On the utility of queer studies and related critical approaches, an if/then thread.
1) If humans have bodies (as a precondition), then humanity is predicated on what makes a body human, and what makes humans bodied.
1) If humans have bodies (as a precondition), then humanity is predicated on what makes a body human, and what makes humans bodied.
2) If queer studies is concerned with how bodies become bodies, under what structural, ontological, epistemological conditions--and not just what 'sexuality' means, then QS is a method for understanding bodies in their ongoing transformations, undoings/becomings, aliveness.
3) If the aliveness of the body--what makes it a body--is one, if not the primary, concern of QS, then QS should be much more involved in deconstructing the anthrocentrism of western epistemologies than it is right now.
4) If this lack of concern for the place of the human within western thought is not just an 'oops we forgot' but rather a 'we only have one type of human in mind,' then QS is actually super racist because it can only conceive of being as if it were whiteness itself.
5) Finally, if queer theory wants to have meaning today, then it must erode its own pre-conceived notions of what counts as a body (i.e. not just humans or white-oriented humans), and become something more critical of the power of its own foundational assumptions.
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