Queer Ends: Digital Culture, Queer Youth, and Heterosexuality Beyond Heteronormativity

• In Event: 4232 - Critical Theory I: Dialectical Engagements

Abstract

Lori Duron is a popular “mommy blogger” who turned to the Internet to better understand her gender-creative child. Failing to find adequate information, she launched RaisingMyRainbow.com, on January 1, 2011. Virtual communities like those created by Duron play a vital role in an emerging queer world-making project that places heteronormative families on the frontline of initiatives to create queer affirming communities (both digital and material). Through a case study of mommy blogs, I demonstrate that the heterosexual family unit can be a site of queer affirmation, and in fact serves to produce a queer social world. However, my dialectic reading of mommyblogs is sensitive to concerns about inclusion and normalization. Mommyblogs can certainly be criticized for pacifying the radical critique of normativity intrinsic to queer studies. This paper considers the discursive construction of queer children in the digital space of mommyblogs. Preliminary research shows that queering and normalizing are simultaneously taking place. The heteronormative family structure and hierarchies within it are complicated under the weight of the queer child even as queerness itself is normalized in the exchange.

A case study of Duron’s blog frames a critique of queer theory, particularly, queer theory’s lack of dialectic engagement with material social phenomenon. I argue that queer theory’s failure to account for material transformations in heterosexuality and the family, such as those constituted on Duron’s blog, misses an opportunity to identify and engage and perhaps shape alternative ways of thinking and enacting the family as well as gender and sexuality.

Author

• Jennifer Lynn Miller, University of Texas at Arlington