Megan Lee

Megan Lee is obviously on the side of the righteous, and I think people at a certain stage in their lives, by which I'm mostly thinking of young smartypantses from working-class areas starting university and realizing with a shock how class-stratified the academic world is and how it's really mostly not about being smart at all, could benefit much form this short memoir/meditation. For me, it was a bit goes-without-saying, but then, who knows, perhaps there's another audience in well-meaning richie riches who don't quite know yet how to think of class oppression in the same bushel as oppression based on race or gender.

One thing I really appreciated, though, was the title. The term "class-queer" isn't really elaborated on explicitly in the essay--it just sits there to colour it. But God, doesn't it seem intuitively right? It interests me too, that I always thought of traditional "queer" as implying "queer relative to constructed role"--e.g., I should be straight but I'm gay, or similar. But in this context it immediately becomes clear: "queer" here is "queer relative to context"--I'm surrounded by people with a background very different from mine who don't get the way their experience isn't universal or understand their privilege". I'm not a queer working-class person; I still getchu, the old neighbourhood; I'm more, to a certain extent, just lost in Oz or something, man. And being revealed to myself in an authenticity an identity that isn't lost or obscured, confers a security that allows me to reflexively look back at the old neighbourhood etc. and recognizer that, okay, my experiences have maybe separated me from it to a certain extent too--but then, so have the whole gang's. We're all a little class-queer, and in that sense real people make up a third class, the "outside-the-model" class. It's good to have labels that help us look beyond other labels.… (meer)