Queer Culture - Tumblr Posts
Friendly reminder that LGBTQ+, Queer, and LGBT+ are the preferred terms for the community (x).
Friendly reminder that Queer is approved by 72.9% of the people, and the groups who don’t prefer it’s use as an umbrella term are straight people, exclusionists, transmeds, truscums, sex-negative people, and sex work critical people (x).
Friendly reminder that aros and aces are excluded only 9.2% / 8.1% of the time respectively while being included 78.9% / 81.2% of the time (x)
Friendly reminder that exclusionists are in the minority and aro/ace people are included in the LGBTQ+ community by the people within the community.
Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.
They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!
On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.
On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.
Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.
So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.
The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.
Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.
I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.
And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.
Reminds me of this essay in The Paris Review about how shipping is just “close reading”:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/10/harry-potter-and-the-secret-gay-love-story/
i dont "ship" anything i just understand .
as a south asian queer woman, sometimes mainstream queer culture is really white (/nm— I’m not mad!! i’m just reflecting.)
when mean girls (2024) came out and the queer community was like “Reneé Rapp was the only good part of the movie”… and its like yes that’s great that a queer woman is playing Regina and it’s amazing Rapp champions the view of Regina as a lesbian.
but everyone so casually dismissed Avantika’s performance as Karen (character who’s also queer in this version— Avantika said Karen Shetty is a “pansexual queen”). it was crazy how blind it seemed people were to how groundbreaking her casting was by reversing south Asian stereotypes (1. she’s dumb instead of smart 2. she sings “sexy” when south Asian women are considered in American society to be unattractive)— like it was just a moment where i was kinda sitting there dumbfounded, not at all mad or anything— just reminded that “oh right. they’re white. I’m not. i come from a different perspective and am going to go crazy over the queer woc not the queer white woman.”
Latest reblog reminds me of how much it pisses me the fuck off how every queer person alive has to adapt to the usamerican style of queerness lest we get shunned by the community for being too different. I bring this up a lot but bro that time I got death threats for having ele/dele in my bio bc "by using neopronouns I was making a mockery of REAL trans people" when those are literally just my pronouns in my native language, and when I said that I got hit w the "well you're on the internet so speak english" I HATE GRINGOS I HATE GRINGOS I HATE GRINGOS
"Sometimes people suggest to me, with not a little horror, that I am arguing for a pastel world in which androgyny reigns and men and women are boringly the same. In my vision, however, strong colors coexist with pastels. There are and will continue to be highly masculine people out there; it's just that some of them are women. And some of the most feminine people I know happen to be men."
Fausto-Sterling (2000). "The 5 Sexes Revisited." The Science.
so like a yr ago i impulse bought myself a spidey toy cuz i never really got “boys’ toys” as a kid so i now i’m an adult and can get them for myself sometimes i do.
anyway, i put him on my desk and started using him to hold my accessories (i have like no object permanence so i need my accessories to be relatively visible or i’ll forget the exist) and in the process i think he kinda got…yassified? oh also, he has a bubble wand!
i am a visionary
thinking a lot about how last year i committed to the bit too hard and accidentally made jester hats a symbol of sex appeal (it’s a long story) amongst the campus queers to the point where one acquaintance who i didn’t know well at all spent ages attempting to find a jester hat to get for their partner (who i knew slightly better but also not heaps) for their birthday.
i made an emo trans-masc kermit with a tiny sweater to be hidden in someone’s house as a secret cursed top-surgery present. he’s a little bit janky because i used no pattern and i’m still getting the hang of seeing but like, i love my boy…on also the sweater matches one that the person the kermit is being gifted to has, so they are twins!
this ✨s p o o k y s e a s o n✨ we’re claiming all cartoon skeletons as trans masc icons.
thank you for coming to my ted talk.
what if dating apps had their own version of spotify wrapped??? like i want a fun lil slideshow presentation to tell me fun lil facts like “most people you matched with are homosexuals with strong feelings about the muppet movies”. i think i’m onto something…
i’ve been trying to craft all my xmas presents this year and i thought it could be cute to share some here as i go…
first up, i made my friend this cute lil alien buddy. i made it by using florist wire to create a skeleton of the body, then covered it in tin foil to bulk him up and then covered the tin foil in masking tape to keep it together. after that, i used polymer clay for the head and felt for the body. i used acrylic paint on the face and acrylic yarn for the hair and used some fabric scraps to make lil clothes :))
queer culture is discussing how the “would you still like me if i was a worm” discourse is actually about asking “would still like me if i was a little bit useless - if i was not pretty nor productive, if all i did was exist as myself and all i had to offer you was my presence and my affection” and realising that the people in your life make you feel cherished even when all you can offer them is your company - when you can’t think of something clever to say, or something all that funny to add…when you haven’t washed your hair in too many days and didn’t wake up with enough time to brush it before leaving home…when you can’t quiet motivate yourself to get out of bed, or when your unmasked and what your saying is unpolished and imprecise and randomly gifting someone in your life the embroidery you did to let them know you reciprocate.
australian queer culture is walking into dangerfield and have the manager greet you with “welcome back”
close enough, welcome back pansexual flag 🫶🏻
do people who speak english as their first language know why most (in general) Europeans who speak it fluently are queer? BC friends of mine do not and I am confused BC I thought that was common knowledge
Why is KOSA not trending? This bill aims to take down fandom related sites INCLUDING TUMBLR!!!?? Like we need to get this to #1 on trending and FAST! Please reblog posts on the tags with more resources and spread the word people, this is actually terrifying!!!
Also it doesn’t even end with KOSA, the Earn It Act and many more censorship bills are trying to slip through our legislature and I haven’t seen many people talk about it!
Remember everyone, this isn’t about “protecting children,” because if it was they’d go after actual R34 sites instead of queer people trying to live their damn lives!
the white suit tho