The framing of this survey is already based on an American anglocentric cultural ideal of what it means to be "LGBTQ." When examining queer rights and identities abroad, it's essential to not fall prey to hegemonic California queer theory that posits queer liberation involves a universal "coming out" and an acceptance of specific, english identifiers in society.
As Foucault theorized, even in English society the creation of the "homosexual" as an identity, rather than act, is already a relatively recent development. There are countless cultural milieus in which queerness is performed by entirely different standards than those that are accepted by the "progressive west," and many of those cultural milieus don't revolve around a specific coming out narrative or concretized "lifestyles" arrayed by identity tag like in western english "LGBTQ" movements.
The essential markers of queer liberation are legal protections--which the PRC ensures; medical protections--which the PRC ensures; employment protections--which the PRC ensures; economic protections--which the PRC ensures; food security--which the PRC ensures; housing--which the PRC ensures; and safety--which the PRC ensures.
Now what is ensured legally and what plays out in practice are very different--for instance, though HRT is covered in many urban centres, those in smaller cities or in outlying rural provinces struggle to find doctors accepting of gender diversity. This gets worse as people come to expect specific western promises of queer liberation (that, I may add, few western nations ever deliver on themselves). The PRC is still a widely rural and socially conservative (by western standards that don't consider things like food and shelter to be socially progressive) nation, however there is direct evidence that with an improvement in economic conditions within different precincts in the PRC has come a relative increase in the social acceptance of LGBTQ family members and a diminishing of social discrimination.
Queer liberation will not come from pink imperialism, it will come from the emancipation of the impoverished masses, something the PRC is at the forefront of: since the 90s, 60% of all eradicated poverty globally has been China.
Edited to add: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-08834-y here is a paper you can read specifically about the increase in queer acceptance as income increases. China isn't perfect by a long shot, but by ensuring their ability to lift the quality of life of their people, by staving off imperialist aggression, they are already doing more for queer people than most places. Is there gay marriage? No, but with increased acceptance that will likely come with time, and if I'm being honest I have a lot of negative things to say about how gay marriage was leveraged in the west to defang a much more vibrant movement for queer rights and fold a large portion of people into the status quo and away from their radical coalition with feminists attacking the institution of marriage itself.
Felt bad about not including some books in this post--I always like to recommend further reading when I can--so I came back to this thread after finishing dinner when I can crack open my library.
China's Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism, Ali Kadri is a great look at the functions of imperialism as a waste-commodity producing system, and Chinese economic development in the face of neoliberal wars of encroachment. (The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction is where the theory is most strongly laid out, but the one I recommended gives a decent overview and really hones in on China's refusal of the world neoliberal order.)
For a look at some more cultural explorations of queer identity in China (including Taiwan, which is more accepting of queer people than much of mainland China) from a variety of perspectives both critical and supportive of the CPC:
Transgender China, Howard Chiang
Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life, Denise Tse-Shang Tang
Oral History of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten, Travis S. K. Kong
Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, Chou Wah-shan
Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China, Tiantian Zheng
Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness, Jamie J. Zhao
Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder, Hongwei Bao
Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism, Hongwei Bao
Queer Comrades 2018: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China, Hongwei Bao
Queer Media in China, Hongwei Bao
Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, Jing Jamie Zhao
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires, Francisca Yuenki Lai
Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan, Hans Tao-Ming Huang
Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, Susan Brownell, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Thomas Laqueur is a good background on a lot of the strict gender roles and their historical context that is at play.
Gender Policy and HIV in China: Catalyzing Policy Change, Dr. Qiang Ren, Prof. Baochang Gu, Prof. Xioayin Zheng (this one is more a policy analysis, but gives a lot of insight into sexual policy in China, especially in regards to sex work (which has traditionally been on the fringes of "queer" sexual theorizing).
A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: the Na of China, Cai Hua (not traditionally "queer" per LGBT theorizing, but the Na are a culture in the Himalayan region that practice communal child rearing, which has historically been attacked by Christian colonial missionaries in Turtle Island and abroad as a perverse and "queer" family form that very much falls outside of the cisheteronormative social structure).
don't revolve around a specific coming out narrative or concretized "lifestyles" arrayed by identity tag like in western english "LGBTQ" movements.
literally no gay person in the west does that they just take pride in the "identity tags" because its a great way to be explicit about things the weirdos hate which feels nice to do
this stuff feels so goddamn invalidating to queer people in western countries. we invented these labels, they were never intended for NGO's or imperialism. they were meant for us. i refuse to treat them as if the forces of imperialism own them (and I therefore take immense offense to their use in pinkwashing). but don't confuse us ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE in western countries with the people using the idea of us without our permission or consent to hurt ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE in other countries. We do not support nor condone the political misuse of us, and the people who coined these terms and worked towards queer liberation never, ever wished for them to be used this way.
so please don't fucking treat the queer community, LGBTQ+ community, whatever, as if it only exists as a distinction to oppress and consume, as if our own conceptions and ideas of ourselves are completely invalid and made up. we made these distinctions for ourselves and not for the patriarchal, cis, heteronormative straight fucks up in palaces made of skulls to use them maliciously to hurt others. fuck the imperial machine not just for the result of that specifically but also for tying our community to murder and conquest when no normal fucking gay person here in the capitalist hellhole West ever asked for that. pete buttigieg does not speak for the LGBTQ+ community.
of course places should have their own ability to develop queer theory and terms and ideas. but that's exactly why the misuse of english queer terminology pisses me off so much, it's reduced it to an imperialist scheme in the eyes of the world instead of the individual stepping stone it's creators and the people who DIED for it fighting cops on the street intended it to be.
I have a few things I would like to reply with here, but I want to start with assuring you that no part of my analysis is meant as any kind of personal attack on individual queer people; I realize this can be a sensitive topic and at times that can cause people to feel defensive about discussions, but what I wrote about is western hegemony not individual western queers. I'm sorry for any feelings of invalidation you may feel.
Secondly, I will say that there is an implication in your response that I am somehow "outside" of the discussion. That is to say, you imply that you are "actual queer" and that I am not and thus have no place to speak about "actual queers." I'm not sure what led to this assumption, but it's nowhere in my text, and any quick follow-up showing the sheer amount I study and recommend queer theory (in this thread and elsewhere) should serve as at least a rudimentary hint that I am very much "inside" the discussion, and don't appreciate your implication that I have no place to make this analysis.
Now, as to your point: when discussing cultural hegemony, the intentions and the desires of the individual are quite literally immaterial: it doesn't matter what individual queer people intend with their language. The hegemonic institutions of western imperialism are pervasive and invasive, and whether a settler intends to participate in the perpetuation of hegemony or not is irrelevant to the fact that the settler inevitably and inescapably does participate in it. From the innocuous application of english identifiers to other cultures (like claiming that hijra, or two-spirit, or travesti, or transsexuelles are transgender) to outright purposeful queer imperialism. It doesn't matter, it all lends to the weight of the cultural hegemony of the english colonial world.
Even within english itself there are hegemonic ideals of queer identity that get reified through repetition: it is no individual's fault, it is just the way that structures of hegemony function. This is how the word transsexual fell out of vogue, how fairy, dyke and transvestite became relics to mainstream queer theory. And that mainstream is led by white academics and the media apparatus of the bourgeoisie, like it or not.
I also have to disagree with your statement that "literally no gay person in the west does that." Queer media (including posts in this very forum) are rife with discussions of the coming out narrative, and in the western queer lexicon someone is gay, for instance. Homosexuality is not an act, it is a way of being. That's not a value judgement, it's just the way that gayness works in the mainstream (hegemonic) western english culture. The identity tags, while they may matter to varying degrees and for varying reasons to different individuals, do serve the purpose in the mainstream culture of informing a reading of a person's every action, whether we desire it or not. If a trans artist writes a song, that becomes a trans song. For example: look at UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU by Ada Rook. The first song on the album, "im cis" quite literally says "i say none of my songs are about being trans" and yet the first review published about the album spoke about it being a trans album. (Backxwash has talked about this as well, that her album was largely about immigrant experience, racism, and suicidal ideation, but every article about her when she won the Polaris was about "Trans Musician Backxwash.")
On the other hand, plenty of queer people, whether enthusiastically, reluctantly, ironically, or earnestly, contribute to discussions/memes/discourse about being gay or being trans or whatever other label. Again, this is not a value judgement, it is just a thing that I have personally observed and studied (and participated in, because, as I said, the way hegemony works is we are all implicated to varying degrees). It's not inherently a bad thing (and can even be affirming for the participant), but that does mean that the hegemony is continuing to be reasserted. And the real problem is when it gets applied cross-culturally without introspection.
To take it to the way anglo hegemony works: whether you desire it or not, english is the language of the global hegemon. When you use it, when you translate cultural ideas and feelings into english, you are participating in the spread of that hegemony. Things that exist in non-english cultural contexts necessarily undergo transformation to be translated into english to be understood by an english audience. That's the very nature of translation. However, because of the imbalance in power between english (as the colonial language of the global hegemon) and other languages, this is by its very nature a translation that serves to further cultural hegemony.
The point, I suppose, is that settlers perpetuate hegemony whether they wish to or not, whether they are victims of that hegemony or not, and that goes for queer settlers too. (the colonized perpetuate hegemony too, that is its nature, to become instantiated in the society such that it is self-reproducing)
That is to say, you imply that you are "actual queer" and that I am not and thus have no place to speak about "actual queers."
that is not at ALL what i was implying. the entirety of those lines were meant to be specifying how the US pinkwashing machine aren't queer themselves but that they appropriate language from actual queer people to dismiss and harass other actual queer people. As in you are not outside of it, but the US is.
the actual thing i was trying to criticize with your comment is something you repeated here. there's this implication that identifying as gay, trans, etc is inherently simply a "narrative" or something that wouldn't exist without western brainwashing. This is technically true, but misses the fact that "coming out" is a concept that was created specifically because queer people are ostracized in hell country. It's not a western narrative crafted to deceive the public, it's a result of both being assigned an identity of being "other" and the purposeful internalization of that identity as part of our liberation (see the numerous other groups that do this in response to their oppression and see positive results)
I agree that forcefully and naively applying this across cultures is a very bad and often violent thing. I disagree that the queer struggle and community is invalid or somehow unreal within the context of the US culture. In fact both of those facts are because of the same reason, the queer struggle in the US was made because of US culture and therefore by definition doesn't make sense elsewhere, as you said elsewhere in the thread in reference to the coalitions between sexual and gender identity minorities in the US.
purposeful queer imperialism
fuuuuuck offffff. it is not queers doing imperialism. it is the US pinkwashing their shitty practices to retroactively justify them and blackmail people overseas with their NGOs. nothing about it is queer. the "western queers" are not a boogeyman that you have to be afraid of. queer people are not bourgoisie decadence or a falsehood of the West. queer imperialism is a misnomer at best and outright incomprehensible at worst. maybe this is not what you meant by your comments but it's just. so. fucking. infuriatingly invalidating feeling. like oh im sorry i grew up in a country where a queer identity has a direct material and ideological relevancy due to it's effectiveness in building solidarity, guess i'll just stop identifying as gay because it's fake or something. fucking hell
you know the concept of epistemic injustice? thats the kind of shit that exists without these identities and terms in the US. obviously different terms have to be made in other countries due to having entirely different contexts but that implicitly also means those terms are effective and relevant INSIDE the U$
this whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. i absolutely refuse to not take pride in my identity just because some imperialist shitbag thinks it's a convienient thing to lie out of their ass about supporting. these identities were made due to common communities seeking liberation and if that is ever lost in people's memories than i think i'll actually lose it
it's just as much part of my identity as the inherited duty of revolutionary desire, because it is a factor of that. these people who existed and fought for these things and died for these things have passed down their issues to the people of my time and i refuse to erase them or treat them as historically irrelevant.
have you considered the ways neurodivergency interacts with these things and act of forming identities? do you even know how strongly i experience these things? i'm not assuming you don't, you are a user of this website so there's 90% chance your neurodivergent and feel the same things as me. but that's why i feel so invalidated. it's like you understand how i would feel about this but don't care or don't think it's relevant. it hurts
seriously, fuck you for invalidating an entire fucking hereditary struggle that included more black and indigneous people than people ever give it credit for. it's not a fucking settler ideology, queerness is not a settler ideology, being gay is not a settler ideology. it is not reproducing imperialism to identify as gay, purposefully or not. it is not accidental imperialism to identify as gay. go fuck yourself. if you're correct about any of this than i don't want to live in a world where it's the case. i am a fucking transfemme nonbinary person and i take pride in that identity and i'm not reproducing any fucking settler ideology by saying that, because thousands of colonized people completely identify with that exact identity because of the thousands exactly like them who have died and fought for it against the white settler colonist shitfuck of America. fuck you. if you didn't mean any of that than you should have chosen your fucking words better.
the fucking original US settlers didnt bring this shit over. it was made by all the fucking people who got fucked over by them later on. just because it exists in the context of US history doesn't mean that it's complicit with what the US entity believes and does. fuck you. i believed you were part of this discussion, inside of it, from the very fucking beginning, and i wasn't even remotely as fucking angry as right now then. and i still think you're inside of it, you have stake, you've done research. which is why im so fucking pissed. you should know better than to be a fucking nazbol social scab appealing to people by assuring them their little cishet socialist club doesn't have to actually think about those silly uppity gays. your type is the exact one that made this site completely unusable over the long term for autistic people. FUCK YOU
this shit pisses me off SO FUCKING MUCH because there's NO FUCKING REASON to drive ourselves into fucking insane loops of masturbatory logic that we use to invalidate entire fucking traditions of revolutionary thought, because we don't need any of that FUCKING SHIT to condemn the already-termed blatantly existing POLITICAL MISUSE OF HOMOSEXUALITY for fucking COLONIALISM AND MURDER. many countries don't have a great track record with queer rights but that doesn't excuse fucking colonialism and especially doesn't excuse supporting genocidal countries like the US. i don't see any reason why we have to straight up invalidate so many fucking people when that by itself works and literally anyone with functioning empathy would agree with it readily
ok now thats all out of my system im going to cry now. sorry.
edit: i think i read your entire thing in extremely bad faith due to it being very late over here. not an excuse but fuuuuck i need to stop using social media like ever. im going to need to do some serious self crit. comment left up for responsibility/other's discussion purposes
Gramsci for sure, but also Theodor Adorno (especially enjoyed Jargon of Authenticity) and Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed for understanding the ways that oppressive ideology self-reproduces; Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized and Decolonization and the Decolonized;
and, more specifically for ways that "dominant queer theory" can erase identities within even domestic movements, Julia Serrano's Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Angela Pattatuchi Aragón's Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional and Queer Perspectives, Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People
For explorations of this type of Western-progressive imperialism: Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Nada Elia's Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Saffo Papantanopoulou's Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude, and one I massively recommend, Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
These three are a bit more of a tangent, but Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock's Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Dean Spade's Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Eric A. Stanley's Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex are all great ways to really get at the heart of how American calls for "trans rights/protections" are often channeled towards increased policing, surveillance, militarized borders, and, ultimately, violence against racialized minorities and especially racialized queer people. From within America, it is essential for analyses of queer rights, and for calls for queer safety, to maintain a deeply rigid and principled stance against co-optation for furthering state violence, which is why any such calls from within the US to examine queerphobia abroad not only minimizes the violence faced domestically, but also serves to strengthen imperialist narratives of the necessity of aggression/destabilization of the state's enemies.
As Foucault theorized, even in English society the creation of the “homosexual” as an identity, rather than act, is already a relatively recent development. There are countless cultural milieus in which queerness is performed by entirely different standards than those that are accepted by the “progressive west,” and many of those cultural milieus don’t revolve around a specific coming out narrative or concretized “lifestyles” arrayed by identity tag like in western english “LGBTQ” movements.
What, exactly, does this have to do with being trans or transphobia?
Because, as far as I know, differing gender expressions are usually identities rather than acts in lots of different cultures (I want to say they always are, but I'm not nearly well read enough to be confident in that!) The trans identity might be how it manifested in the West, but there are these different gender identities all over the world that express themselves in many different ways.
This was more about queerness in a broader sense (the survey in the article also covered sexual minorities as well as gender minorities). The article lumps sexual and gender minorities together throughout (LGBTQ) and so I was addressing sexual and gender discrimination as a whole as well. I know the title was specifically about transphobia, but there was nothing specifically about gender identity separate from sexual orientation in the article itself, aside from saying trans people were the most discriminated against.
I will also add: there actually are cultural contexts in which "gender identity" is an act, meaning the gender role is, quite literally, the role that is currently being engendered, and not an intrinsic/total way of being, but that wasn't specifically what I was addressing, I just kept it as broad as the source material I was replying to.
Actually, now that you point it out, lumping gender and sexual minorities together is itself a recent Western development! It's a manifestation of our resistance to cisheteronormative patriarchy within the West specifically, it made sense for us to do it so we could combine our struggles together, but applying it globally is probably going to produce lots of errors.
I will also add: there actually are cultural contexts in which “gender identity” is an act, meaning the gender role is, quite literally, the role that is currently being engendered, and not an intrinsic/total way of being,
Funnily enough, that vibes with how I experience gender. My gender is a performance I do for others so that I fit within the social role I desire. I just don't see enough of a difference to say that being a woman is something I do, rather than someone I am. It's both?
Exactly! Coalitional terminology can be very powerful in building cohesive movements and cross-boundary solidarity, but can serve as a bit of a double-edged sword and lead to a glossing over (or even erasure) of the rich cultural differentiation within (Julia Serrano talks a bit about this in Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People has some really great insights about this, and addresses--in a Canadian context--the way that the dominant trans discourse in Canada is english and thus Canadian legislative and organizational initiatives often reinforce an english framework of transgender that seeks to supplant french transsexualité)
Editing to add: if I'm remembering correctly, Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue talks very specifically about the difficulties in forming those coalitional ties in American organizing between trans people and gay people, and the struggle to get gender minorities and sexual minorities to see their oppression and liberation as intrinsically linked.
My gender is a performance I do for others so that I fit within the social role I desire. I just don't see enough of a difference to say that being a woman is something I do, rather than someone I am. It's both?
If you're interested in learning more about the performance and performstivity of gender identities, Judith Butler is a great starting point.
The framing of this survey is already based on an American anglocentric cultural ideal of what it means to be "LGBTQ." When examining queer rights and identities abroad, it's essential to not fall prey to hegemonic California queer theory that posits queer liberation involves a universal "coming out" and an acceptance of specific, english identifiers in society.
As Foucault theorized, even in English society the creation of the "homosexual" as an identity, rather than act, is already a relatively recent development. There are countless cultural milieus in which queerness is performed by entirely different standards than those that are accepted by the "progressive west," and many of those cultural milieus don't revolve around a specific coming out narrative or concretized "lifestyles" arrayed by identity tag like in western english "LGBTQ" movements.
The essential markers of queer liberation are legal protections--which the PRC ensures; medical protections--which the PRC ensures; employment protections--which the PRC ensures; economic protections--which the PRC ensures; food security--which the PRC ensures; housing--which the PRC ensures; and safety--which the PRC ensures.
Now what is ensured legally and what plays out in practice are very different--for instance, though HRT is covered in many urban centres, those in smaller cities or in outlying rural provinces struggle to find doctors accepting of gender diversity. This gets worse as people come to expect specific western promises of queer liberation (that, I may add, few western nations ever deliver on themselves). The PRC is still a widely rural and socially conservative (by western standards that don't consider things like food and shelter to be socially progressive) nation, however there is direct evidence that with an improvement in economic conditions within different precincts in the PRC has come a relative increase in the social acceptance of LGBTQ family members and a diminishing of social discrimination.
Queer liberation will not come from pink imperialism, it will come from the emancipation of the impoverished masses, something the PRC is at the forefront of: since the 90s, 60% of all eradicated poverty globally has been China.
Edited to add: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-08834-y here is a paper you can read specifically about the increase in queer acceptance as income increases. China isn't perfect by a long shot, but by ensuring their ability to lift the quality of life of their people, by staving off imperialist aggression, they are already doing more for queer people than most places. Is there gay marriage? No, but with increased acceptance that will likely come with time, and if I'm being honest I have a lot of negative things to say about how gay marriage was leveraged in the west to defang a much more vibrant movement for queer rights and fold a large portion of people into the status quo and away from their radical coalition with feminists attacking the institution of marriage itself.
Felt bad about not including some books in this post--I always like to recommend further reading when I can--so I came back to this thread after finishing dinner when I can crack open my library.
China's Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism, Ali Kadri is a great look at the functions of imperialism as a waste-commodity producing system, and Chinese economic development in the face of neoliberal wars of encroachment. (The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction is where the theory is most strongly laid out, but the one I recommended gives a decent overview and really hones in on China's refusal of the world neoliberal order.)
For a look at some more cultural explorations of queer identity in China (including Taiwan, which is more accepting of queer people than much of mainland China) from a variety of perspectives both critical and supportive of the CPC:
Transgender China, Howard Chiang
Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life, Denise Tse-Shang Tang
Oral History of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten, Travis S. K. Kong
Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies, Chou Wah-shan
Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China, Tiantian Zheng
Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness, Jamie J. Zhao
Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder, Hongwei Bao
Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism, Hongwei Bao
Queer Comrades 2018: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China, Hongwei Bao
Queer Media in China, Hongwei Bao
Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, Jing Jamie Zhao
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires, Francisca Yuenki Lai
Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan, Hans Tao-Ming Huang
Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, Susan Brownell, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Thomas Laqueur is a good background on a lot of the strict gender roles and their historical context that is at play.
Gender Policy and HIV in China: Catalyzing Policy Change, Dr. Qiang Ren, Prof. Baochang Gu, Prof. Xioayin Zheng (this one is more a policy analysis, but gives a lot of insight into sexual policy in China, especially in regards to sex work (which has traditionally been on the fringes of "queer" sexual theorizing).
A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: the Na of China, Cai Hua (not traditionally "queer" per LGBT theorizing, but the Na are a culture in the Himalayan region that practice communal child rearing, which has historically been attacked by Christian colonial missionaries in Turtle Island and abroad as a perverse and "queer" family form that very much falls outside of the cisheteronormative social structure).
great recommendations comrade
this is awesome (both your first comment with thoughts and analysis and also all these reading recommendations), thank you!
Yup, saving this post. Definitely one of the best of hexbear.
literally no gay person in the west does that they just take pride in the "identity tags" because its a great way to be explicit about things the weirdos hate which feels nice to do
this stuff feels so goddamn invalidating to queer people in western countries. we invented these labels, they were never intended for NGO's or imperialism. they were meant for us. i refuse to treat them as if the forces of imperialism own them (and I therefore take immense offense to their use in pinkwashing). but don't confuse us ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE in western countries with the people using the idea of us without our permission or consent to hurt ACTUAL QUEER PEOPLE in other countries. We do not support nor condone the political misuse of us, and the people who coined these terms and worked towards queer liberation never, ever wished for them to be used this way.
so please don't fucking treat the queer community, LGBTQ+ community, whatever, as if it only exists as a distinction to oppress and consume, as if our own conceptions and ideas of ourselves are completely invalid and made up. we made these distinctions for ourselves and not for the patriarchal, cis, heteronormative straight fucks up in palaces made of skulls to use them maliciously to hurt others. fuck the imperial machine not just for the result of that specifically but also for tying our community to murder and conquest when no normal fucking gay person here in the capitalist hellhole West ever asked for that. pete buttigieg does not speak for the LGBTQ+ community.
of course places should have their own ability to develop queer theory and terms and ideas. but that's exactly why the misuse of english queer terminology pisses me off so much, it's reduced it to an imperialist scheme in the eyes of the world instead of the individual stepping stone it's creators and the people who DIED for it fighting cops on the street intended it to be.
I have a few things I would like to reply with here, but I want to start with assuring you that no part of my analysis is meant as any kind of personal attack on individual queer people; I realize this can be a sensitive topic and at times that can cause people to feel defensive about discussions, but what I wrote about is western hegemony not individual western queers. I'm sorry for any feelings of invalidation you may feel.
Secondly, I will say that there is an implication in your response that I am somehow "outside" of the discussion. That is to say, you imply that you are "actual queer" and that I am not and thus have no place to speak about "actual queers." I'm not sure what led to this assumption, but it's nowhere in my text, and any quick follow-up showing the sheer amount I study and recommend queer theory (in this thread and elsewhere) should serve as at least a rudimentary hint that I am very much "inside" the discussion, and don't appreciate your implication that I have no place to make this analysis.
Now, as to your point: when discussing cultural hegemony, the intentions and the desires of the individual are quite literally immaterial: it doesn't matter what individual queer people intend with their language. The hegemonic institutions of western imperialism are pervasive and invasive, and whether a settler intends to participate in the perpetuation of hegemony or not is irrelevant to the fact that the settler inevitably and inescapably does participate in it. From the innocuous application of english identifiers to other cultures (like claiming that hijra, or two-spirit, or travesti, or transsexuelles are transgender) to outright purposeful queer imperialism. It doesn't matter, it all lends to the weight of the cultural hegemony of the english colonial world.
Even within english itself there are hegemonic ideals of queer identity that get reified through repetition: it is no individual's fault, it is just the way that structures of hegemony function. This is how the word transsexual fell out of vogue, how fairy, dyke and transvestite became relics to mainstream queer theory. And that mainstream is led by white academics and the media apparatus of the bourgeoisie, like it or not.
I also have to disagree with your statement that "literally no gay person in the west does that." Queer media (including posts in this very forum) are rife with discussions of the coming out narrative, and in the western queer lexicon someone is gay, for instance. Homosexuality is not an act, it is a way of being. That's not a value judgement, it's just the way that gayness works in the mainstream (hegemonic) western english culture. The identity tags, while they may matter to varying degrees and for varying reasons to different individuals, do serve the purpose in the mainstream culture of informing a reading of a person's every action, whether we desire it or not. If a trans artist writes a song, that becomes a trans song. For example: look at UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU by Ada Rook. The first song on the album, "im cis" quite literally says "i say none of my songs are about being trans" and yet the first review published about the album spoke about it being a trans album. (Backxwash has talked about this as well, that her album was largely about immigrant experience, racism, and suicidal ideation, but every article about her when she won the Polaris was about "Trans Musician Backxwash.")
On the other hand, plenty of queer people, whether enthusiastically, reluctantly, ironically, or earnestly, contribute to discussions/memes/discourse about being gay or being trans or whatever other label. Again, this is not a value judgement, it is just a thing that I have personally observed and studied (and participated in, because, as I said, the way hegemony works is we are all implicated to varying degrees). It's not inherently a bad thing (and can even be affirming for the participant), but that does mean that the hegemony is continuing to be reasserted. And the real problem is when it gets applied cross-culturally without introspection.
To take it to the way anglo hegemony works: whether you desire it or not, english is the language of the global hegemon. When you use it, when you translate cultural ideas and feelings into english, you are participating in the spread of that hegemony. Things that exist in non-english cultural contexts necessarily undergo transformation to be translated into english to be understood by an english audience. That's the very nature of translation. However, because of the imbalance in power between english (as the colonial language of the global hegemon) and other languages, this is by its very nature a translation that serves to further cultural hegemony.
The point, I suppose, is that settlers perpetuate hegemony whether they wish to or not, whether they are victims of that hegemony or not, and that goes for queer settlers too. (the colonized perpetuate hegemony too, that is its nature, to become instantiated in the society such that it is self-reproducing)
that is not at ALL what i was implying. the entirety of those lines were meant to be specifying how the US pinkwashing machine aren't queer themselves but that they appropriate language from actual queer people to dismiss and harass other actual queer people. As in you are not outside of it, but the US is.
the actual thing i was trying to criticize with your comment is something you repeated here. there's this implication that identifying as gay, trans, etc is inherently simply a "narrative" or something that wouldn't exist without western brainwashing. This is technically true, but misses the fact that "coming out" is a concept that was created specifically because queer people are ostracized in hell country. It's not a western narrative crafted to deceive the public, it's a result of both being assigned an identity of being "other" and the purposeful internalization of that identity as part of our liberation (see the numerous other groups that do this in response to their oppression and see positive results)
I agree that forcefully and naively applying this across cultures is a very bad and often violent thing. I disagree that the queer struggle and community is invalid or somehow unreal within the context of the US culture. In fact both of those facts are because of the same reason, the queer struggle in the US was made because of US culture and therefore by definition doesn't make sense elsewhere, as you said elsewhere in the thread in reference to the coalitions between sexual and gender identity minorities in the US.
fuuuuuck offffff. it is not queers doing imperialism. it is the US pinkwashing their shitty practices to retroactively justify them and blackmail people overseas with their NGOs. nothing about it is queer. the "western queers" are not a boogeyman that you have to be afraid of. queer people are not bourgoisie decadence or a falsehood of the West. queer imperialism is a misnomer at best and outright incomprehensible at worst. maybe this is not what you meant by your comments but it's just. so. fucking. infuriatingly invalidating feeling. like oh im sorry i grew up in a country where a queer identity has a direct material and ideological relevancy due to it's effectiveness in building solidarity, guess i'll just stop identifying as gay because it's fake or something. fucking hell
you know the concept of epistemic injustice? thats the kind of shit that exists without these identities and terms in the US. obviously different terms have to be made in other countries due to having entirely different contexts but that implicitly also means those terms are effective and relevant INSIDE the U$
this whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. i absolutely refuse to not take pride in my identity just because some imperialist shitbag thinks it's a convienient thing to lie out of their ass about supporting. these identities were made due to common communities seeking liberation and if that is ever lost in people's memories than i think i'll actually lose it
it's just as much part of my identity as the inherited duty of revolutionary desire, because it is a factor of that. these people who existed and fought for these things and died for these things have passed down their issues to the people of my time and i refuse to erase them or treat them as historically irrelevant.
have you considered the ways neurodivergency interacts with these things and act of forming identities? do you even know how strongly i experience these things? i'm not assuming you don't, you are a user of this website so there's 90% chance your neurodivergent and feel the same things as me. but that's why i feel so invalidated. it's like you understand how i would feel about this but don't care or don't think it's relevant. it hurts
seriously, fuck you for invalidating an entire fucking hereditary struggle that included more black and indigneous people than people ever give it credit for. it's not a fucking settler ideology, queerness is not a settler ideology, being gay is not a settler ideology. it is not reproducing imperialism to identify as gay, purposefully or not. it is not accidental imperialism to identify as gay. go fuck yourself. if you're correct about any of this than i don't want to live in a world where it's the case. i am a fucking transfemme nonbinary person and i take pride in that identity and i'm not reproducing any fucking settler ideology by saying that, because thousands of colonized people completely identify with that exact identity because of the thousands exactly like them who have died and fought for it against the white settler colonist shitfuck of America. fuck you. if you didn't mean any of that than you should have chosen your fucking words better.
the fucking original US settlers didnt bring this shit over. it was made by all the fucking people who got fucked over by them later on. just because it exists in the context of US history doesn't mean that it's complicit with what the US entity believes and does. fuck you. i believed you were part of this discussion, inside of it, from the very fucking beginning, and i wasn't even remotely as fucking angry as right now then. and i still think you're inside of it, you have stake, you've done research. which is why im so fucking pissed. you should know better than to be a fucking nazbol social scab appealing to people by assuring them their little cishet socialist club doesn't have to actually think about those silly uppity gays. your type is the exact one that made this site completely unusable over the long term for autistic people. FUCK YOU
this shit pisses me off SO FUCKING MUCH because there's NO FUCKING REASON to drive ourselves into fucking insane loops of masturbatory logic that we use to invalidate entire fucking traditions of revolutionary thought, because we don't need any of that FUCKING SHIT to condemn the already-termed blatantly existing POLITICAL MISUSE OF HOMOSEXUALITY for fucking COLONIALISM AND MURDER. many countries don't have a great track record with queer rights but that doesn't excuse fucking colonialism and especially doesn't excuse supporting genocidal countries like the US. i don't see any reason why we have to straight up invalidate so many fucking people when that by itself works and literally anyone with functioning empathy would agree with it readily
ok now thats all out of my system im going to cry now. sorry.
edit: i think i read your entire thing in extremely bad faith due to it being very late over here. not an excuse but fuuuuck i need to stop using social media like ever. im going to need to do some serious self crit. comment left up for responsibility/other's discussion purposes
hi, any links to hegemony, are you mostly working off of gramsci? ty in advance
Gramsci for sure, but also Theodor Adorno (especially enjoyed Jargon of Authenticity) and Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed for understanding the ways that oppressive ideology self-reproduces; Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized and Decolonization and the Decolonized;
and, more specifically for ways that "dominant queer theory" can erase identities within even domestic movements, Julia Serrano's Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Angela Pattatuchi Aragón's Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional and Queer Perspectives, Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People
For explorations of this type of Western-progressive imperialism: Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Nada Elia's Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Saffo Papantanopoulou's Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude, and one I massively recommend, Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
These three are a bit more of a tangent, but Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock's Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Dean Spade's Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Eric A. Stanley's Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex are all great ways to really get at the heart of how American calls for "trans rights/protections" are often channeled towards increased policing, surveillance, militarized borders, and, ultimately, violence against racialized minorities and especially racialized queer people. From within America, it is essential for analyses of queer rights, and for calls for queer safety, to maintain a deeply rigid and principled stance against co-optation for furthering state violence, which is why any such calls from within the US to examine queerphobia abroad not only minimizes the violence faced domestically, but also serves to strengthen imperialist narratives of the necessity of aggression/destabilization of the state's enemies.
What, exactly, does this have to do with being trans or transphobia?
Because, as far as I know, differing gender expressions are usually identities rather than acts in lots of different cultures (I want to say they always are, but I'm not nearly well read enough to be confident in that!) The trans identity might be how it manifested in the West, but there are these different gender identities all over the world that express themselves in many different ways.
This was more about queerness in a broader sense (the survey in the article also covered sexual minorities as well as gender minorities). The article lumps sexual and gender minorities together throughout (LGBTQ) and so I was addressing sexual and gender discrimination as a whole as well. I know the title was specifically about transphobia, but there was nothing specifically about gender identity separate from sexual orientation in the article itself, aside from saying trans people were the most discriminated against.
I will also add: there actually are cultural contexts in which "gender identity" is an act, meaning the gender role is, quite literally, the role that is currently being engendered, and not an intrinsic/total way of being, but that wasn't specifically what I was addressing, I just kept it as broad as the source material I was replying to.
Ah, okay, that makes sense.
Actually, now that you point it out, lumping gender and sexual minorities together is itself a recent Western development! It's a manifestation of our resistance to cisheteronormative patriarchy within the West specifically, it made sense for us to do it so we could combine our struggles together, but applying it globally is probably going to produce lots of errors.
Funnily enough, that vibes with how I experience gender. My gender is a performance I do for others so that I fit within the social role I desire. I just don't see enough of a difference to say that being a woman is something I do, rather than someone I am. It's both?
Exactly! Coalitional terminology can be very powerful in building cohesive movements and cross-boundary solidarity, but can serve as a bit of a double-edged sword and lead to a glossing over (or even erasure) of the rich cultural differentiation within (Julia Serrano talks a bit about this in Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People has some really great insights about this, and addresses--in a Canadian context--the way that the dominant trans discourse in Canada is english and thus Canadian legislative and organizational initiatives often reinforce an english framework of transgender that seeks to supplant french transsexualité)
Editing to add: if I'm remembering correctly, Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue talks very specifically about the difficulties in forming those coalitional ties in American organizing between trans people and gay people, and the struggle to get gender minorities and sexual minorities to see their oppression and liberation as intrinsically linked.
If you're interested in learning more about the performance and performstivity of gender identities, Judith Butler is a great starting point.