Vroni Zieglmeier
LightNews LightNews
banner
vzie.bsky.social
Vroni Zieglmeier
@vzie.bsky.social
89 followers 160 following 14 posts
(socio-)linguist and bubble tea aficionado
swimming, singing, and researching in berlin, heidelberg, and all over the place
Posts Replies Media Videos
vzie.bsky.social
4: Being queer/trans is neither reactionary nor revolutionary

Holly Lewis (2022) Ten axioms for a queer Marxist future. In Politics for Everybody. Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection. London: Zed Books. (p. 275)
The argument that capitalism thrives off normativity ignores the fact that it also thrives off diversity, pluralism, fashion, and market segments. While the heteronormative family is productive for capital, queer urban individualists and drop-out counter-culturalists are also productive for capital – the former as ‘creatives’ in the labor market, the latter as a surplus population (or, in the US, low-cost service industry labor). Queers without children are also not entirely outside the family matrix in that unmarried and childless family members are often taxed with eldercare. It is romantic to think that you can change the world through diverse sexuality, creative self-expression, and communal bonding. But you can’t. Also, trans and intersexed people should not be used as a flag of radical possibility for a new, postgendered future. First of all, trans and intersexed people are, more often than not, gendered. Second, trans bodies have enough pressures without being required to have to intentionally position their bodies as political objects.11 However, if queerness is not progressive, it is also not reactionary or a product of bourgeois deviation, as it was sometimes caricatured by mid-century Marxist and Third Worldist movements. Nor is it a Eurocentric import external to precolonial peoples. It is also not
September 9, 2025 at 9:38 AM
vzie.bsky.social
Catharine R. Stimpson 1990, as cited in Jenness, V. (1992) Coming out: Lesbian identities and the categorization problem. In K. Plummer (Ed) Modern Homosexualities.
A 'lesbian identity' once entailed invisibility because no one wanted to see her. Now a 'lesbian' identity might entail invisibility because the lesbian, like some supernatural creature of myth and tale, shows that no identity is stable enough to claim the reassurances of permanent visibility. (Stimpson 1990:381)
August 19, 2025 at 4:12 PM
vzie.bsky.social
"Yet, some of us have to live in the metaphors that others decorate their theories and artworks with."
deLire, L. Beyond representational justice. Texte zur Kunst, 129. www.textezurkunst.de/en/129/luce-...
(2) Exhaustion and normalization The idea of performative subversion can lead one to (implicitly) conceive of transness as a momentary transgression or as the horizon of an emancipation process of society at large - cis gender is then tacitly normalized as the unexamined opposite of transgression. Yet, some of us have to live in the metaphors that others decorate their theories and artworks with. Representational justice, the politics of visibility, and subversion as a political strategy are fashionable instruments for academic analysis. They are neat concepts if we want to stage ourselves as revolutionary subjects in left-wing political peer groups. Yet they are tough to live in. What are the effects when socially sanctioned aggression, constant distance in everyday interactions, repeated refusal of solidarity and privileging toward cis gender drag on for years? Is it not exhaustion and mistrust? The revolution has been overdue for a long time, and our allies do not - or barely - have to carry its burden. The existence of viable trans identities is being left out of the equation. Why? *Who* is afraid of irreversible transitions and surgical intervention - if not those who (implicitly) normalize cis bodies and cis identities as intrinsically worthy of protection? Is this not ultimately the reinscription of biological gender at the level of political reality?
July 25, 2025 at 10:12 AM
vzie.bsky.social
Judith Butler (1991) "Imitation and Gender Insubordination". In Abelove/Aina Barale/Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Routledge.
What, if anything, can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom? If I claim to be a lesbian, I "come out" only to produce a new and different "closet." The "you" to whom I come out now as access to a different region of opacity. Indeed, the locus of opacity has simpliy shifted: before, you did not know whether I "am," but now you do not know what that means, which is to say that the copula is empty, that it cannot be substituted for with a set of descriptions. And perhaps that is a situation to be valued. Conventionally, one comes out _of_ the closet (and yet, how often is it the case that we are "outted" when we are young and without resources?); so we are out of the closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure, whose door, like Kafka's door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives? Curiously, it is the figure of the closet that produces this expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfaction. For being "out" always depends to some extent on being "in"; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being "out" must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as "out." In this sense, _outness_ can only produce a new opacity; and _the closet_ produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never come.
July 18, 2025 at 3:45 PM
vzie.bsky.social
Andrea Long Chu, Females (Verso, 2019, p. 38)
transreads.org/females/
Gender transition begins, after all, from the understanding that how you identify yourself subjectively—as precious and important as this identification may be—is nevertheless on its own basically worthless. If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it—a light bulb, suddenly switched on. Your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction, and no one, least of all yourself, would care. On the contrary, if there is any lession of gender transition—from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries—it's that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers. When people today say that a given gender identity is "valid," this is true, but only tautologically so. At best it is a moral demand for possibility, but it does not, in itself, constitute the realization of this possibility. The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don't even have a right to be.
July 4, 2025 at 12:41 PM
vzie.bsky.social
ah yes, a totally apolitical symbol
a group of women wearing all black but a french-flag sash and red phrygian hats. each has a shopping cart containing a baby doll and some undefinable objects. according to the french image description, they are marching on a demonstration against LGBT rights in paris, on march 8, 2020. they raise their fists. in the background, smoke and bengal fireworks.
June 3, 2024 at 11:00 AM