Ettling: Appetite For Deconstruction - Part I

[Ed: I just had to break this one up; it was too damn long.]


I think the pan toilet campaign is a good campaign.

It's generated a degree of interest in queer issues and activism on campus that I haven't seen for a long time. It doesn't require much to get involved in this issue. Take some stickers and put them up on toilet doors, and just be involved in the discussion that comes from it.

It's important to be open-minded and listen to the experiences that people have had. At the same time, I think it's important to avoid what is called identity politics. This is what the queer movement intended to get rid of. Just because you are gay | black | disabled | transsexual | bi | white | whatever, doesn't mean that you have can be a spokesperson for everyone that is placed into those categories.

In academia, queer came out of post-structuralism, which had the main aim of getting us to question what is 'natural' or 'normal'. People pointed out how the experience of those who did same-sex fucking was very different according to the culture/time in history that these people lived in. It finally culminated in the stage in the mid 1800s when the conception of the homosexual came to be. This is linked to the time when doctors started pathologising 'same-sex attractedness' and these people were eventually enforced an identity which became known as gay.

In the early 1970s amidst a time of great social change this 'gay' identity was used to gain a whole raft of rights for people who either chose this category or were forced into it. Other gays told same-sex attracted people to 'come out', be gay, so the rest of society knew that there were lots of people like it who weren't all deviants and monsters.

After a while though, people realised the limitations of what being part of this identity could give same-sex attracted people. Gay ended up being a stereotype that excluded lots of people, it was used to sell a liberation, but only to those that could afford it or lived in cities where there were enough gays to make money. It also put same-sex attracted people in a neat, little box so they could be understood, but then ignored by the rest of society. In the end, gay became as much of a problem as it initially was a great solution.


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