This Is Queer

How a philosophy of disruption derails the pursuit of knowledge

Recently, the Instagram algorithm fed me a funny video of an online meditation group being crashed by a bunch of troublemakers. A guy who calls himself Jarry and four of his friends pretend that they’ve signed on to the Zoom call to participate, but before long it becomes clear that they’re just there to cause chaos. As the speaker begins the meeting, they interrupt her with irrelevant questions or simply to introduce themselves, which throws her off completely. When one of the hosts asks them to mute themselves, they pretend like they can’t hear her, so now she has to repeat herself over and over again. What makes the video so hilarious is seeing how long it takes the hosts to realize they’re being trolled—and how frustrated they get in the meantime.

After I watched the video, I realized that Jarry and Co.’s antics are a really great analogy for how critical theory works in education. Their entire strategy is to derail the conversation by pretending not to understand the basic rules everyone else is operating under. All the hosts want to do is get through the boilerplate announcements so the meeting can begin, but they can’t get anywhere because they keep being interrupted by people who act as if they don’t know how anything works. The speaker instructs them to “put their questions in the chat,” and they respond, “Why do we have microphones if we’re not allowed to talk?”

This is exactly how queer theorists approach the pursuit of knowledge. While the rest of us are trying to build upon existing knowledge by, say, determining how liver cancer progresses differently in female bodies than in male bodies, queer theorists ask, “What do you mean, ‘male body’? Have you considered the idea that sex is as socially constructed as gender?”¹ Before you know it, the sun is setting, and all we’ve done is relitigate where babies come from.

Critical theory is a radical political project whose primary purpose is to subvert power. It teaches that the only reason we think something is true or normal or good is because the powerful told us to believe it’s true, normal, or good. The “systems” and the “frameworks” in which we exist are the dirty work of white capitalists. What we’re told is a liberal, democratic society is actually a prison. At any time, critical theorists preach, we can “opt out.” We can prioritize “other ways of knowing.”

This is how we’ve arrived at a moment where the freest people on the planet march in support of foreign regimes that inflict a type of oppression they could never even fathom.² They actually believe that the “oppression” they experience in New York City is equivalent to what women and gay people endure in Tehran. They side with the mullahs because of their common enemies: the West. Colonialism. Imperialism. Capitalism.

Dear reader, this is what “queer” means. It is not an adjective synonymous with “gay.” It is a verb. To queer knowledge, science, reality, or society is to tear down the intellectual foundations we’ve been building since the Enlightenment. Please, please, please do not fall for it.

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1. “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.” - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

2. Queers for Palestine