EXCEPTIONAL POPULAR NEO-QUEER FAMILIES AND TRANSMASCULINE RESISTENCE: ENVISIONING A QUEER FUTURE

Elizabeth McNeill

U.S. popular politics and culture posit post-queer discourses to create an illusion of social equality by partitioning sex, race, class, gender, and sexuality to obscure the material constraints of subjugation that queer and queer of color subjects endure. Thus, postulating the U.S. as exceptional in its treatment of LGBT citizens. This sleight of hand, the U.S. claiming all now enjoy civil equality, masterfully erases the privileged status of white heterosexual cisgender middleclass men as the Subject. Erasing the use of the universal subject in U.S. politics and claiming all are equal obscures the reality that the material conditions of inequality have not been alleviated. This is evidenced with even a cursory investigation into popular politics and media. “Affectual looping,” disconnecting the past from the present through the popular retelling of previous historical narratives by the oppressed, is an affective/effective tool for erasing histories of subjugation so “equality” can be claimed. Thus, history and even activism are being appropriated to reflect a neo-queer story of “alternative facts,” depoliticizing issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality facilitating the appropriation and erasure of queer subjects. Additionally, popular media’s framing of transmasculine subjects as loud, unattractive, lying, cheating, and stealing, accompanied by an aggressive attitude and propensity to commit violence, criminalizes female masculine identities and casts them as outside the American family, often in prison. This familiar trope of aggressive female masculinity produced through cultural imperialism frames transmasculinity as needing punishment, sensationalizing transmasculinity as a spectacle to consume. This reduces transmasculine subjugation and violence to a “transmasculine refusal” to adjust a bad aggressive attitude. Such narratives position transmasculinities as outside the family because of their aggressive temperament, propensity to violence, and their idle “refusal” to discard their “costume.” Thus, portraying transmasculine subjects as refusing family because they would rather wear an “offensive costume.” By their refusal to soften their aggression, transmasculine subjects allegedly make an active choice to refuse the family. Therefore, marking the family as the access point to equality, which enables a reinvestment in heteropatriarchy.

EXCEPTIONAL POPULAR NEO-QUEER FAMILIES AND TRANSMASCULINE RESISTENCE: ENVISIONING A QUEER FUTURE

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