butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
Good lord I’m not saying “you personally have to be violently harmed by cishets to be queer” I’m saying that the term is exclusively reserved for the communities who’ve historically experienced oppression centered around that slur and experienced the violence that it embodies (ie LGBT people)
You’re spouting some nonsense interpretation where you could say “some lesbians are queer but not all” when what I’m literally saying is “lesbians can call themselves queer because the lesbian community has been a target of this slur and experienced horrific violence as part of it”. Ace/aro people who lack same-gender attraction have no place trying to reclaim it because it was never aimed at their community.
Except that historically, people have absolutely been targeted as queer for asexual behavior.
Everybody feel free to grab a beverage and get comfortable, because I spent a lot of time on Google today. (Asexuals, listen up, because we actually have some situations where you are represented in history here.)
Historically, people got labelled queer, and/or queer-bashed, for two major things.
The first was deviating from strict gender norms.
The second was not having hetero sex.
There are tons of examples of white people literature from the 1800s and early 1900s that use terms like “confirmed bachelor” and “spinster aunt” to imply that somebody was queer.
(I was going to say something like European/American/Canadian literature, but let’s call a spade a spade.)
Sure, nowadays we look back at that and go, “everybody knew those people were gay, it was just code for gay, nobody thought anybody was asexual, that wasn’t a thing back then.”
Of course, that still means that people who we would now call asexual would have been getting queer-bashed because people thought they were gay. So all those asexual people, already, have earned their queer stripes under the rubric above – that they are part of a community that got violently oppressed for being perceived as queer.
It’s also worth pointing out that as far back as the 1890s, the LGBT movement – which did already exist, and was particularly active in Germany and New York – was already beginning to categorize and write about asexuality as part of its umbrella.
But is that all that was happening? Were straight people actually cool with people who they thought just weren’t having any sex at all?
Let’s see! (This is code for “hell no.”)
My favorite example that I came across was the Spinster Movement.
The Spinster Movement was really long-lived, from around the 1880s through the 1930s. It was a group of women who either felt no sexual attraction, or felt some sexual attraction but didn’t want to have sex. (I will be the first to say that I’m sure that there were also members who nowadays would identify as lesbian, bi, and trans. But it wasn’t the focus.)
The movement particularly focused on opposing sex work, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. It was deeply tied up in the suffrage movement, which fought for the vote specifically so that women could oppose these things in the political arena.
It spanned a wide range of countries. Norwegian researcher Tone Hellund talks about how first the group was considered queer because they were breaking gender norms. And then:
“[in Norway], in the 1920s and 1930s, female sexuality was suddenly discovered and all women were supposed to have and enjoy their sexuality. At this point, frigidity and asexuality also became a topic, a very problematic topic.
“You could say that the spinsters became queer because they didn’t have sex or didn’t take part in sexual activities, and also because they started to be perceived as potentially homosexual.
“Thus, the romantic spinster friendships of the earlier phase that were not seen as problematic in a sexual way became highly problematic in the 1920s and 1930s. Suddenly, all female relationships were seen as suspicious, they were seen in a new sexual light.“
Notice the “and also” – they were queer for not having sex, AND they were queer for starting to be perceived as possibly lesbians.
In fact, “spinsters” were routinely slammed this way. In Britain, for example, the teachers’ union was attacked over and over with the double spectre of asexuality and lesbianism.
One example from Women’s History: “…The fear of spinsters and lesbians affected women teachers in Britain between the wars. A 1935 report in a newspaper of an educational conference expressed the threat in extreme terms: ‘The women who have the responsibility of teaching these girls are many of them themselves embittered, sexless or homosexual hoydens who try to mould the girls into their own pattern.’” It was very explicit.
And the whole thing is a common accusation that queer people still face today. That what we are is bad because it is going to destroy children and society.
People at the time felt very strongly about how unnatural it was for people not to have sex. Women, in particular, were often divided into “natural” and “unnatural” – i.e. queer – spinsters. Natural ones were widows; unnatural ones were those we have seen here.
In her book “Family Ties in Victorian England,” Claudia Nelson quotes writer Eliza Linton’s description of “unnatural and alien” spinsters: “Painted and wrinkled, padded and bedizened, with her coarse thoughts, bold words, and leering eyes, [the wrong kind of spinster] has in herself all the disgust which lies around a Bacchante and a Hecate in one…. Such an old maid as this stands as a warning to men and women alike of what and whom to avoid.”
We can see some of the hatred of the Spinsters in the way suffragists were treated when arrested for picketing the White House. They were tortured, beaten, hung by their hands all night, fed rotten food, and subjected to attempted psychiatric abuse.
Earlier, during the Victorian era, there was a popular but unsuccessful movement, for decades, pushing to evict spinsters over 30 from Britain, and send them to Canada, Australia, or the United States instead. They were perceived, at best, as “surplus females”, in part because there were many more women than men in the population there at that time.
There was some overlap between the different kinds of queer. Straight people, as a group, had even less understanding and interest then than they do now of what the different flavors of queer might be.
Shannon Jackson’s essay, “Toward a Queer Social Welfare Studies,” gives a good example of how describes how critics of Jane Addams’ Hull-House “called the settlement ‘unnatural,’ worrying that its women were ‘spinsters’ or that its men were ‘mollycoddles’.” In that case, I would guess that they meant “women who have sex with women”.
It’s a good example of how much they conflated the different kinds of queer – that some straight people could use the term to slam people for being asexual, and others could use it to slam people for the opposite. And it’s also a good example of how little they cared which of us they were attacking. The important thing, to them, was that we weren’t having solely hetero sex and living our lives centered around being hetero. Everything else was just details.
(Also FWIW, I want to note that I meant no disrespect to any of the previous commenters or the OP in cutting the previous posts from queerdemons lesbiandoe @punkrcgers and sushi-moss. Tumblr wouldn’t let me post my long-ass reply without trimming; it mysteriously “lost” the whole thing like it always does when I reply at length to a long thread, and I had to rewrite it.)
I’d like to add some things based on my personal research of the history of unmarried people, which is definitely common in the modern aromantic community:
Published Nov. 22, 1960, by Eleanor Harris in Look magazine.
“A third troubled group consists of latent homosexuals. These fall into two classes—the “neuter” who practices no sexual activity of any kind, who is often found working in boys‘ schools and boys’ organizations, and the Don Juan, who is so threatened by his fears of his unacknowledged homosexuality that he engages in affairs with women to prove his masculinity.”
“While emotional problems are common among single men, a number of unwed men adjust completely to life without women and find a thoroughly satisfying existence alone. Some of these seem to have found fulfillment in their working life exclusively. Examples can be found in every field. Other men find a sense of completion by rounding out their business lives with an engrossing hobby, often in the sports field… .
However well he may adjust to his lonely life, the single man suffers disabilities that seem to be traceable directly to his bachelorhood. Unwed men are much less healthy than their married brothers. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company studies show that more than four times as many unattached men as married men (ages 20–74) die of tuberculosis. At ages 20–44, five to six times as many unmarried men as husbands die of influenza and pneumonia. Prior to mid-life, nine divorced men are victims of cirrhosis of the liver to each married man killed by that disease.”
The whole article is talking about how single men are so disgusting, and have so many problems. Tws: homophobia, aphobia, general 1960s shittiness
“If heterosexuality is one of the ways in which men’s power over women is maintained, then lesbianism is or can be a threat to that power. This aspect of resistance involves all women outside of heterosexuality, including celibate or unmarried women. Like lesbians, they are all women who are not subject to men’s social and sexual power through a personal relationship. Thus, although attacks were made on unmarried women teachers primarily as spinsters rather than as lesbians, it will be argued that they were maligned for being outside heterosexuality.” from Current Issues In Women’s History, originally published in 1989 and republished in 2012, discussing the Spinster Movement.
In colonial Asante (which is Modern Day Ghana, and an accurate time period for this is between WWI and WWII), unmarried women were rounded up and imprisoned as an effort to control women’s reproductive rights. Women had to have a man pay and say they would marry them before they would be released. This affected women who could not find a man to marry and women who did not want to marry due to either economic factors, her own autonomy, or the simple desire not to marry. Read more about this time period and factors that contributed to it here.
Another quote I’ll drop here before I leave:
“Our boys, when they arrive at years of maturity and can take earn of a wife, should get married, and there should not be a lot of young men growing up in our midst who ought to be, but are not married. While I do not make the remark to apply to individual cases, I am firmly of the opinion that a large number of unmarried men, over the age of twenty-four years, is a dangerous element in any community, and an element upon which society should look with a jealous eye. For every man knowing himself, knows how his fellow-man is constituted; and if men do not marry, they are too apt to do something worse. Then, brethren, encourage our young men to marry, and see that they are furnished employment, so that they can marry” (George Q. Cannon, Annual Conference at Salt Lake City, Sunday morning, April 7, 1878. Reported by George F. Gibbs. Journal of Discourses, vol. 20, p.7). (Personal Note: lol journal of discourses the irony) -From the church of the Latter Day Saints Conference.
tws: Mormans, LDS, Church of the Latter Day Saints
(Source)
And finally:
Women who perhaps suffered most in this period were, ironically, those like the Queen who did not wish to marry. Tudor society did not have many avenues open to single women and, following the Reformation, those avenues were even less. Before, women were able to become nuns and look forward to a rewarding life in convents, perhaps be a Mother Superior one day. But with the Reformation, the convents were closed. Wealthy single women (heiresses of property) could look forward to being mistress of their estates and wield the power in the community this would bring, but for poor women, the only long-term “career” really open to them was domestic service. It was not surprising, therefore, that most women married. Marriage was seen as the desirable state for both men and women, and single women were sometimes looked upon with suspicion. It was mainly single women who were accused of being witches by their neighbours.
Elizabethan society, England. 1558-1603
Just an infodump by yours truly on unmarried people, who might have been aromantic :) hope this helps
holy shit wow :-0 thank you!!!
[also readers plz note that Sheila Jeffreys is a Notorious TERF, which I didn’t know when I wrote the original post, and that my post above is neither a recommendation nor a review of her book. also that the mainstream suffrage movement was basically a bunch of huge giant racists, who gained much of their success by banding together with white men to keep POC from getting the vote. this is not an endorsement of that movement.]
OP is also just incorrect about the definition of who can be queer. Even if they were correct about a-spec people not having been targeted with that word, queer is still and has historically been defined as “people who deviate from sexual norms and are societally pushed to conform to those norms anyway”. Occasionally an addendum is added for the common sense “as long as you can deviate from societal norms consensually” because sometimes people are deliberately obtuse.
There is no need for violence, for specific targeting as queer, or for anything except societal pressure to conform to a specific form of sexuality that this person does not naturally conform to. Queer has always been more inclusive than that, friend. I have at least 30 years worth of texts and first person sources that say so.
Hey look, it’s me before I had a discourse blog!
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