Rowan Blanchard, star of Disney's "Girl Meets World," has been vocal about various important social issues often related to identity. She has spoken about intersectionality in feminism and has discussed various feminist issues. She has also critiqued the "squad goals" discourse as she found it discouraged inclusivity and diversity. She has even taken to Instagram to point out the sexist nature of telling women to smile.
It is incredibly impressive and important that a 14-year-old television star is boldly starting a discourse on these issues when so many role models remain silent on them. However, her most recent discussion of her sexuality was more problematic than her other rants. Blanchard opened up about her sexuality in a tweet on Saturday as she claimed that while she has always liked boys, she considers herself queer because she does not want to label herself -- she wants to leave it open in order to accept that she may be sexually fluid. She claims she is open to liking any gender in the future and that is why she identifies as queer.
While I value inclusivity, especially within the queer community, I have problems with anti-labeling rhetoric and I do not feel comfortable with someone with no experience or understanding of what it means or feels like to be queer using the term.
Pressure to find a label to describe one's experience can be overwhelming and the truth is, sometimes we cannot put people into neat little boxes, but that does not mean labels have no value. Labels come attached to communities and are used to unite groups of people who are often marginalized and oppressed.
Despite not having the specific gender or sexuality experience that the term describes, Blanchard is applying the term "queer" to herself. She is using the label in an attempt to avoid labeling herself, which is problematic because it belittles the term as a label that represents a community. She claims she does not want to label her experience but then does so with a label that so many people use to connect with others who are marginalized and discriminated against in the same way. She does not currently belong to that community, so she does not currently know what it means to be queer. Hence, she should not currently be using the term.
Oftentimes within the queer community, exclusivity can be encouraged. LGBTQIA+ people can feel that they are not queer enough to belong to the community. Bisexual people are told they are not gay enough to identify that way or genderqueer people can be considered not trans enough to fit in. This is incredibly damaging because the queer community exists partly as a way to deal with being rejected from the heteronormative and cissexist mainstream. So, it is important that my message is not misconstrued here. If Rowan Blanchard identifies as queer because she has a non normative gender or sex experience, then by all means, I think she should identify as such, but I do not think people with normative sex and gender experiences should be using a label reserved for a specific oppressed group.
It's similar to when people try to put the word "ally" in the LGBTQIA+ acronym; it's not designed for these people because they do not have an understanding of the internal and external strife that being queer entails. The inclusion of non-queer individuals keeps this from becoming an identity.
I am so excited to have a young female role model on a children's show that is an outspoken feminist, and believe me, I'm ready for more queer women in media, but I am not comfortable with her discourse about labels and I am not comfortable with her using this important term without really identifying with it.
