It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here.
— Ali Smith, How to Be Both
We can feel queerness as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.
— Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
We use maps for direction to make sure we’re getting to the right place. What happens when a route to a set destination estranges rather than guides? When arriving at the destination makes you feel more lost than if you had gone astray? And where to turn to for orientation when exposed to an affective mismatch between the model experience and the lived experience?
I ought to be writing about my master’s topic, but it’s Valentine’s Day, and this compels me to write about a topic close to my heart (ha.) – queerness. In a heteronormative culture, queer representation continues to stay hidden behind the visible. Growing up, the few times when there was queer representation, it evaporated before I could make sense of it. Lack of such representation means lack of an external reference against which to understand a nascent queer sexuality. And so queerness all too often remains “closeted”.
Due to the missing reference (and also due to the risk of marginalisation and attack), queerness lives undercover. José Esteban Muñoz (1996) describes the fleeting nature of queer evidence as ‘ephemera’: “Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere”. Queerness as an epistemological sphere – it might take years until you get to access this sphere, if ever. For me, this access depended on meeting other queers and embarking on tertiary education. The latter introduced me to de Beauvoir, Lorde, Sedgwick, Butler, Ahmed, Freeman, Foucault, Muñoz, PhilosophyTube. And there are many more to read up on. They are the external reference points for when you feel at odds, trying to navigate heteronormative relationships.
Valentine’s Day honours the martyr Saint Valentine, said to have wedded Christian couples during the third-century Roman Empire, sparing husbands from military service Britannica. (2026). Some might say that, nowadays, Valentine’s Day is promoted by the flower industry and the chocolate manufacturers. If I received flowers and heart-shaped chocolates on Valentine’s Day, I would be legging it. Not because flowers and chocolates aren’t nice per se. But because being perceived and treated like a straight woman who enjoys cliché gifts fails to recognise me for who I am. A relationship in which you’re not seen as yourself? Maybe not the one.
The link between self-hood and sexuality: against Lady Gaga’s popular lyrics“no matter gay, straight, or bi / Lesbian, transgender life / I’m on the right track, baby […] / I was born this way”, sexuality has not always been a signifier of personal identity. In The History of Sexuality, Michael Foucault (2019) traces the emergence of the term ‘sexuality’ to the beginning of the 19th century, correlating with rapid industrialisation and the establishment of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class. It was during this period, that sexuality became associated with the “true” self. Hence, according to Foucault, we are not “born this way”. Sexuality is not an inherent property of the self; instead, the link between sexuality and the self constitutes a historical construct that allows people to view themselves as subjects of a sexuality in the first place: “individuals were led to focus their attention to themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen” (p.9). Natural or fallen. This afterthought illustrates the moral connotations that have come to be attached to sexuality. Foucault’s argument is that an affective experience feels a certain way, “natural or fallen”, in reference to the socially constructed ‘sexuality-truth-normativity’ compound – or, more simply put, in reference to heterosexual norms.
The queer experience feels natural and fallen at once; it enables a person to identify as queer but conflicts with the normative sexuality assigned to the person. Sara Ahmed (2010) writes that, in coming out, many queers experience unhappiness because of causing their relatives unhappiness. Queer happiness won’t lead to a conventional happy life, leading relatives to worry about the queer child’s prospects of ever attaining happiness (or to worry about how they will be perceived by society, having a queer child in the family). It’s on the grounds of happy life conventions that some conservative and right-wing education stakeholders claim that we must ban LGBTQ+ materials from the classroom. We must ensure children don’t grow up confused about their bodies, gender, and sexuality. Such claims fail to appreciate how confusing it might be growing up, “placing [one’s] hopes for happiness in the wrong objects” (Ahmed, 2010, p.115), without knowledge of non-hetero narratives of happiness. The censoring of queer evidence. Muñoz’s ephemera in action.
Add to this the ridiculing of queer evidence: for last year’s Christopher Street Day, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz refused to raise the queer flag at the government headquarters, saying that the Bundestag was not a circus tent. The statement sparked heated debate about queer rights and the political representation of queers in the country. Meanwhile, illiberal states denounce queerness as an imported construct from the purportedly imperial West. Considering these trends, it does not seem unreasonable of Ahmed (2010) to conclude that “we [queers] must stay unhappy with this world” (p.105).
Turns out, when looking at Ahmed’s statement again, it reads less like a resigned conclusion and more like a call to resistance. She does not suggest that we must stay unhappy in this world but with this world; to stay unhappy with heteronormative expectations, discriminatory structures, hate speech and denial of rights. In Muñoz’s view, queerness is futurity: an affective and collective orientation towards a more open and more colourful future. Because learning to love should not close down a person’s future like a trap. Love should open new horizons.
In Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both, we follow the gender non-conforming teenage character George as she is coming to terms with her mother’s death. George’s experiences point to a broader reflection on certainty, linearity, and expectation. There is value in coming to terms with uncertainty, non-linearity, and broken expectations,
“cause although it seemed to be the end of the world to me – it wasn’t. There was a lot more world: cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight”.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.
Britannica. (2026). Valentine’s Day. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Valentines-Day
Foucault, M. (2019). The History of sexuality: Volume 2 – The Use of Pleasure (2nd ed.). Penguin.
Muñoz, J. E. (2019). Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (Chambers-Letson, J., Nyong’o, T., & Pellegrini, A. Eds.) New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/9781479868780
