A Queer Becoming

Words by Madison Grace (She/They)

It’s December and the afternoon shimmers with heat. I’m in a pair of black undies sitting on a small wooden stool on the bright concrete in K’s backyard. The backs of my thighs are damp on the seat. I suck my beer and then turn my face up to the sun, kaleidoscopes of red and orange behind my eyes. The fly-wire door swings open, and I come back down. You ready? K asks.

Yeah. A low buzzing. Then a pulling at my scalp. Is that alright?Yeah. She drags the blade back over my head. The first clumps of hair land on my shoulders. I close my eyes. Every now and then I open them and look down — a growing pattern of dark wispy lines. The buzzing stops. Okay I think I’m done — turn around. I swing myself around and K bends down to level her face with mine. Her eyes roll over me, her mouth cracks open and with one hand she brushes my head, sending tiny hairs flying. So? I ask, nervous. Go look, she laughs, standing up. I go to the sun shaped mirror hanging on the brick wall. My face swims into its centre. I turn my head slowly from side to side, angle my jaw up and down. K appears over my shoulder. You like it? she asks, sliding her hands around my waist.I look at her in the mirror, Yeah. I love it. You look, she kisses my neck, so hot.

Sometimes, ideas feel inevitable. Necessary. They are so deeply embedded in our ways of living, that they become our way of thinking. Without them, things get messy. Queer theory emerged as a field of critical study in the 1990s — inviting us to embrace messy. While, famously, queer theorists didn’t agree on what ‘queer’ meant, they did agree that what they were doing was resisting the idea of identity as something fixed, coherent and natural. Queer is fluid, is a reclamation of strangeness, it is both/and, it is ambiguous and – messy. It resists order, resists definition. Much of the work of Queer theory is based on the ideas of philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault was interested in tracing the ways that humans develop knowledge about themselves. Knowledge, he proposes, is an unstable thing. It is not an essence – it’s forever in flux, shifting, relative. We form it ourselves through the ways we think and speak, and – through the ways we are thought and spoken about. To illustrate his point, he took up the idea of sexuality.

In The History of Sexuality – his four-volume manifesto – Foucault examines the emergence of sexuality as a concept. By tracing back into ancient societies from the present day, Foucault shows that the notion of sexuality as inherent to a person – sitting at their definitional centre – is a relatively recent idea.

Foucault rebuts the widespread idea that in the 17th/18th/19th centuries, in a Western context, sex was repressed before being liberated in the 20th century. Sex, he writes, was brought into the spotlight in the 17th century when Christianity decreed that all desires be spoken – and therefore, transformed into dialogue – in the form of the confessional. In this early form, the pillars of Christianity worked to draw the moral boundaries: whose desires were sinful, and whose desires were not. This wealth of dialogue about people – their lustfulness, their sexual habits, their kinks – meant that sex became an object, a topic to talk about, to know, to study. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this is exactly what happened.

Sex was taken up as an object of study in medical, judicial and scientific circles – these circles working in an interdisciplinary way and producing a binary of natural/unnatural, or: normal/deviant. These words – normal and deviant – were used as nouns, as identity labels. And sex, within public discourse, stopped being an act/s and became, instead, a means of identifying individual and groups within the population. These ideas about sex simultaneously naturalised ideas about gender – ‘normal’ sexualities matched ‘normal’ gender identities, or expressions of gender. And, Foucault added, when your identity is pathologised as deviant, shameful and, therefore, punishable, the subject must censor themselves – becoming complicit in the processes of normalising.

That year, I went home for Christmas. I was bracing myself for the why’s and the tight lipped smiles of extended family. I wasn’t sure that I just felt like it would be a good enough answer for them, and I didn’t think I was sure enough of my own queerness for it to hold. That is to say: I was afraid of the shame.

The questions came, but the shame didn’t. Instead I felt very still and very sure in my difference. Finally, the way I looked matched the way I had always felt — I was reclaiming a strangeness, my space, stepping into it rather than away from it. And, nobody could look away. Their gazes were fixed firmly on me.

How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?, Maggie Nelson writes, how does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality – or anything else, really – is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? This is what feels empowering about queer as a loose identity position – its undefinable form, its insistence on desire as directive. An endless becoming.

But, aren’t we all – always – in a process of becoming? We age. We adapt to circumstance. And change because of this adaptation. Our beliefs, our ethics and our knowledge shifts, expands – shakes itself off. We are always finding newness, or remaking the old.

Sometimes, becoming does have a direction. A path to follow, a destination you are approaching. Other times, this becoming is just becoming. Turning over, circling back. Finding pleasure in the transient, in wide open space.

I haven’t looked back. Once my hair gets long enough to grab between my fingers, I shave it back. Bleach it blonde. Or not. Sometimes K etches a sloping line from the top of my ears down to the nape of my neck. With a shaved head, I feel like a dyke and a mystery. Beautiful and tough. Woman and man. Both and neither. Me, and more than me. A blooming of possibility.