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.

On free speech for fascists (An Open Letter To The University Philosophical Society)

This is a blog post I wrote on my old blog when Trinity Philosophical Society had invited Nick Griffin to address a debate. The debate was subsequently canceled due to pressure from anti-fascists. I’m reproducing it here because it says some important stuff about free speech.

Fellow debaters,

It is with disappointment that I write to complain about the University Philosophical Society’s irresponsible decision to invite BNP leader and Holocaust denier Nick Griffin to speak at a debate on immigration. Griffin’s ultra-right racist political views and involvement in fascist organising are well-documented, and undoubtedly well-known to the committee. The threat he and his party pose to immigrants, ethnic minorities, queer and trans people is both real and pressing. While in the short term, the BNP is unlikely to gain power and carry out their policy of forced deportation of blacks and Muslims, even modest success is enough to encourage hate crimes both by members of the BNP and others on the far-right, both in the UK, and in Ireland. The sense of legitimacy afforded by an invite by a debating society, particularly one as prestigious as the Phil, directly contributes to the momentum of these groups. Moreover, appearances by far-right speakers in events such as this are strongly correlated with increases in the incidence of hate crimes in the surrounding areas. These dangers are particularly acute in times of economic crisis, where ‘blame the immigrants’ rhetoric offers an easily-understandable explanation for complex socio-economic processes.

‘Free speech’ controversies such as this occur with depressing regularity in the debating community, and play out in a ritualistic manner: Some debating society, in an attempt to assert their commitment to freedom of speech and/or provoke a debate about the limitations of freedom speech (or, if I’m being cynical, to stir up controversy for the sake of publicity), invites a well-known fascist to address the house. Predictably, anti-fascist, anti-racist and immigrant groups come out strongly in opposition. The debate itself is of little importance as a debate (since an interesting, informative and nuanced debate would not involve Nick Griffin) but rather as the centrepiece of a dramatic narrative with the society’s committee in the centre defending the open society against the illiberal forces of unfreedom – immigrants, racialised minorities, and the anti-racist movement – with the fascist playing the hapless victim who just wants the opportunity to present his opinion. This inverted ontology, in which racialised minorities become the oppressors and the racists the victims, is a recurring trope of racist discourse – the ordinary white man as victim of imagined multiculturalist hegemony – and is a consequence of the elevation of abstract principles (‘freedom of speech’) over concrete realities (people’s lived experiences of racism).

Of course, we are always told, the fascist will not be given an uncontested platform, but rather will be robustly challenged by invited guests and society debaters. Having invited the fascist to speak regardless of the views of minorities and anti-racists, the debaters now adopt the pose of anti-fascism (white knights to the rescue!) and (rhetorically) confront the fascist as principled defenders of multiculturalism. By taking on both the anti-racists and the racists, the debaters consolidate their self-image as supremely rational intellectuals, through their performance elevating themselves above the vulgar irrationalism and illiberalism of the antifascist struggle, brave defenders of universal values against the murky contingencies of subjective struggle. If only these minorities would rationally argue that they shouldn’t be deported en masse to the Third World because of their ethnicity, rather than trying to undermine our free speech utopia!

This is a perspective steeped in privilege. It’s easy to be in favour of free speech for fascists when you’re not the one whose humanity is called into question, and when you’re not the one whose life and safety is under threat from the growth of far-right groups. Posturing aside, there’s nothing particularly brave about forcing other people to take the risk in order for you to maintain your consistency in applying an idealised schema of rights and freedoms. Only in a worldview that invisiblises racial hierarchies does it make sense to conflate the ‘right’ of fascist groups to organise with the concept of freedom.

In any case, have we not been here already – dozens of times? Have we not already had the meta-debate about the limits of debating? Have we not already explored the boundaries of freedom of speech through the performance art ritual of the fascist in the debating chamber? Can we not have a debate about a complex issue like immigration with descending into Marilyn Manson-esqe transgressive theatrics? There’s plenty of people with important things to say whose perspectives we’re ignoring because we’re too busy focusing on the fringe lunatic, not least those for whom racism is a daily lived-reality rather than an opportunity for a publicity stunt

Victory lap? Pentagon? Corporate sponsors? This is not Gay Liberation

Reblogged from Kasama:

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Kasama received the following contribution. It also appears on the blog The Cahokian.

by ish
It's gay pride season. This weekend is New York City's big Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade.

I've gone almost every year since I've lived in New York City, over thirty years. My first Pride was 1977, before I lived here. In the middle I went to Pride in Chicago.

Read more… 1,597 more words

A good post on the recuperation of queer struggles by capital and imperialism.

Review: The Crises of Multiculturalism – Racism in a Neoliberal Age

This is the text of a review I wrote for Irish Anarchist Review No. 5, which is available from the WSM (PDF should be up soon). I’ll hopefully write about some of this stuff in less wordy faux-academic language soon.

Title: The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age
Authors: Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley
ISBN: 978-1-84813-581-9
Publisher: Zed Books
Available online from: zedbooks.co.uk
Cost: £15.99

In November 2011, the Fine Gael mayor of Naas, Darren Scully sparked controversy when he announced on national radio that he would no longer represent “Black Africans”, due to their “aggressiveness and bad manners” and their tendency to “play the race card”. Ultimately, the controversy caused by Scully’s blatant and unambiguous racism forced his resignation as mayor.

1. It Ain’t Easy Being Blue.

However, as Crises… co-author Gavan Titley pointed out, the mistake, from Scully’s point of view, was not in being racist per se, but rather that he “played the wrong race card”. [1] While overt racism is still experienced by people of colour both on the streets and within institutions, in public discourse the language and tactics of racism have become more subtle (to some extent, in response to significant victories by anti-racist, anti-apartheid and post-colonial movements worldwide, and the demise of scientific racism as an ideology). Racist speech is no longer concerned (explicitly at least) with racial superiority and inferiority, or even with race per se, but rather with the supposed impossibility of the harmonious co-existence of different cultures within a single society. Scully’s blunder was his lack of political sophistication, not his racist intent.

Multiculturalism in crisis

In Crises…, Lentin and Titley discuss similar themes, exploring the dynamics of racism in contemporary public discourse in the era of neoliberalism. Specifically, they discuss various narratives around ‘the failed experiment of multiculturalism’, which function as a means of ‘laundering’ racist ideas and policies. These narratives have a fairly familiar form: For the past number of years we have been living in the era of multiculturalism, whose noble aspirations were pursued by state institutions across the Western world. However, despite the good intentions of it’s left and liberal proponents, multiculturalism has proved to be an utter failure and must be abandoned.

These narratives, while often presented by their narrators as someone finally speaking up on behalf of the silent majority in the face of repressive political correctness, in fact crop up regularly in public discourse, with everyone from newspaper columnists to mainstream political figures such as David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, to far-right figures such as Nick Griffin or Geert Wilders clamouring to sound the death knell for multiculturalism.

Crises… challenges those narratives, by questioning whether a coherent multicultural era ever existed. They argue that multiculturalism was never seriously embraced by the establishment beyond the rhetorical, nor by left anti-racists, who saw it as a liberal retreat into culture (but who have been forced somewhat reluctantly into the position of defending multiculturalism against attacks from the right). Instead, the spectre of multiculturalism is erected as a target for the racial anxieties of everyone from liberals to the far-right.

This thesis is elucidated by combining theoretical analysis with discussion of various recent controversies: moves to ban or regulate the wearing of Islamic headscarves or burkas by Muslim women, the Swiss ban on minarets, the ‘free speech’ controversy around the Jyllands Posten cartoons, the 2004 Citizenship Referendum in Ireland, and others.

Free speech and white privilege

2. This is discussed explicitly by Titley in relation to the recent invites of Nick Griffin to speak at UCC and Trinity College here.

Of particular practical significance for the Irish left, specifically those involved in anti-fascist organising, is the discussion of the Jyllands Posten cartoon controversy, which has a number of parallels with the free speech debates that regularly result when fascist leaders are invited to speak on university campuses. [2]

In such controversies, the substantive issue at stake (in this case the racist content of cartoons of Muhammed in a newspaper with a right-wing anti-Islamic agenda and historical links to fascism) is subsumed into a meta-debate about the principle of free-speech and its limits. This reflexive reframing of the issue serves a particular political function: to apparently invert the power structures of a white-privileged society so that the white racist becomes the victim of oppressive multiculturalism – an ontological inversion that functions to delegitimate the complaints of the oppressed and cast the oppressor as a symbol of Western liberal values.

“Organised around this abstraction is a ‘threefold cast of characters’ beginning with the protagonist who breaks a taboo in pursuit of freedom, who is subsequently supported by principled defenders of the open society, and both of whom triangulate with the subject who has taken offence… Muslims are cast as this intolerant apex, and thus positioned, ‘end up being treated as deficient in comparison with the evident open-mindedness of those who tolerate transgression’”. (pp. 138)

A similar dynamic exists in the case of fascist speakers on university campuses, with anti-fascists being drawn into a liberal-idealist discussion about what rights exist, how far they extend, and which rights take precedence when they conflict – a discussion which ultimately benefits fascists and racists. The more materialist analysis found here of how such events and the controversy surrounding them actually impacts the subjects of racism is perhaps a more useful way to frame discussions around applying a No Platform For Fascists policy.

Liberal racism, feminism vs. Islam, homonationalism

Also of interest is the authors’ exposition of the various forms of racism embedded in liberal approaches to understanding race and to governance, which are significantly more subtle than those of the right and far-right. Multiculturalism itself is exposed as an effort to depoliticise racism, rendering invisible structures of racialised power through constructing an imagined post-racial landscape, and in doing so functioning both as an adjunct to the post-politicism of neoliberalism generally and as a liberal mirror to the far-right’s shift in focus from race to culture. This post-racialism deprives racialised groups of the right to challenge discrimination as they experience it. Multicultural diversity is exposed as a coded language for certain acceptable ways of performing minority cultures – good diversity – which is counterposed with kinds of cultural performance less palatable to the white majority – bad diversity.

The co-optation of feminist and queer struggles by racist agendas is also discussed in-depth. Contemporary racism often employs the language and concerns of feminist and queer struggles in order to position Muslims and other racialised groups as a threat to the gains made by these movements, even though many of these gains are recent and heavily contested within even the most progressive of Western societies. This was a particularly significant dynamic in debates about Islamic headscarves and veils across Europe, where veiled Muslim women were presented as a threat to the position of all women with European societies. The actual views and experiences of veiled women were in practice excluded from these debates, which were more concerned with white people’s particular racialised vision of what a free woman looks like.

The authors draw from Jasbir Puar’s work on ‘homonationalism’ in discussing the use of queer issues towards racist agendas. Queers, particularly those who fall into the category of ‘homonormative’ (those that closely mirror heteronormative sexuality and heterosexual identity: upholding monogamy, binary gender etc.), are able to “enact [previously barred] forms of national, racial or other belongings by contributing to a collective vilification of Muslims”. (Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press  pp 21) This dynamic is particularly significant in relation to the struggle for Palestinian national liberation, as Israel uses its relatively progressive position on LGBT rights to project itself as the ally of Western queer people in a region dominated by homophobic Muslim states and thus help to justify (pinkwash) it’s continued oppression of Palestine.

Conclusion

As an academic text, rather than an anti-racist handbook for activists, Crises… is somewhat lacking in direct practical insights for anti-racist activists, and often requires significant effort to parse the analyses presented into a useful form (a problem that is compounded by the dense writing style of the authors). However, a sophisticated understanding of how racism works under neoliberal governance is key if we are to win the ‘battle of ideas’ against those who would use racism to divide and control us in the interests of the ruling class. As such, the depth and incisiveness of analysis in Crises… make it an important text both for those seeking a better theoretical understanding of race, and those who work to combat racism in society.

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.

How not to deal with criticism

So yesterday I whipped up a storm of self-righteous indignation over on the ‘I’m not gay but I don’t care if you are’ Facebook page. Apparently happy-clappy liberal sentiment can quite quickly turn to anger if you puncture their self-congratulatory bubble of bland platitudes with some actual analysis and experience of how oppression manifests itself.

In the end, me and several of my friends were blocked from the page and all our comments deleted. I’m not entirely sure what I expected to happen – I guess “I see where you’re coming from and will rethink my approach to this” wasn’t realistic. Oh well. The whole drama did raise an important question, though:

Are members of an oppressed class entitled to make demands regarding what kind of support they receive from members of the oppressor class?

Yes.

Moving on, here’s a selection of some of the really dumb shit people said to me, with snarky commentary:

Obviously this fellow doesn’t understand the position of a person who is not homosexual but is not all up in arms and offended by the fact that others are, so maybe he shouldn’t judge those of us in a different position than him just as we don’t judge homosexuals, eh?

I’m sure it’s a tough position. In many ways tougher than actually facing discrimination…

This article shows the same level of maturity as the child learning to ride his bike, who pushes away the hands of the parent attempting to support and protect them with the insistence that they can “Do it themselves”. I do not understand the determination to reject an ally.

Thank God we have straight people to patronise protect us, otherwise we might actually fight our own struggle on our own terms scrape a knee.

If the ally didn’t announce their hetero orientation at the outset, wouldn’t that be to invite a comment like, “Honey, you can’t speak for me! You don’t have the first clue about what it means to be gay in a predudiced society.”

“Honey”

I am an allie. I DON’T have to be an allie the way you say I do. I CAN be an allie on my own terms. If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to be here.
I put a lot of thought into this name and my intentions behind the name were calculated.

We get tons of hatemail from homophobes and occasionally attacked by those that we fight for.
Some of us are just way to picky…

The phrasing and “Tone” of this page name is intended to provoke thought in homophobic people, or people that are otherwise indifferent to the suffering of others.
I have no (inherent) desire to please gay people with this page…that was just a pleasant by-product. The name inspires other people that aren’t gay to look within themselves and ask, “Do I care if he(or she) is gay? and if I do, then ‘why’.”
It works wonders…you should see the response I get from the sticker on my car. It provokes thought…which, I might add, is easy to see in people’s faces.
If it pisses off a few people in the process, then so be it…at least they’re thinking.

These are all from the page founder “Mike Thought”, who apparently gets to decide what it means to be an “allie” and doesn’t have to listen to what actual queer people think. Although I guess if you make up your own word you do get to define it…

Saying I don’t care if you are gay means just that. I choose people who I want to be friends with based on their charater and morals. Everything else doesn’t matter to me..age, gender, race or sexual orintation.

Yup. It’s totally possible to just declare yourself blind to age, gender, race and sexuality and no longer be responsible for your privilege.

The fact that this guy uses ‘queer’ all throughout the article invalidates his argument. Queer usually implies some kind of departure from normalcy, I couldn’t finish reading, because he used it so often.

How about you not use the term queer when complaining about semantics lmfao!!!!

This would be hilarious if one of the page admins hadn’t taken it upon himself to censor all comments explaining why some of us choose to identify as ‘queer’. Apparently heteros also get to decide how other people describe their sexuality.

Whomever wrote this is a very sad person. I can see the hurt and mistreatment by the way they argue and nitpick the semantics of this Facebook site, especially a site that has dedicated their time to support the who I am assuming is a gay person writing this article. Time to accept your probably sad and scary past and move forward with your life to one that is more welcoming today than it was yesterday.

People like this are probably not worth the time and stress. Just ignore them, it takes someone really unhappy with themselves to attack someone who is trying to spread peace and do good.

I might say I hate being otherised, but what I really mean is I hate myself…

This post: “You can be straight, just don’t assert it or use it for acceptance, because that might offend some people”

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: “You can be gay, just don’t assert it or use it for acceptance, because that might offend some people”

“You’re oppressing straight people!”

Stop hating and nitpicking. Leave that for the straight homophobes. You’re not doing the gay community any favors by spewing hatred and judgement. Isn’t that exactly what you ask the heterosexual community NOT to do? I think that’s a little bit hypocritical there aren’t you?

I don’t even.