Appetite For Deconstruction - Part II

Some people are now very critical of gay because it has often been very sexist, and without listing every other non-heterosexual practice, it has basically made invisible anyone who isn't a white gay boy who likes dance music. Activists who work with queer theory - which is knowing that you can't get rid of identity, but that the next best thing is to make people aware of it - talk about 'queer' and advocate things that blur the boundaries because:

It makes people aware of the important things they have in common - like the need to take a piss.

It allows participation by everyone that wants to be involved

It makes people question their knowledge of issues and not just rely on their own personal experience.

It means that the people in power ('straights') can't just say 'I'm not gay, so why should I care'.

It demands that straights and everyone, educate themselves to stop reproducing oppressive behaviour that affects not only themselves, but other people.

It says that 'just because I’m a woman, doesn't mean I inherently know everything about feminism and how to solve the problem of sexism.'

It means that queers always have to question the reasons they do things so they don't fall into traps of stereotyping and excluding/oppressing people.

What queers might need to be wary of:

Talking like they own an issue

Speaking disrespectfully to people and disregarding their experience.

Being exclusionary and elitist because someone has chosen to adopt an 'identity'.

The inevitable 'exclusionary' aspect of queer:

It inadvertently forces out people who refuse to question their identity


The role of biology/bodies in queer:

People often question what the point is of looking to science to explain any component of queerness. If there is a gay gene or a transsexual gene - should parents be warned so they can abort the foetus or fix it with drugs? If we really want to think about things in terms of biology, why don't we just look at it in terms of the personality of people, and how 'compelled' they are to align their sex with their gender, or how 'compelled' people are to act on their same-sex attraction. Clearly many 'trans'/'gay' people go their whole lives living as how society wants them to, just because for them, it's not perfect but it is tolerable. For other people, they can't, and so in some instances surgery is necessary, or making a point of coming out as 'lesbian' is necessary.

I personally don't think this is the ideal way things should be. Perhaps a better solution is to promote an acceptance of the different practices that people do and to remove the binaries (like woman/man, white/black etc) that unreasonably oppress the people on 'the bad side': women | black | disabled | gay | etc.

Like the unfortunate experience of being attracted to members of your own sex - feeling that you are this thing - and being told that you are being dishonest if you don't confess to everyone - so they can tolerate you. Transsexualism is the same. Like all oppression related to sexuality and gender - it wouldn't be an issue if we got rid of the binary gender system. And we have to continually remind ourselves what the point is in having a system of 'sex' or 'gender'.


Reality kicks in:

Yeah, we are a long way from the point of getting rid of these HUGE categories, which is why we run campaigns like National Genderf*#k Day and pan toilet stuff. It creates confusion and it promotes discussion. It forces queers to look at their own experience of gender, how they deal with sexism and produce it themselves. It makes us interested enough to read posts like this, so we can be informed when 'straight' people make stupid comments. Or even when we do. And we can help us educate each other so there is one less close-minded bigot in this world.


Pan toilet campaign:

People are going to have different opinions about gender | sexuality | queer | essentialism vs constructionism/whatever, the point is that this is a campaign with a pretty broad scope for people to say what they want to say. And people - no matter what their identity/experience - shouldn't feel threatened that they are going to lose anything.

We are fighting for a pan toilet so in the immediate time frame people have more choice. People can still identity as a man, like they can identify as a woman, like they can identify (or non-identify) as anything else.

We are fighting for a pan toilet so in the long term, we bring people to a point where they are accepting of difference.

***
And if you still haven't had enough links:

Review of Peniston's (no, this is not a pun) Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Review and review of Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century


Technorati: GenderFuck, LGBT, GLBT, queer activism