menu
Comment

OPINION: What Do Queers Want? by Jason Thomas-Fournillier

April 29, 2022

After a quarter of a century the question that remains is what do queers want? The gay agenda aims to identify and rescue LGBTQ+ people from oppressive conditions in which they live in. The universalising nature of white neoliberal relationships in which some countries in the global north assume the responsibility in the global south.

Focusing on the Arab and Muslim world, the gay agenda reach is global. LGBTQ+ political points have been made with its perceived benevolence of the global north as a body of people organisations and people whose goal is to liberate LGBTQ+ people from oppression.

The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody. The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you’ve just told them. It comes to this then, there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted and discriminated.

Queer communities have political agendas, we fight to be accepted by heterosexist mainstream society or resist assimilation into the heteronormative culture. I’ve found that such a usage of queer brings solidarity to a marginalised group, giving them power in numbers however ignoring the differences among people and groups. This form of lumping everyone who falls outside of social norms under the category of queer ignores the differences between them and thus misrepresenting us as the same. Labelling a group as queer could also reinforce gendered and sexualised dichotomies by creating queer in relationship to and opposition with all others who represent ‘normal’ heteronormative society.

At this current point in history, queer connotes a new meaning and political commitment. Since the widespread emergence of biological and social notions linked to sexuality and gender, queer has been used to challenge the pervasive inequalities that stem from this recent historical shift in constructions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Although queer has opened space for resistance, transnational research and debates have also challenged it. Despite these challenges, queer remains a concept, form of activism that continues to push and disrupt established boundaries and binaries.

X