bugs rule and are queer
right now i just spent an hour relaxing outside listening to the endless buzzing of a million cicadas as they swarm cook county. most years the cicadas are heard and not seen (at least by me, maybe i'm bad at finding them) but this year there are so many! so many!! sometimes when i'm outside one will land on me and i have to gently coax it off somewhere better. what a good bunch of friends.
tell me about your cool queer bug friends (challenge: talk about why bugs are queer without reference to metamorphosis)
The same word that means "the little things that crawl unseen" also means "errors to be fixed". The same word that means "a class of animal that, as the evolutionary joke goes, exists to fuck and die" also means "reasons a program defies our intent". The same word that means "beings that largely made hard shells out of themselves" also means "things to be understood on their way to being annihilated". Even when computers were women wrestling with 30 tons of vacuum tubes, before "rocks taught to think" came to share a word with "the product of human nature", bugs were at odds with them.
The same word that means "Colorfully clad migrant" means "One whose wings cause hurricanes". No metamorphosis was required for the monarch butterfly to wear its oppressor's name in drag.
Queerness is antanaclasis of the self. The same word is exploded into two definitions-- one to acknowledge how power sees us, one for anything else, literally anything else. The folk story is that the moth that flew into the ENIAC was the origin of "bug" meaning "error", but the word was in use in Edison's notes. The bug whose corpse is displayed in Grace Hopper's notes was part of a long line of "little guys you just can't get rid of" being the same English word as "something we need to iron out of the facial recognition software". These etymological "coincidences" are a window into how language-users thought about the small and erratic for thousands of years.
The same word that means "queer" means "happy".
