I like the way that Sedgwick deconstructs categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality by describing the way that a multitude of sexual behaviors or acts are reduced into this particular binary, such that the gender of peoples’ sexual partner becomes what constitutes their sexual identity/identifier. I am thinking about how Sedgwick is engaging the concept of queerness or queering as a verb here, such that queerness becomes about exploding these categories of normativity. I think that this connects to thinking about the potentiality of queerness to re-imagine the world and to explode our ideas about what is possible. This connects to the work of many black and native theorists whose work I am interested in, particularly in thinking about the imperative from native scholars and activists to imagine futures in which the united states does not exist. I think that for many folks this may be difficult to imagine or may seem like an impossible future, but I think that Sedgwick’s work in this text illuminates the way that normative ideas about what is possible are shaped through things like language.

I am thinking about the work of theorists and scholars writing in the field of queer of color critiques, particularly the work being done suggesting how processes of constructing homosexuality as an identity and a deviant one at that, are implicated in racialization and maintaining white supremacy. I am interested in thinking about what Sedgwick’s argument means if we consider racialized bodies as already read as embodying deviant sexualities or how racialized queer folks have to constantly navigate the way that queerness is always already connected to racialization.

In response to Sedgwick’s problematizing of the hegemonic discourse of ‘coming out’, I am thinking about how this imperative of coming out functions as if doing so somehow reveals some greater truth about the person coming out, even though it seems like in doing so, the constructions of particular sexualities will be read onto the person coming out.