Thoughts on Queer Theory

This week I finished my PhD preliminary exams...and can finally see the light at the end of this academic tunnel!  I will be back in the blogging world now that I have time to be creative and reflective.  One of my questions was to discuss what queer theory meant to me personally.  I wrote this as a response.

Proclaiming queerness is a dangerous game

Removing me from my academic bubble where I write with some measure of anonymity

I am not a white, middle-class, male voice, yet as a writer and academic I am able to pass as such

until I proclaim my queerness

Queerness, or oddity, has been something I wrestled with throughout my academic journey

A Mexican-American female who spoke no Spanish, refusing to wrestle with ethnicity…accepting the label of a “bad” Mexican with shame and resignment

A female labeled a heartless bitch…fighting for equal ground with men…crying at night because being a strong female is exhausting and lonely

A conservative Christian from Texas…heart broken by the love of a group of beautiful gay people…struggling to reconcile faith with ideas of hate 

Chafing under labels of identification- Mexican, Female, Christian- that placed me in a position of powerlessness

Hiding the odd beauty that shaped my voice, my thoughts

Seeking to assimilate into white, clinical walls- the ivory tower of academia

Sacrificing self for some measure of normalcy.

Queerness scared the shit out of me. 

To not only admit my strangeness, my inability to define myself

But to celebrate this oddness terrified me.

Questioning identity, Questioning notions of self

Not only refusing to be bound by social definitions

But questioning the ability to define at all…

Queerness was a lot to handle for a young academic seeking to belong.

Queer theory pushed me to celebrate all that was messy, fucked up, and dirty about my life

To play in the spaces between definition, to lose myself in feelings and emotions

to toss everything I knew about identity out the window and allow my strange white-Mexican, ethnically challenged, hybrid voice to flow forth

questioning why labels provide security, how labels limit my ability to connect my heart and emotions to my writing

queer theory, defying definition, resists everything I learned academics should be about

it is living theory, defying grasp and comfortable in instability

Queer theory asks me to step away from textbooks where my voice is not present

to question the assumptions underlying the academic world I once longed to reside in

To embrace the peculiarity that is unique in my experience

avoiding classification, evading objective truth

Questioning, Challenging

a queer voice pushing against a cold academic world that desires to rid itself of ambiguity.

Queer theory is more than theory, but a mindset of stretching, wondering, and resisting encompassing all areas of life

In queerness is survival for it allows my voice, my emotion, and intellect

      space to be heard.

As a queer theorist I play among identity labels, using assumptions of what I should be as a starting place for expanding conversation of who I am

I play cultural mash-up- blending, severing, and rearticulating all that is my identity

Pushing back at assumptions and creating a hybrid category of identity that is me for the moment.

As a queer theorist I write, identify, and think in the moment

Knowing this identity, constructed from my experience thus far

This moment is fluid and will change.

It is in this ability to change, to shift radically that queer theory remains current and living

For today I write as an exhausted poor graduate student fearing the rules and procedures of academic measuring- comprehensive exams.

Tomorrow I may write as a conqueror who bravely challenged boundaries, answering academic evaluations of merit in emotional verse.

Both the exhausted and conquering graduate student are a part of this identity and queer theory allows and accepts these voices to exist concurrently.

Today I pay homage to the queerness that has shaped me as less traditionally “academic” and more of a writer and thinker

Today I proclaim my queerness, exiting this messy poem when the muse of inspiration has expired rather than the necessity of a page count has been reached.