Queer Spaces in a Straight World: The Dilemma of Sexual Identity

Abstract

If it is indeed true that ‘all the world is queer’, except for Robert Owen and his addressee, then what kind of world do we inhabit? Is everyone queer — straight and gay alike? Does a queer world mean that queer is the new straight? Of course, such playfulness inevitably forces us to reflect on the way in which the world as we know it is not queer, but one that is schematised according to gender differences and a presumptive heterosexuality. However, Owen’s wry comment also allows us a moment to imagine a different kind of world than the one we currently know. What would it be like if, as Alice declared on her journey to Wonderland, ‘Everything is queer today’?¹ What if ‘everything’ from legal to political, social, and everyday practices and policies were defamiliarised and destabilised?

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

(Sir Robert Owen, in Cole, 1930)