Rolequeerness is not about sex. It’s about power. But insofar as sex is about power, then rolequeerness is simply a neologism pointing out the reality of sex as infused with inegalitarian power relations and describes one’s desire to undermine that inequity.
The idea that human relationships are infused with power imbalances is not some new insight birthed, fully-formed, from the imaginations of rolequeer people and no one else. That’s not what’s interesting about discussions of rolequeerness nor about rolequeer sex. What’s interesting about these things are the stories rolequeer people tell one another and ourselves about what we can do to sabotage our own positions as people with the ability and desire to dominate other people.
This is what distinguishes rolequeer sex from many other approaches to erotic intimacy: its core tenet that moving towards vulnerability together is a move towards safety; that submitting *with* someone else—rather than submitting to someone else—strengthens you both; that despite what we may have internalized in a pervasively abusive society, there is nothing fulfilling about dominating or about being dominated.
I spent a bit of time musing about how to describe rolequeerness succinctly, mostly spurred by unquietpirate‘s search for anarchist sex literature—as in literature about anarchist sex, not sex that anarchists have. This is what I came up with today.
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