When JKP asked me to write a piece on queer joy for Pride season my immediate response was ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’ After these past two years, how can a focus on joy – or pride for that matter – be anything but a deluded kind of ‘back to normal’ dream: a dangerous denial of what we’ve been through, what we’re still going through? On reflection though I began to wonder about receiving the phrase ‘queer joy’ as an invitation. What might it mean to queer joy?

Queer umbrellas

If we take queer as a noun – an umbrella term for our LGBTQIA+ community – then it’s hard to find much joy. At a cultural level, the pandemic disproportionately impacted queer people’s mental health and queerphobic hate crime soared. The recent government U-turns on banning conversion therapy, and subsequent decision to do so only for sexual orientation, reflects the ongoing moral panic against trans folks, and how intersex and a-spectrum people are rarely included under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella in more than name, given that erasing practices for these groups are some of the most extreme and commonplace.

The impact of living through this time has been even greater for those – many of us – whose queerness intersects with other marginalisations: disabled folks who’ve seen COVID policies and practices centre abled people and treat them as disposable; those who the current economic crisis is pushing into ever-deeper levels of poverty; and people of colour – also disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, rises in hate crime, and endless cultural gaslighting of their experiences past and present.

At a community level, this has all taken a massive toll. In the last year alone, my close communities have seen six deaths, all related to mental health struggles rather than COVID itself.

While we might want to tell joyful stories of queer communities drawn closer during a time of crisis, the truth – for many of us – is the opposite. Understandably, given our experiences of both cultural trauma, and frequently the developmental trauma of not being fully accepted by our close people growing up, many of us have fallen back on our unconscious survival strategies: attacking outwards – blaming and ostracising those who seem to be hurting, abandoning or endangering us; attacking inwards against ourselves, or crossing our own – or others’ – boundaries in attempts to get our needs met; withdrawing into smaller and smaller zones of safety; and/or avoiding pain by distracting ourselves, distancing from those who’re struggling, and rushing ‘back to normal.’

These reactions have bumped up against each other painfully, often resulting in irreparable rifts and ruptures, which only exacerbate our levels of isolation and distress. It’s been hard indeed to face other’s limited capacities to hold us through this crisis, perhaps harder still to face our own tendencies to default back to habits which hurt ourselves and others.

So where is the potential for queer joy in all of this?

Queer seeing

Queer activists generally use the word queer as a verb: a doing word. The doing is a radical questioning of normative understandings of gender and sexuality, but also way more than that. Queering challenges all the interwoven axes of oppression that position one group as more valid and valuable than another, and all the culturally accepted ways in which we relate to others and ourselves.

Under this definition, we could find queer joy in a refusal to go ‘back to normal,’ recognising that normal has never worked for marginalised people like us. We could find it in insisting on being radically honest about what’s going on in the world and in our communities right now: understanding the links between our own individual trauma patterns and the traumatised and traumatising forms of relating we’re embedded in, including social and climate injustice.

We could find queer joy – and solidarity – in this kind of clear-seeing (or queer-seeing) of what we’re all up against, and in our determination to find better ways, knowing that our experiences actually make us some of the best-placed people and communities to do so.

Queer feeling

Another meaning of the verb queer is troubling the binary understandings that so much normativity is founded upon. In addition to the heteronormative binaries of straight/gay and man/woman, we could extend this to include all those binaries that render one group of people centred and another marginalised, one intelligible and another invisible, one valuable and another disposable.

From this perspective we might also question the valuing of certain emotional states over others. I read the request to write this piece as an invitation to focus on the light for a moment, because haven’t we all had enough darkness? But what if we can only have light by also embracing the darkness? Pride by acknowledging our (cultural, community, individual) shame? Joy by making room for all the feelings that are not-joy too?

There’ve been many attempts to identify the fundamental emotions. For our purposes, I’m going to say there are seven (mostly because it fits the nice queer metaphor that I’m planning to shoehorn into this section). These are joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and some kind of category for loving/peaceful/powerful feelings (opinions vary on this one).

Emotion wheels illustrate these seven feelings, and all the other feelings under each category, in rainbow colours (see where I’m going with this?) As with rainbows (the actual kind and our LGBTQIA+ kind), emotion experts from ancient Buddhists to present-day psychologists emphasise that we need all of the emotions/colours. Instead of our common cultural binary that renders some emotions ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, and tries to maximise the one and avoid the other, such approaches invite us to become intimate with all seven, and all shades within and between them, embracing them as we would dear friends. Indeed, many would argue that it’s only to the degree that we’re able to flow through all of these feelings that we can fully experience any of them. In trying to eradicate sadness, for example, we would also lose joy, as in the movie Inside Out.

Queer kindness

So bring on your queer rage, your queer terror and grief and shame. All are welcome here. It’s only through learning how to feel the full rainbow of feelings that we’ll be able to experience queer joy, and to see how we hurt ourselves – and others – when we repress these feelings, or react from them in order to get out of them as quickly as possible. Only with the full rainbow of feelings can we really understand what we – and others – are up against, and find some understanding and kindness for that.

To me that’s the message of the wonderful recent queer film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is all about how we might stop passing trauma on from generation to generation as we’re currently doing. The tortured – and torturing – character, Jobu Tupaki, who has (queerly) seen it all, says that she was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel. While admitting their human smallness and stupidity, the other characters find their way to give her that, if only for fleeting moments. I’ll leave it here with another quote from that movie:

“The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.“

Find out more

More on how to feel all the feels in my zines Welcome Monster Feelings, Staying With Feelings, and blog post on Staying With The Big Feels.

The post Queer joy appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Consent

The third free book is all about consent. It starts with my consent checklist zine and then goes on to all the recent writing I’ve done, particularly focused on sexual consent and social scripts, how we can make all our relationships more consensual, the importance of boundaries, the impact of gaslighting on consent, and applying consent ideas to various contexts.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

The post Free book 3: Consent appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

Many thanks to Justin Hancock for the podcast conversations which were the starting points for these posts. You can find those over on megjohnandjustin.com and on our Patreon. If you want to learn more about consent, there’s no better place to start than Justin’s new book Can We Talk About Consent? Available for pre-order now. He’s also written a great post on gaslighting in relationships.

What is gaslighting?

Gaslighting is when somebody manipulates another person so that they doubt their own reality or sanity. The word comes from the play and movies called ‘Gaslight’ where one character tries to make another crazy by constantly questioning her experience. One thing he does is to dim the gaslights in her home. He then tells her that they haven’t got dimmer and that she’s imagining things.

In her forthcoming book, Lori Beth Bisbey says that gaslighting does two damaging things simultaneously. It convinces you both that:

• Your perception is distorted, and that
• Another person – or group’s – perception is reality 

Lori Beth points out that, as well as being a sign of a non-consensual relationship, gaslighting makes us more at risk of non-consensual situations. For example, gaslighting about our experiences when we’re younger makes us more likely to mistrust our own feelings, and to overly trust other people’s sense of how things are. In later life this may mean that we override our sense of danger that something isn’t right about a situation or relationship. It may mean that we believe a partner or friends’ sense of what is normal or acceptable in a relationship even when it doesn’t feel good to us. It may mean that we doubt our sense that something non-consensual or abusive has happened to us when it has.

What’s involved in gaslighting?

Common features of gaslighting include:

• Minimisation (e.g. it wasn’t that bad, it didn’t have such a bad impact, no-one intended any harm, you’re making too much of this)
• Denial (e.g. it didn’t really happen, your memory is inaccurate, what you’re describing isn’t real, you’re acting crazy, everybody else agrees with me so you must be wrong)
• Victim blame (e.g. it was your fault, you brought it on yourself, surely you could just have done X and it wouldn’t have happened, bad things only happen to bad people)
• Defensiveness (e.g. it’s nothing to do with me, I’m blameless, you’ve hurt me by raising this), and
• Offering a superficial fix that doesn’t get at the extent of the problem (e.g. couldn’t you just try…? Let it go. You’re overthinking this/making a big deal. Look on the bright side).

Who gaslights?

Rather than being something that only a small minority of abusive/narcissistic people ‘over there’ do in deliberately manipulative ways, gaslighting is something we’re all socialised into within our non-consensual culture. It’s also on a spectrum, with most of us automatically going to a gaslighting response sometimes. 

For example, we might gaslight unintentionally, and/or for understandable reasons when:

• We don’t want to acknowledge that a close person is struggling so much and that we might be powerless to help them,
• Their experience shows us just how unjust and painful the world can be, 
• Their vulnerability frightens us because we’d hate to be that vulnerable ourselves, 
• Their experience highlights a privilege/oppression dynamic that we benefit from ourselves, or 
• We’re scared that our own behaviour might have been harmful in some way either to them directly or to other people in similar ways in the past.

Lori Beth writes that gaslighting can be deliberate, but it can also be unconscious on the gaslighter’s part, for example when it involves protecting them from a negative view of themselves, or when it involves them asserting their need to be ‘right’ in order to shore up their sense of themself.

Levels of gaslighting

Gaslighting happens at all levels. One of the reasons that we struggle to spot it, easily fall into it in our own relationships, and internalise it and gaslight ourselves is because it is so common in wider culture, and in the communities and organisations that we’re part of.

You might find it useful to identify forms of gaslighting that were familiar to you at the following levels growing up, or which you see in the world and relationships around you in the present.

Cultural gaslighting

Gaslighting has been evident in political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as denial of the extent of the problem, its impact, or the fact it is impacting some – marginalised groups – far worse than others. #BlackLivesMatter has also highlighted how those common features of gaslighting are generally present in everyday responses to police brutality against black people, and in racism more broadly.

The common features also map onto the rape myths which surivors generally hear when they speak about their sexual assaults. These are present in jury decision making, and are often internalised by survivors themselves, making it hard for them to acknowledge what happened to them, or to speak out about it.

It’s important to be aware of how marginalised and oppressed people in particular tend to be gaslit in wider culture, for example in the portrayal of trans people as not really existing and as perpetrators of violence when they are statistically vastly over-represented as victims of violence.

We can be mindful of when our go-to response when hearing about a situation is minimising, denial, victim blame, defensiveness, and coming up with quick fixes, that we’re at risk of perpetuating cultural gaslighting in that area.

Systemic gaslighting

Gaslighting also happens in systems such as organisations, communities, and families. A common form of gaslighting involves individualising something which is really a systemic/structural issue. Examples of this include: 

• ‘Explaining away’ why all the people high up in an organisation are white men, rather than acknowledging and addressing the role of structural sexism and racism, 
• Scapegoating one individual in a community as abusive rather than recognising an underlying issue with normalising of non-consensual behaviour in that community, 
• Blaming an individual for being over-sensitive rather than dealing with structural racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. in an organisation,
• Giving a brief training or workshop on some form of injustice rather than tackling it throughout the system.

Lori Beth Bisey highlights gaslighting as a common feature of many of our early family lives. Many children are taught to distrust their needs, feelings, and boundaries because they don’t have these heard, reflected back, and respected by caregivers. Gaslighting children risks them learning to mistrust their own experiences, becoming unable to tune into vital needs and boundaries, and being overly trusting of potentially unsafe others rather than checking them out of building trust over time. 

Common examples of gaslighting in childhood include adults: 

• Telling kids they shouldn’t – or don’t – feel the way they feel about something, 
• Pretending that tough things aren’t going on in their family or community when they are,
• Making light of their struggles, 
• Assuming they must have done something to cause any bullying or hurtful behaviour they experience, 
• Suggesting their experiences or identities are ‘just a phase’ or not real,
• Blaming them for finding something hard when this may well be due to a form of disability, neurodiversity, or mental health struggle, 
• Telling them they have to accept adult behaviours after they have expressed discomfort with them (e.g. forms of touch or invasions of privacy).

Relational gaslighting

One reason why gaslighting in families or educational settings is so damaging is that it can set us up for emotionally and otherwise abusive later relationship dynamics. If we’ve been taught that our feelings are not valid, that we don’t have a right to privacy, and that our body is other people’s to touch even when we don’t want it, we can easily fail to recognise when people later on in life are undermining us, trying to control us, or even assaulting us.

Signs that you might be gaslit in relationship include: feeling foggy, lost, or murky rather than clear about what’s going on, and finding yourself protecting that person – and their view of themselves – in conversations with other people. 

It’s useful to ask yourself whether your experiences and views are affirmed or undermined in the relationship, whether another person’s views are put across as always ‘right’, and/or whether any difficulties are blamed on you rather than being seen as relational issues and/or there probably being responsibility on all sides. 

It can be the case, of course, that both or all people in a relationship engage in gaslighting behaviour. In conflictual and non-consensual dynamics people can often end up attempting to undermine each other’s versions of events in gaslighting ways. Important things to hang on to hear is that there are generally multiple stories through any situation, and that it’s important to affirm the truth of each person’s lived experience of it, without undermining anybody else’s. More on this in the break-up chapter of my book Rewriting the Rules.

There are links to more posts on consensual and non-consensual relationships at the end of this post.

Self-gaslighting

Sadly, because of cultural, systemic, and relational gaslighting, it is easy to gaslight ourselves, which often contributes to our suffering. 

For example, if we have mental health problems, common stigma around mental health can often lead to us questioning whether what happened to us was really ‘bad enough’ (minimising), wondering whether our mental health problem is even real (denial), blaming ourselves for it (victim blame), mentally defending the people/situations that traumatised us (defensiveness), and telling ourselves that we should be able to easily fix this as individuals, rather than recognising the extent of the trauma and/or the wider systems which are involved in our suffering (superficial fix).

Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help us learn how to reality-test, how to regulate our feelings and come to a more trusting relationship with them, and how to find and articulate our needs and boundaries.

Responding to gaslighting

At all these levels it can be helpful to respond to the common features of gaslighting in the following ways – when drawn to gaslighting behaviour ourselves, or when experiencing gaslighting from others. 

• Minimising: Instead acknowledge the ongoing impact of what happened, and that it may always be there.
• Denial: Instead recognise that what happened was real and painful, and allow any feelings to be present, assuming that they are sensible.
• Victim blame: Locate the responsibility for what happened in the person/group who behaved in the harmful way and/or in wider systems and structures, not individualising it in the one who is suffering or was victimised.
• Defensiveness: Be accountable for your role in what happened if relevant, acknowledge the systems and structures involved.
• Superficial fixes: Ask the person concerned what helps, and practice these things. Do your homework to learn what is generally supportive in such situations. Seek consent before giving any advice. Try to empower the person in finding their way through rather than assuming you know what’s best for them.

Importantly please be kind and gentle with yourself around this. Because gaslighting is such a common go-to response at all levels, and because most of us grew up with it, it is really hard not to engage in this behaviour with ourselves and with others. We all need to do the work of learning how to treat ourselves kindly and honestly, knowing our trauma responses and stuck patterns, staying with our feelings, and articulating our needs and boundaries where it’s safe-enough to do so.

Further resources

You can find more of my resources about consent on my consent work page.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

Patreon link: If you found this useful, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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