Author: MB

In Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs, Jan Zita Grover discusses the concept of “the burden of scarcity” (Grover, 187). When representations of a given group are in short supply, that rarity can distort the public perception of the group by overrepresenting or underrepresenting certain aspects of the group. One example cannot possibly capture an entire group of people with different identities and experiences, but society could view a single photograph or statement as representative of a large group. The burden of scarcity, therefore, is the burden of the expectation that a single object or action can meet all of the varied, and sometimes conflicting, expectations places upon it. It also refers to the pressure for members of underrepresented groups to act as ambassadors of their group and to police their actions to avoid negatively impacting the perception of their group.

The burden of scarcity still exists. Though this is obviously a small sample size, I have personally policed myself to represent groups I am a part of well. Until the last month of my senior year, I was the only openly queer person in my high school, and I felt a lot of pressure because of it.

 

Reference

Jan Zita Grover, “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs”

Zachary Blair’s Boystown describes the way that digital media reinforces racism and racial segregation in Boystown, a prominent gay neighborhood in Chicago. In 2009, following a series of violent assaults in the Boystown neighborhood over a short period of time, residents formed multiple watch groups as well as a sort of “digital neighborhood watch” on Facebook (Blair, 292). While the intention of these digital efforts was to stop or reduce violent crime, they reinforced racial segregation by taking and sharing pictures of people of color in the streets (Blair, 293). These pictures were posted to the Facebook group and depicted people of color as disproportionately responsible for crime (Blair, 294). As a result, “digital interactions…legitimized racism by providing Boystown residents and business owners with social experiences that supported degrading and criminalizing people of color” and shifted race relations in the community (Blair, 298). This led to white residents redefining crime to criminalize people of color by enacting fictitious noise and loitering ordinances (Blair, 298). The Facebook groups also gave a platform for the sharing and legitimization of racist views (Blair, 298). “Boystown’s neighborhood-based digital practices…create and exclusionary heteronormative environment where racism can flourish” (Blair, 300).

Reference

Blair, “Boystown. Gay Neighborhoods, Social Media, and the (Re)production of Racism”

Spade identifies the idea that anti-discrimination law perpetuates “the false impression that the previously excluded or marginalized group is now equal, that fairness has been imposed, and the legitimacy of the distribution of life chances restored” as a shortcoming in current law reforms (Spade, 43). This idea cuts off room for further growth because it, inaccurately, portrays the struggle as over.

He also identifies the conceptualization of how hate crimes are motivated as a shortcoming in hate crime laws (Spade, 42). By thinking of a hate crime as a bigoted individual versus a trans person, the proposed hate crime statues ignore systemic transphobia (Spade, 42). Additionally, this conception of transphobia reflected in laws would mean that only individuals who overtly, and provably, considered the victim’s gender expression could be legally punished (Spade, 43).

 

References

Dean Spade, What is Wrong with Rights?

 

The antisocial thesis in queer theory is the idea that homosexuality is inherently incompatible with community, sociality, civic service, and traditional qualities of good citizenship (PMLA, 819). Something that stands out to me is the idea of the “cult of family in the United States that never questions the value of biological reproduction” and its relationship to non-procreative love with respect to fears about mortality (PMLA, 820). Another premise of this that stands out to me is the idea of sex as anti-communitarian (PMLA, 823).

Politically incorrect erotic desires are an opposition to the antisocial thesis because labeling desires as incorrect is a method of alienating members of the queer community that can only be rectified by acknowledging difference (Rodriguez, 342). Rodriguez supports a future of queer sociality based in recognition of differences instead of antisociality, and talks about the ways that the political right demonizes sexualized and racialized subjects and that the queer community disavows those things in response to that (Rodriguez, 332). Rodriguez claims that the “inability to recognize the alternative sexual practices…that exist outside the sightlines of cosmopolitan gay white male urban culture” is fundamental for antisociality, which does not have room for sexual possibilities outside of those identities (Rodriguez, 333). Because of this, Rodriguez writes about fantasies whereas Bersani and the PMLA focus on actual practices because antisociality is framed around certain sexual practices emphasizing white, able-bodied men and does not have room for sexual possibilities outside of those categories (Rodriguez, 335).

 

References

Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave

PMLA, The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory panel

Rodríguez, “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies”

 

In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, there is a sex panic surrounding sex that is not for procreation, which exemplifies Rubin’s use of them term. Homosexual sex is explicitly forbidden, as is abortion and birth control, and the sex that is purely for procreation is lacking in intimacy; these restrictions against sex for reasons other than procreation is enforced militarily.

Asexuality complicates this because, in a society that is focused on sexual practices and desires, they lack sexual desires. Sex is central in the society of The Handmaid’s Tale; however, the citizens are not acting on sexual desires as much as societal obligation enforced by violence. Therefore, asexuality complicates this universe because asexuals don’t desire sex at all, meaning that although they would not be having sex for reasons other than procreation, it’s unlikely that they would be having sex for procreation either.

References

Rubin, Thinking Sex

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex

 

Image retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4504744/Joseph-Fiennes-plays-rapist-Handmaid-s-Tale.html

The last stanza of Gloria Anzaldua’s poem To live in the borderlands means you… reads “To survive the Borderlands/ you must live sin fronteras/ be a crossroads.” If you inhabit  seemingly contradictory or mutually exclusive identities, it can be hard to embrace all of them. However, the places where those identities intersect, at least in my experience, are often the most authentic parts of a person. This is what she means by “crossroads.” To live without borders between identities is to survive and truly thrive. This stanza means that to live well with multiple identities is to erase the lines separating them, and to be a holistic, whole person.

The transitions between English and Spanish feel very natural to someone with an understanding of Spanish. The words she chose to include in Spanish seem to be words that are commonly understood, even by those who are not fluent in Spanish. This is significant because it maximizes the number of people who will relate to the poem by maximizing the number of people who understand all of the words.

Reference

Anzaldua, “To Iive in the borderlands means you”

In her essay “The Whiter the Bread,” Alison Reed asserts that the “…fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms. Whiteness, then, goes unacknowledged and unexamined, while uncritically reproducing multiculturalist logics that mainstream visibility can smooth over ongoing injustices, precisely by exploiting the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed, 57).​ “Embodiment in post-racial terms” is the embodiment of racialized people in a society that considers itself beyond viewing race as more than a construct.  Post-identity politics is the idea that all identities are constructed (Reed, 51).  The idea of a post-racial society comes from the misguided idea that racism in the United States ended with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. The “hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” is the result of queer political movements’ attempts to draw parallels between the struggles against oppression on the basis of race and of sexual orientation. White queers disavow their privilege in order to maintain a stance of injury, meant in either physical or emotional terms. This leads to white queers identifying with an othered group, and denying any privilege in order to avoid dealing collectively with privilege inherent in whiteness (Reed, 50). This use of single-issue identity politics is harmful, and the fetishization of racialized black bodies is thereby necessary to perpetuate an idealized cohesive queer community (Reed, 50).

 

Reference

Alison Reed “”The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”

Queer theory is a field of academic inquiry that examines both the structuring of society into “normal” and “queer” categories and also the impact of these structures and their relationship to power differentials. As an undergraduate, I majored in neuroscience. Perspectives from queer theory would be useful to neuroscientists because neuroscience is moving towards finding the biochemical explanations for human experiences, and queer theory could be a valuable lens through which to view some of those experiences. More specifically, neuroscience has not identified the structures that give rise to gender expression and queer theory would be valuable to anyone interested in identifying those. As a genderfluid person with a neuroscience background, I’ve often wondered about what is going on in my brain on a neuroendocrine level that is influencing my gender. There are also sex and gender biases in research, which is what many neuroscience students do with their degrees, so queer theory would be useful to them in fighting that.

Cathy Cohen wrote that the institution of marriage helped to exploit black bodies and justify white supremacy (Cohen, 454). She gives the example that marriage, historically, has been applied to civilized people who could regulate their sexual desires, but it was legally excluded from slaves. In that way, marriage reinforced white supremacy because black people who were involved in the injustice of slavery were unable to participate in legal marriage, which was a sign of civility. This is relevant to Cohen’s discussion of coalition politics because it underscores the importance of intersectionality of identities. Marginalized groups coming together for coalition politics experience a shared loss of power but their potential is diminished when the members of the coalition ignore the inherent intersectionality of sexual orientation, class, gender, race, and other factors which can put them on the side of their group’s oppressors on some issues (Cohen, 482). Coalition politics is hard because the groups in the coalition need to support one another and acknowledge aspects of privilege that they experience.

References

Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”

 

Hollibaugh’s main point in this paragraph is that the queer political movement has shifted from a struggle for freedom and sexual liberation to a movement for extensions of heterosexual rights to homosexuals. She complains that the current political movement is aimed towards “gay nuclear family rights and for serial monogamy” while it once aimed for sexual liberation. She concedes that there has been a great deal of progress in the current trends of the movement, with gender conforming gay people trying to fit in with the rest of society, but thinks that the gay liberation movement has lost something in it’s attempts to normalize queer people. She says that the gay liberation movement has shifted from a movement about a diverse culture’s freedom to a movement about normalizing a conforming subset of that community.

Wilchins claims that white American culture is one of the only cultures that splits sexual orientation from gender (27). On page 19, Wilchins discusses how this distinction might be questionable, giving the example of sexual orientation impacting gender expression in the form of clothing. She quotes a woman who wants the right to be a lesbian in her sexual orientation and also to look like a stereotypical lesbian in her gender expression with clothing. The first time I wore a tie around my parents, they exclaimed that it was for boys. That made me feel insecure and vulnerable. I think that the links between sexual orientation and gender expression are most obvious in people who fit into male/female, homosexual/heterosexual categories as binary oppositions, and that the connections between those aspects of identity become extraordinarily difficult to parse out for anyone who falls outside of either, or both, of those binaries.