The Two Faces of Queer Narrativity
How queer storytelling can lead to liberation or further oppression
Hey everyone! As a young graduate student focusing on queer literature, I think a lot about what queerness means and what some of the bigger issues are facing the queer community today.
As I’ve written about in other posts, the stories that we tell about ourselves (or hear from others) shape the way we see the world—what’s possible, what’s not possible, what we want, and how to get it.
For queer folks, this is a no-brainer.
We’ve been hearing stories about us since we were children, often very damaging stories about who we are that simply are not true.
So, let’s take a look at how queerness and narrativity come together and how we can tell better stories about ourselves.
What to expect
- What’s Narrativity?
- What’s the Problem?
- How do We Fix it?
What’s Narrativity?
Narrativity is a big word, but it doesn’t have to be scary. When we’re talking about narrativity, we’re just talking about how we construct narratives or stories about a certain thing.
Everything we know, we know through some story. Every article we read online, every podcast we listen to, every infographic with cute little letters and cute little colors is conveying some type of story to us.
We don’t encounter narratives just by reading.
Let’s take blogging as an example. Here, we take aspects of our lives and distill them into a specific story that is easy to consume and interesting to other readers.
The effect is a stylizing of our lives into what we think is worthy of being shared while we toss out anything that isn’t of value.
In the process of consuming other stories from books or movies or blogs, we learn what to value from others and begin to automatically consider aspects of our own lives as unimportant to our own life story.
As you might expect, this can have some issues in regard to queer folks, so let’s take a look at some below.
What’s the Problem?
Since stories shape how we think, we ought to think about the stories that we take in. Narratives contain information about how men should act, how women should act, how we interact with each other, and how not to. More plainly, our ideas of gender and sexuality are built with stories.
Characters, settings, and plots work like bricks in the gender and sexual ideological houses that we live in.
Let’s Talk Romance
Think about the traditional rom-com.
The typical story is that boy meets girl, they don’t really like each other, all of a sudden they’re in love, things go wrong, and then they live happily ever after. We assume after that that they go on to have kids and create a family together.
And what happens next? Those kids grow up and do the same thing, over and over and over again.
In essence, the rom-com could be read as a higher evolutionary development, further enticing us mere depositories of genetic information to pass on our genes to the next lucky generation of humans.
For queer folks, we don’t necessarily jive well with this story. For one, most of them are overtly heterosexual in their choice of characters. Already, then, queer folks are excluded for not being cis or not being in love with the opposite sex.
But wait, what if we change it to boy-meets-boy or girl-meets-girl?
Well, the focus on perpetuating the family is also troubling because, if you haven’t noticed, same-sex sex isn’t all that useful for producing new humans. The narrative’s implicit connection to reproduction, therefore, excludes us all the more.
While we can adapt certain aspects to find our place in the narrative, the overall structure was set up to exclude us, which might explain why versions of gay rom-coms haven’t done so well.
The rom-com is just one type of narrative that is most explicit in its connection to the Straight Mind and promoting reproductive sex over non-procreative (queer) sex.
We could, and many have, examine all types of narratives for how they exclude queerness and, thus, characterize us as less valuable in the literal grand scheme of things.
How do We Fix it?
Good question. The answer is—I’m not sure. I could say “Write queer folks, write!” But the solution isn’t as simple as that. The problem with narrativity is that it forces us to make selections about what matters and what doesn’t matter.
In essence, we are forced to overlook some aspects of our lives in order to make our lives sound more cohesive, to make them make sense as a story.
The good news is, we can share new stories with new plots, settings, characters, and dialogue. The only thing we have to look out for is the risk of creating character types and story tropes that then construct a new narrative that queer people must follow to qualify as “queer.”
Even a good story can do damage.
This issue of valuing certain things over others for the sake of a cohesive story isn’t necessarily bad. It becomes unhealthy for us when we allow other stories to dictate what we value.
So yes, you can write a romance novel where girl-meets-girl, they fall in love, and live happily ever after with their two kids in their white picket fence house in the suburbs.
Yes, you can write your story about your polyamorous relationship, how you found each other, the problems you found along the way, and how you created a relationship more stable than most monogamous couples.
Yes, you can write about your experience transitioning and the way you found peace with your gender identity.
Overall, we need our stories and we need to know how to write, film, or dramatize them in such a way that allows all of us to create life narratives that accord with our values and the way we want our lives to go.
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