Queer appropriation

  I’d like to preface the opening to this by saying that even though this is about the appropriation of queer culture im a white girl writing this, so 

I would argue that both cishet men and women appropriate queer culture for their own purposes, and while they do it in different ways they both are attracted by the aesthetics, uniqueness and the community  of being queer 

I think cishet men like to take our struggle and our “punk”ness, the “rough around the edges” feeling, they want to have some reason to feel outcast and alternative and make artwork thats “like.. so deep dude, its really like…real,” and wearing Keith haring t shirts while doing so. I’ve touched on this briefly in the past but it makes me so incredibly enraged at how haring and his art has been treated. They want to feel this idea of an artistic rebellion, but dont want to include anyone who makes them acknowledge their privilege. They all want to feel like theyre banding together, living life on the edge getting piercings and tattoos, neither of which are inherently queer, but theres this association between alternative culture and body modifications which is very queer in the sense of rebelling against set social norms.

The queer community and women have a longstanding relationship with one another given intersectional identities, but also similar systemic struggles, despite this cishet women are still very capable of appropriation, if not more so than cishet men I remember I saw two very straight girl classmates of mine at the yearly pride parade and they told me they just wanted to check it out for fun, and obviously that’s fine for the most part! Im not saying no straight people should ever go to a pride parade, I actually think more should, but it’s the reasoning I “have a problem with.”  It’s actually really insulting when they put themselves in queer spaces “for fun”, Jennifer I cant stop fucking being trans or gay, for you this is just a fun way for you to play dress-up, but this is how people like us survive. Cishet women loveee having a “gay best friend”, they love feeling special and welcomed us and  the acceptance of our community, but when i ask them to sign a petition to stop an anti-trans bill they could give less of a shit. Even worse many end up with shitty violently anti-queer boyfriends or even husbands which they never really have an issue with because the moment that something becomes an effort, the moment they have to take a stand and they’re actually not widely supported, they just abandon it.  Cishet women can actually be notoriously bad at recognizing their own homophobia and transphobia because theyre already victims of misogyny, so this notion that they have to change their preconceived notion’s in some way doesn’t go over with them well and they act like this authority of gendered issue.

On a final note I do want to touch on my own privileges here, it’d be really ridiculous of me to do this entire blog post without acknowledging my whiteness. A lot of this queer/ballroom culture is a result of brown and black trans women and queer people. So there’s this aspect of race to it because obviously nonwhite cis men and women can do the above, but realistically thats not the majority. This sort of queer culture actually goes through a filter if that makes sense where it goes from actually diverse queer spaces to these very white tenderqueer family spaces to then straight people. One really clear example of this is the current punk/indie band scene  where these original punk movements are from black and brown activists, but then these places get filled with very white park slope-y kids,  then just getting replaced with cishet men ultimately defeating the entire point of these feminist, anti-racist movements. Which, this kind of shows why these specifically POC or latino punk shows are so important to have. (Side note I absolutely stole this talking point from a woman I know, she’s absolutely gonna telepathically glare at me when she reads this)