On the Complexity of Agency

One of the most useful contributions of poststructuralism, which is the site at which poststructuralist feminism improves on its forebears, is that agency is complicated.

This is to refute the frequent, oversimplified accusation that poststructuralism’s model of power—in which there is, as Foucault (1990) put it, no outside—eviscerates the possibility of agency and instead do justice to the ways in which poststructuralism provides a nuanced and useful way to think about how we act in the world.

The first major characteristic of the poststructuralist account of agency is that agency is not a matter of acting in a way that is unconstrained by power, but rather consists of working within power, understood as both enabling and constraining—as Butler (1993) puts it in Bodies that Matter, power both subjects us (constrains) and subjectivates us (makes us subjects, empowers).

Thus, Butler (2010, p. 425) says elsewhere, “gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the individual, as some post-structuralist displacements of the subject would contend.”

Though I’m not sure which poststructuralists Butler is reprimanding here as framing gender as “imposed or inscribed upon the individual”—Bartky? Sloppy readers of Foucault?—her siting of gender as occupying a space between “individual choice” and inscription is the key intervention here.

That is, “concrete expression in the world must be understood as the taking up and rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities. Hence, there is an agency which is understood as the process of rendering such possibilities determinate. These possibilities are necessarily constrained by available historical conventions,” but importantly this is not incompatible with agency—it is instead its condition of possibility (Butler, 2010, pp. 420-1).

It is this same complex view of agency that leads Mani (2010, p. 402) to reject the typical modes of making sense of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows; for more information see Sati (practice) at Wikipedia), in which the options are either viewing women as “free agents” freely choosing or “producing a discourse which sets women up to be saved”; she points out that the latter “would situate women within feminist discourse in ways that are similar to their positioning within colonialist or nationalist discourse”—i.e. as not being capable of agency due to, respectively, racialized and gendered “insufficiencies.”

In place of these polarities of complete freedom and complete oppression, she contends, “structures of domination are best understood if we can grasp how we remain agents even in the moments in which we are being intimately, viciously oppressed” (Mani, 2010, p. 401).

In particular, she warns against falling into either a discourse in which “consent was sometimes conceived as impossible by definition: women were simply deemed incapable of it” or the contention that “one could hardly speak of consent when widowhood imposed its own regimes of misery” (Mani, 2010, p. 401).

Thus, though she recognizes that “the discourse of woman as victim has been invaluable to feminism in pointing to the systematic character of gender domination,” she nevertheless contends that “if it is not employed with care, or in conjunction with a dynamic conception of agency, it leaves us with reductive representations of women as primarily beings who are passive and acted upon” (Mani, 2010, pp. 401-2).

What we will do, then, is not decided in advance, but neither do we create it ex nihilo. As Butler (2010, p. 425) puts it, “surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one’s gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and prescriptions, is clearly not an individual matter.”

Though the options may be (and often are) quite limited, then, agency consists in the fact that those constraints don’t mean that life is decided in advance, and our enactments of those norms, as Butler points out elsewhere, are the moments of possibility for doing them differently and opening up new options.

Another major component of the multifaceted poststructuralist view of agency is its account of why people choose things that are in some sense detrimental to them. Some put this relatively negatively, as in Mani’s (2010, p. 401) discussion of sati that describes the “meagre alternatives available” for widows, of which sati may seem the lesser evil.

Butler (2010, p. 421), too, frames compliance with the social as in some sense forced, arguing that “discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished”—which would seem to be in tension with her general understanding of power as productive.

Bartky (2010, p. 414), however, recognizes that people benefit from compliance with the norm:

Women, then, like any other skilled individuals, have a stake in the perpetuation of their skills, whatever it may have cost to acquire them and quite apart from the question whether, as a gender, they would have been better off had they never had to acquire them in the first place. Hence, feminism, especially a genuinely radical feminism that questions the patriarchal construction of the female body, threatens women with a certain de-skilling, something people normally resist: beyond this, it calls into question that aspect of personal identity that is tied to the development of a sense of competence. Resistance from this source may be joined by a reluctance to part with the rewards of compliance.

Though women “would have been better off if they had never had to acquire” the knowledge of how to do femininity properly, the fact is that at least some subset of them does know now and the world is structured such that this is a valuable knowledge.

This argument is reminiscent of Kandiyoti’s (2010, p. 85) argument about the “patriarchal bargain,” in which women hold on to patriarchy “because they see the old normative order slipping away from them without any empowering alternatives. [ . . . ] Their passive resistance takes the form of claiming their half of this particular patriarchal bargain—protection in exchange for submissiveness and propriety.”

In both cases, though the options are not great for the women choosing them, they are nevertheless making an agential decision to go along with the norms that give them a meaningful place in society. Constructions of agency solely as resistance to power cannot account for these kinds of decisions, and this additional explanatory power makes the poststructuralist contribution all the more valuable.

In the end, then, poststructuralism is an important intervention into feminism. As a proponent of the paradigm, I view this as a corrective to both overly constrained psychoanalytic accounts and overly free (neo)liberal rights-based accounts of how people choose to act in the world, but I suspect that even those who cannot accept the poststructuralist account of agency would agree that it gives us interesting things to think about.

References
Bartky, S. L. (2010). Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 404-418). New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2010). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 419-430). New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.
Kandiyoti, D. (2010). Bargaining with Patriarchy. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 80-88). New York: Routledge.
Mani, L. (2010). Mutliple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 390-403). New York: Routledge.

All We are Saying is “Give Standpoint a Chance”?

I always disliked standpoint theories. They seemed naïve, as if their proponents thought that subjects who were marginalized in society were by some magical means not produced in and by the power mechanisms of that society.

I’m still not ready to accept standpoint completely, as I think there are a lot of things that operate in ways people aren’t aware of in their quotidian lives—and which cultural common sense works to maintain outside of awareness—but I have at long last found some things to like about standpoint.

For instance, I never knew—and it was interesting and useful to learn—about the concept’s roots in Marxist thought. Though I mistrust what seems like a simple (and indeed I’m tempted to say “simplistic”) flipping of the binary to privilege the downtrodden by arguing that the vision of the proletariat, in looking from “underneath,” can see social structure better than someone “on top,” and would instead like something like the more complex and subtle standpoint articulated by Narayan (2010) and Collins (2010) (see below), I do appreciate the part of this that is a de-centering of those who perceive themselves as the center.

Second, in having learned about standpoint previously in a generalized way without having deep engagement with specific texts (except Collins’ Black Feminist Thought [2000]), until this point I had not appreciated the subtlety of some iterations of standpoint, which I find much more palatable.

That is, if we can, on the model of what the Bad Subjects Collective of whiteness studies fame calls “vulgar multiculturalism” (Hill, 1997; Newitz & Wray, 1997), speak of “vulgar standpoint theory,” it’s that version that gives the whole enterprise a bad rap. Standpoint is often associated with essentialism in this vulgar instantiation—the idea that (insert oppressed group here) has a unique or superior understanding of the world simply due to their essence as members of that category.

Collins (2010) and Narayan (2010), on the other hand, articulate careful, specific descriptions of when and how standpoint works. They refute, first, the contention that the experience of oppression, in itself, is enough to generate critical thought. Narayan (2010, pp. 338-9) explains the idea of standpoint as one in which “the oppressed are seen as having an ‘epistemic advantage’ because they can operate with two sets of practices and in two different contexts. This advantage is thought to lead to critical insights because each framework provides a critical perspective on the other”—and this is a much-needed explanation of how it is that being marginalized can give critical insights on the “center”—but perhaps more importantly for my purposes here she argues that “mere access to two different and incompatible contexts is not a guarantee that a critical stance on the part of an individual will result.” Similarly, Collins (2010, p. 343) points out that being black and female doesn’t automatically produce black feminism.

Narayan, in particular, notes that standpoint has its problems. First, in addition to a critical view being only one possible outcome of experiencing inequality, she notes that it comes at a cost: “the decision to inhabit two contexts critically, although it may lead to an ‘epistemic advantage,’ is likely to exact a certain price. It may lead to a sense of totally lacking roots or any space where one is at home in a relaxed manner” (Narayan, 2010, p. 339).

Second, Narayan (2010, p. 338) recognizes the danger of essentialism in standpoint, arguing that “sympathetic members of a dominant group need not necessarily defer to our views on any particular issue because that may reduce itself to another subtle form of condescension”; in this way, it is clear that standpoint, when it is taken as an indication that only people who have an experience can know about it and having the experience results in automatically knowing about it, can reproduce a variety of the “wise person of color” or “noble savage” discourses which mean well but are just as essentializing and Othering as negative stereotyping.

Relatedly, Narayan (2010, p. 340) calls our attention to the danger of romanticism, arguing that “the thesis that oppression may bestow an epistemic advantage should not tempt us in the direction of idealizing or romanticizing oppression and blind us to its real material and psychic deprivations.
Finally, in addition to disputing these misperceptions about what standpoint is, Collins and Narayan improve upon other articulations of the theory by delineating a means by which quotidian experience can turn into a standpoint.

Collins (2010, p. 343) argues that “the legacy of struggle against racism and sexism is a common thread binding African-American women” such that the experience of encountering these structures on a daily basis provides the ground for being able to see and question them.

Similarly, Narayan (2010, pp. 337-8) explains that “those who actually live the oppressions of class, race, or gender have faced the issues that such oppressions generate in a variety of different situations. The insights and emotional responses generated by these situations are a legacy with which they confront any new issue or situation.”

What both are contending, then, is that if you run into invisible walls enough times you eventually figure out where they are and how to work with and around that constraint, and I do find this a compelling argument. It makes a certain amount of sense that one could learn to navigate the world through standpoint even without necessarily knowing the full extent of the walls and while still being guided by some of them you haven’t run into enough times to see.

References
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Collins, P. H. (2010). Defining Black Feminist Thought. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 341-356). New York: Routledge.
Hill, M. (1997). Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-la Whiteness, Writing, and other Ordinary Terrors. In M. Hill (Ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (pp. 1-18). New York: NYU Press.
Narayan, U. (2010). The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectoves from a Nonwesterm Feminist. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 332-340). New York: Routledge.
Newitz, A., & Wray, M. (1997). Introduction. In A. Newitz & M. Wray (Eds.), White Trash: Race and Class in America (pp. 1-12). New York: Routledge.

Doing Whiteness in Dutch Indonesia

Ann Laura Stoler, it turns out, proves the point I argued last week that Butler’s (2004) work is useful for thinking about race; Stoler, in her Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2010), describes Dutch whiteness in the Indonesian context as something that had to be “done” (though, despite this major point of contact, the citations suggest that Butler was not a conscious interlocutor for Stoler).

This done-ness of whiteness is implicit in arguments like the one Stoler makes that “prescriptions for bathing, breastfeeding, cooking, and sleeping arrangements tied anxieties over personhood, race, and what it meant to be Dutch to the choreography of the everyday” (17). This is much like Butler’s argument that gender is the appearance of an interior essence produced by repeated quotidian enactments of social norms.

Indeed, this “doing” of whiteness trumped what might seem to be the incontrovertible “matter” of raced bodies just as Butler contends that the sexed body is constructed rather than given. Stoler argues that “the colonial measure of what it took to be classified as ‘European’ was based not on skin color alone but on tenuously balanced assessment of who was judged to act with reason, affective appropriateness, and a sense of morality” (2-6).

That is, you have to “act” white/European/Dutch to get to “be” white/European/Dutch, and indeed it is under this logic that being creole was enough to symbolically unwhiten someone despite the genetic heritage of Dutch parents (68-9).

Similarly, the need to continually “do” whiteness explains the horror the settlers had of “men who had ‘gone native’ or simply veered off cultural course, of European children too taken with local foods, too versed in local knowledge,” as this troubled the equation—which they wanted to be unproblematic—between white embodiment and “white” behavior (2).

This is to say that, if the Dutch sense of racial superiority was founded in their sense of being more “civilized” than the Indonesians they colonized, the ways that white people could in fact “veer off course” and begin to behave in the Indonesian way could potentially mean that this imagined superiority wasn’t inherent. [1]

Thus it becomes clear that, as Butler argues about gender, the necessity of repeated instantiation of norms opens up the possibility of doing them “wrong” or differently—and thus the potential to disrupt their hold on normativity.

However, as both Butler and Stoler note, the breaking of norms doesn’t automatically free us from them. Stoler’s book “treats racism as a central organizing principle of European communities in the colonies,” and rightly so; the ways in which racism had this fundamental status meant that “racial thinking was part of a critical, class-based logic that differentiated between native and European and that was part of the apparatus that kept potentially subversive white colonials in line” (13).

This is to say that the threat of becoming unwhitened (with all the loss of privilege this would entail) worked to discourage solidarity of lower-class whites with native interests. David Roediger (1991) has documented a similar process as happening in the United States, as the members of the working class of European origin “settled for being white” rather than experiencing themselves as having common class interests with black workers.

The necessity of this work to solidify common whiteness, then, calls attention to “the uncertain racialized regimes of truth that guided their actions” and the ways in which the “criteria by which European colonials defined themselves” were unstable and necessitated the sort of “doing” Butler describes to create solidity and effective reality (6).

Notes
[1] On whiteness as self-control and civilization see also Dyer, 1997; Ferguson, 2003; Floyd, 2009; Frankenberg, 1993; Hedges, 1997; Nagel, 2003; Roediger, 1991; Sandell, 1997; Savran, 1998

References
Butler, J. (2004). The Judith Butler Reader. (S. Salih, Ed.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge.
Ferguson, R. A. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
Floyd, K. (2009). The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hedges, W. (1997). If Uncle Tom is White, Should we Call him "Auntie"? Race and Sexuality in Postbellum U.S. Fiction. In M. Hill (Ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (pp. 226-247). New York: NYU Press.
Nagel, J. (2003). Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roediger, D. R. (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.
Sandell, J. (1997). Telling Stories of "Queer White Trash": Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison. In A. Newitz & M. Wray (Eds.), White Trash: Race and Class in America (pp. 211-230). New York: Routledge.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Butler and Race?

In rereading some of Judith Butler’s work as published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004), I was startled to note how little she actually addresses race. This seeming silence on race is particularly odd when editor and introducer Sara Salih gives Butler a lot of credit for looking at race and in light of Butler’s fairly unambiguous antiracist credentials. [1]

Indeed, it seems that Butler in some sense “discovered” race sometime between Gender Trouble (1990, reissued 1999) and Bodies That Matter (1993); her 1990 objection to Mapplethorpe’s depiction of “naked Black men” as one which “engage[s] a certain racist romanticism of Black men’s excessive physicality and sexual readiness” (197) is not on par, theoretically, with the kinds of complex arguments she was making about gender at the same point in her career.

In the Reader, it was only in her 1999 introduction to the reissue of Gender Trouble that she pointed out that “racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender” (95) or that “gender norms” are substantially “underwritten by racial codes of purity and taboos against miscegenation” (101).

These brief mentions, and the recognition that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies” and “the sexualization of racial gender norms calls to be read through multiple lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as an exclusive category of analysis” (95) are really all she gives us.

It thus becomes the reader’s job to discern how Butler’s ideas about gender illuminate (or don’t) aspects of the operation of race as a system of discrimination (in both the “differentiation” and “inequality” senses, a dual valence Butler points out with respect to Wittig on p. 29), and so I shall.

The idea of performativity tends to generate resistance because it violates cultural common sense: “What do you mean, race (or gender) is produced by doing? I can see with my own eyes that this person has a race (gender)!”[2] Accordingly, the social construction of the matter of bodies generally has to be established before performativity can make sense (which makes the fact that Butler explained gender first (1990) and then the body (1993) unfortunate for both her and her readers).

Butler argues that body parts (or bodily characteristics) only come to exist at the point that we notice them (145); accordingly, the physical features that say “race” to us are products of paying attention to them. This does not, however, mean that they are not “real,” either materially or socially, but only that we make sense of bodies through social categories (100) that tell us that this skin color or that eye shape indicates membership in a particular race category.

These are, like sex categories, arbitrary—people from some Pacific Islander groups have the same, objective, “hue” (Dyer, 1997) skin color as some Africans, for example, but we understand them to be different “races” through classifying what “matters” about the “matter” of these bodies, and in so doing materializing these bodies in particular ways (and not others).

Once the matter of bodies is understood as social, performativity becomes easier to accept. Though there’s nothing inherent in the body about the races or genders we inhabit, we experience them as the inner truth of a person because they “act like it." The possibility of “doing” race out of line with the socially produced body is exemplified by the idea of the “Oreo” or “banana”—people of color who “act white” and are presumed then to be “white on the inside.”

Finally, as Butler notes about gender, performances of racialized selves are not volitional acts—we are hailed at birth into a race as much as a gender, and the social imperative to be raced and gendered is difficult and painful to refuse (What are you?).

In the end, then, I think it is clear that Butler’s work on gender can be useful for making sense of race, though clearly this does not relieve Butler of the obligation to make these articulations herself.

Notes
[1] For example, in her refusal of an award from the Berlin Christopher Street Day (i.e. gay pride) organization due to racism within the organization: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/i-must-distance-myself/
[2] The fact that this obviousness only occurs with respect to marked categories of race or gender, and white people and men don’t “obviously” have a race or gender to most people, though important, is beyond what I can consider here.

References
Butler, J. (2004). The Judith Butler Reader. (S. Salih, Ed.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (10th anniversary ed.). New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.
Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge.

The Persistence of (Punitive) Vision

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1995) traces a shift in how power works, arguing that in the late 18th and early 19th century punitive spectacle went out of fashion as the way of managing illegality.

Unfortunately, however, nobody bothered to tell the South.

Indeed, according to Joane Nagel’s (2003, p. 114) telling of the history, it was not until the 1890s that “lynchings moved beyond instances of local lawlessness to take on the proportions of large-scale spectacles.” These occasions of excessive visual penality, Nagel (2003, p. 114) says, were “publicized in advance and attracted crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands,” and she argues that they “were part of the consolidation of the color line and the construction of whiteness in the postwar U.S. South.”

Until well into the 20th century in the South, then, the idea that power had ceased to act upon bodies in destructive rather than productive ways is simply not applicable when it comes to white power acting on black bodies.

Similarly, Tony Bennett (1995, p. 24) argues explicitly that having “witnesses of a symbolic display of power [ . . . ] remained important—and more so than Foucault’s formations often allow.” He particularly notes that the museums his own work analyzes made particular use of the display of “other, ‘non-civilized’ peoples upon whose bodies the effects of power were unleashed with as much force and theatricality as had been manifest on the scaffold” (Bennett, 1995, p. 67).

In Foucault’s defense, there is a sense in which this lapse on his part is the product of looking at the history in one place or set of places and generalizing to all places, which it’s not entirely clear he meant for his work to do.

However, there is nevertheless a real racial absence in Foucault’s work, which is all the more perplexing when racialized difference had to have been relevant in the precise time and place he is intending to describe--France was a colonial power exercising repressive power over bodies that were somewhere in the process of being racialized as other.

Why is it that some bodies were still fair game for this kind of punishment at the same time that others were being subjected to discipline and made productive? Can we explain this simply as those people being seen as ineligible to become docile and productive due to some racialized imputation of unruliness? Is this a product of the production of some bodies as not-quite-human?

These are vital questions, as they can perhaps help us think through things like contemporary uses of torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and Foucault as written doesn’t help us answer them, so now it’s our job.

References
Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Nagel, J. (2003). Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neoliberal Fictions II: Property is Privacy is Freedom

Gay marriage advocates, as it turns out, are complicit with the people who want to privatize Social Security.

This is no nefarious scheme, but rather the consequences of buying in to a certain kind of political logic that has become the standard language of politics in the United States.

Though David Roediger (1991, p. 28) discusses discourses circulating at the time of the American Revolution that “thoroughly conflated opportunity to accumulate and secure productive property with the ‘pursuit of happiness’” and taxation with slavery and therefore unfreedom, in the era typically known as neoliberalism this equation of economic with political liberty has become orthodox—and in the mainstream at least it is verging on becoming unquestionable doxa.

It is this (strange) unquestionability of the equation of property and freedom that animates contemporary activism around gay marriage. That is, though Brown (2003, sec. 6) points out that political liberalism can “lean more in the direction of maximizing liberty (its politically ‘conservative’ tilt) or maximizing equality (its politically ‘liberal’ tilt),” and the demand for equality of marriage rights from the state is clearly the latter, the ways in which the demand for state recognition for one’s marriage is about inequality with respect to things like inheritance and taxes indicates that this “tilting” is within a relatively narrow orbit of economic laissez-faire liberalism.

Floyd (2009, p. 68) makes this argument quite explicitly, arguing that “neoliberal efforts to limit the horizon of struggles against ‘homophobia’ to the right to get married and own property” function “to assimilate homosexual practices not only to a heteronormative model of monogamy and ‘commitment’ but to a related, uncritical identification of privacy with property.”

This contention is also implicit in Gray’s (2009, p. 179) description of the successful framing of gay rights as “special rights” in Kentucky—“rural voters who reject recognition of LGBT rights,” she argues, “telegraph their own feelings of economic vulnerability, lack of access to social-welfare benefits, and reliance on the material more than symbolic preciousness of marriage to span the gaps in a woefully threadbare social safety net.”

“Guarantee us the right to accumulate property with and bequeath property to whomever we choose,” the activist attention to marriage seems to say, but it’s only a segment of the population (gay or straight) who can take advantage of those benefits of marriage.

The idea, then, that “my ability to get married is my property and I should be able to do with it what I want” points right back to the logic that “my Social Security contributions should go into an account for me, and yours should be for you, and if you don’t have enough when you retire then tough.”

Most gay rights activists would be horrified at the latter statement, so why is the former their organizing principle?

References
Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event, 7(1), n.p.
Floyd, K. (2009). The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Gray, M. L. (2009). Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: NYU Press.
Roediger, D. R. (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.

Come Out (of Your Body) on the Internet

When reading Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, after I had pried myself away from Google-stalking Mary L. Gray to figure out where she was from (She’s from where I’m from! Sort of.), I had one of those “I never thought of that before, but it’s so true!” moments with her argument that there is a link between the ideology of coming out and that of being disembodied and free on the internet.

As she puts it, “the politics of LGBT visibility’s demanding refrain to ‘come out, come out, wherever you are’ echoes the rhetorical invocations of disembodied freedoms and escapist anonymity attributed to the ‘effects’ of the Internet” (Gray, 2009, p. 15). In both of these discourses, that is, family/community/the private is framed as bad and oppressive as opposed to the individualist liberation to be who one really is—whether by coming out or becoming digitized.

However, as Gray presses us to ask, who are family/community/the private bad for? They’re necessary, she argues, for rural youth, for whom they are the means of distribution of both emotional and material support.

They’re also necessary—as her analysis hints at with the story of African-American queer youth Brandon but doesn’t interrogate in depth—for many people of color, as has been argued by a number of scholars working on issues of queers of color (and I know it’s horrible, but I can’t remember which right now. I think one place this was articulated was the Combahee River Collective (1981). Bear with me, it’s early).

This raises the question: “why are those who privilege gay visibility valorized as ‘beyond the closet’ and youth of color, rural young people, and other individuals with core identities vying for recognition seen as in denial?” (134) That is, who is it that has the privilege or inclination be public/visible?

Moreover, as Gray’s analysis shows, public and private don’t really work the way we think they do on the internet anyway. These technologies are, first, both public and private, as anyone who’s posted something meant for one audience that subsequently made its way to an unintended other audience knows: “Internet technologies can be both a private experience and a suspended moment of public engagement” (106).

Additionally, as the articulation of the internet as enabling “public engagement” suggests, the idea that the Internet serves a “need or desire to mask queerness from an imagined inherently more hostile social world,” that it promises some sort of alternate public space of freedom from local, embodied troubles is in need of interrogation (106-7; of course, others, including quite prominently Lisa Nakamura (2008) , have argued that offline inequality follows us online).

Thus, Gray argues, her findings “complicate the presumption that new media liberate our bodies from locations and highlights what rural queer-youth identity work can teach us about the politics and conditions of sexual- and gender-identity formation and their indissoluble entanglement of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’” (108). And that’s pretty cool.

References
Combahee River Collective. (1981). A Black Feminist Statement. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (pp. 210-218). Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press.

Gray, M. L. (2009). Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: NYU Press.

Nakamura, L. (2008). Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.