Queerness and the Next System: Opening Up the Discussion
For centuries, the erasure of LGBTQ people from public policy has been the norm, but discussions about the economic future cannot sideline conversations around gender, sex and sexuality.
torbakhopper / CC BY-ND 2.0
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Queer Families, Kinship, and Desire
While Obergefell v. Hodges drastically changed the lives of millions of queer people by legalizing same-sex monogamy, our era of same-sex marriage cannot be interpreted as the apex of queer family-making. Indeed, to collapse non-straight family-making under the umbrella of “same-sex marriage” is to ignore a constellation of familial structures which are still outright prohibited or blissfully ignored by society — among which we find examples of polyamorous or “open” marriage as well as co-parenting arrangements through which more than two individuals function and are recognized as “parents” of a child.
Of additional concern to those imagining the day-to-day functionings of an alternative system must be the ways in which individuals come to a sense of social solidarity with one another beyond or in addition to marriage. Societies have long looked to “the family” as the mechanism through which children become members of a body politic. When we think about models of queer kinship, we’re also thinking about the ways in which we problematize and deconstruct the social mores that dictate how a child conceptualizes themselves, what autonomy is accorded that child, and how that child is permitted to interact with other children and adults. If we accept the idea that an alternative political and economic system draws its strength from the flourishing of its citizens, then we must endeavor to name the right of all citizens — from children through the elderly — to a sense of radical self-determination. Individuals ought to determine not only their career path in life or their policy preferences, but also the name by which they are publicly recognized, the pronouns by which they are called, the gender (if any) with which they feel most identified, and the sexual partners with whom they find pleasure, make homes, or co-habitate.
While it may seem as though conversations about the best ways to institutionalize these arrangements would follow the establishment of new systems as a sort of “second tier” of culture-making, it bears repeating that the ways society constructs, values, and promotes structures of “family” (however broadly construed) have significant impacts on society’s characterization and treatment of children, organization of familial units in physical spaces (i.e. the detached single-family home), attitude towards reproductive technologies, and creation of mechanisms to facilitate or prohibit the transfer of intergenerational wealth. Developing a working model of what alternative familial structures may look and feel like it is far from an exercise in emotional processing out loud; instead, any cohesive design of an alternative political or economic system which fails to address concerns of kinship also fails to account for the formative socialization that undoubtedly occurs when children are raised and sustained within a community.
Queer Possibility
At a purely conceptual level, one of the most interesting themes for future discussion around queerness and The Next System must be the possibility queerness introduces into systems design spaces. By mining the history of trans and queer resistance to heterosexism and cisnormativity, systems thinkers can find example after example of queer folks using a variety of theoretical and applied tactics to challenge dominant narratives of form, representation, and politics while forging resilient communities. Given the audacity of the goal of creating a next system and the hard work to ensue, it’s important that systems thinkers consider not only the desired outcomes of their work but the process of community care which will determine who we are when we finally get to our realistic utopia.
Queerness understood as a framework to approach both activism and intellectual work is a relatively new invention dating to the early 1990s. At about this time, a generation of scholars steeped in the language of poststructuralism found themselves struggling to theorize a way out of the bind created by the explosion of global neoliberal capitalism, an unparalleled boom in information technology, and a re-emergence of cross-cutting social movement activity. Drawing on the legacy of feminist thought, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, as well as activist-inspired formulations of LGBTQ identity, these scholars coined “queer” as a sort of social-political orientation towards the world, expressed through subversion of the accepted. Not only did “queer” carry with it the potential to describe a range of gender and sexual minorities without exhaustively naming them, the term also served another purpose: the reclamation of a slur often hurled at the LGBTQ community. “Queer” quickly became an adjective used to describe a set of individuals, organizations, and communities as well as a verb used to describe the act of subverting, contesting, and thinking back against powerful, normative centers of power. As such, “queer” came to describe those who sought a liberationist agenda as compared to the assimilationist political desires of certain mainstream, monied, and disproportionately white “LGBT” organizations. By calling yourself “queer,” moreover, one signaled not only a sense of militant nonconformity but also a refusal to be constrained by existing social and political realities.
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