QUEER LIBIDO

The Real Significant Other: The Queer Politics of Singlehood

Hi friends it’s hard to believe I wrote this ONE YEAR AGO on valentine’s day — but I think it’s just as pertinent! Here’s to a year more of resisting capitalism and how it creates illusions of scarcity in our love lives, even though we are so connected! XO

queerlibido:

Today is Valentines Day and you pretend that you don’t care about it (even though, at some level, you do). Today you will find yourself increasingly bitter. You will hate the couple engaged in intense titanic meets glacier PDA in front of you (a little more than yesterday, that is). You feel like you are oppressed, like you have been denied something. Today you will think of all of your ex lovers and you will remember the tenderness of their skin, the allure of their promises, and you will hate them a little bit more. This, this essay for you. 

I think I understand what you are feeling.

These days I find myself looking for love on dance floors at gay clubs. I find myself looking at that old gay guy, the one leaning up against the bar eyeing the shit out of me. I find myself hating him because I am afraid that one day I will grow up and be like him – that being queer (and of color) is a death sentence because I am doomed to be forever alone – some creepy trick in a bar.

It is in these spaces that I find myself thinking about loneliness the most. I become aware of the fact that I am ‘single,’ and that some of my friends aren’t ‘single’ and that therefore I am ‘alone’ — an identity that I didn’t consent to, an identity that makes me feel insignificant. I will text my friends emotional things (even though I’m not drunk), I will write pathetic poems about love and fantasize of the day when I meet him (errr, or her, or ze…)

Today is Valentines Day again but this time I am a different person. I am a college student writing a blog in a library instead of doing my homework. I’m supposed to be writing a paper about Marx and instead I’m thinking about love (and realizing that they’re actually more connected than I thought).

In this post I hope to provide a critique of ‘love’ (or at least how our society understands it). I want to draw from lessons from post-colonialism, lessons from asexuality theory, and lessons from queer activism to generate a politic of Singlehood. I will show you how ‘Single’ is actually a site of radical queer resistance and I will deconstruct the methods of power that make us feel what we do today. This is not my attempt to justify myself (okay maybe it is). This is really an attempt to make you (and me) reconsider the systems of power that have come to enforce this dreadful day on us. This is an attempt to show you that you are capable of being loved (in fact, that you already are). 

What does Single Mean Anyways?

I’ve always thought it’s fascinating what Facebook believes is important about our character: our gender (only two options!), our religious/political views, our sexuality (can I choose none of the above plz?), and our relationship status.

Facebook is merely a symptom of a larger ideology. 

Dictionary.com defines ‘Single’ as only one; not one of several. Okay, doesn’t that mean we’re all Single (last time I checked most of us aren’t physically connected, all do respect to our Siamese twin siblings out there)!? Our other options on Facebook are: “In a relationship,” “Married, “etc. It appears that we are ‘Single’ because we have some sort of lack – because we are simply not one of these other categories.

But does that still mean we’re not in a relationship? Last time I checked I’m in a relationship with many people. I am my mother’s child. I am my friend’s friend. I am my teacher’s student. Last time I checked I’m in a relationship with many objects. I adore my clothing (and take a particular fondness for bowties!). I’m in a relationship with space, with the environment, with the floor, with all things around me.

Yet, for some reason FB – and our culture more broadly – wants me to be in a very particular type of relationship. And because I’m not intelligibly in such a relationship, I am ‘Single.’

Not only am I single, but I am ‘alone.’ When I catch up with friends who haven’t seen me in a while they ask eagerly, “So, how’s your love life?” The assumption underlining their curiosity is that my ‘love life’ is the ultimate litmus test for my happiness, for my social well being. I perform accordingly. I am still Single – it SUCKS!!! In this moment I become aware that I am ‘Single’ and I remember that I am supposed to want somebody (one body) in my life and began to mourn the fact that I don’t.

This, to me, is a particularly queer condition. A very particular type of monogamous relationality is enforced on our bodies. The social actors around us police our relations ferociously. “Are you dating him?” “Do you love him?” “Did y’all (okay maybe I’m the only one that says y’all) sleep together last night?” they ask. Those bodies that are not in this system of relationality (presented to us in media typically through two ‘monogamous,’ able-bodied, white, heterosexual, attractive bodies) are made to feel insignificant. In the same way that I used to want to be white, to be straight, to be rich, goddamnit I want to be in a relationship.

It is my contention that the imperative to be in ‘a relationship’ is a mechanism of power. This imperative ignores the relations that we are all a part of. Thank you, Facebook, but I am in a relationship.

I am learning how to be grateful for my mom after benefiting from years of her gendered labor and unyielding compassion. I am learning how to respect my father and feel comfortable being compared to him. I am learning how to love my culture, even though I am afraid that it has no space for me. I am learning how to be a better friend, how to actually be there for others instead of just saying it.

Thank you Facebook, but I am in a relationship. I’m in a relationship with myself and each day we are fighting and each day I am trying to convince her/him/ze/it that her/him/ze/it is beautiful and capable of loving.

This narrow comprehension of relationality is perhaps a product of the Western world. When my grandfather died, my uncles and aunts began to house my grandmother (without hesitation). Now she lives in an apartment complex with all of her brothers and sisters in laws. She is not ‘single,’ she is not ‘alone,’ she remains connected. She is part of a culture, of a tradition, of a family where this type of individualism (a prerequisite for the Western understanding of ‘Single’) makes no sense. I, too, feel connected to my South Asian culture and people in deeply profound ways. I remember this when I’m the only brown body at an Indian restaurant in the trendy immigrant part of London and I get called bhaiya (brother). I remember this when I hear Hindustani music and begin to tear up because it reminds me of dinners with my mom when things were more simple, when I felt like I had a people, like I had a home.

Yet, the fact that I – as a person of color — continue to valorize a particular type of relationship and relegate romanticism and sexuality to one facet of my relationality is profoundly sad to me. How much we have lost! How narrow-minded we have come to understand our bodies, our capacity for love and desire. Why am I expected to be unhappy (why do I feel unhappy) because I don’t have this type of relationship?

The valorization of this particular mode of relating is not just the fault of social and cultural discourse — we also have agency and perform our trauma every day. I perform it when I insist to my friends that I “don’t see ___ like that, that we are just friends.” We create these boundaries, these silos, these distinctions. We divide our love in ‘appropriate’ quantities for ‘appropriate’ relations. We divide our capacity for love into different ‘types’ – friendship love versus REAL love. We perform the trauma of Singlehood. We listen to melancholy song lyrics and post passive aggressive LOVE ME Facebook statuses

Wake up! You and I are receiving love in every fiber of our being right now. It is a tragedy that we cannot see it. That we cannot explore it with everyone we relate to every day, because we are all fixated on such a narrow understanding of a ‘happy’ ‘successful’ relationship that we ignore, deny and legitimize the wonderful, complex, and protean relations we are already a part of.

What purpose does a hegemonic notion of relationality and love serve? Let’s unpack this by thinking about what we first think of when we think of ‘love.’ When we think of love we think of Valentines Day, of marriage, of happy couples smiling, of families.

In particular, I think of my white peers in high school who looked so happy being dropped off by their trendy moms who loved their totally hot dads. My understanding of ‘love’ is deeply imbedded within a milieu of social oppressions – oppressions that construct particularly racialized, gendered, sexualized, class-based bodies as desireable, as ‘normal.’ I am shocked that I’ve waited until now to problematize love, considering that as an activist and scholar I’ve been so committed to dismantling other systems of normalization.

Normal love oppresses us because it polices our capacity for desire and pleasure. Because we are grown up in a world that re-enforces the idea that ‘true love’ can only be found through one (hegemonic) relationship structure, we deny the love we experience from all the other relations we are a part of. Thus, we are denied the capacity for increased pleasure.

Imagine if we were to open ourselves up to multiple ways of desiring, of being, of relating? Imagine if we could experience emotional orgasms just by having a good lecturer, by just having a good conversation with a friend? We’d be happy all the time! Heartbreak wouldn’t be nearly so traumatizing.

Why would the systems that oppress us want to love in this particular way? I believe that normal/hegemonic love glues us to the very social infrastructure that oppresses queer desiring bodies in our society.

Pleasure is antithetical to notions of productivity and reproduction. Homosexuality was historically demonized/stigmatized because it involved sex for pleasure rather than reproduction. In fact the term ‘heterosexual’ was first used as a pejorative term to denote people who had sex for pleasure (god forbid!) The State had an invested interest in restricting pleasure and producing a very particular family unit in order to maintain the status quo – to produce similar looking bodies with similar ideas and a commitment to production. This largely bastardized and overly-simplistic queer history of relationality allows us to deduce that our understanding of (monogamous) love is implicated within this heternormative structure of the family. If people loved beyond the boundaries of this hegemonic relationship, then the very core unit of social, biological, and economic production would be distorted and power relations would drastically shift.

To put it more crudely, perhaps we feel upset that we are Single because we are not somehow productive. Think about it this way. Why do I hate the lonely gay man in the bar? I hate him because, to me (thanks to my socialization), he represents a failed life. Our understanding of ‘futurity’ is predicated on hegemonic relationality. Because this man is not part of this relationality (ostensibly) because this man is exploring alternative sites of pleasure and relationality (alcohol, clubs) than what I ‘expect’ for someone whose body looks like he does, I am upset! This rhetoric of failure is deeply implicated within this anxiety. Instead of focusing on how this man might be maximizing pleasure in his later years, I am concerned with why he hasn’t found someone significant. I am nervous that I won’t find someone significant.

Single Identity Activism!

I wish to re-interpret the abject figure of the Single man at the bar as a site of resistance. What is more queer than being Single? Mainstream culture associates being happy, being healthy, being compotent, being productive with being in a hegemonic relationship – anything else is stigmatized, demonized, Othered. What would it mean for us to reclaim this abject subject position? What would it mean for us to say, “Fuck you I am HAPPY being ‘Single’ (in the way that you narrowly define it) because I realize that I am connected to everything in the world!!!

This is a Single’s manifesto.

Think about all the times your friends would define their future on marriage. When they said, “when I get married I’ll….” Fuck that! What about, when I achieve personal social and political liberation I will… What about! When I learn to love myself I will… What about when I finally decolonize from growing up in a small town texas I willl.. Our very notion of happiness, futurity, and progress is colonized by the imperative of the hegemonic relationship structure.

So what are we going to do about it? The personal is political! Let’s began to deconstruct how we let certain people hurt us more than others, why we spend more time with the people we’re sleeping with than the people who actually make us feel the most happy. This is not to suggest that if you’re in a relationship you should immediately break up and be Single (because this would just be endorsing the understanding of ‘Single’ we’ve been given by a heteronormative society). Rather, I’m encouraging us to develop Single Consciousness (a fancy way of conceptualizing self-confidence). Let’s learn to love ourselves and give loves to all others, not just particular bodies or relations. Let’s stop performing the ‘abject’ Single and let’s develop the relations we are already so privileged to be in. Remember that our understanding of love is so narrow and so hegemonic that it denies the existence of alternative ways of knowing, of being, and feeling. If you find yourself falling in (hegemonic) love, make sure that you do not let it seduce you away from all your other connections. Do not lose your ‘self’ in this relationship. Do not define your life’s worth on this relationship. Contextualize it! Think about it within the broader systems of pleasure and relations that you’re implicated in.

Next, we need to think about Single activism in the realm of formal politics and the law. We have to better articulate a queer Single critique of gay rights advocacy which suggests that the only way to love queer bodies is if they’re in a socially sanctioned single relationship. Why is marriage the only way to get 1,137 federal benefits? Why must we be in a relationship to get these benefits? Don’t we deserve them as individuals?

We must provide an intervention to discourse which seeks to construct the ‘Single’ figure as a site of abjection. Think critically when you watch your chick flicks, call your friends out when they’re moping about ‘being single.’ Do not police their relations – let them find happiness on their own terms. We can only change our culture by re-imagining it. I have no idea what this looks like but let’s try our best to make it happen. We need to start asking ourselves what queer love looks like – what it means to actively resist the normalization of a particular way of relating and to open ourselves to all the pleasures and relations around us.

Dear White and Other Privileged Friends: or, Toward a Pedagogy of Unlearning

Dear white and other racially privileged friends who experience fits of indignation when I post anti-racist critiques on my facebook page:

You see I’m often conflicted on how to best respond to your feelings. I recognize that they are legitimate and come from a well-intentioned place, but I respectfully and vehemently disagree with you. I could send you articles, data, statistics, artists, and much more about these issues – but no matter what I often get the feeling that you won’t understand what I’m saying because we’re speaking different languages. What I mean to say is that the discussions we might have about power systems like white supremacy are structured by the very logics of those systems. How can we expect to challenge systems of oppression when the ideas and language we have access to originate in those systems? How do we understand the destructive realities of racism when our bodies are primed to deny its existence?

As the terms of debate are currently structured I don’t think we’re going to go anywhere. The only way we can progress forward is if we backtrack a bit: if we forget what we read about in that one article in the New York Times, if we forget what watched on CNN, forget what we learned in our International Relations class, forget all of it. What I have to say to you isn’t new information – it’s been around for a long time. We just weren’t provided with the framework, the history, the tenacity to understand it. In order to become better anti-racists we can’t just expect to learn more about racism and issues facing people of color across the world. Before we do this, we must unlearn. In entering these discussions the question should not be about proving how much we know, but rather how much we do not know. Our pursuit of knowledge should not be about learning, but rather unlearning. The project should not be about becoming anti-racists at first, but rather un-becoming racists. This is an arduous, emotional, and at times painful process and violates the ways we thought ‘learning’ worked. This is not the sort of sanitized education that we learn in our universities – those degrees that teach us about the world without truly implicating us in its violence, without making us uncomfortable. Learning to become an anti-racist means unlearning the idea that we exist outside of the things that we learn – means relearning that we not only inherit the legacy of violence, but enact it every day with our silence.

Unlearning what we have been told

What’s always struck me in conversations about identity politics (and racial justice in particular) is how people tend to cite common knowledge in order to justify their claims. Such data is easily dismissed in other political discourse by progressives (imagine someone saying they didn’t believe in global warming because they went outside today and it was cold), yet the domain of identity politics is generally seen as a topic that everyone can equally weigh in on. The common knowledge around these issues brought up in conversation is largely misleading or flat out incorrect. The common knowledge and/or logics that people rely on is the very same knowledge and/or logics that systems of power instill in us to maintain power. We should already be skeptical of the ‘commonality’ of this knowledge in a world where racial violence, colonialism, imperialism and racial genocide are also all too common.

In order to meaningfully engage in conversations about racial justice we must therefore (un)learn common knowledge/tropes like these:

1. The It Gets Better Trope:“While I’m sad to hear that queer people of color feel isolated from the contemporary gay (white) movement, eventually their issues will be addressed…that’s just how social movements work…it takes time.”

Not true. Did you know that there is more racial segregation in the American school system than there was in the late 1960s? Did you know that there is a significant body of Critical Race Studies that debunks the valorization of the Civil Rights Movement and reveals the ways in which the CRM failed to realize racial and economic justice for the majority of people of color in the United States?  

This meta-narrative of ‘social movements’ actually function as a tactic of oppression. We are told that ‘social movements’ were realized in the 60s and 70s and now women, gay people, and racial minorities have ‘rights.’ What these narratives don’t express is often more telling than what they do. What these narratives don’t tell you is there is still significant discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, etc. (just take a look at the demographics of our elected representatives). What these narratives don’t tell you is that largely only people with class privilege have benefitted from these ‘movements.’ What these narratives also do is construct a ‘social movement’ as an event somehow always relegated to the past and as an event that somehow exists outside of bodies themselves. Such narratives excuse us from thinking about how we are contemporary vehicles for the prejudices we have inherited and since cultivated.

2. The Rights Based Discourse Trope: “People of color enjoy so many rights in the United States! We extended the right to vote to everyone and passed non-discrimination legislation to make sure that no one can legally discriminate!”

We have to unlearn the idea that state recognition/rights is an adequate marker of social progress. This relationship is actually more fraught and complicated than we’d like to think. Most of the time, especially when it comes to anti-discrimination legislation, only people with class privilege benefit from these laws and their implementation. Also, legal recognition or incorporation in the legal/state apparatus can actually cause a spike in violence/discrimination. Take for example the recent AP Poll that demonstrates how 51% of Americans express explicitly racist attitudes against blacks – anti-black attitudes have actually increased over the past four years even though we’ve had a black president.  As activist scholars like Dean Spade have noted, the realization of legal equality matters much less than the actually campaigns and movements for those laws. Just because you change a law doesn’t mean that you’re going to change anyone’s mind. Conversations can be some of the most radical tactics of our activism. Racism isn’t magically –over—because the law says it is. Even though there are technically non-discrimination policies in place in 2011 685,724 people were stopped by the NYC police – 84% of them were Black even though black people only comprise about 23% of the NYC population.

Despite what you might think, activism is not only about the courts, about demonstrations, about the law. The political is not only about your voting for President Obama and feeling like a citizen (for a day). Activism is about you and me in this conversation. Activism is about how you think, when you are silent, what you read, what economies you support, where you choose to live, what you dress up as for Halloween. In framing the State as the only actor in our conception of ‘social change,’ we displace our own culpability, our own incrimination in systems of oppression.

3. The Government’s Responsibility Trope:“Justice for Trayvon Martin! Send Zimmerman to jail!”

When 17 year old African American Trayvon Martin was shot in February 2012 many people of color passionately argued that Zimmerman should be sent to jail immediately. Justice became conflated with ‘prison sentence.’ This is symptomatic of our citizenry’s unyielding belief on the benevolence of the State and the criminal justice system as a remedy for all our grievances. The irony of this situation is that, in their call for justice, people of color activists further entrenched a system (the increasingly privatized prison industrial complex) that disproportionately targets and oppress our communities.

We must unlearn the benevolence of the State and imagine alternative modes of community-based justice. The majority of working class people of color live in constant fear of police brutality and state violence and surveillance. Every criminal law (criminalization of abortion, criminalization of drugs, etc.) has a disproportionate effect on people of color who are already seen as criminal by a logic of white supremacy. The State is one of the most pernicious sites of violence for women (police commit sexual assault against women who report rape), violence for people of color (racial profiling and the construction of the prison industrial complex which has put 1/15 adults in prison and this stripped a large percentage of people of color of their voting rights – a strategy that Angela Davis calls a new form of contemporary slavery), and violence for queer people (rape and ridicule of sex workers, trans people, and other gender offenders).

We have to unlearn our conception of the State as some monolithic entity: the ‘State’ is composed by thousands of different individuals like ourselves – individuals who share their own prejudices and yet are expected to implement policies and make moves that run contrary to their predispositions and beliefs (so many of them just don’t).

Unlearning what we see

Along with citing common knowledge rather than taking the time to research our positions on racial justice, we must unlearn our eagerness to cite what we see as legitimate evidence. We must avoid the: “It can’t be, because I haven’t seen this!” or “I saw this and therefore it is” move. A reliance on the register of visibility may be already antithetical to a project of racial justice. 

The thing about poverty and inequality is that those in power always find a way to relegate it to the domain of the invisible. Did you know that in the US – apparently the most wealthy nation in the world – almost half of our population is living in poverty or near poverty? People around the world – including Americans themselves – don’t see this because the field of representation is always already political. The images that media, that popular culture, that our ‘diverse’ universities create are engineered in such a way that they often obfuscate the lived reality of inequality. 

In (un)becoming racists we have to acknowledge the ways in which invisibility has always worked as a strategy of white supremacy and colonial domination. We can see this when we read the discourse generated by colonial empires as they talked about the savages in their colonies (the person of color is always hyper-visible, while whiteness is never marked), read the pseudoscience constructed to justify colonialism and genocide, read the way that ‘ethnicity’ was constructed as a category to incorporate Europeans into the ‘constructed’ racial category of whiteness and therefore continually exclude black/brown bodies. We become familiar with the ways that whiteness has always maintained its power through its invisibility. Even though whiteness created racial difference, it excused itself from ever being named as a race.

Another way that white supremacy maintains its invisibility and therefore power is with its reliance on results/static oriented thinking versus process/mobile orienting thinking. Racism is seen as something that inhabits particular bodies. We hear of ‘racists’ as a type of people that we can easily identify. This is not the case. Racism can be better be conceptualized as a series of actions – actions that we can discern from a cursory survey of the field of representation. Both white and people of color can do white supremacist things and participate in structures of white supremacy. In recognizing racism as an active process we can see how ‘seeing’ only captures a glimpse of it and is never able to obtain the full process.

(Un)becoming racists means that we have to learn to see what has been rendered invisible.

Here are some examples of how representation often arises in these conversations:

“I’m a White Person and I’m not Racist!”

This is a tactic used by white people who conceptualize racism as only an interpersonal or interactional phenomenon that involves the expression of explicit prejudice to a person of color. The argument goes that because a white person (thinks) they treat people of color with respect and don’t call them mean names, they are therefore not racist. Because a white person sees themselves as somehow ‘different’ than the category of a ‘racist,’ therefore they are not racist. People use this argument may cite ‘extreme’ examples of racism (like the KKK) to distance themselves from it. 

However, this argument incorrectly perceives what racism is. Yes racism is interpersonal, but it is also structural. White supremacy is an institution, is a particular logic, an ideology. White supremacy is a particular logic of domination that has a long history that involved (and continues to justify and render invisible) the exploitation of labor of people of color around the world, the forced enslavement and trafficking of people of color, the genocide and forced displacement of people of color, the destruction of indigenous traditions of people of color, the extinction of native languages, the pollution and exploitation of the land owned by people of color, the rape and sexual conquest of people of color, the spread of infectious diseases of people of color, the torture and mutilation of people of color, among other heinous crimes. The very system of law, of governance, of propriety, of development, of modernity, of time, of reason, etc. is a result of these violent histories. Yet, because white supremacy maintains its power in its invisibility, we do not see these systems as racialized. Because we associate these atrocities with the past, with our ancestors, we do not feel implicated. Because we do not see ourselves participating in this corruption, we pretend that we are not.

White supremacy by its nature is invisible – it is something ALL OF US (including people of color) are socialized into. If you don’t believe me take an Implicit Association Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/ and confront your own internalized racism(s). What we have to unlearn is that our bodies are unproblematic sites of knowledge. The ‘enemy’ is not something outside of us, rather it is part of us – what Ashis Nady calls “the intimate enemy.” The lens with which we view the world is already textured by white supremacy. 

All of us are complicit in white supremacy, but white people may be even more unaware of this because, unlike people of color, they do not have to develop a self-conception of being a racialized being until they are in situations where their whiteness becomes hyper-visible (visiting a country in the Global South, getting called out in a Facebook discussion). Thus, when you hear a critique directed to “white people” it is because white people are significantly less likely than people of color to take the time to understand themselves as having a race and participating in structures of white supremacy. It is because, therefore, white people are significantly less likely to interrogate their racial privilege and acknowledge the ways in which their ‘success’ does not arise solely because of their merit, but also because of their historical and contemporary racial privilege.

“But my person of color friend said…”   

This occurs when well-intentioned white people may recognize that they have a different relationship to visibility because they have not been racialized. So, they cite the knowledge of their person of color friend to justify their ideas. This is symptomatic of a tactic called ‘tokenization’ – which was central to the project of colonization. Native informants were used to justify exploitation of the colonies. “Because this Indian thinks it’s okay – we’re going to go ahead and do it!” One person of color cannot represent all of the opinions/thoughts/perspectives of a diverse peoples.

Also, because people of color have grown up in a white supremacist world that has told – and continues to tell them – that they are insignificant, are less than, are worthy of incarceration, death, genocide, cultural extinction. It makes sense that many of people color have internalized racism and aspire so deeply for validation from white bodies, whether they recognize it as such or not. In advancing this argument what you are, in fact, doing is appropriating a body of color for your white supremacist agenda. 

“But I’m a person of color and I don’t think this is racist!” 

People of color can also be complicit with white supremacy and prejudiced on the basis of race (let’s talk about Condoleeze Rice and her decisions which have resulted in the torture and execution of countless innocent brown bodies, let’s talk about people of color who roll their eyes when their community members talk about the racial oppression they have received from white people). As I’ve tried to explain, white supremacy is an institution that is perpetuated by all bodies, including bodies of color. Bodies of color can totally say things and make decisions that contribute to white supremacy. As a brown person I am totally complicit with white supremacy and say/do/think racist things far too much.

As people of color attempting to ‘make it’ in a world dominated by a logic of white supremacy we are often not provided with the language, spaces, or methods to identify and communicate our experiences with racism. Every part of the system encourages us to remain silent and go along with the agenda. In this system we are encouraged to call out people of color who are vocal about their oppression as ‘obnoxious’ or ‘extremists’ in the same way we are taught to view black bodies as ‘criminal’ and brown bodies as ‘terrorists.’ It’s the same tactic white people use to distance themselves from the KKK. In distancing ourselves from the ‘obnoxious’ we become more reasonable, moderate, rationale, and down with the (white supremacist) system. Thus it makes perfect sense that people of color – once they have access to privilege – want to hold onto it desperately and not revoke it.

However in order to be anti-racists (not just people of color, there is a difference) we must question the legitimacy of the standards of our success, we must question the parameters our tongues, our bodies, our politics, our thoughts have to assimilate into to become successful, we must question what types of people are unable to experience the privilege we have. We must draw attention to the ways in which has been and continues to be a site of extreme material and economic oppression of people of color across the world (look at the distribution of wealth across the globe thanks to centuries of (settler) colonialism, slavery, genocide, and empire).

Rather than blithely accepting the status quo, we must use our comparative privileges to create a space for justice for all people of color – including the poor, the immigrant, the incarcerated, the homeless, the colonized, the undocumented, the non-English speaking, the non-Christian, etc.

We must (un)learn validation from a white supremacist system. We must unlearn the drive to universalize our privileged experiences and unlearn the assumption that all people of color should be quiet. Instead of distancing ourselves from conversations of racism, we should use this thing, our ‘race’ to build solidarity with communities who do experience incredible disadvantages and violence on account of their race.

Unlearning Objectivity

I began this letter establishing that the conversations we have around race are actually structured by the very logics of white supremacy itself. This is evident in the way that we are asked to speak about race in a ‘civil,’ ‘objective,’ ‘reasonable,’ and ‘appropriate’ manner that is ‘not offensive to white people.’ The conversations we have about race are seen to exist in a vacuum – divorced from any history. We continually re-invent the wheel when we asked to re-prove the importance of racial analysis. We must unlearn the ways we have been taught to speak about race because those ways are necessarily racist!

Center/Periphery

Every time I post anything challenging white-supremacy people get upset about the “anger” and the “radicalism” of the piece – “could you have picked something more reasonable, they ask?”

We have to (un)learn what we think of as radical. Radicalism a matter of perspective. The fact that 1% of Americans have devised tactics to control the majority of wealth in the world is pretty radical. The fact that people can still deny the importance of affirmative action or other programs to address centuries of institutionalized racism is pretty radical. The fact that students at universities across the world don’t learn about white supremacy, its history, and its current implications is pretty radical!

What we must recognize is that the very keys to liberation are constructed as ‘radical’ by the system to dismiss their legitimacy. How do you expect to end racism unless we think in ways that make you uncomfortable? Can you explain to me why there is still so much inequality in the world when people have been thinking reasonably for a long time? What we must recognize is no one has come up with the answers to solving social justice issues like white supremacy because of the mandate of this political pragmatism, the mandate of this reasonability, this demonization of imagining and thinking outside of the box.

We must unlearn our cursory dismissal of critiques and arguments that come across as too ‘radical,’ too ‘outlandish,’ too ‘unreasonable’ and recognize the ways in which white supremacy creates distinctions between what is ‘useful’ and what is ‘excessive’ as a tactic of its surveillance and control.

Affect and the Personal

Folks also may take offence to the “rage” of the anti-racist text. They may feel ‘isolated’ by this and ask for a less overwrought critique. 

Such a response, once again, is a tactic of white supremacy. It’s the discourse around 9/11: “How could ‘they’ do this to us – how could they be so extreme?” (discourse which ignores histories of violent exploitation and imperialism directed at the Middle East by the US and called ‘foreign policy’) It’s a way in which affect/rage/un-rationality is always ascribed to the body of color without recognizing the real history behind this feeling.

Do you honestly think anti-racists go around just wanting so desperately to yell at everyone and get in fights? As someone who has been in my fair share of these I can tell you it’s pretty exhausting and isn’t that fun. We are turned to rage as a last effort. We have tried your methods of respectability; we have tried to express our concerns with racism and imperialism in your appropriate channels and forums. We have been ignored.

Our expressions of rage come from a frustration with a system of white supremacy that continually renders our voices and critiques invisible. Our expressions of rage come from a desire to penetrate through your noise-cancelling headphones (called privilege). Our rage has a history (and so does your disbelief).

Furthermore, what makes you think that feeling ‘isolated’ by this text is a ‘bad’ thing? In dialoguing about race we have to invite our full bodies – in all of their visceral honesty – into the conversation. We cannot endorse a paradigm of rational thought that sees our intellect as somehow ‘outside’ of us. What makes you think that challenging systems of oppression like white supremacy will be easy? What makes you think that coming to see yourself as a white person is going to be comfortable? If it was easy it would have happened a long-ass time ago. It should be an extremely isolating, difficult, and emotional journey to cultivate anti-racism.

What is more important is less that you are feeling isolated, but rather, what you choose to do with that affect. You could follow the route of most privileged people and distance yourself from that emotion and rest-assured in your white bourgie sensibility and surround yourself with people who think and act like you do and validate your integrity. Or, you could use this as a radical opportunity to unlearn yourself and unlearn your privilege. You could use this as an opportunity to reflect on how the majority of people of color exist in a state where they feel perpetually isolated by you. You could use this as an opportunity to reflect on your racialization as a white or privileged race person.

This learning, this cultivation of your anti-racist racial privilege, is not something that you can just develop in reading the articles you read on Facebook. It is something that you have to (un)learn in all realms of your life: it is a way of living and thinking that has to become infectious: the way you refuse to go to certain parties and endorse racist and/or colonial stereotypes, the way that you refuse to keep silent about the jokes made about custodial/janitorial staff, the way you can’t feel comfortable in a club with all people who look like you, the way you must even invite this critique into the bedroom and question the racist construction of your deepest and most personal desires.

Unlearning Knowledge Itself

The way we are taught to think about ‘knowledge’ is that it is something that we own, something that we control, something that we cultivate (not the other way around). In our Western education systems the accumulation of knowledge is dictated by a logic of capitalism and therefore functions with models of competition and scarcity. Knowledge becomes something that we horde, we amass, something that we must continually prove and subsequently use to justify our social position and distinguish ourselves from other people if successfully proven. Knowledge stratifies us – it divides the ‘intelligent’ from the ‘unlearned, the ‘A’ from the ‘B+.’ And we buy into this understanding of knowledge so much to the point that we pay tens of thousands of dollars for it a year and accrue significant debt and sleepless nights.

What if the way we have been taught to learn and express our knowledge is antithetical to a project of social justice? What if we don’t know how to learn how to eliminate racism and other systems of oppression because we have been taught to create empires and not movements with our knowledge?

Could it be – perhaps – that the knowledge we are taught is an insecure knowledge, is a knowledge that relies on continual validation, continual dismissal of critique, continual putting down of others? That insecure knowledge, that college degree, makes us perpetually terrified of critique – we the college students who get pissed when we get B’s on our papers, we the learned class who so deeply believes that we’ve got things figured out.

Our relationship to knowledge makes racial justice impossible because as with any project of liberation, we must liberate ourselves from dominant ways of knowing that the system – the same system that has incarcerated more African-Americans in our prisons than were enslaved in 1850 – has taught us.

In order to dialogue meaningfully for justice we have to unlearn this knowledge. We have to unlearn the logic of ‘criminal’ ‘justice’ as a means to make our nation more ‘safe.’ We have to unlearn that tinge of fear when we see a black man walking on the street at night. We have to unlearn the overwhelming beauty of whiteness that we see marketed to us on television screens.

The way we have been taught to ‘know’ is in a way that requires us to continually prove to the world that we know exactly what we’re talking about – that we have well-reasoned arguments for every belief we might have. Within this system of knowledge we get punished for admitting our ignorance – we don’t get the degree, we don’t get the job, we don’t get the credibility. We get punished for not knowing the ‘answers’ for not having the ‘finished product.’

We have to develop a relationship with knowledge that makes us eager, and not intimidated or offended by critique. We have to approach knowledge with humility and not dominance. We have to stop viewing knowledge as something that we can access as individuals, and instead think of it as something that we can only discern as collectives.

Ultimately, we have to perceive knowledge as something that is beyond our control, something that is continually unknowable and inaccessible. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we didn’t know something, it should be an expectation, especially when it comes to issues of justice. We cannot make demands that these topics render themselves in intelligible forms that we can consume (when you ask me to prove that white supremacy exists). In making this demand we assume that the key to knowledge is about knowing facts, having results. What gets lost here is the process. We should think of anti-racism as a continual process of collective unlearning – a seemingly insurmountable project that requires us fundamentally to forget what we thought we knew, and commit ourselves to (un)learning anew.

Unapologetic Bodies: Or, You’re a Hot Mess (And I Love You For It)

I’m a hot ass mess. I am sooo messy. I’m the gurl you gossip about with your friends because she don’t have her shit together. I’m the mess who’s crying at the club (you think she’s drunk out of her mind, but she’s pretending). I’m the guy who’s giving you mixed signals. I am all of these people, all of these feelings, and more. And, I don’t give a fuck.

Recently I had a pretty serious accident and sustained burns on my feet, thigh, and hands. I found it difficult to perform the most basic of tasks: typing on my laptop, cooking dinner, giving myself a bath, walking down the hill to the grocery store. At first I felt uncomfortable asking my flatmate for his support and would try to over-exert myself when he was out of the house (giving myself clandestine showers aka falling in the bathroom and exacerbating the problem). I was a mess. There were days I couldn’t do anything. I spent the majority of my time feeling things. Not all of these things were optimistic: sometimes I thought about what would have happened if I didn’t wake and my entire body caught on fire, sometimes I thought about the reactions of my family and friends and who seemed to care and who didn’t, sometimes I thought about what would have happened if I died. 

We are told that these feelings are natural. We are told that this is part of the process of healing and recovery. Then we are told to get over it. We are told to move on, to be happy, to clean our shit up, to become another productive body contributing to society’s collective delusion of stability, able-bodiedness, and happiness. And that’s what people kept telling me: hang in there, it gets better, you’re looking much better. And so I lied to them.

I lied to them because the Olympics were going on and we all had constant reminders of how powerful, how able bodies are able to be. Not just in the Olympics: walking on the streets, in the news, everywhere we look we see bodies that have got their shit together, bodies that dress impeccably every fucking day, bodies that somehow find a way to eliminate the distance between ‘couch’ and ‘gym.’ Some nights I would be awake with my entire body throbbing. Sweating, I’d sit up on my bed wincing and tell myself not to cry, tell myself that even though I’m not an Olympic athlete, I am a human with a body capable of power, capable of growing, of healing, of forgetting. Some mornings I would wake up suddenly when the light hit my face because it reminded me of the fire. Some afternoons when I walk into my apartment I smell something burning and run upstairs to make sure that nothing is on fire. 

After the accident I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my body.

I’m one of those people who reads a lot of postmodern theories about bodies and how they perform and eat and fuck, but I’ve never really felt my body, never really listened to what it was saying. As an able-bodied and middle-class person ascending in ‘higher’ education, the truth is I have never had to pay much attention to my body: I have never worked a direct service job, never seriously entertained the idea of being an athlete or serving in the army. I was taught to cultivate my mind: to read books, to make art, to grow intellectually. Processed through a Western education system I learned that my ‘mind’ was the repository of knowledge: that inventions like science were more legitimate than feelings like god. I only became reminded of my body in the extremes of discomfort or pleasure.

I think I really felt my body for the first time – in all of its radical and visceral honesty – lying in the emergency room wincing and feeling like I was on fire all over again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for me to recognize and acknowledge my body and all of its faults, inconsistencies, and demands. I have been thinking a lot about how my body is actually one of the most radical texts I have yet to read and discover.

During my accident and short period of different ability (acknowledging the privileges of the impermanence of this here) at first I found myself apologizing for everything. “I’m sorry for holding you back / I’m sorry that I can’t party with you tonight.” I found myself asking: why do I feel compelled to apologize? What is so wrong about my body that it could not be accommodated for? And I began to think – what if we stopped apologizing? What if we just lived our bodies in their full integrity in all of the visceral affect, without apologizing?

Think of the ways we find ourselves apologizing for our bodies. Excuse me, sorry, can I go use the bathroom? Sorry, I turned in the assignment late I had a tough night last night, Sorry I can’t keep up with you, I’m just not that fit… Apologies have become so normalized in our days that they seem routine. I started to count the number of times I apologized for body in a day: for it being in the way, for it not being able to keep up, for it not being productive enough, for it being messy. Let’s ask ourselves: are we actually sorry or have we been made to feel sorry?

Often many of the times we apologize it’s because our bodies are making a critique of the space and other people don’t like it: our bodies are telling our colleagues that this meeting is far too long, that there should have been food here, that this workout was too intense.

Throughout my life I have found myself apologizing not only for my bodily functions, but also for the symbolic meaning that has been forcibly placed on my body. I am sorry about 9/11 (but I am not Muslim). I am sorry for holding his hand and making you uncomfortable. I am sorry for wearing clothing that makes you angry (I mean question your gender and sexual preference). I am sorry for bringing up race when we’re hooking up. I’m sorry that I can’t stop thinking and writing about race. I am sorry that I don’t work out. I am sorry that I am so hairy.

And these are the types of apologies that are not verbalized; they are the apologies that we inscribe on our bodies. They are the times I would sneak in the bathroom when I was a kid and steal my sister’s razor to shave every hair on my body so I could fit in and look like my (white) classmates at school. They are the times I first moved out of the house to college and realized that I could now buy hair-removal cream without my mom knowing (I didn’t do it). They are the times I told my mom that I wanted to go to Church like the white kids, that I wanted to buy more expensive brand-label clothes. All of these acts of assimilation (erasure) are apologies – we refuse to allow our bodies to exist authentically and we silence its critique. As queer bodies, as bodies of color, or other abject bodies, our bodies tend to be inherently critical of the spaces we inhabit. Yet in our efforts to assimilate, to apologize, we deny the knowledge, the ways of knowing of our bodies.

I find myself apologizing the most to white men. I apologize when I change the names of my majors to seem more alternative and less radical. I apologize when I change the tone of my voice, speak deeper so I sound more straight-acting. I apologize for being too political, too brown, too effeminate, too extreme, too radical, too everything by conforming and modifying my appearance, my body, and my behavior to fit into a paradigm where I come across as normal, status quo, desireable (just with that provocative edge). Most of the time I apologize with my silence. I refuse to articulate my attraction to them because I fear their judgment, fear that they will tell me that they are not attracted to my body (and that I will agree because their eyes are the ones I have been taught to view my body through).

And I am tired of silent because I was tired about lying about the pain of embodiment, the migraines, the throbbing of the night. And I bet you’re tired of being silent to and I want to ask – what if we stopped apologizing? What if we asked ourselves every time we felt the urge – no, the compulsion, the imperative – to apologize, why we were doing it? What if we only apologized when we meant it, not because we had to?

I want to live as an unapologetic body. I want to be a body that is so brown it offends you. I want to be a body that is so queer it makes you uncomfortable. I want to be a body that is so consumed, so overfilled with emotion that it makes you cry. I want to be a body that doesn’t apologize for not turning in assignments because it was making art. I want to be a body that listens to you crying and doesn’t judge you. I want to be a body that is so messy, so all over the place, that it makes you feel positively put together.

I have seen the way that the burns on my fingers have healed and I have seen the way skin has peeled and re-grown and I have felt the lowest and most base things and I am recognizing that it is more about the feeling, more about the growing, more about the process, than the result. And when we apologize, we forego the process, we abandon the critique, we assimilate.

So I want to put forth a theory, a politics, an aesthetic, an affect of UNAPOLOGETIC BODIES: bodies that acknowledge that apologies function at the level of our silence and oppression. Here are some initial components – have any contributions?

1. RADICAL HONESTY: What if we didn’t have to wear a suit and tie to work if we didn’t want to? What if I could tell you that I didn’t actually like your outfit? What if I could tell you that I – that we – are not doing fine, that we are actually in terrible pain, that we are conflicted, that we are messy, and that we need you desperately. What if we could tell everyone we were attracted to that we fancied them? What if we didn’t have to closet our crushes? What if we could tell our (a)sexual and (a)romantic partners what exactly we wanted? What if we could break up with friends? What if we didn’t have to fake smiles at parties?

I think we have forgotten how radically honest our bodies are: the way our bodies tell us that we have to use a toilet no matter how inconvenient the situation, the way our bodies tell us that we are sleepy no matter how much work we have, the way our bodies tell us that we are in pain no matter how much we are supposed to be happy, functional, competent. I understand that if you and I were radically honest we would get kicked out of schools, fired from our jobs, etc. – but let’s envision ways to be more (radically) honest with one another. Let’s allow our colleagues to go to the bathroom without asking, let’s stop thinking it’s weird or strange for someone to twitch, scream, yelp, dance during a meeting. Let’s create spaces where people can figure out what authenticity means to them, and where we can validate it, in all of its hot messery. Let’s stop telling people that we are fine, that we straight, that we are religious, that we are respectable if we’re not. Let’s embrace the most unruly parts of ourselves – because this is what our bodies do. Our bodies, they are often messy, uncomposed, bleeding, twitching, itching – this is part of what we are (don’t deny it).

2. INTERDEPENDENCE: At first I apologized for asking people to help me out performing basic tasks. It was only through being unable to do these tasks that I began to recognize how hard it is to actually be a functional body in our world. I don’t think we realize that enough (but our bodies do: remember the stress, the fatigue, the hunger). It actually takes a lot of attention, of focus, of coordination, of inspiration to perform our daily tasks. And being a body – especially an abject body in our world – is challenging.

I want to envision a world where helping one another isn’t seen as a positive gesture. I want to envision a world where giving gifts don’t require thank you notes because we live in a culture of giving, a culture of sharing, a culture of interdependence. We should not celebrate or glorify activists or volunteers for doing good work – we should all be doing good work, finding ways in our own careers, studies, and other pursuits to do public good. This is something we learned from our bodies but are increasingly forget. Remember how we required our guardian’s milk to survive? Remember how we required our caretaker’s words, touches, embrace to learn how to feel, think, speak? Remember how we required our siblings fights, arguments, tantrums to relate, empathize, anger, build coalitions? We grew up relating in such radical and interdependent ways and then we were confronted with the expectations of our bodies: confronted with the 4 year degree, the 9-5 job, the 8 digits that defined our identity and we were told that as bodies we must be individuals that function well alone.

3. RECLAIM HOT MESS AND DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND: I spent my summer in Cape Town, South Africa. Last week one of my closest friends and I met-up and had a thorough debrief and laid all of our hot mess out on the table (what a beautiful process). After our catharsis she called me a few hours later and told me that she hadn’t thought until now what it meant to be a Xhosa African woman. She realized how her mom told her to only talk to the white kids growing up, to go to the private school, to forget her native language and dance and ceremonies and go to school and now she (and I) are forgetting our bodies, are forgetting the radical potential of our bodies as texts, as sites of culture. Our conversation got me wondering – what it is about the imperative of Western modernity that denies our bodies (even though, ironically, it is predicated on the labor of bodies of color?) What I’ve begun to think about is that often to become appropriately modern, to become appropriately successful and useful in our world we are compelled to forget our bodies and their knowledge.

Ask yourself — what are we learning in school and how are we being taught to articulate and answer questions? And how have our schools discouraged our rage, quieted our anger, silenced our beating hearts? And what if we viewed emotional and artistic expression as legitimate as your capitalist economics books? In prioritizing bodily knowledge and listening to our bodies we can resist the imperative of the modern neocolonial subject – a subject that divides their time, space, emotions into pre-defined spaces, times, places, a subject that conforms, that apologizes, that weeps in silence.

Listening to our bodies isn’t enough, we must RESPOND to them – and the truth is – sometimes our bodies encourage us to be hot messes.  What I notice about all of the expressions we label ‘hot mess’ is that they tend to defy logic, tend to be outside of the boundaries of rational respectability. We call others hot messes in order to establish our own put-togetherness. The ‘hot mess’ becomes our collective site of baggage, of trauma, of vulernability. In relegating hot messery to the Other, we hope to prove our own stability. What if we all recognized the ways in which we were hot messes? What if we (re)learned how to appreciate hot messery with empathy, vulernability, and solidarity? What becomes increasingly apparent is that we are learning to delegitimize emotion (unless it is positive) as an authentic and powerful mode of expression. We are learning to prioritize well-reasoned arguments over catharsis, over bodily release.

Sometimes our bodies encourage us to cry, to dance, to whine, to bitch, to moan, to orgasm – so let’s do it! Let’s not give a fuck what they think about it! Let us cultivate solidarity with Prince Harry, with all the people who fuck up, who make bad decisions, who aren’t private about their affairs, their messups, their inconsistencies, their heartbreak, their inconsistencies. So let’s be that hot mess at the club, at school, at work, at all the spaces where we are expected to be something we don’t want to be. Hot mess is an act of protest, an act of resistance, an embrace of your body integrity. So let’s be colored, let’s be queer, let’s be political, let’s be radical, let’s be messy and REFUSE to apologize.

One of my poems from my latest collection “UNAPOLOGETIC BODIES:”

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

we, brown
we, welfare check
we, crippled
we, trans
we, addict
we, hate crime
we, abused
we, freak
we, trembling
we, forgotten
we, undocumented
we, colonized
we, queer
we, homeless
we, heart-broken
we, police state
we, depressed
we, occupied
we, lost
we, terrorist
we, vulnerable
we, ugly

we, who have bodies that fuck,
that shit,
that bleed,
that crack,
bodies that mutilate,
that phlegm,
that fart,
that piss,
bodies that twitch,
that itch,
that quiver,
that lie
bodies that pack
that cut,
that trip,
that weep

refuse to apologize,
refuse to forget.

For Lack of a Better Word: Queering Our Libidos

This essay is the second in a collection of essays I’m writing on race and sexuality. In the first essay I discussed how we must begin to think about how constructions of race and white supremacy are central to even our most personal sexual desires. In this essay I want to back-track a bit and outline the framework I am using to grapple with these questions.

I can’t tell you how many times my friends (of all races) have told me to “get over” my white fetish. They resonate with my plight and understand where it comes from, etc., etc., but they point it out as an obvious site of contradiction in my politics and activism. They establish a timeline – Okay so I understand you grew up in a conservative town, but now you’ve been out and away for a long time…isn’t it getting better? The parameters are set: we begin at internalized racism, self-hatred, and longing for whiteness and we are supposed to ‘end’ at radical self-love and for other people of color.  They tell me to try things out with boys of color, “experience what I am missing out on.” When I even bring up the possibility of finding a non-problematic white person, one who, in fact, contributes to my project of racial emancipation I am often shot down.

It seems – as it often does – that progressives have found ourselves in a bind.

As soon as we articulate our racialized desires, we are told to get over them because they are problematic. In the true spirit of liberalism – we present a compelling critique without meaningful alternatives. Yes, I agree, that it would be absolutely wonderful to experience desire for a boy of color – hell – for women, for people of all genders, races, ethnicities, abilities, etc. The fact of the matter remains that there is a large distance between the utopian politics I can entertain intellectually and the body I have been implicated with: a body that messes up, desires confusingly in contradictory ways, a body that finds it nearly impossible to love itself completely.

In this piece I want to grapple more with the project of emancipating desire and what that entails.  The question “When are you going to get over it?” I think is the wrong one considering the epistemology it is derived from. This question is symptomatic of a particular way of understanding sexual desire that often denies the material reality of our bodies – bodies that find themselves located within violent differentials of power, bodies that experience race, gender, desire in intricate and multi-faceted ways.

Beyond That’s Problematic! Developing a language of critical attraction

What strikes me when my friends tell me to “get over my racial fetish” is the assumptions at work about the elasticity of some sorts of desire and not others. These same queer friends get offended when their parents, their church, their government tells them to “get over” their desires and be straight. What becomes interesting here is how particular types of desire – often types of desires that don’t fit well into ones understanding of normality and propriety – are seen as fleeting, protean, malleable (racial fetishisms, pedophilia, etc.).

Let’s think about the mainstream strategy of the gay and lesbian movement here. In its plea for acceptance, gay and lesbian people market (and I use this word intentionally) their desire as essential, static, and uncontestable. Same-sex desire gets depicted as a fixed mode of being, a “born this way,” an innate characteristic of a body. In this strategy of acceptance and adherence to a homosexual/heterosexual sexual binary, gays and lesbians delegitimize other types of desires and modes of relating that do not align well with this narrative. The argument becomes: “we as gays and lesbians are legitimate because we are not pedophiles, not drug addicts, not racial fetishists.” We become legitimate because our desire is inborn, it is domesticated, it is private, it is married.

What gets lost in articulating these identity-based claims? Who must be put down in order for gays and lesbians to experience ascendency? What kind of (racialized) bodies must be outcast from the nation state for gays and lesbians to be incorporated into the national imaginary?

When people used to tell me to “get over it,” I would respond, “I can’t – this is just who I am!” My response – as a delegitimized sexual subject – was to retreat into the parameters of essentialism and therefore respectability. It was to make a claim that I have no agency, no control over my desires and that this was just the way things are.

What I’ve since realized, is this gesture constitutes a serious dismissal of a radical and transformative introspection of desire. In accepting essentialism in all of its seductive rhetoric, we ignore the ways in which we actually do have agency, the ways in which we actually do have control over our desire. In accepting essentialism we position our desires as impenetrable (no pun intended), and thus don’t even attempt to question them. In saying that I was “just this way” in the same way that my queer people of color friends would tell me that my attractions were “just racist,” I precluded any possibility of critical self-investigation and development. I accepted my desire without problematizing it and having to ask the more important question, the question that I think motivated my friends remarks: How are you reconciling your white fetish with the Revolution?

What becomes continually apparent is we do not yet have a way to talk critically about our desires and how these yearnings are actually central to our process of collective liberation.

I can’t tell you how many activists I’ve met who leave their politics at the doorstep and engage in erotic and affectual relations un-critically, seduced by the semantics of ‘love’ and ‘lust.’ Indeed – blithe acceptance of sexuality is becoming increasingly characteristic of liberal spaces: we create ‘safe spaces’ in our organizations where we allow people to self-identify with tokenized identities that are becoming increasingly comfortable to (neo)liberalism: LGBTI(ETC). Yet the ‘safety’ of these spaces often eliminates the possibility for meaningful critique: we cannot interrogate the white gay rice queen (white man who predominantly sleeps with Asian men) about how he exercises his racial privilege as part of his queer identity, we cannot question the class privilege of certain queers in the room who are able to have more access to sex (with their iPhones, their cars, their money for club fees). With an increasing culture of ‘human’ and ‘LGBTI’ ‘rights,’ we have seen a blanket and uncritical acceptance of sexual minority ‘identities,’ but not yet a serious engagement with practices, and how those practices (by sexual minorities themselves) can reify other systems of oppression.

While I do not mean to undermine the importance of these safe spaces and do not mean to dismiss continuing (extreme) manifestations of sexual prejudice, I want to raise the point that I don’t think we’re going far enough – I don’t think we have yet thought seriously enough about the need for ourselves to think critically about our sexual, erotic, and affectual desires and how they might be antithetical to our larger projects of liberation. Not only have we pushed far enough, we have not developed the language necessary for such an endeavor.

In our increasingly ‘queer’ movement – ironically – the only models we have for serious attempts to shift and interrogate our desire are provided by right-wing conservatives (for example: Evangelical Christians who send their children to gay-reparative therapy). We have increasingly abandoned the radical second-wave feminist spirit of women who chose to be lesbians politically, women who theorized heterosexuality as a mechanism of patriarchy, women who practiced asexuality politically as a way the hetero-patriarchy infused in all sexual encounters.

As Lisa Duggan has written about in the past (“Queering the State”), Right-Wingers and Queer Theorists are the only ones who talk about sexuality as a socially constructed and contingent phenomenon. Thus, as progressives, we don’t have a way to encourage critical introspection of desire without aligning ourselves with people who, certainly, would be opposed to our political envisions. Duggan suggestions that we need to shift the debate and stop speaking about ‘sexual minorities’ as individuals with fixed identities, but rather talk about sexuality the way that we talk about religion: as a sustained commitment that certain individuals choose to participate in/with. Indeed, as Duggan notes, (neo)liberal tolerance for ‘religion’ views it as a comfortable mixture of choice (an individual chooses to be spiritual yet it is a choice that is not delegitimized) – and identity. It is a choice that is respected as being intentional, focused, and dedicated.

I find Duggan’s suggestions promising. We need to invest more in our (a)sexual desires: study them, discuss them, deconstruct them, think about how we do (or do not) situate them in our politics.

I want to envision a critical self-engagement with our desires that is not conservative, hegemonic, imperial, or dogmatic. I want to call for a politics of thinking about want more holistically and how realizing ‘want’ without critiquing it can have adverse consequences. I want us to think about our sexual desire as a process much like our academic intelligence. We need to learn about what turns us on, why it turns us on, how we feel about it. This process – like any other absorption of knowledge – is collective: we must encourage being called out, questioned, and not retreat into the domain of identity politics and subjecthood (but I’m gay…you don’t understand). We have to be able to speak confidently and justify the exercise of our libido.

Reconceptualizing Liberation: Beyond That’s Problematic!

When I ask for all of us to think critically and shift our desires, I don’t want to be in the same camp as the Evangelicals. I don’t want to locate all agency in the individual (you can get over problematic desire yourself) at the cost of the system (the system constructed your desire). We don’t have a way to address the complex interstices of ‘individual’ and ‘system’ and this significantly stalls our capacity for transformation For example: My friends tell me to get over my (individual) desire and I responded by blaming the (system).

At the end of the day we are problematic bodies living in a problematic system. We ambition, we yearn, we dream to escape it and unfetter our desires. However, we find ourselves restrained, shackled, domesticated by the very system we are trying to dismantle. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we desire ethically and politically within such a problematic world: how do we acknowledge the violence of our desire, but still get off on it?

Radicals throughout the years have posited particular states of being and modes of relating as the panacea – a phenomenon that has become quite ubiquitous in queer communities. We hear people who practice radical polyamory condemn people in monogamous relationships for “buying in the system.” We hear gays and lesbians call out bisexuals for choosing an opposite sex partner, we hear genderqueer activists yelling at transsexuals for wanting to “pass” and therefore “reinforcing the gender dichotomy.” While, yes, I agree that there is some grain of truth to this: chances are a same-sex couple of the same race will be gawked at more on the streets than an opposite-sex couple of the same race and therefore – yes — we need to acknowledge the relative privileges we all hold, etc. However, what often gets lost in this debate is intentionality.

My issue with the rhetoric of “get over it,” is that it draws a linear trajectory from ‘abjection’ to ‘liberation’ and locates these affects within particular types of relating. Furthermore, such rhetoric focuses on a capitalist understanding of ‘results’ being the only indication of ‘progress.’ Bodies of color intimately connected to whiteness are always necessarily constructed as self-hating and antithetical to racial justice whereas bodies of color loving other bodies of color are always necessarily constructed as liberatory, radical. This rhetoric also demonizes bodies that demonstrate hyper-racialized fetishes in a way that I find troublesome. In haling those of us with white fetish, Indian fetish, insert racial fetish as “problematic,” other progressives are able to excusive themselves from any serious engagement with the racial construction of their own desires. It establishes that the ‘fetishist’ is the only one with problematic desire, the only one with fetishes, the only one who needs to work on their desire. It establishes the domain of racial fetish as only for a minority of people, not for all people.

I don’t think we can afford to locate ‘liberation’ in ‘abjection’ in particular ways of relating or being: in doing so we universalize our own individual perspective (a gesture that, as I need not remind you, was central to the white (settler) colonial project). As bodies implicated within systemic violence – I don’t think we can afford to focus on product-oriented thinking (being completely liberated from white supremacy), instead we must focus on the process, the cultivation, the exercise of our desires. What I suggest we do is draw more of our attention to intention: how are we thinking about our desire in the big picture? Or more specifically and personally, is this white boy contributing to my process of radical racial emancipation? How do I reconcile my attraction to white men within my larger anti-racist and anti-colonial political agenda? How do I see whiteness as an institution and as a body politic fitting into the revolution I envision?

This is one of the many things I find promising of queer ways of conceptualizing sexuality. ‘Queer’ — as a movement, a politics, an aesthetic — incorporates all those who are thinking critically and intentionally about their desires in order to challenge systems of heteronormativity, white supremacy, (neo)colonialism, patriarchy, etc. Queerness requires us to recognize that there is not one path, not one mode of politics, not one type of liberation: rather we need multiple, diffuse strategies to contest dominant power. A white straight couple isn’t necessarily “part of the system,” if they are perpetually finding ways to complicate society’s assumption of their relationship, finding ways to organize around the social and economic privileges they have been afforded for radical transformation.

Confessions of a Snow Queen: Owning Up to Our Racial Fetishisms

In Spring of 2011 I wrote and performed a poem “Tryna” expressing and owning up to my internalized racism and how it shapes my desire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ3GXKYy3mE

After performing this poem for the first time I had several queer people of color approach me and tell me in private that they, too, shared similar desires for whiteness, but had never felt comfortable articulating it publically. Curiously enough many of my white queer friends avoided eye contact with me after the poem and never brought it up again. Every time I perform this piece I get similar reactions.

In this piece I want to share my personal story of internalized racism and how this was and continues to be linked to my queer identity. It is my goal to use this piece as a starting piece for a collection of essays on race, queerness, and desire. In subsequent posts I want to address, in more detail, questions and strategies that I raise here.

Gay identity as a tactic of white supremacy

The mainstream gay narrative includes a story that begins with trauma, abjection, insecurity and ends with liberation, visibility, and confidence. We are asked: When did you know? When did you first figure out? And we respond with the stories they want to hear: we tell them about screaming “I’m gay” outside in the middle of the night, we tell them about sneaking looks in the locker room. But we do not tell them about the first time we were called a nigger. We do not tell them about how we refused to speak our native tongue at home. These stories, they elide histories of racial trauma that are not ancillary, but actual central to the construction of our queer identities. I want us to revisit our self-narratives and think about the role of race in their construction. I believe that race is, actually, always already implicated in these stories, even for white people.

Here’s mine.

 I have always been attracted to whiteness. I remember in kindergarten I would develop crushes on all the white boys in my class – those white boys who came from rich families with mothers who ran the parent-teacher organizations, those white boys who played little league baseball and joined Boy Scouts.

These were the days I would go home and ask my mother why we didn’t go to church. I would tell my grandmother to stop wearing saris and put on pants instead. These were the days I’d ask my parents why we weren’t like other families: why we didn’t eat steak for dinner, and watch football, and do the things that normal families do. Growing up I always felt inadequate and embarrassed by my brownness and my Hindu/South Asian culture. I would willingly attend Christian youth groups with my white friends and feel so much validation in their acceptance.

This attraction was, and continues to be, always about power. I wanted to be white so desperately because that meant I would finally be normal, finally be accepted. I admired the white boys in my kindergarten class because they had power, they had respect, they were beautiful.

At first I didn’t have the language to understand my feelings of Otherness and inadequacy. It was only after 9/11 that I was able to understand that I had a race. I remember it vividly: on September 12 my mother told me to be careful at school. My middle-school had an assembly in the gym. We were all instructed to wear white and blue and we gathered and sang the national anthem. I remember singing as loud as the rest, and I remember feeling part of something bigger than myself. I didn’t really understand what happened, but goddamnit I knew that I was American. I knew it in the same way my Hindu temple knew that it was a good idea to put an American flag on the back of our t-shirts: “God bless America / we will never forget September 11.” After the assembly a white classmate came up to me and asked me, “Why did your people do this to us?” And for the first time I felt the burden of brownness.

The truth is, at some level, I began to believe everything they said. I began to believe that I was not an American. I began to believe that my people were wrong. I began to believe that my people were ugly.

Coming into consciousness of my brownness occurred at the same time I began to come into awareness of my same-sex desire. It’s impossible for me to divorce these narratives – they have been, and will always be – interrelated. The boys I began to fantasize about were the same boys I wrote love letters to as a child, were the same boys I wanted to become so desperately. The boys – the men – I was sexually attracted to were the very white men who made me feel ugly, made me feel insignificant, made me feel worthless.

Awareness of my homosexuality arrived at the same time as consciousness of my racialization. In some ways, my homosexuality worked as a mechanism of my racial oppression and contributed to my feelings of racial inadequacy. Now, the very white men who degraded me felt sexy to me. My desire shackled me to white supremacy. As much as I wanted to love my brownness, my culture, my otherness – I became even more drawn, tantalized, and attracted to whiteness. As much as I resented and was bruised by the racial trauma inflicted by the white men around me, I found myself deeply attracted to them. I found myself accepting their insults, their stereotypes, their racialization – justifying it with my attraction to them.

When I ‘came out’ and began to consume gay discourses – pornography, blogs, movies, etc. – the depictions of gayness reified whiteness. Queer characters were almost always white, gay porn almost always included white men – unless it was explicitly marked as interracial or racial/fetish porn, etc. At first I didn’t mind this. In fact, I enjoyed it; I found these depictions of whiteness incredibly attractive. Now that I look back on it, consuming these discourses, coming out as ‘gay,’ and organizing within a traditional ‘gay rights’ framework made me happy because I felt like I was becoming white. Being ‘gay’ being part of a ‘gay’ community gave me an opportunity to escape from my race, gave me new connections to whiteness, new ways to intimately embrace it and experience its validation. As I began to get more involved with mainstream gay life, I found myself feeling less brown. I used language and identity-frameworks that were inaccessible to the South Asian community I grew up with (and was okay with that, because at least my white friends accepted me). I went to parties and political gatherings with mostly white people. I stopped talking and thinking about race, and fabricated a de-racinated narrative of queer oppression to fit in, to be part of the community.

 Racial Fetishism Within Queer Male Communities

Originally I thought that identifying as gay and participating in gay communities would make me feel more legitimate, more desirable, more affirmed by structures of whiteness. However, I soon realized that queer communities actually inflicted some of the most severe racial trauma for me.

My first significant relationship was with a South Asian woman my first year of high school – before I started actively identifying and participating in gay/queer communities. We shared our experiences with racial trauma, our experiences as diasporic South Asians, our anxieties about our Hindu religion in our small town and I began to develop erotic and romantic feelings for her. Our subsequent four-year relationship was perhaps the most important development in my project of racial liberation. Through her I began to feel beauty in brownness. Looking back, I was less attracted to her gender, and more attracted to her race. Typical heterosexual narratives that suggest that men enter relationships with the ‘opposite’ gender and rely on a difference model did not align well here. Rather, I was attracted to her because of our mutual sameness.

 In all of my subsequent relationships and interactions with (white) men, I have been unable to experience this sense of solidarity, of kinship, of sameness. Mainstream narratives of homosexuality conceptualize it as ‘same-sex’ desire: we hear stories about how men know how to please other men better because they have a penis. We hear how same-sex relationships are more functional because both parties “get one another.” These narratives, as is the case with most gay narratives, do not map well on queer of color experience like my own. All of my relationships with (white) men have felt much more conflicted, racially charged, and based on a paradigm of ‘opposites.’ Embracing a white male body never feels comfortable, natural, same. It feels foreign, exotic, opposite.

 As I began to participate in white gay communities I recognized that what attracted to me to these boys – what had always attracted me to whiteness – was its difference from me. Whiteness was a commodity, a property that I didn’t own and was systematically denied. I wanted to be with white guys because I was attracted to the power, to their foreignness, to the thrill of difference. I found myself turning down incredibly charming and political queer boys of color, because I just didn’t get the same power trip, the same attraction to them. I found myself pursuing the most problematic, the most racist and obnoxious white boys, just because their otherness was that desirable.

 My early and uncritical experiences with white men reminded me that I can never have access to this cultural capital, that I will always be brown, no matter how much queer communities profess to be ‘one.’ I began to realize the extreme racism and colorism that governs much of queer male life: the lighter you are, the more attractive you are. The darker you are, the more likely you are to be friend-zoned.

 The majority of the times I found myself incredible invisible to the white queer gaze. I met white boys with dating profiles: “No Asians / No Fems.” Sexual racism like this was rarely as explicit, it manifested itself in more silent and pernicious ways: always being the ‘friend’ and never anything more, etc. When I would confront my white queer friends about why they didn’t date other boys of color they’d often say things like: “I don’t see race – get over it, it’s not important!” And though they would often profess liberal and anti-racist politics, they would still only sleep with and date other white men. When I began to meet white queer men who were or experienced intimate relations across the color lines they would often say that race wasn’t central to their desire or relationship. The idea was that being gay already involved transgressing one taboo, why not jump over another?

 Those white queer men who did express interest often articulated it in ways that were just as problematic, just in a reverse direction. One white boy told me that he had always wanted to be with a brown man. He told me that I felt like a real man. And, at the time, I loved it. For the first time in my life I experienced validation from the very body that taunted me growing up. When he embraced me I felt like America taking me back again, I felt worthy, I felt normal. In that small encounter I experienced a tremendous range of trauma and emotion. I performed my race – in its most bastardized forms – for him so that I could obtain his acceptance. In subsequent relationships I experienced similar hyper-fetishization – experiences where my brownness was central to a white man’s attraction to me. It manifested itself in sometimes subtle ways – comments on my rugged masculinity (gesturing to histories of associations with bodies of color and primitive animality), cloaked racist sayings like all South Asians are so sexy).

 In all of these experiences – the ones where I was hyper invisible and hyper visible – one theme remained constant: I was always reduced to my race. My race was the primary basis of my desireability or undesireability. I never was able to enter interactions where my race was not salient – the paradigm established was that I was always the one with ‘the race,’ while whiteness remained unmarked, uncontested.

 Thus, ironically, even though I expected my homosexuality to integrate me into a community that made me finally feel part of something bigger than myself again (after becoming an outcast in a post 9/11 nationalist American), I actually began to feel even more brown, even more violently racialized.

After severally racially charged experiences with white men I found myself in some of the deepest and most visceral racial trauma of my life. I found myself predicating my very self-worth, my integrity, on validation by white men. It didn’t matter how many people of color were attracted to me, only white guys counted. It didn’t matter to me how successful I was in school or how wonderful of an activist I was, only validation by white men could make me happy.

 The Limits of Queer Epistemologies: Ways Forward

 I soon recognized that the ways I, uncritically, desired whiteness were destructive to my political and emotional liberation. I began to read a lot more critical race theory, post-colonial theory, and think much more about white supremacy and how queer projects are complicit in it. I am now committed to decolonizing the intimacy I participate in – to disarticulating my attraction from the imprint of my oppression and envisioning alternative and radical ways to feel, relate, and engage with whiteness.

 I am extremely skeptical of the race neutrality of the majority of queer/gender/sexuality desire. I strongly disapprove of the way that queer communities and individuals organize, fuck, art, envision, and grow together in ways that don’t address racial difference. My experiences with internalized racism have given me the privilege to see how race can actually become central to our desire and politics. Here are some ways that I’ve been thinking about this:

 1. Our Sexual Identity Frameworks are already racist. We need to stop relying on a framework of sexual identity that anchors our attraction to ‘sex.’ Currently the only way that we think of sexual identity is in terms of what gender/sex’s we are attracted to. The only discourse I had access to growing up told me that I was “gay” because I was attracted to (some) men. However, it makes no sense for me to identify as ‘gay.’  Identifying as gay would mean that I am a man attracted to other men. But the truth is I am not attracted to all men. I am attracted to a very particular type of racialized, classed, gendered, etc. masculinity. Current frameworks of sexual identity assume that ‘men’ and ‘women’ exist as stable categories and elide racial and other differences among men and women. The assumption here is that all men look the same, which is obviously not the case. Using this framework, white man can identify as gay but still only be intimate with other white men. Gay becomes a way in which we can cloak our racisms, rather than make them central to the way that we articulate our desires. We need a more complex way to relate our sexual proclivities and histories to one another. We need a language that acknowledges the multiple vectors that we come to fetishize. In my case, my desire and identities have been more oriented around race, than sex/gender

 2. Our sexual desires themselves are already racist. As a queer body of color I have not had the privilege to disassociate my attraction from my oppression. The people I am most attracted to are the people I have been told to be attracted to. Our society – through media, and other discourse – valorizes particular expressions of white and masculine identity. These images have been ingrained into me to the point that I often have to question whether I am attracted to an individual for them, or for their whiteness - whether I am attracted to an individual, or a system. I am troubled by a paradigm that locates minority bodies as the only bodies that experience attraction this way. The fact is that all desires are implicated within racist, classist, colonial, etc. systems and circuits of desire – it’s just for some of us this is more salient. We must think critically about the nature of our desires and how to contest, unlearn, and re-imagine them.

 3. We need to talk more about the relationship between white supremacy and sexual politics: I have shown how my body of color has been implicated in a project of white supremacy. It is important that we move beyond a framework that suggests that white people are the only people who can be racist. The reality of the situation is that most of us are white supremacists. White supremacy is a pervasive, totalizing, and dominant ideology that becomes bolstered by all bodies – not just white bodies. I want us to think more about what our queer movements and radical sex movements are doing to contest white supremacy – or, rather, how they are becoming (or have always been) complicit with this ideology.

4. Attraction as already fetishistic: I believe that fetish-oriented models of sexuality are a way to allow us to talk about internalized racism and other prejudices in relation to our sexual desires. Inspired by queer psychoanalysts like Tim Dean, I’m interested in re-imagining all desire as fetishistic. What this means is that we are not born predisposed to any particular attraction. Rather, we develop our attractions. (ie the penis is not inherently attractive, it becomes attractive). This process of becoming attractive occurs within a white supremacist, patriarchal, prejudiced culture in which particular fetishes become normalized (ie white heterosexual intimacy) while others become seen as perverse (foot fetish, racial fetish, etc.). Talking about our desires as fetishes is productive because it helps us remember that our desires are protean, able to shift, change, and respond. It reminds us that we experience desire as individuals – that no group-oriented terms like ‘gay’ (or even queer people of color) can adequately describe the specificity of our desire.

5. Gay rights/advocacy is not a queer project. Within a narrow-issue gay politic, I could excuse myself of my internalized racism and focus on my same-sex intimacy as already inherently radical. This isn’t sufficient. I think the power of a queer project lies in its ability and acknowledgement that our desires are political and that our intimacies are microcosms of the Revolution. A queer project involves unlearning our identities and attractions, disarticulating our racial fetishes and allowing ourselves to be attracted to all races. A queer project makes us be more critical of the way that we have conflated homosexuality as inherently transgressive. Isn’t predominant attraction to men or women implicated within structures of sexism and patriarchy? Queer desiring men need to think more about how our lack of attraction to women is related to and contributes to misogynist interpretations of the female body. Queering our desires involves opening ourselves to new types of intimacies, new types of consensual pleasures, with all types of identities. We are not yet queer, we aspire to queerness – and as part of that project we have to learn how to expand our desires and make them more empathetic, embracing, and radical for all.

Protect Me From What I Want: Radical Sex for the Revolution

As part of a day-long workshop called “Mapping Your Sexual Desire: Liberating Your Sexual Body” we were asked to write our name and what we were “interested in” on our nametags. I was the youngest – and perhaps most inexperienced (though not to conflate age and experience here) — of the bunch, simultaneously shocked and excited by the prospect of being so honest, so public of the nature of my desires. I soon realized that I didn’t really know what my body desired (I suppose that’s why I was at the workshop). I ended up writing something like: “Alok / conversation / cuddling.” The guy next to me was interested in waterworks, the one across liked being chained up and abandoned…I think there was a barebacker in the group, as well. I felt positively vanilla.

I ended up leaving the workshop early. My discomfort didn’t stem from some sexual naïveté, prudishness, or internalized conservativism (at least I hope not). It arose more from the type of discourse, the logic of the event – the way that sex, intimacy, and desire was discussed.

In this piece I want to problematize dominant narratives of sex-positivity. I will demonstrate how sex-positive spaces have the tendency to rely on the heuristic of a normal body – a body that is often assumed to be sexual, white, Western, and well-to-do financially. In this piece I want to imagine a sex-positive feminism that thinks more radically about sex, bodies, relationships, intimacy, and liberation. I recognize that there is no ‘one’ type of sex-positive feminism and that I cannot judge the entire goals of a movement from the experiences I’ve had interacting with these spaces. I acknowledge, too, how indebted my own sexual ethics, politics, and values are to contributions from sex-positive feminists. (I am supportive of the majority of conclusions and aims of such activists for example the idea that sex/the erotic is often stigmatized, that states/patriarchy/hegemonic institutions police and restrict our desires, that one should never be judged for having ‘too much’ sex, the importance of frank dialogue and (enthusiastic) consent, the role that sex plays in overcoming trauma, etc.))

I hope that my critiques can help us, as activists committed to a sexual liberationist project, envision a more inclusive, complicated, and embracing movement for sexual autonomy and the realization of radical collective pleasures.

What is sex, anyways?: Radical Post-Colonial Asexualities

Last week a gay friend at a bar asked me what I was going to be doing over the weekend. I told him that I had tickets for a really great queer art performance scripted by a friend. He looked at me, a bit aghast, and said: “Why watch that when you can get the real thing – why don’t you go find some hot guy on the dance floor, bring him back to your room, and fuck him.” I insisted that I’d really rather watch this play, but he maintained “there’s nothing better in the world than orgasm.”

Really now? I want us to think more critically about the dominance of ‘orgasm’ in discourses of sex and pleasure. The assumption at my workshop was that everyone who participated was motivated by sexual desires and enjoyed having sex. ‘Liberated’ sex was presented as the panacea for our sexual repression – finding what really ‘got you off’ would help you ‘unlock’ your ‘deepest’ ‘sexual’ desires (orgasm). After we found this site of desire, we were encouraged to re-visit as frequently as possible.

As asexuality activism reminds us, the idea that all people are born sexual is one of the most misleading social assumptions that our dominant culture teaches us. It’s much more complicated and many individuals (not just self-identified members of the ace community) experience sexual desire so simply. From the vantage point of asexual subjectivity, sex-positive rhetoric is often exercised in an almost missionary fashion: bodies are educated about mystic forces that they are capable of, told that they must adopt a specific doctrine, and then, with enough practice and commitment, they will experience liberation (read: orgasm). While this narrative may apply to many sexually-able people, differently sexual people are immediately isolated from this conversation.

Many ace bodies are completely disinterested in sex. Does this mean that they cannot experience liberation of their desire? Many ace bodies can orgasm, but do not experience it as a driving or motivating force in life (I’ve heard – “it feels like blowing your nose” a few times). Does this mean that they just haven’t located their true desires yet? Do they just have to ‘get better’ at sex?

I’m troubled by this paradigm: that bodies that somehow are not being pleased (in a very narrow understanding of bodily pleasure) are constructed as un-enlightened, ignorant, repressed. Bodies that can orgasm at will and experience all the time are depicted as liberated bodies, bodies that have somehow been ‘saved’ from pathologizing discourses that delegitimize queer sexuality. I understand and empathize with where this paradigm comes from. As queers whose bodies, whose acts have been criminalized, shamed, etc. it makes sense that our movement has located a radical politics in not only accepting, but publically articulating and demonstrating our intimacy. However, we have to make sure that the liberated bodies we imagine do not rely on the same tactics of exclusion we have opposed in the past. In much of our current rhetoric: sex is presented and uphold as the dominant site of pleasure and intimacy. Other ways of relating, other ways of experiencing happiness are seen as inferior.

Instead of talking about ‘sex’ and ‘orgasm’ (terms that are often exercised in ways that root pleasure in ‘sex’ acts involving genitalia) we need to talk about pleasure more holistically. In psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or desire. Sexual desire is one type of cathexis – but bodies can be oriented and strive for many other sites of desire in many different ways. Language that emphasizes the importance of not only having sex, but having sex all of the time isolates bodies that negotiate different relationships with pleasure. We must shift our rhetoric to a language centered on self-determination – one that argues that all people should be allowed to do with their bodies as they please to (even if that involves not having sex).

Ace-friendly frameworks also have a lot of parallels with post-colonial critiques of universalizing sexual discourse. The Western world loves to talk about how ‘backwards’ sexually the Global South is (read Massad’s Desiring Arabs and Stoler’s critiques of Foucault for more background on this), but as recent criticism by post-colonial queer scholars have shown – the West applies a very narrow understanding of sexual liberation, an understanding that privileges particularly notions and expressions of (public) visibility that does not graft well on many non-Western traditions. These traditions may have completely different relationships between public/private spheres and different connotations associated with bodies, intimacy, and sexuality. In the same way that ace bodies are constructed as perpetually in a state of un-enlightenment, subaltern bodies are also relegated to the domain of ‘repressed.’ We must move away from such binaristic trajectories that locate ‘repression’ and ‘liberation’ in particular ways of being. Instead, we must recognize liberation as a process, as an impossibility, that we all have our own respective ways of realizing.

Incorporating ace-critiques into our work expands the horizons of what is possible in a body liberation workshop. Sex – as its narrowly defined by heteronormative and acephobic interpretations of bodies and intimacy – is one path of many toward body liberation. For other bodies it may involve hugging, cuddling, good conversation, friendship, dancing, political organizing. These methods of obtaining pleasure are no less legitimate than the ‘holy’ power of orgasm. Incorporating ace-critiques force queers to be more creative and envision new sites of radical pleasure. What if we could speak with such passionate rhetoric about more things we do? What if we could re-frame watching a movie, catching up with a friend, creating art as sex? If a queer project is committed to expanding the terrain of pleasure, we must move beyond bodies interacting intimately in socially rehearsed scripts with other bodies.

The emphasis on sex positive feminism has done much to challenge heteronormative scripts of intimacy – moving us far, far away from phallic/receptable models of sex and valorizing sadomasochism, bondage, and other performative sex acts. However, I still think we can push further. Our rhetoric should not only be about ‘realizing’ pleasures, but also developing the capacity to expand pleasures, learning how to experience the world and all the opportunities it offers with a new capacity for enjoyment, intimacy, and orgasm (in the most dephallicized way we can imagine it).

Inter(sex)ionality: Contextualizing Sex Within a World of Power

As progressive activists we are all too willing to talk about how “sex is political.” We throw around the feminist mantra that “the personal is political,” but sometimes I wonder if we truly internalize what it means to think about fucking and desire in the context of extreme inequalities.

As I’ve argued, sex-positive rhetoric often includes an imperative for people to realize and act on their sexual desires. We are told: if a woman, of a gay man, of a body is attracted to another body it should overcome its internalized slut-shaming and go for it! We congratulate our friends for “getting some” last night. We create hierarchies in our communities – so and so is very experienced (read: liberated). The assumption is that the more we ‘realize’ our desires, the more liberated we become.

For many bodies this is not the case. For some bodies, ‘realizing our desire’ is actually detrimental to our other paths toward liberation and decolonization.

Sex positive rhetoric rarely interrogates the origin of desire – rarely encourages us to ask what kind of bodies get labeled as sexy and why this is the case. Sex positive rhetoric must incorporate an intersectional lens to its discourse. What is ‘desireable’ in our world is determined by global systems of capitalism, (neo-) colonialism, white supremacy, ableism, heterosexism, etc. We have to ask ourselves – in acting in our desires, in getting what we ‘want,’ are we reifying these systems of oppression? It is my contention that sex-positive rhetoric ignores the reality that for many of us, our attractions function as a mechanism of our oppression. Realizing our short-term sexual desires may not actually be positive for our larger project of self-love and emancipation.

I offer my own queer racialized body as an example. As a body socialized in the imperialist and white supremacist country in a region populated by predominantly white, upper-middle class, Christian, heteronormative, etc. peoples, my understanding of beauty was severely and violently delineated by power. I grew up continually being reinforced at every level that white, straight, masculine men – the bodies of power in our community – were the most beautiful and desireable bodies. My desire and the internalized-racism and feelings of self-inadequacy that spawned are a tactic of white supremacy. How are people of color, how is the Global South supposed to overthrow white supremacy when we have been internalized at some level to find white people the most beautiful? How are we supposed to find a radical power in browness and blackness when whiteness has colonized our very capacity to experience pleasure in our own race?

If I followed the mandate of sex-positive rhetoric to act on my desires I would not challenge my white and male fetishisms. I would congratulate myself for ‘liberating’ my desire and getting with white guys. But I ask – whose terms of liberation are these? ‘Realizing my desire’ is too simplistic of a narrative for this queer and racialized body. Acting on my desire can actually be detrimental to more important projects (to me) of decolonization. This is not to say that I am advocating that bodies of color should refuse intimacies with whiteness. Rather, we must think more critically about how we negotiate this desire and more cautiously about when we do and do not choose to act on it.

I want us to think of a sex-positive feminism that challenges the essentialized, static, and hegemonic notions of desire we are socialized into. I want a sex-positive feminism that makes us find beauty in the ugly (as Mia Mingus implores us to in her incredible work: http://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/moving-toward-the-ugly-a-politic-beyond-desirability/). I want a sex-positive feminism that acknowledges how we are implicated within corrupt regimes of power, but still encourages and capacitates us to expand the horizons of our desire and learn to find all (consensual) bodies beautiful and worthy of desire.

While I acknowledge that because we have been so violently socialized into these beauty norms without our consent it may be nearly impossible to overcome, that doesn’t mean we should not try. Liberation is a collective and gradual process.  If we want to envision sex as political, we need to recognize that our own bodies work against us as hegemonic tools. Instead of only talking to the ‘hot’ people in the bar, of only looking for your particular fetish – let us try, actively, to expand our horizons; to talk to bodies and explore their politics, to join and relate to bodies that entertain a similar vision of a liberated world of desire.

What is wanting in the revolution?

Throughout this piece I have gestured to a critique, more broadly, of wanting: of how particular bodies become wanted, and other bodies undesireable, about how we are told to exercise and realize our wants, without contesting where they wants originate from, etc. I’d like to end with a call for us to re-imagine the character of ‘wanting’ in the way we articulate our desires and politics..

What I mean to say is: What does it mean to ‘want’ in a capitalist society that has made every transaction about obtaining profit? What does it mean to ‘want’ when the only way we have learned to want is for our own self-gain?

A couple of months ago I found myself at some underground queer party in San Francisco. There was a sex-room at the back, everyone around me was inebriated and doing hard drugs, and (white) boys were grinding together, unapologetically, in various shades of nudity. In this site of pleasure, in this sex-positive space, in this destination of (I) want, I found myself profoundly disheartened.

Not all pleasure is ‘good’ – in fact, pleasure and wanting can lead to the demise of the radical and utopian worlds we strive for. We need to unhinge the “I” from our desires and think about our individual desires, our individual libidos, within the context of our collective social movements.

How can we re-orient ourselves to think about collective based pleasures? How can we think about creating sites of pleasure that are not dominated by individual hedonism? Who has access to the types of pleasure we normalize as transcendent? How do we experience pleasure responsibly in a world of extreme poverty? How do we realize our wants without contributing to the despair of others?

A sex-positivity that seriously engages with these questions, among others, is one that I can confidently say that “I want.”

A Speech to Queer Youth Activists

I typically employ a particular type of coming out narrative – one that deeply implicates spacial and geographic transformation (emotionally and physically) and falls along a relatively linear conception of mobility and development. I explain to people that my high school was not a safe space. I don’t go into detail (I think I don’t want to remember what it felt like) but I list a couple of examples of the types of things my teachers and fellow peers used to say about homosexuality to justify how the hostile climate of my high school would not have been accepting of my identity. I may choose to tell them about my classmate who told me that all gay people should be hanged or I may include several tantalizing and tragic vignettes of the way I was bullied in the hallways called fagatron. I tell people that as soon as I got away from my high school and moved to ‘liberal’ California I was able to experience a sort of self-liberation. I finally felt ‘comfortable’ enough to visibly and politically articulate my sexual identity.

Speaking at my high school in front of an audience of a couple dozen queer, questioning, and allied students made me fundamentally reconsider the way I construct this narrative and the power that is implicit in all our narratives (and how we self-actualize them).

At my talk I couldn’t deliver this gay narrative. What would it mean to essentially tell these students that the only way they could experience affirmation and acceptance was if they moved out? What would it mean to focus on the bad parts, to remind them of the prejudice they experience on a day to day basis?

In preparing my thoughts for this talk I found that not only did I have to speak to a new and unfamiliar demographic, I also had to speak to myself. I began to recognize the limits of the political strategy that is implied by my coming out narrative.

It is a politic that reinforces a (false) dichotomy by constructing the South as inherently backwards and ‘the rest of the US’ as inherently ‘progressive.’ (Even though the reality of the situation is that prejudice is ubiquitous and not limited to particular bodies or spaces). It is a politic that ignores the material and social consequences of my educational, familial, able-bodied, class, and gender privilege because it assumes that all bodies can ‘escape.’ It is a politic that subsumes the specificity and complexity of our social development within a simple and narrowly focused ‘gay’ narrative (what about all the other experiences I had in high school? How were they crucial in contributing to my ‘development’ and why are they dismissed in this narrative?) Most importantly, it is a politic which elides a very radical and important possibility: the notion that it actually IS possible to change our home and find liberation within structures of heterosexism.

In writing this speech I began to realize that my very narrative – my core understanding of ‘self’ – is not outside of prejudiced power structures. Even though my narrative feels so right and comes so easily – perhaps it only comes easy because it is not actually challenging anything. Perhaps I only began to understand my narrative as such simply because this was the dominant narrative I had been socialized into.

After interrogating my own narrative and the assumptions that govern it I’m interested in disrupting it. I think narratives like these reinforce the very power structures we are trying to dismantle. We need to present more complicated counter-narratives that are messy, contradictory, depressing, and realistic. We need to incorporate a more complex analysis of queer youth issues and development if we truly want to ‘liberate’ queer youth.

Here is an intervention to this narrowly-focused politic. This is what I wish I had heard when I was struggling in my high school. This is a speech, a letter, directed to myself and to a burgeoning youth queer movement:

Flawed Paradigms

What comes to mind when you think of the ‘gay’ movement? Chances are you think of the Human Rights Campaign and their gosh-darnit this is so aesthetically pleasing ‘equality’ sticker – the very sticker you were so proud of yourself for sticking on the back of your mom’s minivan that you drive to school. Chances are you think of marriage equality: of the ‘State’ ‘denying’ gay people their very integrity and going against ‘true love.’ Now I want you to think about what comes to mind when you think of gay ‘activists’ who compose our movement. Chances are you think of people participating in protests and rallies screaming into megaphones demanding full and equal rights. You might think of a Pride Parade with gorgeous and fit gay people dressed up with all their reckless fabulosity. 

Now I want to ask you a question. What would change in your life right now if the Supreme Court ruled that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and that every State in the United States now had to legalize same-sex marriage?

My guess is that after your cried tears of joy, felt a delicious burst of self-affirmation in your heart, texted all your friends, and kept the news on all night, you would recognize thatvery little in your day-to-day life would change.

Chances are you will still get made fun of. Chances are the teachers who called you Satanic for wearing a rainbow bracelet to school will still think you are Satanic. Actually, the prejudice you experience might even increase. Imagine how angry the uber-Republican Coach who teaches you American History will be? Imagine the comments he’ll say in class, imagine the points he’ll deduct from your papers without giving any reason.

Next ask yourself: What would happen if you tried to organize a Pride Parade in the hallways of your high school?

Sure it’d be a bunch of fun to organize. You might even get funding from one of those holy mainstream gay rights organization for this project. You might even get featured on their website. But, imagine what your teachers would do. Some of them, undoubtedly, would be very proud of you and your confident visibility. But imagine the teachers, students, and administrators who would be annoyed. Imagine how much trouble you would get in. Imagine what the school would look like when all the confetti was cleaned up.

It would be just as ugly, just as sterile, just as prejudiced.

Marriage equality and pride/visibility are two tactics that have become made central to the organizing of our LGBT movement.

Now I want you to think critically of these images: of the gay couple getting married, of the gay marriage activists running around in Pride parades – do they look like you? Do they experience their sexualities like you? Are their tactics, their identities, pertinent to you?

I don’t think so. It is my belief that these dominant ideas actually aren’t related to your situation. For many of you your sexuality is the worst thing in the world to happen to you. You are terribly confused, alone, and scared as hell. Most mornings you wake up afraid to go to school and most nights you ask yourself whether or not you are going to make it to the next day. Sure you are reading these articles online (and clearing the cookies afterwards), but you are far too scared to share them with your parents (because you know they’re far too conservative to accept you). But, these images make you think that one day you could grow up and ‘come out’ and become a ‘gay activist’ and maybe even get married! That one day – once you’re out of this god-forsaken high school you will be able to experience happiness like that; that your life will be meaningful.

You have been made to believe that the only way that you’re going to experience happiness is in the future. Because of these images, because of your very understandings of ‘activism’ and ‘gay,’ you do not believe that you can be satisfied right now. We believe the myths that we are told that it will somehow “get better” in the future because we are terribly lonely. We fear rejection from our schools, from our families, from our religions, from our friends. So we hold on to these images. So we plaster our binders with Equality Stickers and we dream of what it will be like to move to New York City, to find a lover, to get married, to have our parents say, “It’s okay.”

I actually believe that these dominant ideas lull us into complacency and prolong our feelings of inadequacy because they make ‘happiness’ and ‘activism’ as somehow beyond our reach. I want to show you that you have the power to cultivate happiness and engage in activism RIGHT now. That liberation doesn’t have to be after your graduate. That even in your awful and prejudiced high school you have an oasis of hope right now in your own heart and those of your peers.

Adopt your own individual narrative of identity and resistance

The dominant definitions of activism and positive depictions of homosexuality that we encounter do not fit our specific situations. Let’s think critically about our own needs and experiences with our identities. The truth is there is not one way to be an activist nor is there one way to be gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or transgender, or an ally, or queer. Actually, we have to develop, cultivate, and organize around our own frameworks. Only by addressing the (harsh) and (depressing) realities of our own situation will we be able to overcome them. What follows are some suggestions and some of my concerns with adopting a ‘gay’ ‘rights’ framework in high schools.

Let’s first think at the level of identity articulation and formation. You and I have internalized understandings that the only way that we’re going to be happy is when we come out as ‘gay.’ I used to think this. There were nights in high school I’d go outside and scream “I’m gay” in my backyard just because I felt guilty, dirty that I was hiding from the rest of the world. I’d imagine what it would be like to be ‘out’ and ‘happy.’ I conflated ‘out’ with ‘happy.’

The mandate to come out is actually impractical for young people. The action of ‘coming out’ associates that there is a space to land once you take those preliminary steps. The truth is many of you cannot afford to be ‘out’ right now. You may step out and find that the ground has been moved beneath you: you could be kicked out of your houses. You may step out and experience violence: You could be beaten up at school. You could lose all your friends. Is this worth the cost?

The mandate to ‘come out’ privileges a particular notion of mobility – that we must ‘move’ away from where we currently reside in order to be liberated. Coming out is narrative not only privileged at the level of the individual, but at the level of ‘community.’ We are encouraged not just to identify as ‘gay,’ but to participate in gay life – to move to San Francisco, to live the gay lifestyle, to, sometimes, even go out further – to the gay cities of Europe and beyond.

This mandate of mobility is detrimental to our project. Most of us cannot move (due to the conservatism of our town, our class and racial identities, our obligations to family/community). Not only can we not move, but why should we have to move? What if we were able to build resistance from within (the closet, the conservative town, the ‘abject’ place?)

Let’s re-frame the narrative of mobility. It’s up to you to decide. You should never feel pressured to identify a certain way or to follow a particular trajectory. You should not be judged for only telling some of your friends and not others. Do what makes you comfortable. Do not judge other people for not ‘coming out,’ even if you know they are so bicurious. Use the words that make you comfortable, or don’t use words at all.  Find frameworks, labels, terms, situations that maximize your happiness right now. Maybe ‘coming out’ doesn’t even make sense to you. That’s completely fine!

Stop focusing on the ‘closet’ as a site of repression (I know this is hard, but try it), and view it, rather, as a strategic tool. View it as an outfit. Don’t let it restrict you. Take it on or off as you please. It can always be there for you in the back of your closet even when you’re technically ‘out.’ We each have to create our own strategies and paths to liberation and these paths may end up in completely different directions with very different destinations. You don’t need to be ‘out,’ you do not need move to a city, to ‘the North’ to experience affirmation and find safe spaces. You have the ability to excavate small spaces of resistance with your own identity, friend group, and schools. Sure these spaces may not be as ‘glamorous’ and ‘liberating’ as you’d like them to be, but there is nothing wrong or backward about them.

Build Diverse Coalitions

This process of introspection and analysis of our own particular surroundings doesn’t only make us reconsider how we negotiate the closet, but it also encourages us to analyze the very language with which we use to articulate our own sexualities and speak about sexuality in our schools. I encourage you, as people committed to ending prejudice in your school, to self-reflect on whether the term ‘gay’ is really effective for you.

Many ‘gay rights’ interventions in high schools have been reactionary. We have an understanding that there is an immediate crisis of (serious) prejudice directed against people perceived to be non-heterosexual / gender transgressive and we want to stop this prejudice as soon as possible. While this is certainly important, we need to make sure that the methods we employ to articulate this prejudice and counter it aren’t actually counter-intuitive to our ultimate goals of ending discrimination. In order to do this we must not only be reactionary, but we must think of the root causes of prejudice – where does prejudice emergence? How does it become cultivated and disseminated? What ideologies construct this?

In order to answer these questions we must not only focus on the experiences of non-heterosexual / gender variant students, but we must also incorporate a frank analysis of the experiences of ‘prejudiced’ ‘bullies’ themselves! Indeed, these ‘perpetrators’ are just as much victims of the patriarchal and heterosexist society we live in. They are struggling with the same gender and sexual boundaries that we are, they just respond in very different ways. Let’s think about what it would mean to incorporate these ‘bullies’ into our analysis at the level of identity articulation / word choice.

The word ‘gay’ is by no means neutral. Think about how your peers often use it: “That’s so gay” (as a pejorative). ‘Gay’ becomes constructed as a site of failure, of incompetence, perhaps even of perversion. I remember in high school even though I wouldn’t walk, talk, or dress like the other boys as long as I avoided the term gay I was able to excavate relative spaces of safety. As soon as I became labeled as ‘gay,’ or ‘faggot,’ I immediately became more susceptible to verbal and physical harassment. By ‘marking’ an individual as ‘gay,’ they become associated with all of the negative stereotypes and may actually experience increased risk of discrimination than they had before they identified as anything. Thus, we have to be careful in the way that we always feel the need to ‘name’ difference because this very process of naming or identifying may by antithetical to our goals. Sure, you could argue that by proudly identifying as ‘gay’ in high school you have the ability to significantly counter these stereotypes and re-frame assumptions. This is probably the case for close friends and family, but does it have an effect on the most homophobic people in our schools – the ringleaders of violence and prejudice? In fact continuing to push ‘gay’ identity may preclude the very possibility of conversation with these people – conversation that is necessary for changing school climate. In propagating ‘gay,’ we, in turn, create ‘straight’ – we give words, language, verbal ammunition to construct ‘bullies’ who now see themselves as ‘straight.’ In a patriarchal and heterosexist world what transcripts, what scripts do we have for heterosexuality? The type of heterosexuality these (newly straight) people adopt are prejudiced, exclusionary, perhaps even violent. In dwelling in the language of ‘identity’ based asks and claims we need to think about how ‘homosexuality’ AND ‘heterosexuality’ interact to mutually construct one another as identities and practices. There is actually a radical possibility in ambiguity, in the unnamed. It may feel weird and uncomfortable, but at a strategic level it may permit us access to spaces, conversations, and hearts that we wouldn’t have before.

Even ‘positive’ depictions of homosexuality may have negative affects on the efficacy of our advocacy. Think about positive depictions of homosexuality you may have encountered online, through pornography, or on TV: chances are the ‘gay’ people you have seen are white, male, able-bodied. Considering that many youth come to formulate their understanding of ‘gay’ subjectivity/identity from these discourses (and not from actual encounters with people who identify as gay) we must recognize that when we employ the word ‘gay’ in our schools we simultaneously evoke all of these larger associations (which are racialized, class-based, gendered, etc?). What does it mean to continue to use the word ‘gay’ as the percentage of people of color in our schools continues to increase?

Growing up as a queer South Asian I always felt like ‘gay’ was for white people. I had never seen brown ‘gay’ people, so I assumed that at some level my increasingly uncertain sexuality was a result of my Westernization, a racial and ethnic failing, a process of me becoming more ‘White.’ Yet, ‘gay’ was the only framework I heard about, so I accepted and internalized it readily and began to reject my South Asian culture, assuming that (white) Western culture provided a space of recognition and acceptance for me that my own ethnicity did not.

Indeed, the use of ‘gay’ in our advocacy may have the effect of isolating heterosexual-identified and queer students of color. The way we have emphasized ‘gay’ as the one intelligible way of comprehending non-heteronormative expressions actually causes queer youth of color (like me) to experience isolation from our cultures, traditions, and families. Thus, Youth activists have to make a concerted effort to

1) Cultivate leadership of queer people of color and other people with intersectional identities in our groups and organizations

2) Recognize a vast array of different ways of identifying/labeling/articulating sexuality and not advancing an imperative of ‘gay’ identity (one that is often racialized as White) 3) Incorporate anti-racist frameworks in our messaging and pleas (i.e. not adopting zero tolerance policies for homophobia as this contributes to a high school to prison pipeline which disproportionately affects people of color).

Finally, what does it mean to advocate for ‘gay’ ‘rights’ in your high school when the majority of people are just beginning to have sexual and erotic encounters? Seeing that there are already so few spaces to talk about sex (in my high school we didn’t even have sexual education!), what does it mean to introduce the topic of homosexuality? First this might actually reduce the number of people experimenting sexually in your high school. As soon as people begin to associate same-sex intimacy/encounters with a very particular ‘gay’ identity,’ they might feel like they don’t identify/look like that ‘identity,’ and stop themselves from experimenting. Also, as research suggests, often the most homophobic people are the people who repress their homoerotic desires the most. If we want to reduce homophobia in our schools, we need to create the conditions for more homoeroticism, for more experimentation, and a ‘gay’ ‘rights’ based framework may not allow us to do this. 

Focusing on ‘gay’ advocacy also could be interpreted to create a special category with ‘special’ rights. What if we were to re-focus our advocacy toward sexual education in school more holistically? This would allow us to incorporate everyone into our asks and advocacy. We could use more language like ‘self-determination’ and ‘sexual health’ that is, of course, inclusive of queer identities/practices. In making demands for progressive sexual health/education curriculums we are providing forums to talk about what bodies – not just gay bodies – can do and consent to. Homosexuality can become less associated with a particular type of identity (one that becomes Othered, demonized, and discriminated against) and moreso a particular type of action.

We will certainly face backlash in making these claims. Conservative parents will think that we are trying to recruit their children with our homosexual agenda. However, the result of actually obtaining progressive sexual education might not be as important as the process and the conversations we get to have about sex, sexuality, and health. The language that we employ and disseminate in this advocacy is what’s important as it sparks consciousness, self-reflection, and capacity for dialogue. These conversations allow students to think about their own sexualities, respective sexual privileges, ignorance about their own identities, confusion, anxieties, and insecurities. These thoughts, these interactions create new capacities for coalition building and solidarity.

Re-conceptualize ‘activism’ and ‘allyship’

As youth queer activists we need to be more deeply concerned and troubled with the way that the mainstream gay rights movement has dominated the very language of ‘Equality.’ What does it mean that the very word ‘Equality’ has become claimed and marketed by the gay movement when there are so many continuing social and economic inequalities in our society?

We recognize this reality every day in our hallways. It’s not just the ‘gay’ kids who get picked on: it’s the kids of color, it’s the non-Christian kids, it’s the ‘fat’ kids,’ it’s the kids with disabilities, it’s the poor kids. Yes, bullying on the basis of gender and sexual identity is a major issue, but it’s an issue among many. As young people we have a particularly privileged vantage point to understand that inequality still exists against many different social groups. We interact with diverse people daily. Unlike our (older) peers who work at fancy non-profit organization offices in Washington DC and New York City and are able to think of ‘prejudice’ and ‘equality’ in narrowly focused ways that only consider the experience of ‘gay’ students, we encounter multiple-forms of discrimination every day we go to school. In fact, we might even be the cause of some of this discrimination: accepting our LGBT friends but making fun of the kids in Special Education.

If we really want to dismantle prejudice against LGBT people we need to think more about what type of bodies, what type of personalities, what type of identities get stigmatized in our school and how these struggles are interconnected. Indeed, my high school presented a really tangible and easily accessible way to understand how heteronormativity intersects with multiple systems of discrimination. Every year the homecoming king and queen looked the same: they were a heterosexual pair, white, Christian, able-bodied, blonde, athletes, upper-middle class, etc. etc. Through the institution of ‘Homecoming,’ we can see how many high schools (not just my own) valorize not only heterosexuality, but Whiteness and Able-bodiedness. Students who do not fit the ‘paragon’ ideal are made to feel insignificant, self-loathing, insufficient. Growing up I not only wanted to be straight, I wanted to be white, I wanted to be Christian, I wanted to be rich, I wanted to wear Abercrombie & Fitch (not because it was sartorially pleasing…far from it!…)

Considering the intersections of these prejudices at a real and immediate level in our schools, I do not think we should be only focusing on discrimination against kids on the basis of gender and sexual identity. In doing so, we are only fighting for the rights / legitimacy of white privileged LGBT students. Instead, we need to create models of activism that address the needs of all students. Indeed, only by dismantling racism, classism, ableism, sexism, and other hierarchies of oppression can we truly dismantle heterosexism – as these ideologies all are interconnected a complex system of power.

Thus, I believe we should think about the radical potential of being an Ally, more broadly. I began this speech with critiquing the narrow definitions of ‘activism’ we have become socialized into arguing that rallies, pride parades, and direct actions may not be the most effective strategies of resistance in our high school. I think Allyship is, instead, a much more legitimate and useful strategy.

‘Ally’ is an elastic and un-specified enough term that it can apply to multiple different types of discrimination, not simply LGBT-based discrimination. ‘Ally’ unlike ‘gay,’ is not (as easily) associated with a particular race, gender, class, etc. It is a term vague enough that student activists can imbue it with meaning – make it cool, hip, important for all students. In a culture where students become demarcated and classified into separate groups and categories every day, Allyship provides a necessary intervention: it allows students to self-identify and to transgress boundaries. Allyship permits a space for radical coalition building among groups.

It is important to concede that allyship presents a particularly useful framework for queer youth activists because it provides a space for queer and questioning students who may not ‘be able to come out’ to still actively identify as something different. Yet, this difference has not (fortunately) become associated with as much stigma as gay/lesbian. We need to strip the ‘straight’ from ‘Straight Ally’ and think of Ally more of a space (emotionally, intellectually, and politically) of resistance. Being an Ally is a useful framework for political action in your high school. Being an ally means asking your history teacher why the history of women and minorities aren’t covered in your curriculum. Being an ally means intervening in a conversation when someone says “No Homo” and explaining why it’s problematic.

These interpersonal and interactional encounters you have are more important than any demonstration you could coordinate. They confront people with their racist, sexist, heterosexist, etc. assumptions and present alternative realities, visions, and perspectives that have the potential to radically transform peoples’ minds and directly confront systems of oppression.

The Radical Potential of Emotion

Allyship presents a compelling way to publically engage in activism, especially for students who might not be comfortable enough in their own (marginalized) identities or may not have safe spaces to articulate themselves as otherwise different. However, allyship is not the only tactic of resistance.

Perhaps the greatest and most effective tactic of queer youth activism is at the personal level. Dominant narratives of ‘activism’ tend to construct it as something external, something necessarily public. What if we were to re-conceptualize activism as also a personal process, one that happens from within? What if we viewed self-love as a campaign goal? What if we viewed our humanity not as something that is inborn, but that which results from a process of becoming increasingly empathetic? 

Indeed youth activists have to work through layers of internalized prejudice. Educating ourselves, meeting diverse people, participating in clubs/groups that engender happiness are all part of this process! Loving yourself and others – especially those who are stigmatized in your schools – is a massive act of resistance. That means playing violin in your orchestra because you love it is a form of activism. That means spending hours talking to your friends on AOL Instant Messenger (do people even use that anymore?) is a form of activism because it makes you happy. In doing these things, you are bestowing worth to a body, to an identity, to a perspective that has become stigmatized by your community. You don’t have to wait to be an activist until you graduate from high school, recognize that perhaps your political arena is best fought on

One note of caution: as you engage on the process of self and community love, make sure that you never forgot the feeling of being stigmatized – that raw, visceral, feeling of exclusion and prejudice that festers in your gut. Sure, nudge it aside with positive energy, but do not lose the trauma; rather, learn to command it, evoke it on whim. Located in this emotion is a radical potential for coalition building. This emotion will equip you with a language to communicate your story to others and build connections with diverse peoples who have been discriminated against in other ways. If you completely dismiss the feeling you will forget what it was like – you will forget the importance of what we’re fighting for. You will lose your efficacy as a compassionate and intersectional activist.

This is what the older generation of ‘activists’ who dominate our movement is slowly forgetting. They are forgetting what it felt like to hate themselves. They are forgetting what it was like to see prejudice at every direction in their schools, not just directed at them. They are forgetting that they were not holy; that they, too, called other kids names.

The Real Significant Other: The Queer Politics of Singlehood

Today is Valentines Day and you pretend that you don’t care about it (even though, at some level, you do). Today you will find yourself increasingly bitter. You will hate the couple engaged in intense titanic meets glacier PDA in front of you (a little more than yesterday, that is). You feel like you are oppressed, like you have been denied something. Today you will think of all of your ex lovers and you will remember the tenderness of their skin, the allure of their promises, and you will hate them a little bit more. This, this essay for you. 

I think I understand what you are feeling.

These days I find myself looking for love on dance floors at gay clubs. I find myself looking at that old gay guy, the one leaning up against the bar eyeing the shit out of me. I find myself hating him because I am afraid that one day I will grow up and be like him – that being queer (and of color) is a death sentence because I am doomed to be forever alone – some creepy trick in a bar.

It is in these spaces that I find myself thinking about loneliness the most. I become aware of the fact that I am ‘single,’ and that some of my friends aren’t ‘single’ and that therefore I am ‘alone’ — an identity that I didn’t consent to, an identity that makes me feel insignificant. I will text my friends emotional things (even though I’m not drunk), I will write pathetic poems about love and fantasize of the day when I meet him (errr, or her, or ze…)

Today is Valentines Day again but this time I am a different person. I am a college student writing a blog in a library instead of doing my homework. I’m supposed to be writing a paper about Marx and instead I’m thinking about love (and realizing that they’re actually more connected than I thought).

In this post I hope to provide a critique of ‘love’ (or at least how our society understands it). I want to draw from lessons from post-colonialism, lessons from asexuality theory, and lessons from queer activism to generate a politic of Singlehood. I will show you how ‘Single’ is actually a site of radical queer resistance and I will deconstruct the methods of power that make us feel what we do today. This is not my attempt to justify myself (okay maybe it is). This is really an attempt to make you (and me) reconsider the systems of power that have come to enforce this dreadful day on us. This is an attempt to show you that you are capable of being loved (in fact, that you already are). 

What does Single Mean Anyways?

I’ve always thought it’s fascinating what Facebook believes is important about our character: our gender (only two options!), our religious/political views, our sexuality (can I choose none of the above plz?), and our relationship status.

Facebook is merely a symptom of a larger ideology. 

Dictionary.com defines ‘Single’ as only one; not one of several. Okay, doesn’t that mean we’re all Single (last time I checked most of us aren’t physically connected, all do respect to our Siamese twin siblings out there)!? Our other options on Facebook are: “In a relationship,” “Married, “etc. It appears that we are ‘Single’ because we have some sort of lack – because we are simply not one of these other categories.

But does that still mean we’re not in a relationship? Last time I checked I’m in a relationship with many people. I am my mother’s child. I am my friend’s friend. I am my teacher’s student. Last time I checked I’m in a relationship with many objects. I adore my clothing (and take a particular fondness for bowties!). I’m in a relationship with space, with the environment, with the floor, with all things around me.

Yet, for some reason FB – and our culture more broadly – wants me to be in a very particular type of relationship. And because I’m not intelligibly in such a relationship, I am ‘Single.’

Not only am I single, but I am ‘alone.’ When I catch up with friends who haven’t seen me in a while they ask eagerly, “So, how’s your love life?” The assumption underlining their curiosity is that my ‘love life’ is the ultimate litmus test for my happiness, for my social well being. I perform accordingly. I am still Single – it SUCKS!!! In this moment I become aware that I am ‘Single’ and I remember that I am supposed to want somebody (one body) in my life and began to mourn the fact that I don’t.

This, to me, is a particularly queer condition. A very particular type of monogamous relationality is enforced on our bodies. The social actors around us police our relations ferociously. “Are you dating him?” “Do you love him?” “Did y’all (okay maybe I’m the only one that says y’all) sleep together last night?” they ask. Those bodies that are not in this system of relationality (presented to us in media typically through two ‘monogamous,’ able-bodied, white, heterosexual, attractive bodies) are made to feel insignificant. In the same way that I used to want to be white, to be straight, to be rich, goddamnit I want to be in a relationship.

It is my contention that the imperative to be in ‘a relationship’ is a mechanism of power. This imperative ignores the relations that we are all a part of. Thank you, Facebook, but I am in a relationship.

I am learning how to be grateful for my mom after benefiting from years of her gendered labor and unyielding compassion. I am learning how to respect my father and feel comfortable being compared to him. I am learning how to love my culture, even though I am afraid that it has no space for me. I am learning how to be a better friend, how to actually be there for others instead of just saying it.

Thank you Facebook, but I am in a relationship. I’m in a relationship with myself and each day we are fighting and each day I am trying to convince her/him/ze/it that her/him/ze/it is beautiful and capable of loving.

This narrow comprehension of relationality is perhaps a product of the Western world. When my grandfather died, my uncles and aunts began to house my grandmother (without hesitation). Now she lives in an apartment complex with all of her brothers and sisters in laws. She is not ‘single,’ she is not ‘alone,’ she remains connected. She is part of a culture, of a tradition, of a family where this type of individualism (a prerequisite for the Western understanding of ‘Single’) makes no sense. I, too, feel connected to my South Asian culture and people in deeply profound ways. I remember this when I’m the only brown body at an Indian restaurant in the trendy immigrant part of London and I get called bhaiya (brother). I remember this when I hear Hindustani music and begin to tear up because it reminds me of dinners with my mom when things were more simple, when I felt like I had a people, like I had a home.

Yet, the fact that I – as a person of color — continue to valorize a particular type of relationship and relegate romanticism and sexuality to one facet of my relationality is profoundly sad to me. How much we have lost! How narrow-minded we have come to understand our bodies, our capacity for love and desire. Why am I expected to be unhappy (why do I feel unhappy) because I don’t have this type of relationship?

The valorization of this particular mode of relating is not just the fault of social and cultural discourse — we also have agency and perform our trauma every day. I perform it when I insist to my friends that I “don’t see ___ like that, that we are just friends.” We create these boundaries, these silos, these distinctions. We divide our love in ‘appropriate’ quantities for ‘appropriate’ relations. We divide our capacity for love into different ‘types’ – friendship love versus REAL love. We perform the trauma of Singlehood. We listen to melancholy song lyrics and post passive aggressive LOVE ME Facebook statuses

Wake up! You and I are receiving love in every fiber of our being right now. It is a tragedy that we cannot see it. That we cannot explore it with everyone we relate to every day, because we are all fixated on such a narrow understanding of a ‘happy’ ‘successful’ relationship that we ignore, deny and legitimize the wonderful, complex, and protean relations we are already a part of.

What purpose does a hegemonic notion of relationality and love serve? Let’s unpack this by thinking about what we first think of when we think of ‘love.’ When we think of love we think of Valentines Day, of marriage, of happy couples smiling, of families.

In particular, I think of my white peers in high school who looked so happy being dropped off by their trendy moms who loved their totally hot dads. My understanding of ‘love’ is deeply imbedded within a milieu of social oppressions – oppressions that construct particularly racialized, gendered, sexualized, class-based bodies as desireable, as ‘normal.’ I am shocked that I’ve waited until now to problematize love, considering that as an activist and scholar I’ve been so committed to dismantling other systems of normalization.

Normal love oppresses us because it polices our capacity for desire and pleasure. Because we are grown up in a world that re-enforces the idea that ‘true love’ can only be found through one (hegemonic) relationship structure, we deny the love we experience from all the other relations we are a part of. Thus, we are denied the capacity for increased pleasure.

Imagine if we were to open ourselves up to multiple ways of desiring, of being, of relating? Imagine if we could experience emotional orgasms just by having a good lecturer, by just having a good conversation with a friend? We’d be happy all the time! Heartbreak wouldn’t be nearly so traumatizing.

Why would the systems that oppress us want to love in this particular way? I believe that normal/hegemonic love glues us to the very social infrastructure that oppresses queer desiring bodies in our society.

Pleasure is antithetical to notions of productivity and reproduction. Homosexuality was historically demonized/stigmatized because it involved sex for pleasure rather than reproduction. In fact the term ‘heterosexual’ was first used as a pejorative term to denote people who had sex for pleasure (god forbid!) The State had an invested interest in restricting pleasure and producing a very particular family unit in order to maintain the status quo – to produce similar looking bodies with similar ideas and a commitment to production. This largely bastardized and overly-simplistic queer history of relationality allows us to deduce that our understanding of (monogamous) love is implicated within this heternormative structure of the family. If people loved beyond the boundaries of this hegemonic relationship, then the very core unit of social, biological, and economic production would be distorted and power relations would drastically shift.

To put it more crudely, perhaps we feel upset that we are Single because we are not somehow productive. Think about it this way. Why do I hate the lonely gay man in the bar? I hate him because, to me (thanks to my socialization), he represents a failed life. Our understanding of ‘futurity’ is predicated on hegemonic relationality. Because this man is not part of this relationality (ostensibly) because this man is exploring alternative sites of pleasure and relationality (alcohol, clubs) than what I ‘expect’ for someone whose body looks like he does, I am upset! This rhetoric of failure is deeply implicated within this anxiety. Instead of focusing on how this man might be maximizing pleasure in his later years, I am concerned with why he hasn’t found someone significant. I am nervous that I won’t find someone significant.

Single Identity Activism!

I wish to re-interpret the abject figure of the Single man at the bar as a site of resistance. What is more queer than being Single? Mainstream culture associates being happy, being healthy, being compotent, being productive with being in a hegemonic relationship – anything else is stigmatized, demonized, Othered. What would it mean for us to reclaim this abject subject position? What would it mean for us to say, “Fuck you I am HAPPY being ‘Single’ (in the way that you narrowly define it) because I realize that I am connected to everything in the world!!!

This is a Single’s manifesto.

Think about all the times your friends would define their future on marriage. When they said, “when I get married I’ll….” Fuck that! What about, when I achieve personal social and political liberation I will… What about! When I learn to love myself I will… What about when I finally decolonize from growing up in a small town texas I willl.. Our very notion of happiness, futurity, and progress is colonized by the imperative of the hegemonic relationship structure.

So what are we going to do about it? The personal is political! Let’s began to deconstruct how we let certain people hurt us more than others, why we spend more time with the people we’re sleeping with than the people who actually make us feel the most happy. This is not to suggest that if you’re in a relationship you should immediately break up and be Single (because this would just be endorsing the understanding of ‘Single’ we’ve been given by a heteronormative society). Rather, I’m encouraging us to develop Single Consciousness (a fancy way of conceptualizing self-confidence). Let’s learn to love ourselves and give loves to all others, not just particular bodies or relations. Let’s stop performing the ‘abject’ Single and let’s develop the relations we are already so privileged to be in. Remember that our understanding of love is so narrow and so hegemonic that it denies the existence of alternative ways of knowing, of being, and feeling. If you find yourself falling in (hegemonic) love, make sure that you do not let it seduce you away from all your other connections. Do not lose your ‘self’ in this relationship. Do not define your life’s worth on this relationship. Contextualize it! Think about it within the broader systems of pleasure and relations that you’re implicated in.

Next, we need to think about Single activism in the realm of formal politics and the law. We have to better articulate a queer Single critique of gay rights advocacy which suggests that the only way to love queer bodies is if they’re in a socially sanctioned single relationship. Why is marriage the only way to get 1,137 federal benefits? Why must we be in a relationship to get these benefits? Don’t we deserve them as individuals?

We must provide an intervention to discourse which seeks to construct the ‘Single’ figure as a site of abjection. Think critically when you watch your chick flicks, call your friends out when they’re moping about ‘being single.’ Do not police their relations – let them find happiness on their own terms. We can only change our culture by re-imagining it. I have no idea what this looks like but let’s try our best to make it happen. We need to start asking ourselves what queer love looks like – what it means to actively resist the normalization of a particular way of relating and to open ourselves to all the pleasures and relations around us.

The Politics of Claiming Oppression

The first time I learned that I was ‘oppressed’ was when I arrived as a freshman at Stanford University. University was the first time I met like-minded ‘activists’ and we began to organize around our collective ‘disempowerment.’ I learned how to construct a narrative of my own oppression – as a ‘queer’ ‘gender transgressor’ of ‘color’ from ‘the South,’ I learned about the distinct axes and hierarchies of power (race, sexual orientation, gender identity, geographic location, religious identification) that had caused me to be ‘oppressed’ by society. In college, activism became the way in which I could battle these systems and liberate myself and others from this ‘oppression.’

For the next few years I wrote spoken word poetry about my oppression, I spoke on panels about what it was like for this queer to grow up in Texas, I made a point to remind my largely (neo)liberal University that minority issues were still important. I decided I wanted to major in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Ethnic Studies with a focus in Queer Studies (not just Queer Studies, but Queer of color Studies) (really just a complicated way of saying Me-studies). At first I felt anxious about studying myself, but my professors reinforced my conviction that my narrative, my story had been silenced from history and it was the project of minority-based disciplines to excavate and promote these ‘oppressed’ narratives. I believed them and fell in love with postmodern theory and my increasing capacity to deconstruct my surroundings, understand ‘power,’ and theorize every component of my life. My education reinforced the idea that I was oppressed. I learned about ‘hegemonies’ and the way that power gets allocated and normalized. I learned about the importance of subaltern voice and began to see myself as a necessary intervention, as an important (silenced) subaltern voice.

This narrative of oppression wasn’t limited to my college campus. LGBTQIPA activists confirmed that – yes – I was oppressed, feminist activists agreed, anti-racist activists also gave their vote of confidence. In the issues I became increasingly passionate about – mainly queer, feminist and anti-racist struggles – I found acknowledgment, validation, and solidarity around my ‘oppression.’

I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable about identifying as ‘oppressed.’ In my liberal University, in the activist urban spaces I frequent, hell even in the international activism work I do abroad, I have created spaces of solidarity, of safety, where I no longer receive prejudice; those around me do not merely affirm my identities, they celebrate them. While we still have a long way to go in the rest of the world, I have managed to create and participate in relatively safe spaces.

I want to interrogate how I – a middle-class kid with an incrediblyprivileged education can see myself as ‘oppressed’? What does it mean for me to utilize a language of oppression considering the social spaces of safety I have created? More broadly – what does it mean to claim animmaterial oppression? In this essay I want to open a space for dialogue within our activist communities to discuss (and act!!) on the politics and ethics of claiming oppression.

Two Shades of Feeling: (Im)material Oppression  

What makes me feel oppressed? In this piece I do not want to make the conservative argument that the language of oppression actually createsthe oppression (the horrid self-fulfilling prophesy narrative). What I’m asking is – what makes the language of oppression so meaningful to me considering my social and economic location?

When I envision my oppression I remember what it was like growing up as a (insert all my oppressed categories). My ‘oppression’ is found in my past – it is the time I was first called a faggot, the time I was called a terrorist, etc. My classes on oppression have introduced me to theories that can describe this process – this process of being ‘hailed,’ being ‘Othered’ as the deviant. I could talk to you extensively about the consequent literature on stigma and the psychological implications of being ‘demonized’ as the ‘Other.’ So, it seems, the language of oppression is appealing because it helps explain, contextualize, (and get over) the wound, the injury of difference.

When I think about my own ‘oppression’ I rarely think of the structuralopportunities I have been denied because – while at some level I’m sure that on account of my race and gender presentation I have been denied opportunities – these experiences have not been as significant, as isolating as my (psychological) feelings of difference. This is reflected in my own art and activism. After I identify myself as oppressed, I make a call for acceptance, a call for inclusion – not a call for reparation or redistribution. The oppression that I – and many of my peers – claim that we have experienced stems from a politics of recognition, not redistribution.

Queer theory has made me hesitant to suggest that there is a dichotomy between recognition and redistributive – based justice / activisms (and indeed there is significant work on categories of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ that disrupts this dichotomy), but I feel this may be a useful heuristic to explore further.

Thus, what is psychological oppression? Psychological oppression is afeeling of inadequacy, of being discriminated against, of being told that one is ‘wrong.’ Psychological oppression – to extremely oversimplify – is a condition of the mind, the spirit. It follows that material oppression is one that is more concerned with the ‘physical,’ the body. Material oppression is violence, it is poor working conditions, it is poverty, it is hunger, it is homelessness. Certainly psychological oppression informs the material and vice versa, but for the purpose of my argument we will maintain a relative distance.

What strikes me is how when I think of my other ‘activist’ friends, when I think of my courses at school and the theories and disciplines I have come to adore (and fetishize), I recognize that they are mostly concerned with psychological oppression. Indeed – why do we have a Queer Studies and a Women’s Studies, but not a Poverty Studies, a Violence Studies? Why have my studies in ‘Critical Theory’ been more concerned with affect than statistics, more curious about art than healthcare? How can we have minority studies that are written in a discourse that is only accessible by my ~intellectual~ peers?

We must reconsider how the language of oppression has been dominated by the psychological – at the cost of – the material. While we – as activists – often pride ourselves on featuring the subaltern, we have to recognize that perhaps the greatest subaltern cannot speak. This ‘subaltern’ may be illiterate, too poor to even engage with our discourse, to concerned with surviving material pain to articulate a ‘critique’ of our ‘discourse.’ And those privileged few who overcome psychological and material oppression who do speak are often marginalized by the discourse of our psychological oppression.

This is because our discourse is sexy. It is sexy not just for us, but also to those who listen and feel appropriately guilty. A discourse of affect, of feeling, of Otherization is much more palatable than a discourse of poverty and violence. While we use our language of (queer) oppression to critique phenomena like gay marriage perhaps we should reconsider – maybe we are just like gay marriage. When we articulate our psychological oppression and call for acceptance the challenge we are making, the critique we are articulating, really isn’t that radical. Yes, it’s demands difficult paradigm and conceptual shifts to eradicate notions of gender, sexual identities, racial difference, etc. but these notions function at the level of the ideological. It does not, necessarily, involve a call for money, an increase of taxes, a call for assisted labor, giving up a home.

What if our discourse around our own oppressions is hegemonic? What if it is a result of our relative bourgeois privilege and has actually distanced us from the communities we are (ostensibly) so interested in empowering. Sure, our rhetoric has effectively empowered our individual and collective identities – but at what cost? I do not mean to suggest that we should stop speaking about how we are oppressed; rather I am calling for more scrutiny in the way that we speak about our own oppressions.

We need to think more about the silences in our discourse. Sure there are always Marxist and anti-capitalist critiques of our identity politics, but instead of viewing them as critiques, what if we reviewed them as indicative of significant ways in which we have allowed our own material privilege to create a language of oppression that only applies to us and our own issues? How have we created a discourse and rhetoric of oppression that mandates a particularly privileged visibility and intelligibility? How can we expand our discourse to incorporate subjects who may not be able to draw as linear of an oppression narrative, may not be able to explain feelings of differentiation and inadequacy like we do.

Additionally, we need to think more strategically about how to make simultaneous claims to psychological oppression considering perpetuating material oppression. I do not want to suggest that all material oppression must be overcome before we articulate a more social activism and politics, instead, I’m interested in new ways to build connections and intersections for multi-issue based advocacy. For example – it is all to easy for me (and other queer theorists) to critique the queer movement’s prioritization of gay marriage (it’s so normal!). But, the fact remains that many gays and lesbians are not going to stop lobbying for gay marriage – an institution that is central to their psychological oppression. Rather than simply critiquing this excess privilege, what if we thought of new ways to embed a language of material queer oppression – homelessness affecting queer youth, violence against trans people – within this more normative and sexy discourse? Perhaps this is an impossible project – perhaps psychological oppression will always dominate the material in our capitalist society, but I’d like to see more genuine effort before we draw that conclusion.

The Failure of Intersectionality: Reconsidering Hierarchies of Oppression 

The critique that I am advancing suggests that we interrogate more seriously the nature of the identity and oppression frameworks we have constructed. In particular, I want to reconsider the way that we have come to view and utilize the concept of intersectionality.

A facile response to my critique would be to suggest that all of our identities are intersectional. While I may only be psychologically oppressed on the basis of my racial identity, other people (due to their economic, geographic, political locations) may experience enhanced (perhaps material) oppression on the basis of their racial identities. We cannot speak about a category of ‘racial oppression,’ without thinking about the multivaried ways that other axes of identity/oppression shape ‘race.’

While intersectionality has certainly been useful to me and my peer activists I can’t help but wonder – can ‘class’ really be reduced to an intersectional status? Intersectionality – or at least the way we have conceptualized it – allows me to draw the following conclusions: I am oppressed on the basis of being queer, but poor queers are differently (and perhaps more) oppressed on the basis of their socioeconomic status. Intersectionality permits us to acknowledge material oppression, but still insist on the importance of the psychological – to suggest that there is violence against some queers, but insist on the validity of my own oppression.

What if our concept of intersectional oppressions as actually perpetuating violence against those who experience material oppression? My critique is not of the theoretical phenomenon itself, but on the way that is has been exercised. Let us recall, for example, the glorified history of activist social movements of the 1970s. Activist groups like Gay Liberation Front began to usher in a new era of activism one in which they made parallels with their own oppression (on the basis of sexual orientation) to other oppressions (most notably, racial oppression). While these concepts of solidarity and intersectionality were great in creating the illusion of a human rights activism, they actually eventually lead to an increased ghettoization (where activist movements like GLF and the Women’s movement were criticized for only focusing on single-issue, narrow-minded understandings of identity). This failure speaks to the way that we acknowledge, but do not internalize intersectionality. The gay movement acknowledged racial oppression, but insisted on the importance of fighting for gay rights.

What if intersectionality really means that we should not fight for gay rights? What if intersectionality was interpreted to mean that we should not have such a thing as ‘racial justice’ or the ‘women’s movement?’ If our issues are truly intersecting and mutually constructive of systems of power, wouldn’t it be more advantageous (for us all) to identify the most marginalized issues and work toward the most privileged? Because, if the logic of intersectionality follows, by fixing the systems which oppress the most violently, we will in turn have no need for a ‘gay’ rights – right? But ahh – here is where our contemporary usage of intersectionality complicates things. It is not PC to say that one issue is ‘privileged’ because we all experience our own individual conceptions of oppression and goddamnit the gay movement should be able to continue, even if it is anti-thetical to an anti-capitalist movement! We can’t seem to agree which issues are the most ‘important,’ the most ‘marginalized,’ so we (often) end up fighting for those issues which directly relate to our own feelings of oppression and hope that somehow it will all work out. But what if this disagreement — these complications — are a result of our greed, self-interest and  inability (and lack of desire) to grapple with material oppression?

As history has revealed, this ‘Me-Politics,’ this self-promotional politics without a frank analysis of class has lead to a continued silence around material oppression. Rather than being taught new and creative ways to end global goverty, address the affects of colonialism, end homelessness I am learning ways to understand how heterosexuality has oppressed homosexuality.

 How have we been reduced to this? How have oppressive systems allowed psychological oppression to continually suppress the material? How can we shift our discourse, our pedagogy, and our activisms to address material oppression?

 Conclusion

I am confused and I am disturbed by the implications of the argument(s) that I am advancing. Within this own piece I have been self-contradictory: at points I argue that we should work towards an activism that allows us to advance the issues of psychological oppression along with material oppression and then go on to argue that perhaps it would be more useful (for us all) to engage with the material first. My confusion – in many ways – reflects the position of a generation.

We are young and impassioned activists who have learned a lot about oppression in college. We genuinely want to improve the world’s condition, but the models that we have been equipped with are becoming increasingly antiquated. This piece – this blog as a whole – is an attempt to grapple with a harsh reality: what if the paradigms of oppression, what of the frameworks of (post-) identity that we have learned and loved are actually antithetical to justice for all?

I encourage you (and myself) to think, reflect, and act. Here are some suggestions:

1. Let’s stop constructing  meta-narratives of oppression. Not all people conceptualize oppression the way we do and we must not universalize this discourse.

2. Let’s be discerning and economical (pun intended) in the way that we present our oppression. For example, I’m going to be much more cautious as seeing myself as an ‘oppressed’ person, especially in terms of what that means for others who actually experience material oppression

3. Let’s devise creative ways to address material oppression and embed this discourse within our own advocacy and theory. This will involve taking math and economics classes.

4. Let’s demand more analysis of capitalism, class, (neo)colonialism and other topics that are not adequately addressed in our social justice curriculums

5. Let’s reconsider the limitations and promise of intersectionality and think more critically about what it means to claim solidarity with material oppression, but distance it from our own advocacy and activism