I’m going to do more research on this in the months to come (as usual) but one of the most disturbing and heartbreaking impacts of queer theory is “queering the dead.”
“The queer community needs to
sustain the restrictive, claustrophobic, and alienating structure of
gender; without it, the queer as a concept would make no sense. And
their drive to claim any and all who violate the dictates of womanhood
as “men” or manhood as “women” is central to this mission. A woman
casting off femininity and ritualized submission while still being a woman
is a threat to the male supremacist idea of what females can be; a
woman casting off femininity and ritualized submission so as to become a
man leaves the “woman = submissive resource” structure intact. They
want romantic individuals bucking the system’s stifling constraints, but
never actually threatening the existence of the system itself. In other
words, they need outlaws, not rebels.”
So, women who were strong, brave, outgoing, doctors, soldiers or warriors or fighters, leaders, inventors, politicians, and anything else that demonstrates the female ability and capacity to be more than a mother, nurturer, romantic interest, or sex object, are being rewritten as men. In other words, under the influence of queer historical revisionism: if any woman is not stereotypically a woman then she must not actually have been a woman.
I first encountered queer historical revisionism/ female erasure on this website many months back where a post with thousands of notes (with all supportive comments except for about one) claims as a fact that a woman who passed as a man to become a medical doctor was really wanting to be a man.
In these queer revisionisms, there is no consideration for the fact that throughout human history, women on the basis of them being female have been denied access to politics, positions of power and leadership, education, combat roles, and more and that these women relied on being male-passing in order to have experiences that were only accessible to men on the basis of them being male.
In queering the dead, specifically female-born-women, Feminist analysis of institutionalized and systematic male privilege is completely tossed out the window (more like buried) in favor of a type of queering of historical figures that is in some cases not only anachronistic but a heinous type of female erasure that completely removeswomen’s historical contributions.
The reason this is so painful for me personally is because it was the histories of women warriors, female rulers and leaders, female inventors, female philosophers, female doctors, and more, that inspired me, gave me strength (and still give me strength), and brought me to Feminism.
I read The Encyclopedia of Amazonswhich is an “alphabetical reference work on women from ancient
mythology, religion, literature, American Indian folklore, and historywhose lives were spent in combat.” The book has over 1,000 entries.
I read Hell Hath No Fury: True Stories of Women at War from Antiquity to Iraq. Since these women were warriors – something stereotypically “manly”, clearly a “male-thing” – queer theory could easily rewrite them as men, especially if they spent a period of their life passing as male in order to do what they had to do.
I was so young then and I wonder about the young teenaged girls now who want to learn about women’s history but already can’t find much, not only because it isn’t taught (in detail especially) in their schools but also because queer theory is capable of destroying any remnant of female contribution barely available to them now.
Queer activists can write women out of history by replacing female pronouns with male pronouns, “masculinizing” the names of female historical figures or using their male-passing names as indicative of their supposed desired biological sex or gendered sense of self despite there being little to no evidence that they had sex dysphoria and would permanently transition if they could.
In the case of queering the dead: women wanting access to certain opportunities and experiences denied them due to patriarchy privileging male people over them IS these women actually WANTING to be male! The obvious fallacy here is that identifying with is not the same as identifying as. You can want to be a warrior, something that’s a part of the male role, and not want to actually be male.
