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thinking about queer terms though I do really want more non-english terminology. Both translations and just new terms. I think it's sad that queer conversations in non-english languages often are anglo-centric or even in half-english. I think we need to create more non-english terminology.
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@ink I feel this very strongly. I know more about say, gender neutral language, in English than my native language. And other terms relating even to my own identity. Some debates around language make a lot less sense, being "imported" from the US.
And like, often the language does exist in Portuguese, and I could seek out more local communities and resources. But I do like the international communities. It just sucks that it is all so dominated by the US imperialism, that there are so many more resources in English, that debates center on US internal politics, that there isn't any effort to make everything more multilingual, more international, to compare and include perspectives from different places...
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@ink this is something i have mixed thoughts about--one of my acquaintances from Singapore (who was bi) actually insisted on never being called "queer" because "queer" was a term that didn't originate in his language--in other words "queer" was an Anglo imposition onto him, even if his experiences of sexuality were legibly read as queer to Anglos
The other day someone else I followed share this interview (https://www.thecut.com/article/jules-gill-peterson-short-history-of-trans-misogyny-interview.html) from Jules Gill-Peterson that sort of gets into this point:
"You explicitly reject using the word 'trans' as an all-purpose, catchall term to describe all transfeminine people. Why?
I’m just tired of the generic 'trans.' The word 'transgender' hasn’t been around for even quite as long as I have, but I don’t think it has a lot of great things to show for itself. The 'trans umbrella' framework has a flattening effect that minimizes massive differences in living conditions between Black and brown trans women and all other trans people, whether we measure it by income, degree of criminalization, or rates of violence. And that awareness hasn’t resulted in an LGBTQ movement that actually fights for Black and brown trans women’s concrete interests.
Can you also unpack why you differentiate 'trans women' from people who’ve been 'trans-feminized,' that is, those whom the state has marked for violence through a process you call 'trans-feminization'?
It began with me wanting to understand, historically, how trans women came to be treated differently and subjected to such exceptional hatred and violence, even among other trans people. But then I ran up against a brick wall because, well, not to reinvent one of the age-old problems of feminism, but if there’s no single, shared, common-denominator experience of womanhood — one of the critical assumptions of feminism for the past 30 years — then there’s not going to be one for trans womanhood either. There are many people who don’t necessarily share this Euro-American definition of 'trans woman': two-spirit people in the United States, hijras in British colonial India, travestis in Argentina. That’s where I came up with this phrase 'trans-feminizing' to talk about the processes through which whole groups of people in the 19th century were targeted and subjected to this kind of violence that we call trans misogyny, but not because they were 'trans women' in the way that we use that phrase in the United States today. To me, you have to understand the relationship between those two things in order to understand how vast the scope of trans misogyny has been — that it actually has a very long global history. Otherwise, you are sort of just continuing that fundamental violence of misrecognition that would misclassify people by forcing them into a concept that they themselves don’t necessarily identify with."
So I think that for me instead of trying to make "queer" more expansive I think that the better move would be to 1. acknowledge rather than pretend it's possible to transcend the limits of "queer" as a concept spawned within the Anglosphere (for every concept is necessarily bound by the limits of the conditions under which it was formed) and 2. support struggles against cisheteropatriarchal oppression beyond those limits on their own terms.