Violence In Queerness
Queerness has always had a complicated relationship with violence and not just the obvious kind, like hate crimes or discrimination, but quieter, messier forms too. It shows up in the stories told about us, the ways we shape our bodies, and even in how we connect with each other through shared struggles. Rather than viewing queerness through a purely painful lens, it’s worth asking how struggle intersects with expression, survival, and connection.
Reading the Subtext, Seeing the Queer
As a group of people widely connected to pain, it’s no surprise that the media that reflects us often intersects with that feeling. This is shown in how homoerotism in media is closely linked with violence, and one of my favourite books that shows this is Fight Club. The destruction of oneself to create something more raw, like peeling off a scab or feeling the scrape of concrete against your knee, is a release in a world full of conformity, and I love it.
Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, has long been interpreted through various lenses of capitalist critique, toxic masculinity and psychological disorders but a queer reading often goes under-acknowledged. Homoerotic subtext is embedded in the intimate, nearly romantic bond between the narrator and Tyler Durden, which resists heteronormative explanations. This is not just about repressed desire but also about identity fragmentation and longing for radical transformation which are both key aspects of many queer experiences. Despite many weirdos who red-pilled it to shreds, Fight Club is and will forever be a queer story. It is about how a man who just can’t seem to sleep, just can’t seem to fit in, and just can’t seem to feel normal within himself. He's a freak, and I can relate. The book gave me a way to see how I was too stuck in this cycle of mundane as I was going along with what the world expects of me and how it doesn’t have to be that way. The narrator’s insomnia and crisis of identity symbolise the broader alienation that many queer people feel in a world where their existence is either denied or marginalised. Rather than passively accepting societal norms, the narrator’s descent into chaos reflects a deeper refusal to conform to expectations of masculinity, productivity, and emotional repression.These being systems that often exclude or suppress queer expression.
There are many breakdowns of the queerness in this book and movie, so I recommend watching them on youtube, but what makes it so queer to me is the destruction. The pulling of flesh from bones with teeth feeling of raw struggle. Importantly, the film’s aesthetics (its underground fight clubs, body modification, and rejection of capitalism) mirror many of the ways queer subcultures have historically created alternative spaces to express identity and agency. The physical violence is almost theatrical, mirroring performative masculinity and hinting at the homoeroticism that simmers beneath these displays of aggression. Queerness is saying fuck you to expectations and what others think, and that’s what Tyler learns himself before becoming a domestic terrorist. But it was against the banking system, so hey, what can you do about it! I think everyone should give it a read and then go watch a bunch of sweaty men fight each other in the movie!
When Pain Is the Point
In queer kink communities, violence takes on a different face of consent and performance. Practices like BDSM, roleplay, or dominance and submission play have the aesthetics and mechanics of violence but reframe them to allow mutual trust and negotiated power. This reframing is central to the concept of “safe, sane, and consensual” or “risk-aware consensual kink,” which guides many queer kink practices. Consent is ongoing, communicative, and informed, often involving check-ins, aftercare, and pre-discussed boundaries. These are not reckless acts of harm but rather structured rituals of expression and intimacy.
This eroticisation of pain is not accidental but historical, as it is rooted in queer resistance: where marginalised people reclaimed the tools of oppression and turned them into rituals of autonomy and desire. The lash, the gag, the bruise become symbols not just of erotic power, but of survival. Historically, queer people have had their desires pathologised or criminalised. Kink became a way of asserting control over narratives that had long been dictated by outsiders. For example, in the 1970s and ’80s leather scenes, particularly among gay men, and BDSM culture became a space where sexuality could be explored on one’s own terms, being hypervisible, radical, and defiant in the face of societal shame.
There’s a kind of transformation happening where pain becomes pleasure, domination becomes intimacy, and violence becomes a language through which queer people reimagine control over their bodies and histories. This is the acceptance of pain, as queerness itself is going to hurt, and people already think it’s weird, so why not go all in and give them a real show? It shows defiance in oppression and gives substance to the phrase “every time we fuck, we win.” This quote, popularised in queer activist circles during the AIDS crisis, encapsulates the resistance embedded in queer sexuality. It asserts that joy, pleasure, and even spectacle are forms of protest against systems that seek to erase or control queer lives. Kink thus becomes more than just erotic, it is politically and emotionally significant.
The Body as a Battleground
Queer bodies often live at the intersection of pain and transformation. The ways that queer people reshape themselves through surgeries, piercings, and tattoos are acts of both violence and creation. Each involves a physical breaking down and rebuilding that’s deeply personal and inherently queer. These practices challenge dominant ideas of the “natural” body and binary gender roles. Gender-confirming surgeries, for instance, disrupt the notion that biology is destiny, while piercings and tattoos can visually and symbolically disrupt the expectations imposed on queer bodies by cisheteronormative culture.
Surgeries can be some of the most powerful acts of self-creation. The cutting and reshaping of flesh is violent by nature, but for many queer people, it’s a necessary and hopeful process: tearing away parts that don’t fit and building something that finally feels right. This violence isn’t imposed from the outside, it’s chosen and controlled, making it a radical form of reclaiming the body. People often describe surgery as an act of alignment between the internal self and the physical body. Though medicaliSed and often gatekept, these procedures can be liberating. They also make visible the deep tension between personal identity and institutional authority, since access is often restricted by government and medical systems.
Piercings are smaller, but no less significant. They puncture and alter the skin, marking the body with deliberate violence that’s both intimate and public. For queer folks, piercings can signal identity, community, or personal history. They’re a way of transforming the body into a site of expression and power, interrupting norms about what bodies “should” look like. Facial or body piercings have long been used by queer people to claim space in a visual landscape where conformity often equals safety. From septum rings in queer punk scenes to eyebrow piercings in trans youth cultures, they act as wearable declarations of non-normativity, difference, and pride.
Tattoos, too, carry their own form of violent beauty. The needle scratches beneath the skin, injecting ink in a process that’s painful but creative. Tattoos tell stories, memorialise experiences, and inscribe identity onto the body. For queer people, tattoos often hold personal or political meaning, turning the body into a living canvas of resistance and pride. Whether it’s a symbol of queer resistance (like the pink triangle that was once used by Nazis to mark gay prisoners), or a more personal symbol of identity, tattoos allow for permanent self-inscription. Unlike clothing or makeup, they are often irrevocable, signaling long-term commitment to a way of being that is deliberately chosen, not passively inherited.
These alterations are battles fought not against the body, but with the body, shaping it into a truer, freer version of itself. There’s a kind of transformation that happens in queerness that involves pain, both emotional and physical. Whether it’s coming out, transitioning, or just surviving, it often hurts. But sometimes that hurt leads to change. We might not call it “alchemy,” but that’s kind of what it is. To take pain and turn it into something new. Tattoos, surgeries, and heartbreak all leave a mark, and sometimes those marks are exactly what help us grow. It’s not romanticising suffering; it’s just being real about how messy and painful becoming yourself can be.
Bleeding Together
Within our history and I’m sure our future, queerness always comes with community: a sense that against all odds, discrimination, and violence, we always have each other. If queerness is marked by individual pain, it is also held together by collective resilience. The queer community is often forged in suffering, and yet it endures, binds, and even loves. This communal aspect of queerness can be traced through activist movements, nightlife scenes, mutual aid networks, and chosen families. Whether in ballroom culture, pride parades, or HIV/AIDS advocacy, queer people have consistently built structures of support where mainstream society has failed them.
To bleed together is to survive together: sharing trauma stories, offering care, and building chosen families all show how the stain of violence only helps us see each other more clearly. There is violence here too, sometimes turned inward, sometimes turned on each other, but underneath it lies an unspoken pact that we may suffer but not alone.
Mental health disparities in queer communities are well-documented, as are higher rates of homelessness and abuse. Yet, in these same spaces, you often find grassroots mental health support, crisis intervention, and radical acts of love. Mutual care becomes a lifeline. This isn’t just emotional, it’s life-saving. This solidarity does not erase the hurt, but it makes it bearable. The queer community becomes a wound that won’t close but also a healing that never stops.
For many people, accepting their queerness can feel like a rebirth, as you become something new but still yourself and somehow more yourself than ever before. Like peeling away layers of what you were told to be, only to uncover something raw, truer, and beautifully complicated underneath. It’s not always triumphant, and it’s rarely clean. There are moments when you mourn the versions of yourself you had to shed and the identities you wore for safety and survival, but there’s power in the shedding too. In queerness, we learn how to rebuild. We make families from scratch, rewrite gender with our own hands, and stitch together selfhood from scraps of desire and resistance.
We find meaning in chosen names, in clothes that feel like home, and in the languages we teach ourselves to ask for love. This process, this becoming, doesn’t follow a straight line. It loops and breaks, spirals and reforms. And through it all, there’s that quiet truth: queerness isn’t just about who we love or how we identify; it’s about how we survive. It’s about how we find beauty in the broken. How we make art from ache. How we carve out joy even when the world tells us not to.
Queerness is not neat, and it’s never just one thing. It’s struggle and softness, chaos and care. It’s the ache of becoming and the beauty of being seen, even when bruised, even when broken. What binds all these experiences together, from the violence of self-reinvention to the intimacy of shared wounds, is a refusal to let pain be meaningless. We turn it into connection, into identity, into art. Whether it's through fiction like Fight Club, kink rituals, body modifications, or chosen families, queer people have always found ways to survive by making something powerful out of the hurt. That’s not weakness, that’s skill. That’s legacy. And in that, there is something deeply hopeful: we don’t just endure pain, we repurpose it. We bleed, but we build too. And sometimes, what we build is even more beautiful than what was torn down.