Reddit Reddit reviews Saint Foucault : Towards a Gay Hagiography

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Saint Foucault : Towards a Gay Hagiography
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1 Reddit comment about Saint Foucault : Towards a Gay Hagiography:

u/[deleted] · 7 pointsr/radicalqueers

> There has to be a straight for queer to work, but since there has always been and will always be it does work.

There definitely has to be something to measure queer against but it doesn't have to be heterosexuality. When we think like this, we can start to think of heterosexual people as enemies, when many/most of them are quite nice!

One of the best discussions I've found on what it means to identify as queer is from David Halperin in his book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. He states,

> “Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm, Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer,’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children – with perhaps, very naughty children. ‘Queer,’ in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community – for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire.”^p.62

In other words, queer isn't opposed to heterosexuality, but stands instead outside of whatever is considered normal, which just happens to be heterosexuality and monogamy. This is why I identify as queer, even though I'm a fairly vanilla gay cis-man, because identifying as queer allies me with everyone and everything that is still unaccepted, even as I myself am increasingly seen as "normal."