How do we, as queer people navigate the labyrinth of heteronormative realities, particularly in spaces where queer subjectivities are not just erased but never thought off? How do queer individuals make sense of themselves, build relationships, and carve out a space of their own when their daily lives are devoid of any lived experience to which they can relate? In the absence of representation and acknowledgement, queer people started reading their lives into literature, movies, songs, and everyday encounters. Evolved in the 1980s and 1990s by queer theorists, “queering” is a literary technique to challenge heteronormativity by analyzing places in a text that use heterosexuality and binary gender identities.
Different queer theorists used queering techniques to re-examine the social phenomenon through a queer lens. For instance, the concept of homosociality is generally used to describe and define social bonds between persons of the same sex in order to understand men and masculinities as a mechanism and social dynamic that explains the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. However, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985) classic study, Between Men, viewed homosociality in a more nuanced and dynamic way. Sedgwick addresses the relationship between various sorts of desire and intimate relationships between men rather than only utilizing the term as a tool to analyze social ties and power relationships between men. She argues,
“To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.”
Similarly, Adrienne Rich coined the phrase ‘Lesbian Continuum’ in her easy Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980) in order to counter numerous ways in which lesbian experiences and existence have been made invisible. Because of the difficulty of unearthing distinctly ‘lesbian’ experiences and events from the past in the wake of heterosexuality, Rich proposes that the lesbian continuum could include all women-identified experiences that women encounter in their lives.
Moving away from this academic realm of queer theories (which significantly informs our daily lives), it is crucial to ask how your ‘average’ gay or lesbian fellow uses queering in their life. How can you read something as queer when a phenomenon does not explicitly seem so? However, the whole point of this approach is to subvert and disrupt hetero-patriarchal structures, which collectively function to keep queer experiences out of everyday life or push them into the periphery where queer desires, imaginations, and lives are shunned.
Now the question arises: how exactly will you read anything as queer? The answer to this question is multiple, diverse, and divergent, similar to the meaning of the term queer. One could read anything (or, to an extent, maybe everything) as queer. For instance, two guys walking down the street might be seen as friends, brothers, or buddies, but looking through a queer lens, they could be a couple masking their queerness under the ambit of ‘male bonding’. Or a couple of days ago, when I saw two young women praying together in a temple, though other devotees may consider them friends or sisters, my queer lens read them as a couple praying for lifelong companionship.
One could read queer into any sphere of society, be it cinema, music, academics, politics, or even sports. Yes, the highly masculinized sports space could be ruptured through queer reading. Why should we assume that everyone admires a game for its athletic finesse? Some of us could be admiring the silhouettes of running bodies. However, queer feminists have challenged the continuum between romantic friendships and love, which other queer theorists like Ruth Vanita tried to establish in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a slippery slope where affection between men slides into or is coded as erotic without being overtly depicted as sexual. Adrienne Rich’s Lesbian Continuum also faced similar criticism as it effectively served to desexualize lesbianism.
Even if interpreting something as queer in different contexts is a flawed method, it does give queer people a breath of fresh air or moments of delight by allowing them to feel included in an environment they are often excluded from.