Queering Your Therapy Practice

Queer Theory, Narrative Therapy, and Imagining New Identities

Julie Tilsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000398854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the AASECT Book Award for General Audience 2022!

Queering Your Therapy Practice: Queer Theory, Narrative Therapy, and Imagining New Identities is the first practice-based book for therapists that presents queer theory and narrative therapy as praxis allies.

This book offers fresh, hopeful resources for therapists committed to culturally responsive work with queer and trans people and the important others in their lives. It features clinical vignettes from the author's practice that bring to life the application of queer theory through the practice of narrative therapy and serve as teaching tools for the specific concepts and practices highlighted in individual, relational, and family therapy contexts. The text also weaves in questions for reflection and discussion, and Q-tips summarizing key points and practices.

A practical resource for both seasoned therapists and students, Queering Your Practice Theory demonstrates how therapeutic practice can be informed, improved, and deepened by queer theory.

1
WHAT IS QUEER THEORY?

All F’d Up

LaTrisha sighed and shook her head. “So, I come back to school after summer break, which was great, by the way—I had this amazing internship at the state Capitol. And some of the people on my floor in the dorm are like, ‘Ohhh, we heard you’re with that other R.A., Alexis. Does this mean you’re a lesbian now? Or, bi?’ I mean, god! I’ve been back on campus like a week and this shit is going on, and I’m supposed to be leading all the freshman orientation stuff. Give me a fucking break!”

I’d known LaTrisha, a 21-year-old cis Black woman, since she was a freshman in college. I provided her with counseling support throughout her father’s struggle with cancer. Now she’s an R.A. and a senior, and apparently dealing with other people’s imposition of identity conclusions.

“Damn,” I said. “That sounds super frustrating. What do you call it, the thing you need a break from?”

Without missing a beat, she said, “People’s f’d up idea that we all gotta be a thing they can put their finger on…and keep it there!”

“Do you have any ideas about what gives people this f’d up idea?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I get it; I guess I do it myself sometimes, too, but I try not to. It’s like, we want to know who people are, or we think we know who they are, so we know where to put them in our mind. I suppose it comes from people always doing it.”

“So, everyone does it and that keeps everyone doing it, is that right?”

“Yup.”

“What about that is f’d up to you?” I asked. “What about that has you so mad?”

LaTrisha looked down, shook her head, and then looked up again and met my eyes. “I’m mad because I didn’t think I had to make an announcement to date a girl. And, I certainly didn’t think I had to get a whole new ID card stamped ‘Q’ on it. I mean, if I don’t declare I’m queer or bi, people throw all this shade and say I’m homophobic or in denial. That’s some bullshit! My favorite uncle is gay, and my best friend is queer. I was in the GSA in high school for three years. Why can’t I just like who I want to like?”

“What ideas do you have about why people want you to declare a new identity?”

“Oh, you know… people assume they know who you are based on who you date or have sex with, so they want to put you in a place. It’s all pretty dumb.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty dumb,” I said. “So, do you see smart people making this dumb assumption?”

“Yup.”

“Does that mean they’re not so smart, or does that mean the assumption is really powerful? What do you think?”

“Hell, yeah! The Force is strong in that assumption!”

“OK, General Organa! You said people ‘put you in a place’ based on who you have sex with. What’s important to you about refusing to be put it a place, at least based on that?”

“So, I think it’s about the assumptions. People assume straightness—that’s the biggest assumption people always make, and it’s f’d up. I never told anyone I was straight—they just assumed it, probably ‘cuz I dated a dude for a few months. But I never said, ‘Yo, I’m a straight girl!’ But I totally think that assumption is part of what’s happening now, because it’s just like when people thought I was straight—I’m not supposed to change or be flexible at all. The assumption is that people have to stay the same. That’s f’d up, too. Because that’s what people want to put a finger on—what label they can pin on you! Now, they want me to choose a new label to fit their assumptions about who I am, now that I’ve dated a woman. It’s all f’d up.”

We both paused a moment. We let her words, and the revelations they carried, settle into us.

I asked LaTrisha if I could ask some more questions, and she agreed.

“For you, is the f’d up part that people want to label you? Or that they want you to stay and not move from a label? Or that they assume things about who you are, and don’t ask you? Or is it something else?”

“All of it. It’s f’d up that people want to put you in a box and label you; it’s f’d up that they have assumptions about what those should be and don’t ask you; it’s f’d up that, once you’ve been labeled and sorted into a box, you’re supposed to stay there; and it’s super f’d up that people think they get to have an opinion about any of this. Why can’t I just like who I want to like? Get with who I want to get with?”

When I share stories like LaTrisha’s with other therapists, I often hear them say some of the same things that her friends told her: that she’s in denial about her “true self” (i.e., her sexual orientation), or that she’s struggling with “internalized homophobia.” They hear her question, Why can’t I just like who I want to like?, as avoidance of the inevitable: coming out to herself and then to others.

Conventional gay-affirmative practice would involve helping LaTrisha accept and love herself (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s not what LaTrisha thinks her problem is) and to “claim” a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer identity.

But why? LaTrisha isn’t hiding or minimizing the relationship she had with Alexis. In fact, she wants “to like who I want to and get with who I want to.” She’s contesting something else. LaTrisha is questioning identity categories based on sexual desires or practices. In a nutshell, this is also what queer theory does.

What’s in a Word?

Before we address queer theory, it’s important to talk about the word queer.¹ Until the late 19th century, people used queer as an adjective, and it meant “odd or eccentric.” It wasn’t necessarily pejorative or malicious; it was simply a way to describe a person or experience as peculiar.

It became a pointedly derogatory epithet, used as a slur against effeminate men and people with same-sex desires, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s playing “smear the queer.” This was a “keep-away” game in which the person with the ball was “the queer,” who was then chased and tackled by everyone else.

In the 1980s, in response to the Regan administration’s deadly refusal to address the AIDS epidemic, and to an escalation of anti-gay violence, the radical activist groups Act Up and Queer Nation began using queer in their messaging. While the use of the word disturbed many (including some gay and lesbian people), it proved effective in disarming the word of its hurtful power.

This use of queer by queer people (against whom the word has been used) is an example of a reverse discourse (Foucault, 1978). A reverse discourse occurs when a group, instead of contesting or resisting a word or phrase that’s used to oppress them, takes up the use of the word or phrase on their own terms and for their own purposes.

This taking back of the word queer has proven very successful. It has integrated into mainstream culture in TV shows like Queer as Folk (2000–2005); Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007); and its 2018 re-boot, Queer Eye. The mainstreaming of the word has led to its use as an umbrella term for all non-normative genders and sexualities.

Although this use of queer is ubiquitous, it is important to note that many people also use it in a disruptive and destabilizing way, one which intends to critique identities, rather than to establish or describe one. This radical and politicized use of queer is about challenging all forms of normativity and unhinging binary assumptions.

Queer theory organizes around this more radical elaboration of the word. Here is the definition of queer that I use in this book:

Queer is a critique of identities, not an identity of its own; it stands in resistance to fixed identity categories; it stands against “normal”; and it signifies resistance to regimes of normativity.

(Tilsen, 2013)

There can also be generational and regional differences in people’s use of (and comfort with) the word queer.

What is the significance for you as a therapist of this fast and furious history of the word queer? Why do you need to know this history?

One important reason is so you can check yourself. Please ask yourself these questions:

• What do you think about the word queer?
• What are your reactions when you hear it? Is your reaction different when a straight or cisgender person uses it than when a gay or trans person does?
• Given your reactions, what might you need to do to be better prepared to work with people who prefer the word queer to describe themselves?
• What might you need to do to be better prepared to work with people who do not like the term, especially when applied to themselves?

In your therapy practice, if you typically use the word queer but your client doesn’t, please don’t call them queer. It is a very unqueer thing to insist that someone use the word queer if they describe themselves differently (Tilsen, 2013).

Now let’s flip that around. If your client uses queer, use queer with them, even if it’s not a term you would ordinarily use (or a term that usually makes you cringe). It’s linguistic violence (Strong & Zeman, 2005) when we impose language on people that is different from what they use, especially when it has to do with their identity. Refusing to honor clients’ language is a refusal to understand how language matters to them—and understanding is always our first imperative as therapists.

Here’s another reason why this is important: when we understand that there are many ways people use queer, we are better prepared to suspend our assumptions—and, when someone uses the word, to ask them what they mean and why that meaning is important to them.

It can also further your understanding to ask someone who doesn’t use queer why they don’t—provided that you ask it to understand, not to challenge.

I always want to use the language that people use to describe themselves. I also want to understand what that language does, and how that’s different from other potential ways of languaging their identities.

Lastly, it’s important to be familiar with the history of the word queer because it illustrates the way power flows through language to produce meaning—and to create worlds. This is the process of social construction and discursive production. Narrative therapy is based on this understanding that language is produ...