JEFF GOLDSTEIN: The United States of Queer.

From the perspective of Queer Theory, when Kelly claims to be “speaking the truth,” the very act she lays claim to is an affront to the Queer activist, who doesn’t believe in truth in any important way. What we may call “reality” is to the Theorist only a collection of discourses always in conflict. The meta-narratives — which are the dominant discourses that inform us culturally — are where the real power resides: they provide the frames of reference we live inside, and that we are socialized into accepting are the universal truths that determine our ways of knowing.

One of these phallogocentric — male-created and maintained, by way of male privilege and power — meta-narratives is, under the framework of western Enlightenment thinking, “Science,” which must itself be constantly “problematized.” It is science that informs us that humans exist within a sexual binary, with few and rare genetic anomalies. To the Queer theorist, though — and by extension, the Queer activist — this binary must be rejected entirely, because it is nothing more than a white male creation meant to maintain the subjugation of those who exist outside the binary’s demands. Thus, no one is “male” or “female,” just as no one is “gay” or “straight”, but rather on a spectrum, with gayness and straightness in all of us to varying degrees. We are each Schrödinger’s Faggot, perpetually and potentially both in and out of the closet.

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