What The Q

There was a time when I thought that two words—gay and lesbian—and therefore two letters—g and l—sufficed. I now know—in fact I think I always did—that the words gay and lesbian never really did justice to the exceedingly complex variability within and between all kinds of folks who claim an ever-growing amalgam of letters. These letters—one current version of them is LGBTQ—are meant to name and include as much diversity in the realms of sexuality and gender as possible. Such an effort is of course doomed to fail. The dizzying array of differences in and between bodies, sexualities and genders will always exceed any aim to quantify or qualify, to catalog or situate. Not that people in general, or psychoanalysts in particular, will ever stop trying. It's what we do in response to differences. The individual, the singular, can only be thought about as such in relation to those elements, however they get schematized, that provide the ground for making a distinction.

This is why the Q in LGBTQ is crucial to me. Q stands for both questioning—as in someone who is questioning their sense of themselves as sexual, gendered or embodied—and for queer. I am aware that the word queer may trouble or confuse or offend. That's the point. To come up against a certain discomfort or unease in response to the term queer is to begin to comprehend the kind of impact that queer people want to have on anyone who is more settled in who they think they are.

And if psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it is how everyone has a tendency to settle—or at least to try to settle—consciously, preconsciously and unconsciously.

Queer thinking makes trouble with questions that aim to disrupt various kinds of settling. Such as, how can we live with LGBTQ as well as A for Asexual and I for Intersex and what comes next? How can we live with our genders, trans or non-conforming or otherwise? Especially when, as much as we might like to think so, we don't know what gender is? And what has happened in and to sex