I think some āqueerā fans have some sort of difficulty reckoning with the difference between the individual self and the group. Pretty much every time Iāve spoken with someone who likes āqueerā, they have been fixated on the fact that they personally like it and want to use it to describe themselves, and canāt really accept that it is a heavily politicised term for a group, which is something they canāt just slice off if they want to (there is also the fact that many of them want to use it because they want to apply the imagery it has bc of its history, but somehow avoid the rest of the group having a say).
tbh itās the same with āwomanā and āmanā. The default response to feminist criticism is, āWhat does it matter to you how someone describes themselves?ā because theyāre focused solely on the effort to describe themselves, and so arenāt prepared to consider that ofc theyāre using group terms and expressing a view of what the group āwomanā or āmanā must be, in order for them to fit or self exclude from it. Women who say theyāre not women because they have complex feelings and like to be comfortable and safe are thinking exclusively about themselves and the unfair standards they set themselves (because theyāre women), and not very much about how this then applies to everyone in the groups whose boundaries theyāre redrawing. They donāt really register that what theyāre doing is actually making huge political (often conservative) statements about huge groups of people, all in the pursuit of a personal vocabulary they wonāt just find adjectives for.
