Author: YD

In the context of Jan Zita Grover’s “Framing the Question: Positive Imagery and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs,” the burden of scarcity, in my interpretation, first necessitates a lack of media or popular exposure for or of an under-, mis-, or un-represented group of people. This creates the ‘scarcity.’ The burden is more complex. When it comes to portrayals of these groups of people, since there are not many making the rounds in popular culture, the portrayals that are seen become representative of the group as a whole. For instance, lesbian erotica. In the art exhibition Drawing the Line, by Kiss & Tell as discussed by Grover, the same lesbian couple was portrayed “in a variety of sexual desires and practices ranging from hugging and soft kissing through whipping, bondage and voyeurism.” [1] People’s recorded responses were limited to analyzing the particular pictures and the acts within, rather than the larger ‘picture’ if you will, of the fact that the depicted couple was the same as in previous images. These reactions were therefore to a representation of a romantic/sexual action rather than to the action itself. This brings us to the burden of scarcity. Without mass exposure, people only have small bits of information to go off of when interpreting the lived experiences of un-, under-, and mis-represented groups.

Such lacks of exposure persist to this day with the dominance of the white male in the film industry, for instance, among many others. As summarized by an article on two studies published by USC and UCLA, “When evaluating race and ethnicity of characters in film and television, 71.1 percent were white, 12.2 percent black, 5.8 percent Hispanic/Latino, 5.1 percent Asian, 2.3 percent Middle Eastern and 3.1 percent considered “‘other.'” [2] This whitewashing of media leads to a scarcity in exposure to the lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed groups thereby creating the burden of scarcity in the media that is released and in the privileged public’s interpretation of marginalized peoples.

[1] Grover, J. Z. (1991). Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs. In Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs(pp. 184-190). London: Pandora.

[2] Austin, P. (2016, February 22). Hollywood Whitewashed: White Men Dominate Film Industry, Studies Confirm. Retrieved from https://patch.com/california/hollywood/hollywood-whitewashed-white-men-dominate-film-industry-studies-confirm-0

Boystown in Chicago used to be seen as one of the safest neighborhoods in Chicago. With the hit of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, people started channeling anger and hatred toward the LGBTQ youth of color of Chicago for the decreased rent and property values and an alleged increase in crime (even though police records show an apparent decrease from the previous years). Social media played a large roll in this channeling of racist fears and (white) homonormativity. Facebook groups like Lakeview 9-1-1 and Take Back Boystown frequently saw posts with photos and videos taken of queer POC demonizing them with racist, classist, and transphobic ideologies, blaming them (the others)for the apparent increase in crime and decline in property value in Boystown. [1] Noise complaints, loitering, drug possession, and other petty crimes were used to blame the queer “street youth” of color of Chicago for more violent crimes like assaults and muggings. What was neglected, however, were the loud drunk white gays outside bars, the white drug dealers, the white ‘trouble makers.’ Anecdotes from trans women of color indicate an increase in racism and a willingness of residents to be more open about their racist/transphobic/bigoted attitudes in Boystown, which they mention used to be a place of acceptance and safety. Not that there wasn’t racism in Boystown before, but the effects of social media creating an echo chamber of bigoted hatred toward queer POC were such that these previously suppressed attitudes became more mainstream.

 

[1] Blair, Z. (2016). Boystown: Gay Neighborhoods, Social Media, and the (Re)production of Racism in E. P. Johnson (Ed.), No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (pp. 287-303). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Law reform projects, while often well intentioned, are unable to protect the ‘more vulnerable’ people in the trans community, or even the majority of trans folks. While it can be true that the more privileged (read middle-upper class white trans folks) many see some level of benefit from the inclusion of nondiscrimination laws, these laws fail to account for systemic oppression and multiple factors of oppression such as race, sex, class, etc. Furthermore, these laws only add to the arsenal of those systems which perpetuate systemic oppression and that are the largest perpetrators themselves of discriminatory violence. As Dean Spade wrote in Chapter 2 of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, “Since the criminal punishment system itself is a significant source of racialized-gendered violence, increasing its resources and punishment capacity will not reduce violence against trans people.” [1] If real change were to happen, expanding the power of the police and of the criminal justice system is not the place to start.

[1] Spade, D. (2015). Normal life administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

To me, antisocial thesis in queer theory is the, at least partial embracing of homophobic views of homosexuality in order to contend and undermine the socially constructed heterosexual view of self. That is not to say to agree with homophobic view of homosexuality, but to use the views against themselves. As Tim Dean put it in “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” “The burden of ‘antisocial thesis in queer theory,’…is not that lesbians and gay men are unsociable but that some aspect of homosexuality threatens the social and that it might be strategic politically to exploit that threat. Homosexuality can be viewed as threatening because, insofar as we fail to reproduce the family in a recognizable form, queers fail to reproduce the social.” In order for homosexuality to be threatening, there has to be an intrinsic homophobic stance taken as a starting point to completely demolish homophobic views. Furthermore, the concept of utopia stands out to me as particularly moving. As Juana María Rodríguez put it in “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies,” “The work of utopia must always be both a casting of possibilities and a tireless critique of the present.” By viewing queer theory in an antisocial frame, antisocial in the sense that the concept of queerness combats the heterosexual patriarchal hierarchy, and by imagining a utopia in which these hierarchies cease to exist, the conditions of the present can be critiqued from the theoretical framework of a “perfect” world. As a utopian society does not exist, all theorizing from the utopian viewpoint must be fantasy. As Rodríguez put it, “Fantasy offers a venue for exploration and pleasure that is available to anyone who dares.” By also looking at sexual fantasies rather than sexual practices, sexual possibilities rather than sexual realities can be taken into account in the queer narrative.

I believe that the image presented here perfectly exemplifies what Gayle Rubin termed “sex panic.” In Rubin’s own terms, “Right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and premarital sex moved from the fringes to the political center stage after 1977, when right-wing strategists and fundamentalist religious crusaders discovered that these issues had mass appeal.” It is exactly this opposition to sex education and anti-homosexual sentiment (as well as media sensationalism) that led to the misidentification of this flag of dildos and sex toys as an ISIS flag. It is essentially the stigma against the erotic that caused this misidentification, and demonstrates the true nature of “sex panic.” However, Rubin’s arguments about sex panic are entirely hinged upon the Western emphasis on the “sexual imperative,” as Ela Przybylo puts it. There is no mention of asexual erasure, e.g. insisting that asexuality cannot exist, or that the asexual experience is not valid. The image I present is innately sexual as the objects depicted on the flag are for the sole purpose of sexual acts. This complicates sex panic in the context of everyone within society as not everyone in society has sexually driven thoughts and / or feelings. 

 

Asexuality and The Sexual Imperative: An Interview with Ela Przybylo

Thinking Sex

The author of To Live in the Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua, is of mixed race as she tells us in second and third stanza of the poem. The poem continues to discuss how torn she is living in the “borderlands” “caught in the crossfire between camps.” The author cannot choose a side as she doesn’t fit in with any specific one as seen in this stanza:

To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

The poem switches between English and Spanish which is a linguistic representation of the fact that she is stuck between cultures and doesn’t fit in entirely with any. In other words, to live in the borderlands is to not have a voice and to not fit in with any specific culture. That is why the last stanza of the poem reads: “To survive the borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.” In English, “sin fronteras” translates to “without borders.” The author is implying that to survive, you have to be a bridge between cultures and to help people from different cultures and ethnicities understand each other.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live In the Borderlands Means You,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194-195.

Embodiment in post-racial terms in the context of the aforementioned quote indicates that fetishizing blackness in post-racial terms, or in other words, fetishizing blackness while erasing black identity, reinforces the racial power inequalities that be. Furthermore, this erasure has caused a “white queer politics of injury” that presents white queerness as the state of being ‘other’ without taking into account the major privileges involved in racial identity in order for white queers to take the stance of a victimized ‘other.’ By ignoring race in talking about queer identities, a major privilege is thus ignored and it is therefore counterproductive to view queerness in terms of the neoliberal concept of being ‘colorblind.’ As society stands, race is intimately intertwined with all a person’s identities whether such intimate involvement is acknowledged or not. By not acknowledging race and by ignoring it in queer theory, white supremacy is further enabled with the framing of being progressive, rather than addressing the inequalities and power structures that progressive politics are intended to address and dismantle. Amber Musser made clear the importance of addressing race in the context of all of a person’s identities in “Re-membering Audre,” “While Lorde was unapologetic about claiming a multiplicity of identities—mother, poet, warrior, lesbian, black—these identities made her aware of multiple forms of marginalization and enabled her to imagine a feminism robust enough to tackle difference and create authentic community.” However, in labeling Lorde as queer, rather than as a black, mother, poet, warrior, lesbian, her racial, maternal, personal identities are erased for the sake of being ‘colorblind,’ but the reality of this erasure only supports the “hegemonic understandings of race,” as Reed put it. Clearly, although queer theory is useful for addressing issues of queerness, its current state of whiteness means it still needs to take into account other identities in order to develop a fuller, more inclusive, more progressive understanding of identity politics and how queerness is seen in the contemporary societal context.

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

Amber Jamilla Musser, “Re-membering Audre. Adding Lesbian Feminist Mother Poet to Black”

My definition of queer theory: Deconstructing and examining prevailing societal concepts of gender/sexuality and proposing new approaches and terminology, while building off of established schools of thought, to form an understanding of how we as individuals and as a society view, interact with, and identify queerness.

To ecology and evolutionary biology majors: Queer theory can offer interesting and much needed insights into separating human societal constructs from biological mechanisms. For instance, in examining gender and sexuality from a biological perspective, it’s is important not to be influenced by preconceived notions of what it means to be a sexual and gendered individual. Queer theory can allow you to transcend the prevailing social concepts of gender and sexuality so that when studying, say, non-heterosexual relations in organisms other than humans, you are inclined more to think about how these actions relate to fitness, social structures, dominance, etc. rather than imposing how human queerness affects us onto another species.

In the scope of ecology and evolutionary biology, queer theory can be thought of as a thought process to separate human societal constructs from the nature of the evolution of non-heterosexual relations in the natural world and how they ultimately relate to, and impact the evolution of populations and their role in ecosystems. Furthermore, queer theory allows you to study how populations of the same and different organisms interact with each other without imposing anthropocentric concepts and notions onto non-human organisms.

 

We have come a long way from the times when interracial marriage was legally prohibited, but that does not mean that marriage is no longer a system used to perpetuate white supremacy. As Cathy Cohen wrote in her article, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics, “The stigmatization and demonization of single mothers, teen mothers, and, primarily, poor women of color dependent on state assistance has had a long and suspicious presence in American ‘intellectual’ and political history.” In this example, it is primarily women of color who are poor and single mothers who are demonized. She points to a quote from The ‘Underclass’ as
Myth and Symbol: The Poverty of Discourse About Poverty reading, “Does that stigma attach to all such households – even, say, a divorced executive who is a custodial mother?” This raises the question of whether it’s really only the marital status of the woman of color that is being called into question, and not her race (hint: it’s definitely about race). In this instance, the marital status of a woman of color is being used to perpetuate white supremacy in the demonization of her as a woman of color while using her choices in marital status (as well as financial situation) as justification for the disguised racism. However, as can be seen by the wealthy white single mother, marital status is not the subject or cause of abuse. What makes coalition politics so difficult is the need to take into account power structures, privilege, and prejudices in play, and noting how they alter the experience of marginalized and normalized groups. To recognize all possible factors at play in perception is near impossible, but to recognize as many as possible and discuss their interrelationships is how we move forward with coalition politics .

The gay liberation movement, as Hollibaugh framed it, used to be about freedom, about bringing the complexity and fluidity of queerness into the social eye to be accepted at face value without pigeonholing groups or recreating the power structures already engrained in society. Now, the gay liberation movement has become what it was trying to overthrow. It is filled with power structures and a vision of the “gay nuclear family.” That is, a family just like the conventional “nuclear family” but gay. Hollibaugh argues that the complexity of the queer community has been shunned in favor of “gender-appropriate gay representatives,” i.e. those that fit within what is now considered conventionally gay. In other words, the gay liberation movement has become about showing that “we are just like them,” as Hollibaugh put it, rather than about moving past convention and the nuclear family and opening up a whole new concept of what it means to be a sexual and gendered being.

Gender and sexuality, according to Wilchins, are intimately intertwined; inseparable. However, Whilchins points out that “White American culture tends to be one of the few that splits sexual orientation from gender.” This rift is especially apparent in transgender rights. Transgender, at one point, became used as a term to describe “anyone who crossed gender lines.” Cross dressers and transsexuals were grouped under the same category of transgender. This description of transgender indicates that there is a near indistinguishable tie between sexuality and gender. We, as a society, have defined gender based on sexuality and have used their respective terms to uphold the gender binary and “traditional” sexual sentiments. What the term transgender goes to show, is this intimate tie. If gendered objects and sexuality can be grouped and accepted under a single term, there must be a strong connection between them. In my own life, I have seen how passing privilege in terms of sexuality is innately tied to gender and traditionally masculine or feminine behaviors. I can easily pass as straight due to my traditionally masculine appearance and many of my gendered and therefore sexualized interests (such as sports, hiking, camping, martial arts, etc.). On the other hand, I can just as easily express that I am not straight by partaking in traditionally feminine activities such as crocheting, winterguard (which is heavily dance based), cooking, jewelry making, etc. I can therefore conclude that gender, and gendered activities lead people to assume sexuality and are therefore intimately related.