The concept of the "strange familiar" comes from the realms of sociology and cultural anthropology, and it is one of those phrases and concepts that are so ubiquitous and varied that I have not been able to trace it back to a reliably definitive source. (Please let me know if you feel you have done so.) It often shows up as "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange." I don’t think anyone can claim to have the objectively correct definition of what this means at this point, but only what each person who has invoked it seems to have employed it to mean.
For my purposes, it is looking at life and social structures on this small planet of ours, as best I can, as though I just crash landed here while passing through this solar system on the way to someplace else. The truth is, I’ve often felt like this is precisely my experience of the world. I have variously blamed this on a number of things over time. Growing up in a repressive cult as a heart-on-my-sleeve, proto-queer/trans kid in a suffocatingly small, conservative, religious town, and then working at the stuffy business end of international software and digital services for many years. Or not learning until painfully deep into adulthood that I have fairly intense PTSD, which has contributed to me living my life on high alert—constantly scanning for potential threats and pattern-matching against catalogued dangers.
Having always lived my life a few clicks outside what I would come to learn is a purely fictitious gender binary, and having always been queer AF, I have been very aware that dominant systems, structures, and norms simply aren’t for me. In fact, in many cases they are designed specifically to exclude people like me. Fortunately, the longer I live and the more I learn, the clearer it becomes that I am not the strange little unicorn I once thought/worried I was. It turns out these dominant systems and structures and norms aren’t working very well for anyone at all. Even the architects and overseers of these systems and structures, and those they are meant to privilege at the cost of others, it turns out, are diminished, impoverished, and harmed by them. If we look just beneath the headlines and the highlight reels of the fragile veneer, we can see that these so-called socioeconomic elites are actually living mean little lives inside their bespoke gilded cages.
In terms of the lens I bring, I have a BA in Sexuality, Gender and Queer Studies, with a minor in Spanish. I have an MS in Postsecondary Adult and Continuing Education — essentially studying the theory and practice of how adults learn — and I will be starting a PhD program in Sociology in Fall 2025. I’m also an insatiably curious lifelong student and researcher, reader and writer.
If I haven’t lost you by this point, then I think we’re going to be intellectual pals with a lot of fun ahead of us. So stay tuned, voice in, and let’s find and explore the strange in the familiar.
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This is The Strange Familiar.