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Queerness Quotes

Browse 43 quotes about Queerness.

Queerness Quotes

“I used to think that she [my mother] wanted me to be someone else. But it wasn’t her who wanted me to be someone else - it was me. She pushed and challenged me. And I didn’t like it. But it wasn’t because she wanted to ruin my day. She was, in some ways, like Dante’s mother. They both expected their sons to be decent human beings - and they were going to do everything they could to make that happen. And they sure as hell let us know when we weren’t getting it.”

KindnessParentingQueernessMothers And Sons
Book:Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World
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“We all carry unseen stories under our skin. We hold identities around ethnicity, gender, ability, or religion that remain invisible and are discounted by the world around us. We wish for a sense of belonging without negotiation, explanation, or being required to somehow prove our validity. In a world of separation and division, we need to learn to be better at seeing (and believing) each other.”

IdentityDiversityLabelsBelongingInclusionVisibilityQueernessDeiIdentities
Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
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“What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth...if silence is golden it is also in this case, very expedient.”

IgnorancePrivilegeCommon SenseInvisibilityConventionQueerness
Author:Radclyffe Hall
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“The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain... Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think that men love wars... And my incurable anger, my unbendable wounds break open further with ears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.”

WarFeminismLesbianQueerness
Book:The Dream of a Common Language
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“Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment.”

LoveSexSexualityQueerQueerness
Book:A Dialogue on Love
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“But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself. Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste... Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up... A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”

HopeGrowing UpSuicideLgbtqQueerness
Book:How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
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“The Sex Wars are over, I've been told, and it always makes me want to ask who won. But my sense of humor may be a little obscure to women who have never felt threatened by the way most lesbians use and mean the words "pervert" and "queer." I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian -- femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed.”

QueerBdsmTransgressionHegemonyFemmeLesbianismQueernessPervertSex Wars
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. SIGNED.
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“We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious.”

Love Is LoveQueernessPansexualityFalling For People Not GendersFree Of Gender ConstraintsOmnisexuality
Book:Every Day
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“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. (p. 1)”

LgbtqUtopiaQueernessFuturity
Book:Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
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“Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.”

IdentityUnpredictabilityOutside The BoxQueernessAlways Be YourselfInfinitely IndefiniteThe New Normal
Book:Golden Boy
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“Androgyny doesn't look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purpose of legibility feels futile... As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness”

GenderQueernessQueer TheoryAndrogynyQueer LitGender PresentationEyes Without A Face
Book:It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
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“And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.”

UtopiaQueernessQueer TheoryAfrofuturism
Book:The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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“Bisexual passing also exposes the often-invisible structure of monosexism, since by crossing the monosexist line [by passing] we show that it exists. Our passing also threatens people's own "pure" identities, because despite the fact that we may look or act like them, we are not in fact like them. This means that we represent their anxiety of being "polluted,”

PrivilegeBisexualityQueernessBisexual IssuesMonosexuality
Book:Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution
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“I began to realize that the stability I had felt all my life was actually a mix of resignation and illusion. I had resigned myself to living a life of struggle, accepting the oppressive nature of capitalism, racism, ad patriarchy as simply the way it was. I had grown not just accustomed to oppression but comfortable with it.”

Travel WritingBlack Women QuotesBlack PowerQueernessBlack Feminist
Book:Are We Free Yet?: The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America
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“When he was with a client, he had to be careful not to use any of the forbidden words. Struggle, resist, rebel, queer—and a host of others—were considered too radical by the State and had been banned decades ago, replaced with more innocuous words such as 'to make effort ', 'to dispute' and 'to betray'. Queer, having passed through 'LGBTQIA+' at the turn of the century and 'Sexual and gender divergents' to decades later, now had no permissible equivalent that wasn't a slur. As the linguists working in the State knew very well, without a vocabulary to express it, there could be no concept. By banning the very idea of queerness, they hoped that the people themselves would also disappear.”

StruggleRebelQueerLinguisticsResistQueernessDoublespeakReappropriation
Book:Margins and Murmurations
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“It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.”

LifestyleQueerQueernessPansexual
Book:Black Wave
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“It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, human ideas about life and the world and words that mean nothing, about definitions that mean nothing to Earth, to nature, to the universe. Boys and girls and intersex people and me--we're just ideas, and when we're dead, the ideas will go with us. It all means nothing.”

HumanityQueernessIntersexualityInfinitely IndefiniteCosmic Indifference
Book:Golden Boy
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“Then people can't look left or right the way they do. They can't mind other people's business. That's the point of the dream: What will people become if they have to mind their own business instead of other people's business? If they can't find others to hate, to kill, to target? What happens if light, music, drugs, sex, everything all disappears and all you have is you? Do you like you? Can you survive you?”

HatePrideLgbtqQueerHomophobiaLgbtqiaReflectionsQueerness
Book:Vagabonds!
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