the queerness of it all
on what being queer means to me, gossip, radical intimacy, bridgerton (light season 3 spoilers!!), and air travel (again)
I am writing this latest installment from the united club at o’hare, where I’ve spent most of my day waiting for my rescheduled flights to tel aviv. this time of year makes it hard to avoid thinking about queerness, especially on my way to a land where a genocide is actively unfolding. multiple people I love have made jokes or sent memes where the punchline is the supposed hypocrisy of “queers for palestine” and I have not been amused, personally. as a person who is yes, not heterosexual, but also more importantly, very queer, I do not see the irony they claim as obvious.
the title of this post is taken from a phone call with a close friend from a few months ago during which she shared her feelings about an impending visit to her girlfriend’s hometown. she explained that despite being quite religious, her girlfriend’s family seemed “okay with the queerness of it all.” the phrase immediately imprinted on me as a more generic model of being, an aspiration.
queerness is often reduced only to the realm of sex, to be defined in the popular imagination as not identifying with your biological sex or as being attracted to people who are not of the “opposite” sex. but queerness, as I see it, is about diverging from the norm. in my conceptualization, to be queer means to imagine other ways of being, to permit oneself to embody those other possibilities. I view being queer as akin to the idealization of being a scientist, another label I identify with: as one who questions, inquires, and explores. queerness is magical because it is an escape from the assumptions that weigh down on us. living a queer life is the choice, often borne out of necessity, to suppress the pervasive, constant chorus of “should”s and “supposed to”s. in recent years, I have been shifting away from identifying as bisexual and towards queerness because it feels more authentic and all-encompassing than a mere description of who I like to sleep with. the venn diagram of queerness and gayness is not a circle.
I watched all 4 new episodes of bridgerton here in this dystopian club where the wine pours are heavy and the disgruntled travelers are aplenty. someone recently told me they were surprised I watched the show because it seems “very straight.” I struggled to articulate it then, but I see now that I’ve finished the season and ruminated a bit that this assumption comes from a conflation of queerness with homosexuality. while the show may contain almost entirely heterosexual plotlines, I’d argue that it does explore queerness. it takes place in a fictional Regency Period world where the norms and expectations are strongly articulated, impossible to ignore, and constantly on display in the form of balls and mating seasons, wealth and style. these characters live in Society, in a more obvious and outwardly visible way than the rest of us do.
while bridgerton has a reputation for featuring nudity and sex, and most of it is straight and normative, it is— like queerness itself— about so much more than sex and romance. it is about the struggle to find oneself within Society and to act with personal integrity under the risk of being gossiped about or excommunicated. the voice of lady whistledown acts to remind the residents of Mayfair that they are being watched and judged, that their transgressions will be noted and their secrets revealed. still, people choose love marriages at the cost of status, pursue taboo relationships, and betray one another for their own needs.
the end of the third season gives us a sexual storyline that lives outside the heteronormative, monogamous norm, and explicitly addressed the question of what is natural in the process. one character tells another, “there is so much in society that is unnatural, but a feeling between two people, whatever their sex, is the most natural thing in the world,” assuring them “how good it feels to be free.” this is the crux of the matter. queerness, to me, must go beyond diverting from the “natural” or “normal,” toward divesting from the concept that such a distinction exists at all. what is normative is not automatically more natural, healthy, or fulfilling than what is divergent.
in addition to binging bridgerton, I have been reading sophie k rosa’s radical intimacy, a book that “explores how the capitalist system shapes our intimate lives.” one of rosa’s claims is that the accepted, hegemonic model for living is not that which is best for us, but it is what is best for the oppressive capitalist system we live under. as rosa writes, “the state’s preferred model of homelife is not privileged for its likelihood to foster love and happiness, but for its utility to capital.” the same can be said for the residents of Mayfair and the expectations of Society. we see in the show how power is intoxicating and how easy it can be to get lost in the chase for it at the cost of one’s truest values and quality of relationships.
if you ask me, gossip, a dominant theme in bridgerton, is itself queer. gossiping is a way to subvert traditional power structures, to act outside the imposed hierarchy of knowing. one of my favorite pieces at the getty is a sculpture made by camille claudel, a female artist about gossip. she chose a theme distinct from that broached by her lover and fellow artist, rodin, to whom she was constantly being compared. this subject matter makes sense as a way to exert power over her own narrative. as lady whistledown says, “gossip is information. it forges bonds.” it especially forges bonds between women, as gossip has often been relegated to the domain of the feminine. these bonds, like those between eloise and penelope or lady danbury and lady bridgerton, are deep and central in a show presumably about romance. for all the emphasis on pairings, they live in close-knit community in a way most of us do not today.
living under capitalism, or in Society, wears down our imagination. it makes it difficult to envision other possibilities, to see outside the tunnel to domesticity we are presented with. one of my favorite bridgerton characters states shares, in the last episode, that she wishes to “simply live for a little while outside” of their “tiny bubble.” she elaborates, “I cannot change the world without seeing more of it,” acknowledging the ways our ability to enact transformation is suffocated by a lack of imagination, which is in turn enforced by a limited view of what is possible. while this pretty netflix offering may be looked down on, especially by straight men, for its focus on relationships between people, I am a strong follower of the “personal as political” philosophy, as is rosa. she writes, and I agree, “experiments in living and relating matter because amidst everyday and structural violence they can expand the realm of the possible and prefigure the future.”
I experience abundant gratitude for the way I was raised, in an intimate home with another family and many parental figures and non-biological siblings, with parents who have a rich social fabric and value variety and communities of care. this origin story makes it easier to see ways of being that are elusive to others. what feels most natural to me is not a monogamous relationship and a nuclear family, but a network of connections that is fluid and complementary. the things we consider to be intuitive are only intuitive to some, depending on our life experiences. quantum mechanics, my favorite subfield of fundamental physics, is often said to be unintuitive due to its emphasis on probability rather than certainty or absolute states. however, this is only the case for those of us raised to see the world in black and white, to want concrete delineations rather than an embrace of nuance and complexity. perhaps it is my favorite subject because it feels the most queer.
I wrote about my love for liminal spaces here before, in ode to the in-between, but I realize here, in this airport, that I also love them for their queerness, the way these spaces exist outside the flow of our normal lives. in this space, I have permission to watch 4 episodes of bridgerton in a row, the way I wouldn’t anywhere else, to nap in public and to excuse myself from pressure to be productive. my flight is boarding now, but I look forward to many more hours (and days, weeks, months, years…) of being queer.
happy pride to all my fellow queers (and in case it isn’t obvious, state-funded violence is decidedly not queer.)