The Social Construction of Sexuality (Essay)

This is an essay I wrote for my Feminism Today! class last semester, which was really useful in helping to clarify my thoughts on issues of sexuality and gender.

Feminism would hold that sexuality is socially constructed. Discuss how and why women’s sexuality and femininity is socially constructed and how these constructs may be the site of oppression, regulation and control.

Sexuality – its origin, content, and political meaning – has been an important concern for the feminist movement. Key in understanding and articulating a particularly feminist picture of the sexual has been the idea that sexuality is socially-constructed. This essay explores the ideas of social construction and anti-essentialism in the context of female sexuality. No definition of the sexual is taken, rather I agree with Stevi Jackson that ‘an act is not sexual by virtue of its inherent properties… [but] becomes sexual by the application of socially learned meanings’.¹ The construction of sexuality involves complex interactions between the body, the self, culture, power, the state, etc., which are explored throughout the essay. First, the issue of essentialism and the meaning of the categories of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are discussed. Next, Freud’s account of psychosexual development is discussed in relation to critical feminist perspectives. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power and of social control, a framework for understanding the mechanisms by which sexuality is constructed is sketched. Next, with Foucault still in mind, the analyses of radical feminists are drawn on to discuss the political implications of normative forms of sexuality. Finally, the tensions between ‘sex-positive’ and ‘sex-negative’ feminism as forms of resistance are briefly discussed.

As it’s presently constructed, to talk of sexuality presupposes gendered subjects. Consequently, to understand how female sexuality is socially constructed, one must first understand how women are constructed as women, by looking at the social construction of sex and gender. Most feminists hold that gender difference is largely if not entirely socially constructed. However, there has always been an essentialist current within feminist thought, which holds that femininity is biologically determined (for example, Naomi Wolf’s recent book Vagina: A New Biography²), but contests the patriarchal conception of femininity as inferior. This viewpoint is criticised by Andrea Dworkin, who argues that essentialism is always reactionary (Fascist, even) in its political implications.³

Many feminists maintain a radical separation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, with ‘sex’ referring to the biological differences between male and female bodies and ‘gender’ referring to masculine and feminine behaviours, attitudes, identity, modes of thought etc. However this sharp distinction, while useful in some respects as a counter to reactionary bio-essentialist arguments, is problematic. The sexing of the body is also an act of interpretation, and as such relies on a socially-constructed interpretive framework within which gendered meaning can be ascribed to (or imposed upon) bodies: this or that particular feature of the body (such as the capacity for reproduction, or a certain arrangement of chromosomes, or a certain morphology) is taken as the salient feature of that body and its associated sex.⁴ In the case of intersex bodies, this act of interpretation is often accompanied by the physical imposition of this interpretation via coercive surgery on infants to ‘normalise’ their bodies within a schema of anatomical norms. Transexual individuals, by radically decoupling bodily sex as interpreted by medical professions from sex as a lived experience, and, in some cases, by transforming their bodies to match their understanding of themselves, also undermine notions of an underlying biological facticity of ‘sex’.⁵ As such, ‘sex’ is not a neutral pre-discursive surface on which gender is inscribed, but rather the construction of ‘sex’ is an aspect of the social process of gender formation.⁶

In Gender Trouble Judith Butler argues that gender (including ‘sex’) should be viewed as a performative utterance: a discursive act which brings into being that which it names.⁷ In this, she echoes Monique Wittag’s argument⁸ that ‘sex’ as a category is inseparable from the power relations in which it is constructed. ‘It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.’ To argue the contrary would be to naturalise the oppression of women with reference to a constitutive difference between the sexes that exists prior or external to society, either biologically (the physical sense) or ontologically (the metaphysical sense).⁹

Among the first feminist works to contest the idea of a ‘natural’ sexuality existing prior to culture is Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society.¹⁰Drawing on anthropological evidence, she compares (hetero)sexual attitudes and behaviours among various indigenous groups, and discovers a wide divergence. Commonsense notions of a qualitative difference between male and female sexuality, in which the male is active and the female is passive (her sexuality is held to involve ‘long arousal and slow satisfaction, inferior sex drive, susceptibility to field dependence… and romantic idealism’), are found to be culturally-specific rather than universal. Cultures are also found to vary widely in the meaning and importance afforded to sexual activity. Oakley’s work provides an empirical support to an anti-essentialist account of human sexuality.

Psychoanalysis is among the key analytical tools for the understanding of sexuality. Sigmund Freud’s male-centric analysis of the psychosocial construction of sexuality, which has had an important influence both on academia and in shaping commonsense understandings of sexuality in wider society, has been contested by feminists. One such critique of Freud is offered by Stevi Jackson.¹¹ She rejects the notion that sexuality is driven by some ‘animal’ or ‘instinctual’ side of human ‘nature’ which is then repressed and shaped by social forces – the Freudian libido – rather it is produced socially, with the biological serving merely as the surface onto which socially-learned meanings are inscribed. Sexual learning involves the assimilation of these social meanings into one’s self-concept, rather than learning to repress or express one’s innate desires. For Freud, libido is an active masculine force, symbolised by the phallus, and the female is defined and understood in terms of its absence, not just sexually, but in her whole personality. Women are, he says, from an early age overcome by an intense envy of the penis and a concomitant feeling of being mutilated which determines her entire personal and sexual development. This assertion, according to Jackson, is unfounded: there is no reason to assume that little girls evaluate themselves negatively on encountering the penis, let alone that penis envy develops to the obsessive proportions Freud gives it. In making this leap, Freud is in fact imposing his own meanings upon children’s behaviour. Simone de Beuvoir¹² argues that Freud’s theory makes little effort to study female psychosexual development in itself, rather he simply modified his masculine model, and in doing so obtained the conclusion that the female is a mutilated male, a complex deviation from the human norm, who is male. She argues that while for little boys, who obtain a living experience from their penis, the penis may be a source of pride, little girls are often only dimly aware of the male genitalia, and thus there is no necessary corollary that they should be humiliated by its absence in them. Further, she argues that Freud’s generalisation of the male Oedipus and female Electra complexes (i.e. that a boy’s affection for his mother and a girl’s for her father during their development have a distinctly genital aspect) is spurious and without foundation, particularly in the case of girls.

The regulation of sexuality per se and women’s sexuality in particular has often been a pre-occupation of political powers. This, according to Foucault, is due to sexuality’s two-fold importance: on the one hand, powers are concerned with the regulation and discipline of bodies, on the other with the regulation of populations.¹³ ‘Regulation’ here should not be confused with ‘repression’: the exercise of control over sexuality may involve ‘refusal, blockage and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification’.¹⁴ From the 18^th century onwards, Foucault argues, biopolitics – that is, a governmental practice concerned with the rationalisation and control of phenomena of populations of living beings, such as birthrate, health, hygiene, etc. – increasingly formed part of governmental practice and became and important concern of governmentality.¹⁵ It is important to note here that, while power often acts through the state, the state should not be seen as a universal and autonomous source of power with a will or intent of its own, but rather as a conduit and series of mechanisms through and by which powers act.¹⁶ In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops two particularly important concepts in this regard. First, biopolitics involves the development of technologies of the body, often diffuse in application and effect, by which the body, understood more or less as a machine, can be explored, shaped and reorganised by disciplinary institutions according to the logic of various powers. These processes produce ‘docile bodies’ shaped and habituated to practices of submission.¹⁷ Second, the ‘panopticon’ is used by Foucault to denote a society in which people are subject to continuous surveillance, which functions to remove the need for coercive force in the exercise of social control. The subject of surveillance, aware of her own visibility, is made to apply constraints automatically to herself, and thus becomes simultaneously both agent and subject of her own subjection.¹⁸

For Foucault, power is not held or exercised by one group over another, rather it is composed of ‘multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization’.¹⁹ As a result Foucault arguably offers a somewhat depoliticised account of the regulation of sexuality: there is no patriarchy as such in Foucault’s analysis; gender is not of particular concern: it is just one sphere of regulation among many.²⁰ Nonetheless, feminists have found in Foucault important analyses and tools which aid the understanding of female sexuality – in particular, a move away from understanding social control as purely a repressive force, which allows for a more nuanced discussion of how and why female sexuality is repressed in certain directions and encouraged in others. Susan Bordo²¹ draws on Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ in discussing how particularly gendered forms of submission are inscribed onto female bodies. Andrea Dworkin’s description of women as being ‘made for intercourse’ (discussed later) can be read in this light.

Radical feminists in particular have been significant in theorising the political significance for women of various forms of normative socially-constructed sexuality. Adrienne Rich, writing in the context of a period of feminist debates on the role of lesbians and lesbianism within the feminist movement, identifies ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and lesbian erasure – i.e. the idea that women have an innate orientation towards men and the definition of lesbianism as less natural, deviant, a product of bitterness towards men, or an alternate lifestyle choice to the heterosexual norm – as an important form of male power.²² She details a range of manifestations of male power ‘ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness’ which, in aim or effect, subtly or forcefully, convince or coerce women towards heterosexuality (particularly within the marriage construct) and away from lesbianism, in the furtherance of a male-oriented political economy of female sexuality.

In Intercourse²³, Andrea Dworkin critically interrogates the act of heterosexual intercourse within the context of a patriarchal society. Within this context, intercourse is understood as both a physical and metaphysical occupation of a woman’s body, which places her in a subordinate position and denies her the integrity and privacy of her own body. She is ipso facto less human than a man, for whom being physically entered is never a normative use of his body. In male discourse, she argues, this is simultaneously both the proper use and a violent abuse of a woman. It further dictates that intercourse is synonymous with and totally delineative of sex. Since men control both the terms on which the act takes place and the ways in which the act may be understood, and since it takes place within a context of fear and inequality, women never fully have ownership of the experience, even if they formally consent to, or even desire intercourse. For Dworkin, private sexual activity is not discontinuous with the social or political spheres: women’s position in the bedroom and in society are inter-related and co-productive of one another. Women must make and remake themselves into the objects of men’s fantasies, failure to do so leaves a woman no longer legibly human. Dworkin leaves open, but does not presume, the possibility that intercourse can survive the dissolution of male power and represent an expression of sexual equality; however, in order for this to happen, women must be equally empowered both to control both the physical and experiential content and to produce the metaphysical meaning of sexual activity.

Dworkin’s argument should be read carefully, however. While she explicitly denies the interpretation that all intercourse is rape²⁴ there is nonetheless a failure to adequately delineate discourses from essences, which leaves similar interpretations open. Read together with Foucault, one might agree that intercourse means violation and domination, and that women may be socialised to experience that domination bodily as pleasure and as desire, but it is not essentially so. It does not follow immediately that entering a person’s body dehumanises and objectifies them – discourse and power relations make it so.

The critical analyses of radical feminists, such as Dworkin, have been criticised by ‘sex-positive’ feminists on the grounds that they are ‘sex-negative’ – i.e. that they reproduce sexually-repressive conservative moralism within the feminist movement in a way that ultimately harms women’s ability to self-determine their sexuality. On her blog²⁵, Lisa Millbank attempts to sketch an ‘authentic’ (non-pejorative) sex-negative feminism, based in the understanding that sex is often in varying ways an imposition, to which feminists can positively subscribe. She argues that sex-positive and sex-negative feminism needn’t be seen as opposed to one another, but rather, that both can act in concert as progressive forces in opposition to patriarchal demands on women. That is: sex-positivity acts as a countervailing force to sex moralism while sex-negativity acts against compulsory sexuality, both of which co-exist as contradictory regulatory forces acting on women. Ariel Levy²⁶, meanwhile, while not opposing sex-positive feminism as such, criticises the utilisation of sex-positive narratives which reposition the sexualising demands and sexually exploitative practices of patriarchy as forms of feminist liberation. These issues are significant when we move from describing the social forces that construct sexuality to formulating a praxis of effective resistance: progressive intentions, such as the creation of counter-hegemonic spaces in which sexuality is celebrated, are susceptible to recuperation by patriarchy, turning them against other women in complex and often unpredictable ways.

In conclusion, a multiplicity of forces and interests are involved in shaping female sexuality. Often, these forces act to naturalise the present position of women by reference to some essential true sexuality: biologically determined, in the case of the bio-essentialists, or ontologically in the case of Frued et al. However, as seen above there is no truth of sexuality that is prior to culture, only discourses and mechanisms which both produce and constrain sexuality according to the logics of various political powers. Patriarchy is the key focus of feminist agitation, but patriarchy is not a monolith, and women are often made to embody contradictory demands simultaneously: for example, that women must be continually sexually-available, but must never be sexual in their own right. Agreeing with Judith Butler, what is clear is that, given the diffuse and multifaceted character of women’s oppression, there ‘is no one site from which to struggle effectively. There have to be many, and they don’t [necessarily] need to be reconciled with one another’.²⁷

Bibliography

Bordo, Susan, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Writing on the body: Female embodiment and Feminist theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Median and Sarah Stanbury, 309-26. US: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004.

De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex. UK: Vintage, 1997.

Dworkin, Andrea, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 57-61. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Dworkin, Andrea, Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. UK: Penguin, 1991.

Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990.

Jackson, Stevi, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Levy, Ariel, Female Chauvanist Pigs, US: Free Press, 2005.

Millbank, Lisa, “The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism,” A Radical TransFeminist, February 29 2012, http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

Oakley, Ann, “Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 35-9. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Osborne, Peter and Segal, Lynne, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

Moore, Suzanne, “Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism”. The Guardian, 5 September 2012. Accessed: 1 December 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/naomi-wolf-book-vagina-feminism

Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 130-43. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Scott, Sue and Jackson, Stevi, “Sexual Skirmishes and Feminist Factions: Twenty-Five Years of Debate on Women and Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 1-31. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Wittag, Monique, “The Category of Sex” in Sex in Question: French materialist feminism, eds. Diana Leonard and Lisa Atkins, 24-9. UK: Taylor & Francis, 1996.

Endnotes

1Stevi Jackson, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

2Suzanne Moore, “Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism”. The Guardian, 5 September 2012. Accessed: 1 December 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/naomi-wolf-book-vagina-feminism

3Andrea Dworkin, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 57-61. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

4Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

5Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004 pp.4-5

6Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990, pp.6-7.

7Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990; Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

8Monique Wittag, “The Category of Sex” in Sex in Question: French materialist feminism, eds. Diana Leonard and Lisa Atkins, 24-9. UK: Taylor & Francis, 1996.

9For the remainder of this essay I will discuss ‘femininity’ and ‘female sexuality’ in terms of cisgendered and cissexual women – i.e. those with normative gender identity, gender expression and bodily sex – and accept, for example, the normative assumption that men have penises and women have vaginas. However, with the above discussion in mind, it is important to note that to do so is, in itself, an act of social construction with political consequences.

10Ann Oakley, “Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 35-9. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

11Stevi Jackson, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

12Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. UK: Vintage, 1997, pp 70-4

13Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990, pp145-6

14Ibid. p.11

15Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p.317

16Ibid. pp.76-8

17Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. UK: Penguin, 1991, pp 135-69

18Ibid. pp 195-228

19Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990, p.92

20Sue Scott and Stevi Jackson, “Sexual Skirmishes and Feminist Factions: Twenty-Five Years of Debate on Women and Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 1-31. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

21Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Writing on the body: Female embodiment and Feminist theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Median and Sarah Stanbury, 309-26. US: Columbia University Press, 1997.

22Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 130-43. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

23Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp 153-82

24Ibid. pp xxxii

25Lisa Millbank, “The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism,” A Radical TransFeminist, February 29 2012, http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

26Ariel Levy, Female Chauvanist Pigs, US: Free Press, 2005.

27Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

Towards a Critique of Tumblr Theory

(Note: I no longer agree with some of the central claims of this piece and am hoping to write a new piece some time in the near future. Particularly, I think the idiosyncratic way I use the term “class” here is both confusing and ontologically suspect. That said, I think the general critique of idealism here remains useful.)

This piece aims to critique a particular representation of social justice (which sometimes even calls itself anarchism) prevalent in online political discussion spaces, with a particular focus on tumbr social justice blogs. Centrally, I will contrast ‘privilege’ and ‘class’ as objects of political struggle, and discuss the limitations of identity politics and call instead for a revolutionary praxis that is conscious of identity-based oppression but enables us to move beyond identification.

This piece is incomplete and unsatisfactory, and I welcome criticism.

I. Class, oppression, metaphysics

Class is commonly understood as a system of categorization of individuals on a socio-economic basis – e.g. the three class model (lower, middle and upper class) or proletariat and bourgeoisie – but here we understand class as occurring in between individuals and groups. Class is a set of social relations that position the subject relative to power. Class has both an objective and subjective component: objective material forces create the basis for the subjective experience of class. Our definition of class is not a narrow economistic one, but includes patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, etc. and understands particular oppressions as inter-related and mutually supporting.

It follows immediately that privilege – the experience of being empowered relative to another – is an aspect of class but not the whole picture. Privilege often presents itself as a social fact without any apparent material cause, as if racial privilege, for example, is created by racist ideas, which simply appeared out of the ether. (In truth, race-thinking has historical roots in colonialist strategic thinking, which required the creation of races both as an ideological justification for colonialism and as a way of managing recalcitrant populations in colonised areas.)

II. Check your liberalism privilege

When separated from class as an object of analysis, the focus on privilege lends itself to a form of liberal idealism and moralism. Awareness-raising becomes the central form of political intervention as though, once we make everyone aware of their privilege and get them to act according to a particular set of moral standards, then privilege will disappear. Thus political struggle becomes political correctness.

Once class is reduced to privilege, then privilege is further reduced to a list of privileges – specific ways in which the privileged group are treated differently, such as men being allowed to have pubic hair etc. – which are endlessly cataloged. Thus, particular manifestations of class are made to appear to be constitutive of class itself. Capitalism, a real material phenomenon with concomitant processes of biopolitical control, is replaced by ‘kyriarchy’, the union of all master-slave relations, presented with no apparent underlying cause.

This is not a dismissal of kyriarchy or intersectionality as such, but rather a critique of an idealist conception of intersectionality which mystifies the material basis of oppression. Without intersectionality, the class struggle becomes identified with the concerns of white cisgendered heterosexual men, but conversely, without class struggle, intersectionality becomes critique without transformative potential. Concretely, awareness of privilege is of central importance if we are to prevent the replication of gender/racial hierarchies within the struggle, but awareness of privilege alone offers little in terms of possibilities for transformative direct action, or, put another way, awareness of ones own privilege is substituted for the kinds of actions that could pose a threat to systems of oppression.

III. Identities, identification, legitimacy

The tumblr social justice community adopt a kind of incoherent synthesis of queer theory, post-structuralist feminism, and liberal rights discourse and identity-politics, constructed, Chinese Whispers style from half-understood fragments of theory abstracted from their metaphysical framework. The postmodernist framework of queer theory entails a radical critique of essentialism and a rejection of fixed and stable identities. To try and reconcile it with the thoroughly modernist framework of identity-politics produces absurdities.

Genderqueer, for example, is not a gender identity, but an approach to performing gender: a radical attack on essentialist conceptions of gender which, through the body, exposes the performativity of gender and thereby undermines the ideological and semantic basis of heteropatriarchy. To claim to be genderqueer and to be oppressed on the basis of being genderqueer is to miss entirely the point of what you’re supposed to be doing: that gender is something you do, not something you are. The very act of defining oneself as genderqueer is to replicate the process of definition which reifies binary gender in the first place.

But that is precisely what tumblr genderqueers do. Genderqueer is claimed first as an identity and secondarily as a basis to make demands for recognition and protection, with performativity playing at best a supporting role, turning attack into defence. Worse, this becomes a basis for appropriating the language and laying claim to the legitimacy of trans* struggles by people who are, in the final analysis, thoroughly cisgendered.

Worse still are the entirely artificial identities and spurious associated oppressions – e.g. transethnics (white people who decide that they really belong to another race, usually one strongly associated with anime production), otherkin (non-humans trapped in human bodies), multiples (bodies supposedly containing multiple identities who ought to be recognised as real and autonomous individuals, an idea which would mean that people with real and serious mental illnesses would be denied treatment) – conjured ex nihlo by those wishing to feel special on the internet.

While these made-up oppressions are dismissed by the more sensible elements of the community„ the basis on which they do so is often theoretically inconsistent. A politics which is built entirely around the right of individuals to define themselves subjectively, with no material or historical basis in the real world, has no real basis for defending against parodies of itself. To dismiss otherkin on the basis that they appropriate trans* stuggles, for example, while obviously correct, within this context amounts to an a priori assumption that trans* struggles are legitimate and otherkin aren’t. It is only by returning to materialism (and to class) that we find a basis for doing so. Trans* struggles have a material and historical reality (real processes by which gender is imposed upon their bodies), which flows ultimately from the particular historical development of capitalism as a gendered power structure, which cannot be said of kids who think they’re dragons.

IV. Against identity

Identity is a cage. That is to say: identity, being, is the antithesis of spontaneity, doing. Identities are alien categories imposed upon us by biopolitical processes of identification, with which are constantly in conflict. Capital needs us to be certain things at certain times and in certain places in order to effectively police and manage us. The revolutionary subject, then, is one without identity. They act authentically in their situation, inhabiting their history without being constrained by it, acting against identity-based oppression in order to open up new possibilities and new experiences, rather than to reify the same categories of cold capitalist managerial logic. Ultimately, freedom means a world beyond identity, beyond capitalism, built on the basis of human solidarity, with a diversity of experiences and ways of living. This means that, while we struggle based on who we are, or who we are made to be (and thus autonomous identity-based organising is sometimes the most effective form of resistance) there is only one revolutionary class and one world to take.

Pinkwashing and assimilation

This is the first draft of a piece I wrote that eventually became this piece on the New Statesman blog. They asked me to focus on one issue in more depth rather than the two separate but related issues of pinkwashing and queer assimilation (which I was happy to do). However, I think it’s also important to understand that the two processes reinforce one another, so I’m presenting the original piece here.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, something perfectly ordinary happened: a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village, New York, was raided by the cops. At the time, gay bars were illegal, Mafia-run, and frequently the subject of police violence.

What made this particular night extraordinary was that the patrons fought back. First bottles and beer cans were thrown at the police, then bricks and cobblestones. Burning rubbish was thrown into the Inn and police responded by turning a firehose on the crowd. 13 people were arrested, 4 police officers were injured, and at least two patrons were severely beaten by the police.

Several days of sporadic and spontaneous protest erupted, including two more nights of rioting, with police struggling to regain control.

The first Pride marches, in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, took place on June 28, 1970, in commemoration of the riots.

Today, as queer Londoners take to the streets for the parade which forms the centrepiece of London’s WorldPride festival, Pride is an unrecognisably different affair: a 3-week consumer-fest replete with corporate sponsors (including, incongruously, the TUC side-by-side with viciously anti-union companies like Coca Cola). [http://www.pridelondon.org/]

It’s a spectacle indicative of an LGBT movement that is increasingly being assimilated into the mainstream, but at the cost of our radicalism and transformative potential.

We are becoming just another interest group, another demographic, another corporate social responsibility box-ticking excercise allowing big business to claim progressive credentials, pinkwashing the exploitation at the heart of their operation. But hey, at least we can be “Out @ Tesco” [http://home.outattesco.com/] while earning a pittance on workfare.

Worse still, we have lost our understanding of solidarity. While the Gay Liberation Front – who emerged from the Stonewall Rebellion as the movement of organised queer militancy – actively sought to build links with groups such as the Black Panthers, now we are allowing our struggles to be co-opted by racist agendas, with everyone from the English Defence League to apartheid Israel feigning concern for LGBT rights in order to portray Muslims as a pre-modern barbarian threat to the status of LGBT people in the enlightened West. [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html]

Perhaps most offensively, Pride London will host a £250-a-plate gala dinner, at which US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be presented with an award, while US troops continue to destroy lives in Afghanistan (including those of LGBT Afghans) and Bradley Manning (who is commonly described as gay, but is actually a trans woman who identifies as Breanna [http://globalcomment.com/2011/why-does-the-media-still-refer-to-%E2%80%9Cbradley%E2%80%9D-manning-the-curious-silence-around-a-transgender-hero/]) rots in prison for revealing details of US atrocities in Iraq.

At present, the LGBT movement is organised around a set of fairly narrow demands for equality, understood as assimilation within already-existing conservative institutions: marriage, the nuclear family, the military, the police, the boardroom.

But equality is not liberation. Take marriage, for example. Whether the definition of civil marriage is expanded to include same-sex couples or not, the State retains the power to define what constitutes a “normal” relationship, to write the relationship script for the vast majority of society, to bludgeon our sexualities into its preferred shape, while those who don’t or won’t fit the script are pushed to the margins.

However marriage is redefined, it will never be ours. However much it changes, we will always have to change more in order to assuage the fears of “family values” conservatives that we pose a threat to their vision of sexual morality. Within the community, there is political pressure, particularly on those who are the most visibly queer, to reshape our sexualities into forms that are more palatable to conservative moralists and legislators, or to ditch the concerns of trans* people altogether because they make us look bad.

Of course, we should fight for a society that’s inclusive of LGBT people, but genuine liberation means changing society so that it’s worth being included in. That won’t happen as long as we continue to dance the tune of capitalists, racists and conservatives in exchange for incremental changes.

Homonormativity: a real world example

I wrote the other day about how “gay marriage takes a certain section of the queer community and makes them just like straight people” and creates internal pressure ” particularly on those who are the most visibly queer, to reshape our sexualities into forms that are more palatable to conservative moralists and legislators”.

Sadly, real life (well Facebook) almost immediately provided a (fairly nasty) example.

On a Facebook friend’s discussion about whether we need Pride marches anymore (cos like, we’ve won already or something, haven’t we?) a couple of people posted comments like this:

Personally as a gay man, I dont see the need for gay men to walk around the streets of Dublin wearing things and leather straps. Thats not something anyone should be subjected to! Straight men don’t do it? SO why do gay men need to! I dont believe in gay pride at all and would certainly never go to one!

The only thing that really bothers me about the pride parade is the whole tight clothes/scantily clad aspect of it. Encouraging acceptance of other sexual orientations should not be used to promote a specific fetish which a small minority of people (gay or straight) have, and pushes a stereotype of limp-wristed, sex-obsessed screamers which isn’t representative of gay people at all. To me that’s just exhibitionists having the time of their lives. And that’s fine, but get your own fucking parade, lads.

I used to be this guy. I’m not particularly obviously queer, and unless I tell people, they don’t realise, which is handy because I can avoid a lot of situations where my sexuality would put my life/safety in danger. I used to have a huge problem with visibly queer people and blamed them for being stereotyped by straight homophobes.

But all this is just homonormativity. It’s people whose sexuality and gender expression is similar to straight people trying to disassociate themselves from the rest of the queer community in order to access straight privilege, and in the process indulging in the same shaming and homophobic abuse as the straight oppressor.

Don’t do this. Ever.

Oh and also: “limp-wristed, sex-obsessed screamers” fought the cops at Stonewall, so it is their parade.

How Gay Liberation became a Family Values movement

As it’s presently constructed, the LGBT movement is probably less than a decade away from achieving all of it’s major aims in most Western societies: centrally, same-sex couples having the right to marry and raise children, and, more broadly, equality, understood as assimilation within already-existing conservative institutions such as the military, the police, or the boardroom. Inevitably, this will mean a massive demobilization and depoliticisation among LGBT people and the collapse of much of whatever activist networks currently exist, as, demonstrably, we will have achieved pretty much everything we are currently demanding.

But equality is not liberation. Paradoxically, even as gay concerns become increasingly mainstream and everyone from major corporations, to the English Defence League, to apartheid Israel scramble to feel the benefits of positive pink PR, we are hardly closer to liberating our sexualities from the bridle of conservative/religious moralism.

Instead, we have sought, and are beginning to be granted, inclusion within heteronormative structures, namely marriage, but only on the understanding that the basic form and logic of marriage is to remain unchanged. In fact, this very concession is at the core of much of the smug liberal advocacy for “marriage equality”: of course conservative concerns are irrational, we have no intention of threatening their family values ideology, we just want in.

Marriage as an institution is the antithesis of free love, the mechanism by which the state bludgeons our sexualities into the most useful shape for reproducing the next generation of labour, and the word-made-flesh of anti-sex theology.

However marriage is redefined, it will never be ours. The State retains the power to define what constitutes a “normal” relationship, to write the relationship script for the vast majority of society, while those who don’t or won’t fit the script are pushed to the margins. This doesn’t just affect people at the point where they “choose” to get married, but in fact all relationships are expected to be proto-marriages: monogamous, and aiming at permanence, with a series of predefined stages (which vary according to culture) on the way to marriage. Romantic narratives about “finding your soulmate” (i.e. expectation that you will only legitimately love one person in your entire life) are bound up with the institution of marriage, and shape people’s expectations around sex and relationships in an often damaging way.

Marriage is the institution of an ideology that sees human sexuality as a threat, and seeks to constrain it. Ideally, sex should only happen for the purposes of procreation, but failing that, only within the bounds of stable monogamy, and not in any way that might be considered kinky or weird. There is no room for fluidity, or polyamoury, or promiscuity, which are at best tolerated among young people with the expectation that they will “settle down”.

It’s an institution borne out of sexual repression and patriarchy, and inseparable from its history as male ownership of women – a history which still shapes the lived realities of married people.

Generally speaking, within the structure of marriage, women are still expected to do the work of child-rearing for no money, and their work isn’t even considered work. Often this is on top of having a full time job, so women work a double-shift, usually for less pay than a man on a single-shift. While same-sex marriage may begin to decouple this expectation from gender somewhat, the child-rearing-as-unpaid-labour problem remains embedded into the very construction of the nuclear family.

Necessarily then, we can only participate in marriage on their terms. However much it changes, we will always have to change more in order to assuage the fears of conservatives that we pose a threat to their vision of sexual morality. Within the LGBT community, there is political pressure, particularly on those who are the most visibly queer, to reshape our sexualities into forms that are more palatable to conservative moralists and legislators, to have a binary-identified sexuality that was fixed at birth, or to ditch the concerns of trans* people altogether because they make us look bad. In other words, gay marriage takes a certain section of the queer community and makes them just like straight people, casting the rest aside.

This process of recuperation has happened over a relatively short historical period. Within decades, we have gone from being a radical sexual liberation movement which challenged and threatened the foundations of conservative sexuality morality, of which marriage is a keystone, to being little more than a movement beating at the door of family values ideology begging to be let in. In order to claim the right to be included within marriage, we place ourselves in the position of defending marriage, or cementing its position in the centre of society – we become it’s biggest cheerleaders, pushing out endless stories about happy gay couples who just want to get married because marriage is such an awesome institution – the fullest and most natural expression of love between two human beings – or of gay couples who raise perfect children (according to conservative standards) because we’re such awesome parents.

In short, as long as we continue to aim for equality-through-assimilation, we concede that we will never win the struggle to free love from the grip of bourgeois morality, and to experience love as we see fit, with whoever we see fit. In fact, we strengthen the institutions that keep our bodies and our hearts in chains.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that the usage of LGBT here for what is essentially an LGB movement focused on LGB concerns erases trans* people. I use LGBT in a referential rather than descriptive sense because that is how the majority of the movement self-describes.

Can heteronormativity be smashed?

(Figuratively of course. Ideas are difficult to literally smash.)

So on Saturday I had a rather interesting drunk conversation with a (gay) friend of mine about a bunch of stuff relating to the queer struggle. The main thing I’m going to focus on is the following set of arguments, which I’m paraphrasing from my very imperfect memory (so apologies if this ends up looking like a mischaracterisation).

You seem to think that the existence of a norm in society is inherently oppressive, and I don’t think that’s true.

Straight people will always be seen as the norm in society simply because most people in society will always be straight, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as LGBT people aren’t discriminated against.

Kids learn most of their ideas about relationships from observing their parents before anyone ever sits them down and has the sex-talk with them, and since most parents will be straight couples, kids will naturally infer that straight-monogamous relationships are the norm.

Predictably, Drunk Me wasn’t particularly effective at arguing against this, but there’s a lot of important ideas in what I should have said, and this is a pretty decent argument to hang an exposition of those ideas around.

I’m gonna break it down into two sections.

Will the majority of people always be straight?

I doubt it, although there’s a limit to how much I can say about the subjectivities of others. Particularly it would be wrong to merely dismiss those who experience their sexuality as innate and natural to them. But the fact that most people experience sexuality this way is almost certainly coloured by the fact that they live in a society that constantly tells them that this is the only way to experience sexuality and entirely erases the voices of anyone who experiences things differently.

Who we’re attracted to is definitely influenced by physiological factors (to deny this would turn queer theory into an anti-materialist abstraction). But it’s also influenced by all kinds of other material forces – most significantly the ideas we’re exposed to about sexuality and the social and economic consequences for the individual if they believe those ideas or not, but also things like the geographies and ecologies of the spaces we inhabit.

Socialisation plays a huge role in forming identities and determining behaviours. To argue from analogy: the reason why the vast majority of people wear clothes for the vast majority of their lives is not because humans are biologically determined to be clothes-wearing animals, but because it’s socially unacceptable for people do be naked in most social settings, because there are certain culturally created ideas about people who are inappropriately naked (they’re assumed to be mentally ill, or sexual predators, or weird hippies, or something like that) and about the human body more generally and the genitalia specifically, and because there are pretty significant negative consequences for people who are inappropriately naked and not a huge amount of pluses.

It’s hard to say with certainty how people would think and feel and behave in a radically different society. It’s hard to determine how much of a role biology has in shaping sexuality because we can’t extract people from their social reality and run controlled experiments in a culture-free vacuum (and even if we could, studying the sexuality of someone who has never interacted with another human being probably doesn’t tell us a whole lot when they only have themselves or the Void to be attracted to). But we can say with certainty that humans do all kinds of things all the time that couldn’t possibly be merely acting out a script written by genes and hormones. We have more agency than that.

Which categories of people you feel attracted to probably has a lot more to do with which categories of people you allow yourself to think about feeling attracted to than it does with some primal urge to fuck someone because your genes are telling you they’d be a good person to put bits of your DNA in (or whatever evolutionary psychology bullshit is trendy at the moment).

For more on this issue, check out my post here and this post by another blog on the same topic. And also Significant Othering, which is pretty great and somewhat related.

Is a ‘norm’ inherently oppressive?

Um, maybe…

I think one of the key points here is actually semantic: we need to draw a distinction between a (socially enforced) norm and merely a majority sexuality.

The former is what exists under the discursive power structure of heteronormativity. Under heteronormativity, heterosexuality is not merely the sexual preference of the majority of people in society – it’s a privileged identity. It’s an identity whose legitimacy is beyond question. It’s an identity which is seen as the default, and which you are assumed to identify with unless you indicate otherwise. It’s an identity that is associated with notions of belonging in society. It’s an identity that allows you greater access to power within society.

This is not something that just happens because 9 out of 10 people in society are heterosexual. It requires the continual propagation and continual enforcement of a mutually supporting and reinforcing set of ideas about sex, sexuality and gender. It requires all of the cultural institutions of society to continually pump out ideas about what kind of sex you can have, who you can have it with, what kind of relationships you can have, and what genders you can be. It requires policing of those who step outside the margins of normalcy or acceptability; the kinds of policing action that take place range from being made to feel weird, or dirty or anxious, to ostracisation, bullying, abuse and violence. (Policing can disguise itself as inclusion by including queer people in a way that emphasises their otherness, or which emphasises the power of straight people to decide who gets included, or by making the inclusion contingent on being queer in a way that’s palatable to straight people.)

The fact that it’s not something that just happens and must be actively reinforced is key here, because it implies that heteronormativity is something that can be fought against by stopping the processes that reinforce it. Even if we accept (for the sake of argument) that only 10% of people in society will ever experience attraction to someone of the same gender, it’s entirely possible for the majority of people to be straight and for society not to make any kind of assumptions about those who aren’t. But that does require us to dismantle the institutions (capitalism, the state, etc.) which propagate those ideas in the interests of the ruling class.

Still: 10% is not enough. Recruit!*

*Not a joke.

Born This Way?

Next in my series on bland well-meaning platitudes with embedded fucked-up ideology (hopefully this time I won’t end up being called a whiny fascist bitch) is “born this way” and all it’s essentialist variants.

Except in this case it’s not so much about the idea that some people are born gay or straight or bi or whatever. While it doesn’t make much sense to me that gender is performative and gender identity is fluid, but what gender you’re attracted to is innate and fixed from birth, if that’s how you understand and experience your sexuality, who am I to say you’re wrong? In fact, I’m sure the “this is just who I am”/”baby I was born this way” epiphany is really important for some people, particularly those who had previously been trying to suppress or deny their desires.

The problem is, “born this way” has become the compulsory narrative for all queer people, and is aggressively policed by certain sections of the community (check out the reaction to Cynthia Nixon’s claim that she chose to be gay, for example). It’s a narrative that erases the experiences and identities of countless people.

Personally, I’ve never felt strongly that any sexuality particularly describes me. There was no eureka moment where I suddenly realised “this is what I’ve been all along”, more a gradual realisation that I was attracted to people not genders and that that’s ok. At various times I’ve identified as gay, straight and bi, but none of those really described me, and it’s caused me a lot of anxiety. Trying to choose from one of the pre-packaged identities on offer was quite a rough experience emotionally. Eventually I settled on ‘queer’.

I’m pretty sceptical that I popped out of the womb with that aspect of my identity fully formed and that I’m now just living out a script written in utero by genes and hormones. I’m pretty sure my unique socialisation – my exposure to anarchism, queer theory, feminism, postmodernism etc., and to a community of radicals where not just tolerance but acceptance and understanding of difference is expected, and where normative assumptions about identity are questioned rather than being taken at face value – plays a huge part.

(You’ll notice I haven’t bothered with any of the scientific stuff here. That’s because I don’t really care. Empirical evidence can at best point us towards interesting correlations between certain genes and hormones and sexuality, none of which implies causation, and certainly none of which is enough to establish that sexuality is innate from birth in every case. But, more importantly, because you don’t just get to erase people’s subjectivities by going “look, science”.)

But anyway, “born this way” isn’t actually an attempt to accurately describe queer people’s experiences of themselves – it’s a political statement, which is the product of a particular politics: the mainstream (liberal) LGBT civil rights movement. It’s a politics that’s fraught with problems – mainly that it aims at LGBT inclusion (or more correctly assimilation) within oppressive institutions that we should really be struggling against (the US war machine, nationalism, the State, the capitalist class, the cops, marriage and the nuclear family, among others) and in doing so has allowed LGBT struggles to be co-opted by reactionary agendas (Israeli apartheid, Islamophobia, consumerism, family values) in exchange for small concessions from the State.

As a political statement, “born this way” is related to a whole bunch of different issues. I’ll try and sketch some of the main ones here.

Anti-discrimination legislation

In the United States, in order for a group to qualify for certain legal protections as a ‘suspect class‘ under the 14th Amendment, it is important (but not strictly necessary) for that group to demonstrate that they possess an immutable and/or highly visible trait that distinguishes them as a group (similar requirements exist in many other jurisdictions). As a result, liberals who see pursuing civil rights through the courts and voting for progressive legislators as the primary methods of political struggle need to establish that sexuality is innate and immutable, and those of us who that doesn’t apply to had better just shut our mouths and stop ruining it for everyone else.

This demonstrates pretty clearly the poverty of the liberal approach to struggle. Rather than actively combating homophobia through grassroots struggle and direct action, they instead attempt to piggyback on the victories of the black civil rights movement by making sexuality like race, even though it clearly isn’t (although arguably race as a political and sociological category is at least to some extent performative, but that’s a different discussion).

It’s all pretty naive stuff. Rights, or freedom from oppression, can’t be granted as gifts from above, only won through popular struggle. Anti-discrimination legislation hasn’t abolished institutional racism, rather it’s outlawed certain overt forms of discrimination. As long as race-thinking and white privilege still exist, institutional racism will just change form in response to legal gains; the language and tactics of racism change, but racism persists. Similarly, no amount of court judgements and no amount of saying “we were born this way” will win queer emancipation if we’re unwilling to fight for the right to fuck who we want without shame.

Curing homosexuality

A major fear is that if we admit that having sex with members of your own gender is something people do for all kinds of different reasons, rather than an immutable part of a person’s biology in every case, it opens the door for various kinds of horrific ‘therapy’ practised by religious bigots designed to ‘cure’ homosexuality.

I’ve never had someone offer to cure me, but my likely response would be “fuck off there’s nothing wrong with me” not “sorry dude I can’t help it, there’s nothing you can do”. Our response as a community should be to empower queer people to make that stand for themselves, and you don’t do that by talking about their sexuality as if it were an incurable disease. If your argument against homophobia is that their bigotry is illegitimate because sexuality is innate, the obvious corollary is that if it were a choice, their bigotry would be legitimate, which makes it a pretty shit argument.

As for the legal side, surely the fact that these therapies have been shown in every case to cause massive psychological damage (and often suicide) is a strong enough argument for them to be banned?

Not unsettling heteronormativity

Most heterosexuals love the idea that their sexuality is innate, because that means their access to heterosexual privilege is also innate and unthreatened. “I was born gay just like you were born straight” is a great thing to hear in a society where it means they were born normal and will never be anything other. It’s a great way to win (tokenistic) support from the oppressor class without unsettling their privileged identity. On the other hand, the idea that they too might find themselves attracted to someone of the same gender is a direct threat to their privilege, and it’s an uncomfortable thought.

If your aim is to win gradual small gains by compromising with an oppressive system (i.e. if you are a liberal) then it makes tactical sense to say things that heterosexuals find easy to digest. But if your aim is a world without heteronormativity, then combating essentialism is pretty essential (pun intended).

Ok that seems like a decent enough ending. Next post will be about the centrality of class in understanding oppression.

“I’m not gay but…”

Thanks for that.

(Or ‘How not to be an ally’)

So the I’m not gay but I don’t care if you are Facebook group popped up in my feed again to remind me just how much I hate their faux-progressive posturing.

Recently I posted an angry Facebook thread (where I believe I called it “heteronormative bullshit”) about it, where the general consensus among both queer and straight friends was that I was “being too harsh” and “at least they’re trying” and I should “stop nitpicking” etc. etc.

I’m still pretty sure I was right, and here’s why:

Firstly, and this is far from the main problem, within a heteronormative society it’s just not enough to “not care” if someone is gay. You have a duty to actively think about being inclusive, in the language you use, the way you behave, and the kinds of speech and behaviour you put up with from friends.¹ Not caring is a cop out that avoids dealing with the specific needs and sensitivities that queer people have as a result of living under an oppressive system.

1. This, by the way, means challenging homophobic speech even when there’s no queer people around.

But the worst part is, “I’m not gay but” is a pretty clear attempt to retain access to a privileged identity while defending an oppressed group. It’s wanting to appear pro-gay while avoiding all the negative consequences of being associated with queers; some of us don’t have that luxury. It’s “I think being gay is ok, and I’m straight so you should take me seriously”.  It’s “I’m normal, but if you’re not that’s cool with me”. And it’s pretty offensive.

I’ve had this move used on me in person on occasion, and it’s a pretty uncomfortable experience: When arguing with some outright homophobe about something, some hetero white-knight will come over and pull the “I’m not gay but I agree with you” move.²Immediately, the dynamic of the conversation shifts from me arguing with a dickhead, to two straight people arguing about me in my presence, and I don’t like it. When someone pulls the “I’m not gay but” move, I don’t think “oh great, an ally” – all I see is someone who wants to reassure a homophobe that he’s not one of the queers.

2. And often expect me to be grateful for their “tolerance”. As a rule, I don’t appreciate being tolerated (as opposed to included/accepted) and you won’t get a good reaction if you try it.

If you want to actually be an ally (as opposed to posing as one) it’s not going to be consequence-free – siding with an oppressed class rarely is – and one of those consequences is people will associate you with a group of people whose sexuality is stigmatised and shamed. If being mistakenly thought of as gay is such a big deal for you that you need to assert your heterosexuality at the beginning of a discussion then you’re not an ally, and you’re probably at some level a homophobe.

Heteronormativity Cards

Another old one that I quite like, about heteronormativity.

Civil Partnership Cards

While browsing in my local Tesco for a deliberately inappropriate card to give a friend for his 21st, I came across these “Civil Ceremony” cards:

It’s not something I’d ever given any thought to, and I must admit my initial response was something like “Oh, how progressive.” But looking more closely I noticed four things:

1. The cards are deliberately labelled “Civil Ceremony”, and not “Marriage” or “Wedding” (or even “Civil Partnership”), drawing a clear distinction between gay relationships and heterosexual marriages.
2. They are the special gay cards, in a sea of heteronormative cards depicting traditional heterosexual marriages, with the implication surely being that gay relationships are other, different, distinct.
3. The message inside is a rather perfunctory and impersonal “Congratulations”, while many of the cards for straight people had messages about love and other similarly romantic/marriagey ideas.
4. The couples depicted on the cards are plastic dolls. Without wanting to go down the Slavoj Žižek reading-too-much-into-things road, are plastic dolls not symbols of falsity and fakeness?

In other words, these kind of cards, which are presumably the socially acceptable thing to give a same-sex couple at a civil partnership ceremony, are actually rather othering and exclusionary. The message is that same sex relationships are different/abnormal, and should be treated differently, as a separate category.

While I’m no fan of the institution of marriage, or of queer mainstreaming (broadly speaking, I support the idea of Gay Shame), I was interested to see what the response of the greeting card industry to the emergence of same-sex partnerships has been. A cursory Googling would indicate that the response has been either to pretend gay relationships don’t exist, and to carry on depicting only heterosexual couples – as exemplified by Hallmark – or to produce the kind of cards described above, the worst example of this I came across being:

which not only others gay people, but also plays up to rather crude stereotypes (what is a “big gay wedding” other than some stereotypical camp extravaganza?).

While clearly this is not some huge issue, it is worth contemplating what role these kinds of cultural traditions play, both in reflecting and simultaneously shaping societal attitudes.