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QUEER ERASURE

Queer erasure is a heteronormative cultural practice where queer people are erased from cultural narratives. Queer erasure (inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and asexual erasure) is used in both scholarly and popular media texts when referring to issues of visibility and exclusion. Some scholars point out the issue of visibility when it comes to re-creating LGBTQ histories, leading to actors not representing those actually present when the histories were actually taking place. For example, queer actors are denied visibility in movies and TV shows when straight and cis-gendered actors are playing characters that identify as being LGBTQ. Some point out that the queer is actively ignored or viewed as an outlier of sorts, where scientists “have relentlessly denied their own observations of animal behavior or neglected their own protocols for collecting scientific evidence." This is to say that there are non-heterosexual practices taking place in nature, where animals practice homosexual acts such as two males rearing a child or enjoying the act of sex. However, the researchers ignore those acts, or brush it off as the animals being confused in their attempt to perform heterosexual practices, instead of writing those findings in their research.

Queer Erasure in Academia and Media

Historian Gregory Rosenthal refers to queer erasure in describing the exclusion of LGBTQ histories from public history that can occur in urban contexts via gentrification.Cáel Keegan, an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies and Liberal studies, describes the lack of appropriate and realistic representation of queer people, HIV positive people, and queer people of color as being a type of aesthetic gentrification, where space is being appropriated from queer people’s communities where queer people are not given any cultural representation. Examples of such include Dallas Buyers Club (2013) , Stonewall (2015) and The Danish Girl (2015).

Erasure of queer people has taken place in medical research and schools as well, such as in the case of AIDS research that does not include lesbian populations. Medicine and academia can be places where visibility is produced or erased, such as the exclusion of queer women in HIV discourses and studies or the lack of attention to queer identities in dealing with anti-bullying discourse in schools. These heteronormative methods of instruction and research only serve to maintain heteronormative standards rather than allowing for diversity. It also allows for the argument to be made that queer people did not exist in history until the present.

The way history was written has made some people belief that queer people did not exist. However, many scholars argue that this is only the case because queer people’s histories were deemed as unimportant by those writing the histories. In order to show that queer people existed in history, Sharon Marcus, a researcher and professor of English and Comparative Literature, suggests to those in academia to actively produce gay history through uncovering them themselves by doing archival work and doing research that exposes rhetorical strategies used to perpetuate that heterosexuality is the only “normal.”

Lesbian Pulp Fiction Novels

The practice to prevent diverse representation of queer people has been in place for decades and centuries. Specifically, the authors of lesbian pulp fiction novels that took hold of people’s interests in the 1950s and 1960s were told that their novels cannot promote lesbian desire. The novels were used to keep isolated lesbians believing and agreeing with the condemnation of lesbian relationships, especially when the novels ended with the lesbian characters either converting to heterosexuality or suffering from madness, suicide, misery or punishment.

These writers disassociated themselves from their work and pretended as though their pseudonyms for their novels were not theirs. Alternatively, some of these writers wrote the way they were instructed by their editors, publishers and society, all the while hoping and believing that they would have their way later. The hope was that with positive representation of queer relationships and better endings instead of stories that had a social intention of promoting negative stereotypes of queer relationships and desire, as if there was a moral to the stories.

See also

• Bisexual erasure