have only touched the surface. But what does it even mean to be queer?
Isn’t it a slur? A naughty word you should never whisper?
Queerness is contentious. It’s always been the shifting fugitive that manages to escape comprehension. It’s cross-gender identification that scares hetero “normies.” The “race mixing” that tricks a White supremacist into realizing that their relationship to blackness is never that far off. The cross-class desire that delights in utopia reminiscent of what Samuel Delaney describes in his memoirs such as Time Square Red, Time Square Blue.
If queerness is impossible to define, how do we build a movement? How do we create stable identities and politics? I and other anonymous contributors rally against that.
If you want to be a woman, be a woman.
If you want to be a man, be a man.
If you want to be the child of Poseidon, I implore you to be it.
You can be whoever you want, and queerness can be whatever it needs to. We don’t need stable definitions to do the work of healing the world;only we can.
Conservatives, liberals, Gay Rights activists, queer academics, everyday working class people–everyone has a stake in defining queerness, yet they all come to wildly different conclusions.
Jose Esteban Munoz was a prominent queer theorist who constantly wrote and spoke about the transformative power of queerness. For him, “Queerness is a structured and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”
Queerness is more than just who you fuck, although that’s definitely a part of that. Queerness is about making something from nothing. Queerness is a never-ending surplus. Queerness is living on the fringes.
Munoz presents a vision of queerness unlike what has been before. Queerness is struggle; queerness is ingenuity. Queerness is finding the strength to make a home in the wasteland. Queerness is surviving that “toxic swamp” Queerness is like the air;it’s everywhere.
What are you gonna do? Not breathe?
This manifesto, if we’re calling it that, is a rally back. It’s the voices and whispers of queer people trying to make it in a world that’s always been fundamentally violent to their existence. It’s not enough to say “we’re here. We’re queer.”
I like the ring “We’re queer, and we’re monsters.”
It doesn’t have to be your rallying call, but it’s certainly mine. This is for the troubled queers. The weird queers.
The bisexuals who are seen as traitors and fence-sitters.
The Black queers who have their contributions to the greater project of queerness erased.
The trans and non-binary folks who are credited for causing the destruction of civilization.
We embrace queerness in all its messiness.
We celebrate queerness in all its world-breaking capacities.
We embody queerness in all its delicious contradictions.
SECTION II: DON’T LET THE OPPS COME GET YOU
Make sure you’re careful. Don’t let the opps get you.
The big, bad lurking hetero–”normies” that want to feast on you. We’re not even just talking about actual heterosexual, cisgender people, although they could maybe be included in that.
Cis-heterenormativity is more than just the policing of gender non-normative behaviors and identities, which includes sexuality and sexual identities. As one of my interolucters says “ heteronormativity…forces us into ways of being.”
Ways of being that celebrate heterosexist pleasures.
Ways of being cut off from that mode of desire–queerness– that breaks open a new world order.
Our queerness lets us know that violence is present, violence is here, but violence is not permanent.
Somewhere, a bisexual boy says to himself “It’s not realistic” to come out.
The enby huddles underneath their blanket, dreaming of a world where they get to be seen as their authentic self, whatever that constantly changing definition might mean.
The Black queen internalizes the idea that they should hate themselves for their femininity or else be punished as a sexual deviant.
The opps are all around us. The opps are buried within us. Cis-heteronormatvity wants us to hate each other. It sustains itself with our self-hatred of the queer Other.
But the world is changing, and our queerness is the oppositional force that helps us create that momentum.
Queer children become queer adults. Imagine a world where that queer kid didn’t grow up hating themselves. Imagine a world where your dream of having that sapphic girl sweep you off your feet comes true.
Think about if you didn’t have to hide your attraction to your fraternity brothers? The richness of the ways your relationships with them could bolster if they understood your queerness as more than just who you have sex with. If they understood that baked in your queerness was a deep love for them, not as sexual , but as flawed, messy human beings who you just can’t let go, because you don’t want to. A love that wants to make them be better because they can be better. And maybe your queerness rubbing against them is the force that makes it so.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Cis-heteronormativity makes it so that people are conditioned to fear difference, to fear change, to fear the Other, especially the Other that is racialized, feminized, and queer.
Those that accept this sense of normal only get to see the world in black and white. They have no idea of what lurks beyond the surface whenever you’re willing to listen. Queerness functions like that “second sight” that invites the desire of more. Queerness is a desire that will never be satisfied.
“I think it’s detrimental to have such a shallow understanding of the world,” says a fellow gender fugitive. Queerness is the choice available to us, but we can’t always take it. Being visibly queer in a world as fucked up as this means getting fucked by life over and over again. Queerness is resistance in the face of violence;queerness is the thing inside us that lets us know we are alive.
If you need to hide, do so. Queerness is entropy;queerness is transformative. If you want to be out in a situation and it feels safe to do, embrace that option. But at the same time, understand the varying levels of difference and relationships people have with their queerness. Being unintelligible as queer is a survival strategy when you are punished for even the smallest transgression. Instead of becoming the queer police, dictating who can be queer and not be queer, embrace queerness for its multiplicity.
If we let ourselves, our queer communities can become their own opps. In fact historically, it’s happened before:
- Middle-class Lesbian feminist during the 70s/80s criticizing working-class identities of butch and femme as heteronormative and reductionist
- The Homophile Movement organizations such as The Mattachine Society purging its ranks of Communist members during the Lavender and Red Scares.
- Contemporary monosexist rhetoric that paints bisexuals as “wishy-washy,” “indecisive,” “heteronormative” and just not queer enough.
- Transmedicalist discourse that constructs non-binary and genderqueer individuals as attention-seeking, impractical, and most of all not trans in the right way.
You can miss me and the homies with that bullshit. We reject any approach that fails to take a materialist understanding of how certain social conditions are created and maintained to reproduce oppression and inequality. Any analysis of cis-heterenormativity is woefully misguided in that it fails to understand how it is reinforced by anti-blackness and misogyny.
Understanding and dismantling transphobia becomes impossible unless we reckon with how capitalism incentives stable gender identities of men as laborers and women as care workers who recreate the figure of the family via sexual and social reproduction.
Me and the homies love our queerness, because how could we not? We’re terrible, monstrous, beautiful beings who exceed what’s even possible. You might never understand me; you might not ever get the homies, at least not all the way. I know I don’t always. But it is our queer desire for coalitions, our queer wish to collaborate.
Any friend of mine is an enemy against the ways things are. It’s as simple as that.
SECTION III: SMASH THE CIS-STEM
If we are indeed as monstrous as you claim us to be, no matter how we might try to appeal to your middle-class ideals of respectability, then monsters is what we shall fucking be. And if there’s anything I know about monsters is that we don’t play nice. Sketched below is not the end all be all on how we get free. What it does do is open up a section for possibility, a possibility to strive for something different. If you disagree, feel free to do. Even amongst us fellow monsters, we have a hard time coming to a complete consensus. That’s the messiness of living with others. Just like Munoz argues in Cruising Utopia, hope can lead to disappointment. But despite that disappointment, our queerness lets us know that the possibility might very well be worth the risk.
- CHALLENGING CIS-HETERONORMATIVITY
This might seem like a broad challenge, and that’s the kind of the way that we intended. As we state earlier in this manifesto, cis-heterenormativity can be about directly controlling and policing people’s gender identities and expression.
A. Ever told your girlfriend that she needs to act like a lady? Cis-heteronormativity, sir.
B. Your gay boyfriend telling you to tone down the “drama” and put away the make-up.
C. Your straight friends that are unwilling to date bisexuals because they see them as “vectors of disease” and “promiscuous cheaters.,” Seems like that reeks from a cis-heteronormative perspective and perhaps even a little monosexism.
D. Structurally denying and pulling back protections that would allow trans and non-binary people access to gender affirming care even though cis people get this all the time; we just don’t call it that.
Challenging cis-heteronornativity is about more than just fighting back against transphobia, biphobia, homophobia etc. It is about understanding how normative understandings and ways of being in the world are ingrained in the ways we understand all of our relationships. Challenging the cis-stem means a lot of different things, but some of these can include providing tangible material changes such as increasing protections for discrimination against queer people in schools, in government, and in the workplace. However, legal changes themselves are always temporary structures that can be taken away at notice. The fact that Roe v. Wade’s legal power has been undone and talks of challenging gay marriage are also beginning to rise to the surface is an indication that using traditional politics alone isn’t sufficient to solve.
We call for a material as well as ideological change in the way we understand our place in relationship to gender and other identities and positionalities. As infamous Marxist and guerilla fighter Che Guevera argues, “To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman.” While rejecting the false binary that Che institutes between man and woman, we recognize that the material conditions of the past and present to some degree shape what actions people are willing to take and risk in a world that is fundamentally anti-queer. Anti-discrimination laws, labor laws, and other civil rights issues will only matter in the context that they support changing the conditions that make embracing reductionist cis-heteronormative views of the world as desirable.
2. CREATE SPHERES OF CARE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
Taking a cue from Marxist and Socialist Feminist, we understand social reproduction as being the sphere of power where laborers have their labor power restored everyday to allow them to keep the wheels of capitalism turning. While our method is queer in that it calls for an amalgamation of theories and methods such as looking to queer theory, Black and Indigenous Feminisms, and even anarchism, we reject any method that is not in some way fundamentally anti-capitalists. We press for this ethic and analysis, especially at a time when rainbow capitalism finds itself intensified during Pride Month. Siding with the capitalist is something me and the homies simply won’t stand for.
Instead of supporting the reckless accumulation of CEO, shareholders, and massive wealth hoarders, we should embrace one another in kinship and struggle. Not everyone is going to agree with each other, and honestly we shouldn’t. Deliberation and debate is the only we’ll be able to manifest any political energy to enact changes. Queer people, especially post Stonewall, have always invested in creating communities of care that enable us to look after one another. For example, STAR(Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries), was founded by trans activists Marsha P.Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and created a space where homeless, gender nonconforming youth and adults could pool their resources together to brace the the violence that they faced under the shared token of the trans umbrella. This is the stabilizing power of care, care that is disproportionately socialized and done by women or femme-identified people.
Like the Red Nation states on their own manifesto on communism and Indigenous struggle, “Care encompasses a set of practices for recreating the world and reimagining our relationship to all relatives.” Community care and mutual aid will not bring the destruction of capitalism, the end of cis-heteronormativity, and so many other systems of domination. However, an ethics oriented around the world-making and world-bending capacities of care to keep communities together is critical for us to survive being in the cut. Supporting one-another with food drives, socialized childcare, and mutual aid requests is one simple step we can take in the direction of empowering our communities. Not only should these material actions lead to our fellow monsters having access to aid, but also inspire a new relationship with care. We must begin to understand reproduction as encompassing something more than just biological kin and needs, but rather a political project that includes disability politics, care for the elderly, fictive kin and the friend group, as well changes that empower various workers that are associated with the “pink collar” such as social workers, K-12 teachers, domestic laborers, and nurses.
3. MASS EDUCATION
Any social and cultural movement must include an aspect of mass education that seeks to empower the working and middle class, especially the section of working class Black and Indigenous queers. We see the goal of education as not about telling people what they should want and desire. Our education is a mode of praxis, that as Black feminist bell hooks describes it, is a “practice of freedom.” We see the goal of this Black feminist and ,dare we say queer mode of education, as being about understanding freedom as multiple overlapping paths forward. Struggling against anti-blackness means we must struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, and cis-heteronormativity.
We’re personally not interested in forcing you to think the way we do. However, after doing and seeing empirical research on the issues we speak on, hopefully you come to a new conclusion. If not a completely new one, at least one that reconsiders things in light of the new knowledge you have learned. We also recognize that education and learning happens in so many contexts outside of literal brick and mortar school buildings.
Education is watching a YouTube video on coming out tips to express your queerness to your family.
Education is learning from your peers how to “properly” reinforce the strictness of gender or how to challenge its underlying assumptions.
Education is reading high theory such as Halberstram, Spillers, Marx, and Lacan, but also embracing “low” cultural modes such as science fiction, horror, and young adult.
Education is constantly opening and happening around us, and we seek to create a queer tradition that prioritizes intellectualism in all its forms, while at the same time recognizing the difference between critique and activism. We’re not apolitical philosophers navel gazing in our ivory tower. We see how our theories and understandings of power and oppression can only be verified and sharpened with continuous praxis.
SECTION IV: REFLECTIONS ON QUEERNESS
We conclude our time together with some reflections from other anonymous queer monsters. Like we stated at the beginning, agree or disagree. But the spirit of kinship, debate, and struggle must be embedded in everything we do for queer liberation, whatever that might end up meaning.
“The goal has to be to walk through the world as a cis man because it is way too risky to find out what it means to be in the spaces as a trans man.”
“I am enjoying this more where I could figure it out along the way.”
“There’s no X or Y coordinate where queerness lives.”
“Queerness for me means family and understanding.”
“Is it bad, or is it camp?”
