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A review by estanceveyrac
Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder by Saundra Mitchell
4.0
Some stories were very good, but more than a handful I really have nothing good to say about. I am disappointed, mostly because of my high expectations, but more & more I see the limitations of an US dominated international publishing industry where the US based writers are meant to represent the entire world when in fact they really do not & the publishing industry congratulates itself on being diverse & inclusive when the vast majority of the stories take place in that one country like that's a universal experience & the vast majority of the writers that do get published have to write in English to get published because the strong publishing industry is only strong in the US, to the point where we have more books translated from English to be published then published in the original languages in many many countries.
I'm tired of reading these stories. I'm tired of the same stories. Especially in an anthology about the future of queerness. This is not the future of queerness. It's not even our present. The future is not gonna be "christianity based homophobia" for a few more centuries, the future isthe formation of family with new family structure, the transition outside of the patriarchal system with the breakdown of the transmission of wealth & power from fathers to sons & without that rigid patriarchal system that was designed to transmit wealth, how do we live, how do we organize community?
The future of queerness is how with advances in medicine, will people transition medically the same way, how will puberty as a whole be medicalized & treated like a process that will be to be monitered & guided, like we use metal to make teeth straighter, how will we use better knowledge of hormones to treat everyone, cis or trans, to better monitor our health.
The future of queerness is a reclaiming of the past, of the history of queerness that predates colonisation, people taking back the narrative that was stolen from them. It's political queerness, with movements leading to changes in legislation, it's fights that will be fought, that will be hard, that will eventually be won.
It will be a shit-ton more non-binary people, a shift in how people address each other when they meet. If fiction doesn't show what we already do of introducing ourself with our prounoms or how we want to be gendered, how are kids supposed to see what's possible. If fiction about the future of queerness is the same as fiction about the now, then there is no point in calling it the future.
I'm tired of reading these stories. I'm tired of the same stories. Especially in an anthology about the future of queerness. This is not the future of queerness. It's not even our present. The future is not gonna be "christianity based homophobia" for a few more centuries, the future isthe formation of family with new family structure, the transition outside of the patriarchal system with the breakdown of the transmission of wealth & power from fathers to sons & without that rigid patriarchal system that was designed to transmit wealth, how do we live, how do we organize community?
The future of queerness is how with advances in medicine, will people transition medically the same way, how will puberty as a whole be medicalized & treated like a process that will be to be monitered & guided, like we use metal to make teeth straighter, how will we use better knowledge of hormones to treat everyone, cis or trans, to better monitor our health.
The future of queerness is a reclaiming of the past, of the history of queerness that predates colonisation, people taking back the narrative that was stolen from them. It's political queerness, with movements leading to changes in legislation, it's fights that will be fought, that will be hard, that will eventually be won.
It will be a shit-ton more non-binary people, a shift in how people address each other when they meet. If fiction doesn't show what we already do of introducing ourself with our prounoms or how we want to be gendered, how are kids supposed to see what's possible. If fiction about the future of queerness is the same as fiction about the now, then there is no point in calling it the future.