>>101186
>im wondering why they do this. do they not care about being rude? do they not see it as rude and theres some context im missing?
The "context" your missing is that you refuse to see the "contradictions" in your activity and disagreed with a person who had undergone a "divine awakening" about the "true nature" of the politics and reality related to sexuality. Specifically that you're still engaging in your "cognative dissonance" to keep yourself imprisonned instead of being literally and unironically reborn as your own Transgender Christ. Here's a more detailed explanation of the concept: https://archive.ph/KITgR
<One of the architects of Queer Theory was Judith Butler, whose work it has been said can be reduced to the following six words: "Life is drag; drag is life." What this refers to is her concept of "gender performativity." Another more modern way to summarize it is "all gender expression is gender cosplay."
<The idea behind gender performativity is that all expressions of "gender" are, in fact, performances. If the underlying biological substrate of sex (male or female) matters at all, it doesn't matter at all to how we interact socially or in how we see ourselves as people. It doesn't factor in at all.
<Instead, we aren't living as members of our sex with all attendant diversity; we're performing our gender as a role, somewhat like on a stage ("all the world's a stage") but more like the way a professional plays the role of his career.
<For example, consider a hypothetical judge, Judge Smith. Judge Smith might just be Bob in his day-to-day life, just another upper-middle class guy with a professional class job and country-club lifestyle, but when he puts on the robes and sits at the bench, etc., he's "Judge Smith." Judge Smith talks in ways becoming of a judge, dresses as a judge, uses a judicial-specific dialect of English, etc., but Bob doesn't usually. Judge Smith is a performance.
<That performance is meant to do an array of social signaling, particularly of his judicial authority, not just to others but also to himself. The entire courtroom engages in an extended performance too, calling him "Your Honor," for example, and deferring to his judgments and leadership of the court. It's all just an act to convey a kind of professional status that "Judge Smith" has but that isn't located intrinsically (or essentially) anywhere in Bob.
<This idea of "performativity" comes from J.L. Austin from a lecture series in the mid-1950s, and Judith Butler appropriated it rather badly into her critical constructivist view of sex, gender, and sexuality (what became called "Queer Theory") in the 1980s, expressing the idea most fully in her two most famous books, Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993). Her idea was, as I said, all of "gender" is the same kind of social-signaling performance.
<Thus, her work can be summarized in those six words: "Life is drag; drag is life." Drag is a stylized and deliberately parodic (like parody) performance of sex, but given as a performance of "gender." An obvious male portrays himself as a highly stereotypical female in the "drag queen." An obvious female portrays herself as a caricatured male in the "drag king" (less common). Butler's wacky idea is that everyone is actually doing drag all the time.
<If you are male and acting female, you're a male doing female drag, but if you're a male acting male, you're a male doing male drag. You're still doing drag. The same goes for women. Everyone is doing drag all the time. Much in those two books specifically discusses the role drag performances play in formulating her conception of "gender performativity," in fact. It's not an idle correlation; it's intentional.
<Moreover, Judith Butler's idea is that all of society goes along with and reinforces these performances. Men are supposed to play "male drag," and women are supposed to do "female drag." For her, this establishes a sociognostic circumstance ("system of oppression") called gender normativity that came to be called "cisnormativity": your "performed gender" is socially and sometimes legally expected to match your sex.
<Her idea is that people learn to do these signals from people already enacting the society-wide "drag" drama, whether to fit in, avoid trouble, get advantages, or whatever else, and they replicate the performance from one person to another. Thus we're all complicit in spreading the "performative drag" to everyone and reinforcing the sociognostic circumstance of normativity.
<To "queer" something, as it came to be known, is to challenge this whole "production" and its underlying assumptions and actual truths through deliberate parodic "drag" performances outside of the normative range. See, Judith Butler didn't believe the normative frame could be overcome, but it could still be mocked. She called this approach "the politics of parody," again based on drag (and the fact that drag queens are doing critical and deconstructive performances in womanface, ultimately).
<The idea behind this strategy is to transgress the boundaries of normalcy in the name of overcoming alleged repression or perceived oppression (oppression in a free society tends to be a matter of histrionic interpretation). It is to slowly erode the concept of normativity by mocking it around its edges and shocking the conscience further away from them. The goal is to dissolve the stability and connection to reality that the norms provide and represent.
<So, to queer is to transgress with a deliberate aim of dissolving or moving the so-called "Overton window" of acceptable "performances" of self, particularly relevant to sex, "gender" (stereotypes about sex roles), and sexuality.
<It is possible to transgress those boundaries through performative cosplay in another way. Rather than seeking to transgress against norms believed (or just said) to be too repressive, you could transgress against norms believed (or just said) to be too licentious. That is, rather than asserting normal and healthy boundaries based in reality, morality, decency, stability, etc., one could engage in a kind of virtue-signaling cosplay performance of strict, narrow, and old-fashioned modes of expression, including around sex, gender, and sexuality.
<The name for this "reverse queering" we use today is "Trad," which is a kind of faddish style and commodity-identity that people can take up and perform in a variety of ways, especially at the conference scene and on Instagram.
<"Trad" seemingly refers to "traditional" or "traditionalist," but that's only where it gets its inspiration. It is not actually traditionalist except in pastiche, and it attaches to no living tradition whatsoever. While someone might like 1950s styles today, for example, to suddenly adopt them outside of the continuity of the evolution of culture and style is, in fact, a performative action. It's wanting to be seen in a particular way and to see oneself in a particular way in a very fake-it-til-you-make-it way. It is, in short, a "gender" performance, just not one expanding the range through artificial manipulation (queering) but contracting it artificially. That is, it's the same activity.
<When this performativity is adopted for deliberate political ends or means, it is, in fact, a kind of "politics of parody" through performative negation of the current mode and current style. It remains essentially a kind of queering, however, and it is still living life deliberately in drag for political ends, which is what Queer Theory claims as its raison d'etre, at least in a certain way.
<Because it is "trad performativity" (or, "trad drag," if you prefer) and because the traditions it draws from are not living traditions at all, "Trad" actually refers to pseudo-traditionalism, a kind of act pretending to be traditionalist while being conspicuously not in line with living tradition anywhere. Because of the break it represents, it is also a (mild, for now) form of transgression, though there are associated things that are not so mild (e.g., whatever the radicals mean by "based," which isn't "based in reality and principle").
<Am I saying you shouldn't be "Trad"? No, not really. It's (still, for now) a free country, or free society, and you can represent yourself as you wish (again, for now). You should just be clear on what you're adopting: a form of queering just as queer as queering but with a mind to constrict norms rather than expand them. You're as free as you want to be a Queer Theorist in your own fashion.
<Judith Butler might grumble about the expression, but if she understands her own theory, she'd strongly approve.
<PS: Most of the people posting this performativity on the 'Gram aren't living any more of a "Trad" life, much less a traditionalist one, than Bob would wear his judges robes to the golf course on Saturday afternoon. Those people are a TV show, and they might be taking you to the cleaners.