Growing up as a queer child in a White working-class environment in Germany in the 1990s meant that you have to navigate the fact that your gender performance and sexuality has been framed by society through discourses of disgust, undesirability, unhappiness, and disease. Or, as Sara Ahmed puts it: “Queer arrives as an affective inheritance of an insult.” Many queer children could barely find affective breathing spaces for escaping the daily verbal aggressions from a heterosexist world as society’s dominant grammar that constantly draws all attention towards it.
Energy Generating DeviceI remember in elementary school when children played tag on the schoolyard running around, laughing, and yelling at each other: “You are gay! You are the one with AIDS now.” A child tagged had to tag another one and transmit his gayness like a virus through the schoolyard. For a short moment in time everyone of us could be gay, but as far as I know, I was the only one where it stuck. It is a lifelong question for many of us to figure out how much of the heterosexist violence implemented by insult has been internalized in our psyches and continues influencing our identities in harmful ways. I am often wondering how much of my gender performance today is a response to a survival mechanism to reduce daily fear of heterosexist aggression.
I’m still often infantilized for not being there yet, at that final destination of respectable masculinity. In most professional environments, I am voluntarily and involuntarily threatened by the unacknowledged heterosexism of my ‘peers,’ as if my queerness is something naive I should grow out of during the maturing process of professionalization and social climbing. Ahmed has also brilliantly conceptualized privilege as an energy saving device: Less effort is required to pass through when a world has been already assembled around and for you. So please make it stop, stealing my energy!
#feelingbackward
from David Frohnapfel