queer

In Ellen Samuels’s essay “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse”, she discusses the convergence between “queer” and “disabled”, suggesting that they both express “the uneasy, often self-destroying tension between appearance and identity; the social scrutiny that refuses to accept statements of identity without ‘proof’; and, finally, the discursive and practical connections between coming out” (233). She wonders, what happens i

I have learned about gender in various classes. I learned that gender is constructed--socially, culturally, historically, politically, psychologically. I learned that people’s genders need not limit what they can do. I learned that biology is not destiny; one’s sex also does not control a person’s capabilities. I learned about the feminist movement in the United States. I learned about the many ways that sexism still exists in this country. I learned to see the forms that masculinity and femininity take in society and to notice the ways in which society socializes people to fit into one of two prescribed gender roles.