Photo by cottonbro VIA PEXELS
Names and pronouns are paramount in entering queer spaces — they tell the whole story, after all. Queerness is relational, as the experience of self is realized through the expression of the other. Saying that your name is José is not a guarantee that you are Latino. However, a woman saying that she has a girlfriend renders a statement of overt queerness almost redundant. In some ways, we can view this communication of queerness as an affirmation of gender: I am a lesbian because I am a woman who dates only other woman. But with the addition of homophobic and specifically misogynistic ideas, the opposite is true: a statement of queerness is seen as a rejection of the message sender’s gender. A thousand homophobic ships have sailed over stereotypes of effete gay men and mannish gay woman. A name becomes a sexuality which becomes a gender and a name becomes a gender which becomes a sexuality and so on until you’re tired of the whole exercise.
All of this is to say that in queer spaces, names hold power, sometimes communicating ideas both of gender and sexuality within a single word. This power of naming operates in two ways. First, the sender of the message of queerness holds the power to identify themselves as queer, and that is something they can negotiate if they so choose, given that they otherwise pass as straight. Second, the receiver of a message of queerness holds the power to impose ideas of gender in response to the sender of the message. Both of these operations can work to combine names, gender, and sexuality into a fraught but whole package.
At-will identifying is not true of people in other groups: there’s no gay skin color, no gay names, and no gay country to say you are from (I’ll set the Lesbos joke aside for now). Put another way: I decide every day if I am queer or not. When asked if I date, do I have a partner, or do I have a girlfriend? In conversations with professors, coworkers, and other members of the rank and file of society, I, as a straight-passing gay woman, get to choose to come out (or not) of the closet every time I interact with someone who does not already know that I am queer.
And there’s not a single piece of media that gets this more than “New Moon Rising,” a classic episode of vampire-slaying juggernaut “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The tension of choice in coming out becomes apparent in the focal emotional scene of “New Moon Rising.” Within the episode, there is a serious drama at play (vampires and other boogeymen aside). Oz, who broke up with Willow, Buffy’s best friend, has come back into town to reunite with her – something that only months ago would have been her wildest fantasy. Yet, Willow is torn as she has tipped over the edge in her feelings for Tara, a girl she met in a Wiccan circle. They have been silently creeping towards a relationship as they’ve gotten closer, but Willow can only now articulate her romantic feelings for the witch. She sits on her bed, torn mentally, as Buffy attempts to wrestle details about Willow’s potential reunification with Oz from her. Willow hems and haws, to Buffy’s great confusion, confessing that “There’s ‘woo’ and there’s a ‘hoo,’ but there’s also ‘uh-oh’ and ‘it’s complicated.’”
Buffy stops as Willow draws out her next words: “It’s complicated … because of Tara.”. Buffy’s face physically changes as she catches on to what Willow is saying after several moments. The viewer can lay a bridge and walk across the pause between Willow’s two phrases. This exact sequence of events is important to describe because what Willow is doing is negotiating queer space for the first time openly. Tara’s name tells the whole story, and without saying that she is queer Willow comes out. By saying Tara’s name, Willow has made a statement about her own sexuality and the baggage that it entails.
The scene continues once Buffy receives Willow’s message. Buffy does not openly acknowledge Willow’s queerness in the same way that Willow does. Instead, she makes a series of generic statements about Willow following her heart, but with an odd twist: each sentence ends with a “Will,” Willow’s infrequently used pet name. There are three within 30 seconds. Buffy struggles to internalize the new information she has received. The titular vampire slayer responds by using an intimate name for Willow, reminding herself of their intimate relationship with a rarely-used pet name, but also using a name that is masculine. With her confession, Willow has become the pursuer of Tara rather than the pursued of Oz, a rejection of gender roles. In this light, Buffy queer codes Willow, with the encryption key being Buffy’s own ideas about gender and sexuality. This doesn’t go unnoticed by Willow. She responds to Buffy’s linguistic onslaught with an anxious “Why do you keep saying my name like that?,” drawing a direct line between the use of Willow’s name and Buffy’s thoughts about Willow’s sexuality.
I also understand the ties between sexuality and names. I have heard the “Katie” vs. “KK” debate over ten times now in college. Here’s the set-up: I mention that when I’m at home or at work, my regular nickname is “Katie,” or some variant thereof (“Katie-lacie,” etc.), while in college it’s “KK.” The person I’m discussing this with will recoil in confusion, and exclaim “You go by Katie? I could never, ever, picture you as a Katie.” A fun alternative is holding the reverse of this conversation with my parents, relatives, and coworkers. I have participated in this scene so often that I can act out both parts of it, hand gestures included. Both sides struggle to understand that I easily and comfortably participate in both names, and it’s one of the few routines I can trust in a constantly evolving world.
Part of the reason why this scene has stuck with me over the years is the sheer repetition of it. I’ve always wondered what drives this dichotomy. Does one make me sound younger, or do I not seem like a nickname person at all? Do people forget that I exist in the home and in the workplace outside of school? However, what I’ve been drawn back to, time and time again, is that, in the former spaces I pass as a straight woman, while I am openly queer in the latter. Viewed in this lens, the insistence that no one could ever see me with a more feminine nickname is a bestowal of ideas about queerness and gender that I neither invited nor needed.
This may seem like a stretch of an argument but considering that I get raised eyebrows when I say that I wear dresses to parties, that I’m a major fan of Taylor Swift, or indicate that I participate in any other marker of straight womanhood lends it some credence. And it’s tiring. On a personal level, I view my gender (and the expression thereof) as divorced from my sexuality. I like to date women, and I wear sweaters constantly not as a gay pride symbol but because I get cold easily. I resent that my sexuality is seen as connected to the expression of my gender, that one can’t exist without the other, even in something as minor as what nickname I go by (all being told, I actually prefer Katie). Established notions of female queerness haven’t helped. I remember reading as many books and searching through as many websites as I could when I first began questioning my sexuality, and quickly becoming lost in things that were femme, butch, or perhaps futch. The expression of my sexuality meant making a statement on the expression of my gender.
What “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and my own experiences seek to describe is the complicated relationship between names, sexuality, and gender, especially in the light of gender roles and misogyny. The sender of the message of queerness can negotiate that queerness at a moment’s notice. But, in their own way, the receiver of a message of queerness gets to negotiate the sender’s queerness as well. This wrestling feeds into overall messages of what it means to be female and what it means to be queer. That all being said, Willow does get the girl in the end.