Queernorm

[ysabetwordsmith]

Linkspam: Metas on SFFsetting Queernormativity and D/s (Reply)

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.


These two entries talk about settings in which queer (of various styles) is considered normal. I find it perfectly plausible -- because, in fact, local-Earth HAS cultures with that feature. It's just not currently popular in big, powerful, mainstream cultures because they are stupid. Yet another case where foreign cultures can be stranger than most aliens.

So of course, I write settings that are queernorm fairly often. Some are human, like Eloquent Souls. Some are alien, like Feathered Nests. Some have parameters that are just totally different from ours, like Beneath the Family Tree, where you can more-or-less see what modern culture would probably think of the characters but they have different views of themselves. Then you have to stop and think, what is queerness? It is transgression across the lines drawn by a culture for sex/romance. So in a culture that expects everyone to be bisexual, that would not be queer by its standards, whereas monosexuality would be; but to mainstream American perspective, that's backwards.

Don't look at me, I think the prejudice is stupid and I'm culturally eclectic anyhow. Queer is normal and queerphobia is a mental illness.

Anyhow, people are talking about favorite queernorm canons, so pitch in what you like.

Comments

Species Specifics

[goatgodschild]

I didn't see him as such at the time, but I would say now that my character Matan Flipperfoot is queer, by the standards of the fantasy world he lives in. He was created to be a wholly unique creature -- he is a species of one. Because of this, he has to explain now and then that, no, aside from being very obviously not human, he has no "people".

Re: Species Specifics

[ysabetwordsmith]

That makes sense. Unique people have their own challenges.

In Terramagne, it's interesting because a few superpowers are really tight-knit culturally, like teleporters and telepaths. Sometimes people who gain powers from the same incident form a cohort, like Junket's cohort. But there's one group that truly became a new people because not only did they come from the same event, it was a village-sized mass of several thousand folks: the Blue People. They soon found out that it's dominant genetically too, which means they can sustain that population and culture.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know that the entire Canon could be called queernorm, but one of my favorite queernorm moments was in Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel. We spend several episodes getting to know Sam Adama, the future commander's uncle, as a badass mobster, and then one episode we see him at home and meet his husband. It's not a big "And he's Gay!" moment; I'm not sure the scene would have changed at all if Sam had a wife instead, because the point wasn't that Sam had a husband, it was that this was a family teaching a younger member a cultural thing (details fuzzy: it's been years). The non-event of it is what stuck out to me.

--Jessica

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's called background parity, when a trait is shown but not made the center of attention. It's typically a later stage in identity literature.

[arlie]

A lot depends on what you mean by "queernormativity".

I find it vanishingly unlikely that there'd be a culture that favors every thing our culture considers "queer," while dis-favoring every single thing our culture thinks of as non-queer, i.e. normal. The only way that would happen is if it were founded by people raised in our culture, who were at the stage of rebellion against their upbringing where "reverse everything" seems like a good solution to all its problems. And the culture wouldn't last, certainly not beyond the founding generation, without a constant influx of fresh young refugees - ideally one selected to consist entirely of people considered "queer" where they grew up.

But that's what I first thought must be the intended meaning of "queernormativity".

The next option would be a culture where there's no pressure on anyone to be a certain way. I don't see that happening either, not with humans involved. We far too often want our kids to be "like us", or alternatively to fulfill our dreams that we were never able to attain for ourselves.

And there are some ways of being that cause problems - either for the person living that way, or those around them. Who wants their child to grow up to be e.g. a miserable drug addict. Who wants anyone to grow up to be a violent bully?

You can of course argue that most of my examples don't involve gender-coded or sexual behaviour. That's easily solved; the violent bully includes rape among their self-expressive activities, and the miserable drug addict believes their only purpose in life is to produce babies, but is unfortunately infertile, and so tried to solve their depression with chemical assistance.

But my bottom line is that I can't imagine humans who don't meddle in other people's business, particularly that of those with less ability to control their own lives, and especially their own children. Moreover, parents need to do this, to an extent, if they want their children to survive infancy, never mind grow up to be functional adults. Thus it's programmed into human innate tendencies, unlikely to be entirely suppressed by culture. And because circumstances differ, the boundaries of this instinct are fuzzy - thus pressuring adult children to "give me grandchildren", "get a better job", "dump that loser", or "convert to the True Religion I've only recently found".

I find it easy to believe in cultures with different rules to "our" current culture; I'm old enough to have lived in several. I can even believe in cultures being more or less strict about their required life style(s), with more or less acceptable variety and tolerance of "eccentrics" vs punishment/incarceration of lunatics/sinners/perverts. But no rules or enforcement at all? Not among humans.