QUEER LIBIDO

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.’ I am interpellated; I become hailed as ‘Single’  — 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 queer 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). Before embarking on this project I want to admit that I am anxious. What does it mean for me to deconstruct the very affect, the very mood I am experiencing in this moment? It feels perilous and I’m bound to make mistakes. But in the spirit of today, let’s rip cupid’s arrow out of our spleen and use it as a pen.

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. It is this discourse of this ideology – expressed through mechanisms like Facebook — that conflates single with being alone.

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 bhiya (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 queer 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