In the midst of the past three weeks, I’ve had a hard time finding reason for celebration and optimism.
The Grammys changed that.
Fall semester 2023, I taught a study abroad program in London. Upon learning about my iPhone’s music library, my students informed me I needed to listen to something that wasn’t made in the 1980s or 1990s. So they introduced me to the music of a young queer artist who was just beginning to make a name for herself — Chappell Roan.
Susan Shaw
Last week, Chappell Roan not only won the Grammy for Best New Artist, she performed her hit song there on the music industry’s biggest stage, “Pink Pony Club,” a celebration of queerness, gay bars and drag. And the audience sang along. Just take a minute and watch the video.
That moment gave me hope because I realized this very public embrace of queerness signaled the extent to which queerness has become embedded in American life, no matter the homophobic and transphobic efforts of the religious and political right. It reminded me that we queers have come out, and we’re not going back into the closet.
That performance also reminded me of the liberating potential of queerness, especially queer joy, for all of us — queer, straight, cis, trans and nonbinary.
Gender is a straitjacket. Gender constrains who we can be, how we can act and whom we can love.
“Gender is a way to structure our social relationships in hierarchies that give some people power over others.”
Gender is an idea created by the societies in which we live, not to explain biological realities or help us lead authentic lives. Rather, gender is a way to structure our social relationships in hierarchies that give some people power over others.
Queerness makes the lie of gender visible. Queerness reminds us that our lives do not have to be predetermined by the body parts we were born with. Body parts are useful mechanisms for living, experiencing pleasure and reproducing (should folks want to do so), but they’re not determinative of who and how we should be, how we should dress, what jobs we should have or whom we should love.
Queerness shows us that social, religious and economic hierarchies that are built on gender are not rooted in any reality. They are a way to keep some men in power over all the rest of us.
That’s why the right is going berserk in its attack on trans people in particular and all queer folks in general.
They recognize that queer joy undermines their empires.
If queer lives, and especially queer joy, are visible, queerness threatens all the lies we’ve been told to prop up patriarchy. Beliefs like women’s submission and queer abomination and women’s silence in the church and exclusion from leadership are undermined by queer joy because queer joy shows us that what we’ve been told about gender simply isn’t true.
“Queer joy shows us that what we’ve been told about gender simply isn’t true.”
Queer visibility challenges the ideas that queerness is unnatural, shameful and sinful. Queer joy uncovers the lie that queer people are inherently damaged, depressed, unhappy, unstable and lacking.
Queer joy says: “We’re here. We’re queer. We’re fabulous. Get used to it.”
And that scares the bejeezus out of the patriarchy.
So Chappell Roan’s performance of “Pink Pony Club” reminded me that we queer folks have a long history of resistance. Queer bars have long been a safe place for queer folks to gather, organize, fight back and dance with joy even in the face of discrimination, violence and oppression. We can be ourselves at queer bars, and that authenticity is empowering and strengthens our resolve.
We’re not going away just because this administration has decided some of us are easy targets and none of us is deserving of full human and civil rights.
And that’s good for everybody. If we queer folks can free ourselves from the constraints of gender, we can show the way for straight folks to free themselves too.
Then we can imagine and achieve a world where who we are is not determined by our private parts but by our very personal hopes, dreams, desires and abilities.
We can leave behind a world where one set of people, based on private parts, are taught and expected to dominate another (and domination costs something of one’s humanity) and where another set of people are taught and expected to submit, be second class, lessen their ambitions, give up their agency, sacrifice their bodies and keep quiet about it all.
Queer joy invites us all to the Pink Pony Club, “where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.”
To me, that sounds a lot more like God’s community than what’s on offer with white Christian nationalism.
Susan M. Shaw is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. She also is an ordained Baptist minister and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide, co-authored with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.
Related articles:
The straight white men are not all right | Opinion by Susan Shaw
How any pastor, even if they’re not affirming, can love queer people | Opinion by Brandon Flanery
Embracing a queer spirituality would have freed me from years of anguish, self-doubt and self-loathing | Opinion by Angela Yarber