What makes a story queer? Is it the subject—a tale of love and desire between people of the same gender? Is it the maker—the artist who carries queerness in their skin, their voice, their lived experience? Or is it something more abstract, an ethos, an energy, a resistance that permeates the work? The question feels slippery, like trying to hold fog in your hands. But perhaps that slipperiness is precisely the point.
Queerness, after all, defies categorization. It doesn’t fit neatly into boxes labeled “trans,” “lesbian,” or even “LGBTQIA+.” It spills over, uncontainable, rewriting the rules as it goes. Queerness is an act of refusal—of binaries, of normativity, of the notion that stories must serve as morality plays or satisfy a gaze that isn’t ours. It’s a dance of subversion, an anarchic whisper that asks: What if this wasn’t about conforming? What if this was about the joy of disruption?
The Subject v/s The Maker
A queer story isn’t simply one that includes queer people. Let’s face it: Hollywood has taught us how shallow that representation can be. We’ve seen the sanitized, palatable queers, constructed for mass appeal—smiling, suffering, dying. Stories that are more about making straight audiences comfortable than capturing queer truths.
But flip the coin: Is a story queer if it is made by queer artists, regardless of its subject? Can a story about straight characters hold queerness in its bones if the filmmaker approaches it with queer eyes? What if queerness isn’t just an identity but a way of seeing the world—a lens that fractures the obvious, inviting complexity and contradiction?
Take Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996). A story of two women discovering desire within the confines of a conservative Indian family. The film’s queerness isn’t just in its plot but in how it dismantles social taboos, igniting protests and dialogues across India. Though directed by a cishet filmmaker, its audacity to transgress societal norms makes it undeniably queer.
Or consider Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), a mockumentary about a Black lesbian filmmaker searching for the untold story of a forgotten actress. The film queers everything it touches—not only in its narrative but in the way it refuses to treat the past as static or the present as simple. Its queerness is in its defiance of linearity, its insistence on joy as an act of resistance.
The Queer Ethos
Queerness is as much about what a story does as it is about what it contains. A queer story refuses the constraints of what stories are supposed to be. It’s David Wojnarowicz stitching a loaf of bread into the mouth of a cow skull, it’s Audre Lorde writing that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” it’s Věra Chytilová making Daisies, a feminist farce that obliterates coherence to expose the absurdity of patriarchy.
It’s the evolving drag culture in India, where trans, gender non-conforming, and queer drag artists—including drag kings—are reshaping the art form. Their performances push beyond traditional boundaries of femininity and masculinity, queering not just the stage but the very fabric of gender itself. In South Asia, the act of queering extends into kinship structures and collective resilience. Consider Ekatara Collective's Ek Jagah Apni, which follows two trans women searching for a home. Its collaborative filmmaking process mirrors its subject matter, emphasizing care and community.
Queerness challenges the binaries of good and bad, right and wrong, narrative and abstraction. It questions the very structure of storytelling—why must there be resolution? Why must there be a hero? Why must we cater to the moral certainties of the mainstream? A queer story is messy, contradictory, and alive. It invites you in but refuses to make you comfortable.
Is Queerness a Story’s Core or Its Context?
Take Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990), a documentary that captures the drag ball culture of 1980s New York. It’s undeniably queer in its subject, yet its creator has been criticized for exploiting and othering the Black and Latinx trans and queer communities it portrays. The film raises questions about the ethics of who gets to tell queer stories—and for whom. Is a story queer if it exploits its subjects? Can something be queer if it doesn’t recognize the intersections of race, class, and gender that define so many queer lives?
On the other hand, look at Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016). A film made by a straight man, about a queer Black boy growing up in poverty. Its queerness is undeniable—not just in its subject but in its tenderness, its refusal to caricature, its quiet dismantling of the hyper-masculine stereotypes often imposed on Black men. Jenkins approached the story with a queerness of spirit, not only of identity.
The Politics of Queer Art
The idea that queerness can only exist in certain containers—that it must be explicitly about sexuality or identity—feels reductive. Queerness is intersectional. It is the audacity to tell stories that dismantle power structures, whether those structures are patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, or heteronormativity. Queerness doesn’t just live in stories about romance or coming out. It lives in stories that embrace ambiguity, that refuse to tidy up their messes, that challenge who gets to speak and who gets to be seen.
Consider Abar Jodi Ichchha Karo, Debalina Majumder’s poignant portrayal of two women navigating love against societal odds. The film queers not just its narrative but the act of storytelling itself, rejecting voyeurism in favor of a deeply personal lens that captures both tenderness and defiance.
Queerness is in the art of Zanele Muholi, whose photography transforms Black queer lives into sites of dignity and beauty. It’s in Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015), shot entirely on an iPhone, capturing the chaotic, joyful, painful realities of trans sex workers in LA. It’s in Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), where a lesbian romance unfolds in painterly silences, defying the male gaze at every turn. And it’s in the defiance of Indian poets like Ismat Chughtai, whose words refused to cater to respectability.
What Does It Mean to Call Something Queer?
If queerness is everything and nothing—a lens, a stance, a refusal, a liberation—then perhaps the question isn’t what makes a story queer, but why we need that question in the first place. What are we afraid of if queerness isn’t neatly contained? If it infects everything it touches? If it reshapes not just the stories we tell but the way we tell them?
Queerness, like all identities, is political. To call something queer is to acknowledge its challenge to the status quo, its refusal to cater to power. It’s genocide, racism, patriarchy—all the systems queerness disrupts just by existing. It’s the audacity to say: There are more ways to be, more ways to love, more ways to tell a story.
Queerness isn’t just what’s on the page or screen. It’s the space between, the tension, the questions we carry when the story ends. It’s not about checking a box but about breaking it open. And as long as we’re asking the question—what makes a story queer?—we’re already inside its radical, messy, transformative answer.
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