Feminist Theories, Single Mothers & Queer Politics

I just finished this paper for my "senior sequence" course in Feminist Theories in preparation for researching and writing my senior thesis. It's lengthier and more academic than what I tend to prefer publishing here. ....I also feel like it's still a little rough and caught up in the limitations of its own theory-speak. But it may be the closest I've come to a comprehensive declaration of academic & activist intent.

Sexual “Dystopia:”
I have this concept for a dystopian short story. In the not-so-distant future, same-sex marriages are legalized, and married same-sex couples are granted the full set of benefits and privileges associated with the marriage institution. Our story opens with a wealthy married male couple deciding to adopt their first child. The couple is interracial, consisting of one Black man and one White man, although in this imagined future, the discourse of “colorblindness” has progressed to such an extent that the mere mention of “race” is social taboo. The White male is intentionally unemployed, while the Black male produces a popular television program that is an amalgamation of the racist minstrelcy of Josephine Baker’s banana dance and the exploitation of contemporary reality television. The program’s cast, consisting primarily of women of color, cohabitate while participating in performance-based competitions. The show exploits the dramas and tensions between the competitors, as the nation voyeuristically thrills to their every “catfight.” In a parallel storyline, a young, pregnant and unmarried Black female is apprehended by security staff at a corporate retailer while attempting a petty scam for pocket cash. She is subsequently arrested, and after police discover her pregnancy, transferred to the care of State-sponsored psychologists, who convince her, with Foucaltian invasiveness, to give up her child and submit to a “rehabilitation” program. This rehabilitation consists of her being cast in the aforementioned reality program in order to instill an appropriate “work ethic,” while her child is given away to be raised by the same male couple with whom our story began.

It may be inaccurate to refer to my story as “dystopian.” “Dystopian” implies exaggeration. In dystopian literature, potentialities are taken to their absolute extreme to render effective allegories. But rather than an exaggeration, I conceptualize my story as political realism, as possible, even probable, within our immediate future. Is my story as conceivable as I imagine it to be? Approximately one year ago, I wrote the following (somewhat overwrought) statement in a blog entry addressing same-sex marriage activism:

Although I frequently feel wired for a particular kind of intimacy, I do not believe mine should be the only acceptable organizational model for sex or love. I am repulsed because I know that so particular a model cannot function for everyone, and because there is literally no widely intelligible language available to legitimize others' choices. This is what terrifies me about marriage activism. That there will be no liberation for the street-walking youth sucking cocks in an alley, that the welfare mother will still be marked a "moral degenerate." So long as the language of respectability governs our lives, so long as we require outsiders to remind us we're inside, to order our senseless reality.

In response, a friend asked, “what does marriage activism have to do with welfare mothers?” His question is valid. Both my statement and my short story assume, but do not specify, certain connections between racist/sexist classism and sexual moralism. What theoretical frameworks have shaped my thinking with relation to sexuality’s intersections with race, class and gender? How do I conceptualize and characterize my own theoretical position?

What follows is a narrative of my intellectual and activist process, an exploration of the theorists who have influenced my current interest in single mothers, particularly poor single mothers of color, as sexually “othered,” potentially “Queered” figures within American heteronormativity, and with the successes and limitations of GLBT and Queer politics with regard to intersectionality and social justice. I begin with an exploration of multiple and interrelated theories of sexuality and power, including Black feminist analyses of sexual racism and concepts of “sexual hierarchies” that emerge from Queer Theory. I then introduce theoretical languages for identifying shifting realities of race and sexuality in the contemporary U.S. that more immediately foreground the need for radical coalitions at the intersections of these systems. Finally, I synthesize these various frameworks to address the contemporary politics of both poor single mothers of color and same-sex marriage activism. By identifying the theories that have brought me to my current location, I illuminate directions for my future research.

Sexuality and Power:

Before exploring Black feminist and Queer theoretical frameworks on sexuality and power, it is necessary to foreground this examination in the Black and multiracial feminist concept of “intersectionality.” Intersectional theories posit White supremacy, capitalist imperialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity as interlocking and mutually reinforcing systems, what Patricia Hill Collins calls a “matrix of domination.” (Zinn & Dill 357). This does not mean that these systems are simply similar in nature, but rather that they are interdependent and mutually reinforcing; you can’t have one without the others. As described in the Combahee River Collective’s seminal “Black Feminist Statement,” “the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (164, emphasis mine). Activist strategies to combat one system of oppression must address its intersecting systems in order to be effective.

Black feminist theorists have long addressed the particular intersection of sexuality and race, providing a history of American sexuality that differs markedly from dominant narratives. This history is grounded in a developed critique of the sexual “othering” of African American men and women within American White supremacy. As Barbara Omolade describes, “the sexual history of the Unites States began at the historical moment when European men met African women in the “heart of “darkness” (362). U.S. racial history is inseparable from U.S. sexual history, as sexualization is always a fundamental component of racialization. Black feminists have consistently exposed, combated and explored constructions of Black Americans as sexual “deviants”. To offer but a few examples, Omolade, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins and Cathy Cohen have grappled with the situation Davis characterizes thus;
The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: The image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality (182).

The constructed hyper-sexuality of Black Americans has been used both to create and justify Black Americans’ position as a wholly separate and inferior category of humanity. As Cathy Cohen explains these histories, “marriage and heterosexuality, as viewed through…the ideology of white supremacy, were reconfigured to justify the exploitation and regulation of black bodies, even those presumably engaged in heterosexual behavior” (505). White South African-American Queer scholar Ian Barnard elaborates on the mutually constitutive nature of race and sexuality, noting “sexuality is always racially marked, as every racial marking is imbued with a specific sexuality…I do not see sexuality and race as disparate constituents of subjectivity or axes of power, but rather sexuality as always-already racialized, and vice-versa” (200). Regardless of their orientation within the dominant American sexual classification system of hetero/homo, all Black Americans are invariably situated outside the White heteronormative ideal.

Queer theorists and related theorists of sexuality contribute alternative frameworks for evaluating sexuality and power by exploring sexuality as it own axis of oppression. In doing so, they move beyond the reductive hetero/homo binary that dominates most U.S. discourse on sexuality to provide more broadly applicable conceptions of sexuality and power. In “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin famously introduced the concept of “sexual hierarchies.” In Rubin’s schemata, sexuality is hierachiezed into a “charmed circle” of “good, normal, natural or blessed” acts and identities and an “outer limits” of “bad, abnormal, unnatural and damned” personalities and behaviors. Rubin’s “charmed circleincludes such normative behaviors and identities as “married, monogamous, procreative, vanilla and coupled,” while the “outer limits” are occupied by “deviant” sexualities” like promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, cross-generationality and public sex. Although different forms of deviance may be more or less penalized at different times in history, sexuality functions as its own axis of power. Socially validated forms of sexuality are defined against their invalid or demonized counterparts. Michael Warner’s concept of the “politics of shame” provides a similar language for identifying sexuality as a prominent axis of power and privilege. Warner theorizes sexual shame as endemic to societies and individuals. Shame experienced broadly at the level of dominant cultural interaction is frequently deflected onto particularly “othered” bodies. Politically specific deployments of sexual shame may then result in hierarchies of shame, with particular acts and identities carrying greater shame than others.

Both Rubin and Warner have severe limitations with regard to sexuality’s intersections with race, class and gender. Rubin’s project of establishing sexuality as an autonomous system of power is imbedded in its historical context. Rubin’s work was a reaction to earlier feminist theorizing that understood sexuality solely as a function of gender and sexual oppression exclusively as product of patriarchy and male supremacy. Thus, her language has a tendency to over-differentiate sexuality from its related systems, treating sexuality, race, class and gender as parallel and similar rather than interlocking and interdependent. Missing from her analysis are the race, class and gender-specific sexualities that inhabit both “the outer limits” and “the charmed circle,” as well as the ways in which sexual hierarchies are mediated by race, class and gender. With regard to the former, the work of Black feminists allows us to see how many, if not all people of color are always already positioned in “the outer limits,” constructed as sexually “abnormal” prior to any engagement with the “deviant” behaviors and identities listed by Rubin. With regard to the latter, we may think of how the privilege possessed by a White upper-middle class heterosexual male allows him to dabble in “damned” behaviors like promiscuity, sex with prostitutes or even homosexual sex without being subject to the same circumspection as less White, middle-class, heterosexually-privileged individuals. Here, Warner provides us with useful language. He differentiates between temporary forms of sexual shaming based upon particular deviant sex acts and the permanently embodied sexual “stigma” attached to particular identities. Where shame can be transcended, stigma is understood as a fundamental or inherent component of particular sexual “others.” But this differentiation also becomes his most profound limitation, as he identifies Queer individuals (here, defined solely as GLBT) as the only persons who experience long-term sexual stigma. This assertion denies the race, class and gender-specific forms of identity-based sexual stigma identified by Black feminists. However, both Rubin and Warner’s work is salvageable when synthesized with the intersectional frameworks outlined earlier. We may understand sexuality as an autonomous system of power and privilege while simultaneously seeing sexuality as a fundamental component of how race, class and gender function to marginalize and empower various groups and individuals. We can augment Rubin’s sexual hierarchies with race, class and gender-specific sexualities while noting the way these hierachies are mediated by race, class and gender. Similarly, we can employ Warner’s language of hierarchies of shame while acknowledging raced, classed and gendered forms of sexual stigma. These theories of sexuality and power provide us with tools for evaluating social and political location of poor single mothers of color, who are situated at multiple intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender. They also help us more accurately gauge the successes and limitations of Queer and GLBT political movements in intersectional activism for social justice.

Race and Sexuality – Shifting Realities:

Recent work by contemporary Black feminists and Queer scholars of color establishes the pressing need for radical coalitions at the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender. The shifting character of race and White supremacy in the U.S. make race’s connections with sexuality, class and gender more prescient than ever.

In her text Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins introduces the concept of “the new racism.” The “new racism” is only “new” insomuch as it illustrates racism’s sophistication and ability to adapt to new conditions, to reflect an illusion of progress while maintaining identical power relations. As Hill Collins establishes, the “new racism” is rooted in historical exploitation and segregation of Black bodies. Although the Civil Rights movements of the 1950’s and 60’s succeeded in abolishing legalized segregation, inequalities remain pervasive. Hill Collins names the disproportionate effects of joblessness, incarceration, HIV/AIDS and sexual violence as well as poor healthcare, education and housing on Black Americans as markers of contemporary inequality. Additionally, segregation remains a reality, particularly in large urban centers where “hypersegregation” through ghettoization occurs.

Manifestations of inequality have become gender and class-specific. Contemporary racial inequalities rely upon class-specific, sexualized masculinities and femininities both in their execution and justification. Realities of middle-class Black successes are used to demonstrate racial progress in a “colorblind” age. Racism, we are told, no longer exists. The social conditions of many African Americans, rather than being caused by systemic power differentials, are caused by cultural insufficiencies. As Hill Collins notes, biologically racist arguments are largely a thing of the past, replaced by arguments of cultural deficiency. Such “cultural” justifications for inequality rely heavily on longstanding hyper-sexualized constructions of Black women and men. As Hill Collins says, “African American progress or lack thereof in achieving the gender norms attributed to Whites has long been used as a marker of racial progress…within a Western sex role ideology premised on ideas of strong men and weak women, the seeming role reversal among African Americans has been used to stigmatize Black people. This ideology…claims that Black masculinity and Black femininity reflect equally problematic conceptions of sexuality” (44). It is necessary to reject dominant gender ideals, Hill Collins argues, as they are inseparable from White supremacy. The “politics” of respectability are no longer effective antiracist practice. Rather, antiracist activisms must direct their work toward class, gender and sexuality-specific manifestations of White supremacy.

Cathy Cohen also identifies class, gender and sexuality-specific forms of racism. Her notion of “cross-cutting” and “consensus” issues in Black political organizing describes the functioning of hierarchies of sexuality and respectability within Black communities. Cohen notes that historically, Black communities have shown a political unity rare among American racial groups. But within the context of the more sophisticated forms of contemporary racism identified by Hill Collins, this unity has begun to break down. As Cohen describes, the dominant political agendas of Black communities are frequently determined by those who wield the greatest degree of power within hierarchies formed by class, gender and behavioral/sexual stigma. Cohen makes a distinction between “consensus” issues understood to affect the black community in its entirety and “cross-cutting” issues understood as divisive. “Cross-cutting” issues tend to be associated with the most “shamed” or “embarrassing” of black individuals – sexual minorities, women and the urban poor. Poor single mothers of color, “othered” by class, sexuality and gender, represent one such stigmatized figure. Both Patricia Hill Collins and Cathy Cohen highlight the need for contemporary Black politics to address the intersections of gender, sexuality and class with race. These arguments highlight the need for radical coalition between Black politics and Queer politics. But these coalitions are additionally impeded by similar hierarchies of respectability within Queer and GLBT politics, as well as by some White and middle-class Queer and LGBT activists’ non-acknowledgment of sexuality’s intersections with race, class and gender.

Poor Single Mothers of Color and Queer Activisms:

In “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” Cathy Cohen applies the theories intersectionality, sexuality and power outlined previously to the particular situations of poor single mothers of color and GLBT/Queer political organizing. The majority of Cohen’s essay is a critique of Queer theory and Queer politics’ failure to address sexuality’s intersections with race, class and gender. Similar to the limitations of Gayle Rubin and Michael Warner’s theories of sexual hierarchy, Queer theories and activisms frequently fail to address the diversity of heterosexual experiences, including the manner in which many heterosexual people of color are far from possessing the full set of heterosexual privileges. As Cohen declares, “an understanding of how heteronormativity works to support and reinforce institutional racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation must therefore be part of how we problematize current constructions of heterosexuality” (40). In Cohen’s argument, the needs and priorities of poor single-mothers of color, whose marginality is justified by heteronormative sexual moralism, could become key sites for emerging Queer activisms. For instance, welfare rights and universal healthcare might be understood as explicitly Queer concerns.

It is my contention that dominant LGBT and Queer organizing’s singular prioritization of marriage rights agendas inhibits radical coalitions and activism for intersectional social justice. In his article, “Welfare Moms and the Two Grooms: The Concurrent Promotion and Restriction of Marriage in US Public Policy,” National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) policy analyst Sean Cahill correctly identifies the discursive relationship between GLBT individuals seeking marriage and unmarried “welfare” mothers, as both are constructed by the Right as threats to heteronormativity. However, he problematically situates these groups’ interests as fully mutual, concluding, “women’s economic self-sufficiency will never be assured by coercion into economically dependent roles, from which many women only recently emerged. And the continued exclusion of lesbian and gay-headed households from the economic benefits that help ensure other families’ well-being will serve only to put them and their children at economic risk” (183). Cahill fails to question whether the social validation of GLBT “marriages” and two-parent GLBT families in the absence of broader reconstructions of White supremacist capitalist patriarchal heteronormative models may serve to directly disadvantage poor single mothers of color. The inclusion of married gays and lesbians within the “charmed circle” may only mean harsher penalties for those still occupying the “outer limits,” including those sexually “othered” primarily by race and class. Marriage is not a politically neutral recognition of one couple’s relationship, but rather a State-sanctioned social privilege. Within intersecting systems of race, class, gender and sexuality-based oppression, privileges for some invariably result in disempowerment for others. As Michael Warner argues, “as long as people marry, the state will continue to regulate the sexual lives of those who do not marry” (96). These realities lead a coalition of radical LGBT scholars and activists to declare, in contrast to Cahill’s statement, that “all families, relationships and households struggling for stability and economic security will be helped by separating basic forms of legal and economic recognition from the requirement of marital and conjugal relationship” (BEYOND).

Building upon my synthesis and application of various Black feminist and Queer theories to the experiences of poor single mothers of color and the successes and limitations of GLBT and Queer activisms for intersectional social justice, I believe my “dystopian” vision emerges as politically realist. It is far from unforeseeable that further marginalization of poor single mothers of color might result from the successes of GLBT marriage activism. However, additional research is necessary to more effectively approach these challenging questions.

Two potential research projects have emerged from my engagement with influential theories. One project is an analysis of single mothers of color -- their sexualization by the State and in social policy, as well as the ways women negotiate these realities. The second project is an in-depth study of GLBT and Queer organizations engaging issues of intersectional social justice, including these groups’ strategies for coalition, their challenges and their allies. How do they sustain their work? How are resources apportioned? How does the current political climate shape their activism? These question lead to broader questions about Queer activism more generally; how are Queer politics currently defined? To what extent does this acknowledge intersectionality? Finally, what may we learn from the groups inhabiting these spaces?


Works Cited:

Barnard, Ian. “Queer Race.” Social Semiotics. 9: 2, 1999. 199-212.

“Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” http://www.beyondmarriage.org, July 260, 2006. Accessed November 18, 2006.

Cahill, Sean. “Welfare Moms and the Two Grooms: The Concurrent Promotion and Restriction of Marriage in US Public Policy.” Sexualities. 8: 2, 2005. 170-187.

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Cohen, Cathy. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

.... “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Feminist Frontiers. Ed. Laurel Richardson, et al. Mc Graw Hill, 6th edition, 2004.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Davis, Angela. Women Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

Omolade, Barbara. “Hearts of Darkness.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995. 362-378.

Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. London: Pandora Press, 1989.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Zinn, Maxine Baca and Bonnie Thornton Dill. “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism.” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim. New York: Routledge, 2003.

"What You Do Best" - Letter to an Onanizing Teen

written January 2005

Dear Timothy,

You’re fifteen years old, and you just “came out.” It seems as though the whole world is either condemning or congratulating you. On the off chance you’ve grown tired of this attention, I have some refreshing news for you. I don’t particularly care. My reaction to your confessed aberrant identity is of no consequence. What is important is that your confession – or perhaps more importantly, your family’s reaction -- situates you within a complex network of power relations facilitated through numerous and structured sexual discourses. The reason this is important has nothing to do with you. Rather, this is important because it illustrates the theories presented in my text The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.

Sexuality is not some inherently stable entity preexisting time and human interactions. Rather, “it is the name that can be given to a historical construct” (105). Within our current social order, sex has been constructed both as a primary location for the exercise of power and as the primary tool for acquiring knowledge of all that identifies us as human beings; “it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds us in darkness” (77). As I’ve argued, the family has become an “obligatory locus” (108) for the construction and perpetuation of sexuality; “its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support” (108). In this sense, your relationship with your mother provides an ideal lens through which to convey what I mean by “power-knowledge-pleasure.”

When you made your “big announcement,” your mother made no attempt to disagree with your conclusion. You didn’t have to explain what you meant when employing the category “gay.” In addition, she did not request your silence, but suggested you speak more openly and to a greater number of individuals. Your gay seminarian stepbrother, your mother’s lesbian friends and colleagues and your stepfather the leftist pastor were all suggested as conduits through which to plug you into “will to knowledge” discourses.
There already existed a proliferation of discourses dating back to the 18th century for explaining, identifying, cataloguing, medicalizing and institutionalizing your aberrant sexual self. It became immediately clear that your sexuality would now influence not only your sex acts, but everything that constitutes the construction of “Timothy.” You “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into [your] total composition was unaffected by [your] sexuality” (43). Assumed qualities such as these, imbedded in the institutional construction of “homosexual,” are a key facet of the “will to knowledge.” Your mother did not repress you. She characterized you. She willed you to transform your “desire into discourse” (21) so that she might experience the pleasure imbedded in her power over your confession. In so doing, she encouraged you to continue your own pursuit of knowledge through pleasure and pleasure through knowledge.

The process of confession has been a key component of the regulation of sexual knowledge through decentralized relations of sex-connected power. After your announcement, your mother subjected you to a fascinating (and very telling) process of sexual interrogation. She asked you not just whether you masturbated, but how often and with what materials. Congratulations, my son! You’re a corresponding figure for one of the four strategic unities in the deployment of sexuality. The “pedagogization of children’s sex” has been one of the most frequently identifiable means through which sexual “truth” and power are both constructed and sought after. Your mother’s declaration that masturbation is normal so long as you don’t do it “too often,” coupled with her assertion that pornography is objectification and therefore an unhealthy expression of sexuality, confirms widely-held notions of children’s sex as “at the same time “natural” and “contrary to nature”” (104). Your sex is “dangerous and endangered” (104). In expressing her concern for your sexual health, your mother experiences a special power-pleasure that comes from her position as “monitor” and “protector.” Additionally, her actions and imparted values strengthen a set of willed knowledges regarding the sexuality of children.

It may seem as though you are entirely at her merciful mercilessness. But not so fast! You are far from powerless. When your mother asked you how often you masturbate, you weren’t exactly truthful. “Once a week,” you said, neglecting to mention that in actuality you masturbate at least once daily, often locking yourself in public restrooms in the pursuit of self gratification. How might your mother react if she knew you went through most of your life in an onanistic stupor? Again, this is of little consequence. What is of consequence is the pleasure and power you experience through the very act of evasion. While your mother exerts power through regulating and policing (but never repressing) your behavior, you know the “pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it” (45). This evasion is itself empowering, “power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement,” (45) you and your mother play out the self-perpetuating power games that define my “power-knowledge-pleasure” principles.

Contrary to widely-held notions, sex is not repressed. In fact, sex is discussed constantly and frequently through a proliferation of discourses fueling numerous and decentralized relations of power. A sexual “will to knowledge” manifests itself both as shared constructions of sexual truths and identities and through the pursuit of a human truth understood to be imbedded in sexuality. Pleasure is experienced through the exertion and evasion of power. The experiences of power, knowledge and pleasure are inextricably connected in our understandings of sexuality.

Timothy, I predict the following in your very near future. Your mother will enter your bedroom uninvited, asking you how your day was while eyeing you with “benevolent” suspicion. You will tell her in no uncertain terms to “foucalf.” Then you will lock the door and do what you do best.
Sincerely,
Michel Foucalt

Shame, Privilege and Pain: A Feminist Autobiography

I don’t like to repeat myself.

As a middle schooler in suburban New Jersey, I was on the receiving end of numerous and vicious verbal assaults, often of a homophobic and misogynist nature.

Fag, girl, ballet boy (I was then a student at the School of American Ballet in Manhattan).

“I love annoying Tim, it’s so much fun.”

“Hello Timmy, my gay friend.”

“Diet Coke break!”

…the last a reference to a television commercial in which a group of women ogle a well-built male construction worker. That my classmates were culturally sophisticated enough to read this commercial’s Queer subtext only resulted in more pointed harassment.

I was only able to keep my cool for so long. Then I would erupt in aggressive physical retaliation; books, binders, even desks were hurled across the room. Once, an incident involving “kick me” signs and wadded up balls of paper hurled my direction resulted in my having to be physically restrained by my fellow students in home room. These outbursts only resulted in slew of additional taunts and nicknames – temprotazm. Timinator. Pscyho boy.

These events were cyclical, repetitive. Several years of my life are a blur of principal’s offices, or of dark corners where I retreated tear-streaked waiting for a school officials to locate and reprimand me, the closest thing I had to sympathetic listeners. At least they always asked “why.” I was shamed by my inability to stop these situations from reoccurring, to become less of a target, to better blend in, to reign in my emotions, to better express myself verbally rather than through violent retaliatory outbursts.

Recently, my therapist suggested that the reason I don’t like to have the same conversation more than once, that I resist reiterating things I’ve already said, might somehow be linked to these adolescent cycles of repetitive shame.

I don’t like to repeat myself.

Since becoming a Women’s and Gender Studies student at DePaul University, I feel as though I have been asked to write multiple “feminist autobiographies,” or to otherwise narrate the development of my feminist consciousness. I’ve privately recoiled from what sometimes felt like the self-indulgent character of these assignments, preferring to focus on the theories, arguments and insights provided by outside sources. As a result, I’ve framed my feminism in terms of intellectual and ideological commitments – transnationalism, intersectionality, social constructionism, Queer theory. But intellectual abstraction, while necessary for drawing connections between experiences and analyzing the construction and maintenance of systemic power and oppression, has its limitations. Intellectualism can mask avoidance or denial, both of experiences of privilege and experiences of pain.

After relocating to a friendlier and progressive private high school in lower Manhattan, I came of age and “came out.” Identification as “gay” was linked with identification as an activist. In the years since high school, I’ve begun to frame my experiences primarily in terms of privilege. My high school was ensconced in East-coast liberal elitism. Anywhere west of the Hudson River was a “square state,” the only acceptable travel destinations located across the Atlantic. My sexuality was characterized by my classmates as a “non-issue.”

My prior experiences of isolation and condemnation have receded into the background. My youth feels bifurcated between exaggerated experiences of pain and privilege, the former feeling as though they happened to someone else, someone who is no longer a part of me. My therapist[1] says this disidentification is common amongst survivors of trauma.

But there are other reasons for my emotional distancing. Although my experiences of verbal harassment did not surface in our discussions until very recently, my therapist and I have spent the past four years analyzing my complex relationship with my mother. It is this relationship that I have seen as most formative of my ideologies, behaviors and patterns. For many years, my mother and I lived alone together as a two-person unit, deeply identified with one another. My mother’s anger at having been wronged and mischaracterized both by her family and social institutions encouraged my own condemnation of injustice. At the same time, the lack of ambiguity in her worldview and her expectations of loyalty and personal excellence became something of a prison as I grew older and felt compelled to differentiate myself. Mirroring the separation in my social experiences are two similarly separate phases of this more private relationship. My middle school years were a time of hyper-connection with my mother as I strongly felt she was my only ally and supporter. In contrast, high school was a time of heated interpersonal battles and painful distancing between us.

My mother assisted me in framing my early adolescent experiences in terms of systemic violence. Together, we condemned what we saw as my middle school’s homophobic negligence as it failed to take seriously verbal harassment based upon “perceived sexual orientation.” But when I later acknowledged my actual Queerness, she was less supportive. I felt that my Queerness was only intelligible to her as a category of victimhood. She repeatedly voiced her fears for my safety, suggesting that I keep my sexuality a secret from my classmates. Although she actively condemns the stigma of gay identity, my mother reinforces the shame of gay sex. Her own deeply-entrenched and moralistic notions of appropriate an inappropriate sexual decisions and behaviors, generally couched in psycholigizing and medicalizing terms of “healthy” and “unhealthy” sexuality have felt genuinely marginalizing. She instilled in me a terror of the purportedly abusive older men who prowled the streets of the West Village in search of younger tail. As a result, it took me a number of years to accept my desires, which often trend toward the older end of the age spectrum. These days, I often react to her influence with a vocal anti-assimilationist sex radicalism that includes condemnation of marriage, fetish acceptance[2] and defense of public sex and sometimes belies my own rather conventional/vanilla practices. An additional dimension of shame accompanied my privileged escape from the hostile environments that greet the majority of Queer youth. My mother frequently contributed to this shame as in our arguments she repeatedly threatened to return me to public school or force me to live with my father in Minnesota, where she declared I might not be so lucky nor so privileged.

Over time, I grew critical of her response to my earlier experiences of harassment. While I needed her to help me contextualize my experiences, I also needed her help to take responsibility for my unhealthy relationship to suppressed anger, an ongoing concern that continues to haunt me as two summers ago I was arrested at O’Hare airport for punching a CTA vending machine that refused to take my dollar bills. That this incident occurred returning from a weekend with my mother is likely not a coincidence.

I don’t like to repeat myself.

Shame again visited me last year as Diversity Outreach Coordinator” for Spectrum, DePaul’s GLBTQ and allied student organization. For some time, I have been haunted by the sense that I am unable to “walk my talk,” that my analyses of power, oppression and privilege rarely leave the classroom to manifest as concrete action. I unconsciously felt that validation from other activists would remove my shame and unhealthfully entered into my year on Spectrum’s executive board seeking an external stamp of approval. The results were disastrous. As I moved into my new position, I felt abandoned by the peers that had supported me the previous year. I didn’t feel attacked, just ignored, as their priorities shifted toward other movements and initiatives with which I was uninvolved. My problematic motivations lead me to communicate badly and behave erratically. When the board declared their intention to plan the final of my six “diversity workshops” without my input, I exploded, making condemnatory public comments about the limitations of student organizing. In response, a fellow group member provided me with a no-holds-barred critique that continues to haunt me, as it seemed to confirm my concerns regarding the inefficacy and privileged intellectual and artistic nature of my activist skills and orientation.

As far as you Tim, you're more problematic than you ever want to let on. I think you thought that you could join in the Women and Gender Studies department, hiding your insecurities behind all the pseudo-academic vernacular that you spew out, hoping that no one would ever see you wipe your nose as it was shoved so far up the professors' asses. But honestly, do your own work and check your male and white privilege bit time, it's appalling. You took on the position of Diversity Outreach Specialist, never did anything with it, yet were in the position to watch the inclusiveness of Spectrum and advocate for marginalized students. If that isn't white male privilege I don't know what is baby.

Aspects of this critique are politically valid, while the individual in question often employs a polarizing and dismissive framework that is damaging within our interpersonal relationship. Negotiating this muddled terrain has been difficult and painful. These experiences, which resulted in the evisceration of my relationships with several key members of DePaul’s Queer activist community, reminded me that shame is crippling. There is no room for ego-based insecurity in activism to combat privilege. My own harsh judgments and condemnations of the limitations of my own activism have prevented me from owning my skills and attributes. Furthermore, my self-shaming was directed outward as I criticized the practices of individuals who daily put their individual welfare on the line in the interests of creating a safer and more inclusive campus.

Coming to this point in my narrative, I begin to realize why storytelling feels threatening, particularly when my stories do not represent me the ways I’ve desired to be seen.

I do not like to repeat myself.

Growing up, I was ever aware of myself as a representative of my mother. In a dominant culture that viciously positions single mothers as the source of all evil both social and moral, I felt responsible for validating her parenthood through my successes. Thus I have always felt drawn toward defending her, even as I’ve grown critical of many of her actions.

In the interest of re-situating my feminist consciousness in personal experience, I conclude this essay by returning to her defense with a series of experiences that were instrumental to my feminist development:

--When I was five years old, my mother explained to me why some people choose to hyphenate their names. In response, I changed my name from Timothy Jones Yelvington to Timothy Jones-Yelvington.

--Also when I was five years old, my mother explained in accessible terms what it meant to be White and male, encouraging me to remain aware of my unearned privileges.

--As editor of a national magazine for the generally progressive Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, my mother introduced me to numerous transnational issues in gender justice.

--My mother instigated my involvement in the “Reconciling Congregation Program” (now Reconciling Ministries Network), an organization working for full inclusion of GLBT person within the United Methodist Church.

For each of these experiences save the second, I might offer a secondary critical note to problematize its limitations. But they are nonetheless crucial to my development. I am learning to own my experiences of privilege and pain.

One of the reasons my Spectrum workshops failed was because I neglected the importance of personal experiences. I thought that perhaps if we spent less time discussing individual negotiations of identity and more time discussing systemic and institutional power structures, members of our group might stop approaching these issues through hyper-individualized frameworks. These goals resulted in workshops that were criticized as dry, academic and inaccessible.

Although I detest repeating particular conversations, ideas, or arguments, my boyfriend complains that I often repeat the same childhood stories over and over again. Yet somehow, despite frequently and self-consciously declaring myself a storyteller, I’ve neglected the power of narrative.

It is frequently necessary to repeat myself.

[1] I am sensitive to the cultural specificity of psychotherapy and its linkages with White middle-class privilege and individualist assumptions.
[2] I remain critical of racist fetishization.

"Broken Ground" and American Dreaming

Multiple feminist critics have remarked that militarized nationalism is frequently a gendered enterprise, supported by particular conceptions of “masculine” valor and “feminine” nurture. Militarized nationalism unifies incoherent populations against the threat of alien “others,” and thus is often inseparable from dominant structures of power and marginalization with relation to race, class, gender and sexuality. Gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized ideologies are mobilized in support of militarized nationalist objectives. Relatedly, feminist critics and activists have challenged dominant responses to the attacks of September 11th. The ideologies and practices critiqued include a romanticized American patriotism that ignores the existence of inequalities both within the U.S. and transnationally; a growing climate of conservatism within the U.S. leading to regressive social policies; the demonization of Arab and Arab-American populations and concurrent racist essentializing of Islam and Islamic practices; the waging of unjust and unjustifiable wars; and a discourse of public grief that ignores the daily violence experienced by various marginalized U.S. population by failing to recognize that the “innocence” purportedly lost on 9/11 is not a privilege afforded to all persons within our borders.

Based upon these developed critiques, one would expect media coverage of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to extend familiar narratives, and analysis of these narratives to fall within semi-predictable perimeters -- the valorization of White heterosexual capitalist patriarchy thinly veiled as American idealism. And to a certain extent, these discourses are present. The New York Times’ lead story from Monday September 11 covers multiple memorial services and events occurring within New York City to mark the anniversary, all filled with romanticized ritual and iconography. The article’s early paragraphs and its first photo emphasize idealized patriarchal family as President Bush is accompanied and supported by Laura in one of her sporadic/strategic public appearances. The article repeatedly engages in a bizarre nostalgia for the days immediately post-9/11, when the nation was supposedly less divided by political disagreement and polarization. Governor George Pataki is quoted as saying, “we had that sense of pride and patriotism and unity…it’s very important that we try to recapture that.” “Unity” as an overriding value is left unquestioned, its gendered/raced/classed/sexualized assumptions, limitations, contradictions and dangers going unacknowledged.

However, also situated on the paper’s front page is a feature hinting at more complex realities. A jump-cut directs readers to a 12-page “special section” entitled “Broken Ground,” which details the lengthy and still-unresolved conflicts occurring over the development of Ground Zero and a 9/11 memorial. High drama ensues through multiple and intersecting narratives portraying a quagmire of competing interests. The article presents a post-9/11 population that is anything but unified, and may be most notable for exposing, although un-self-reflectively, hegemony’s internal divisions and instabilities as various “good old boys,” primarily businessmen and politicians, jockey for position in a complex and politicized battleground. The double-meaning of the article’s title “Broken Ground” itself points toward specific tensions and ambivalences, simultaneously evoking the notion of destroyed, violated land and a productive project begun. Memorials, we realize, are fundamentally political projects. Disputes over the content of a 9/11 memorial reflect disputes over how to make meaning of the events of 9/11. For instance, the proposed Freedom Tower with its phallic structure and corporate office space reasserts the intentions of the original Twin Towers, reestablishing patriarchy and global capitalism at Ground Zero with a message that “our enemies can’t keep us down.” Alternatively, architect Daniel Libeskind’s for a submerged (more feminized?) memorial emphasizing the pit’s “slurry wall” was eventually dismissed as too depressing, perhaps because it threatens to invite deeper reflection on 9/11, reflection that may lead to acknowledgment of related issues such as our complicity in global economic inequalities or U.S. imperialist practices.

The only structural inequality the article actively engages that of class. After 9/11, images and iconography of White working-class and middle-class masculinity have been particularly powerful in consolidating American “unity” against enemy “others.” White male firefighters and rescue workers, like White male soldiers, serve as representations of heroism. Because many White working-class persons, despite their potentially marginal class status, cling to White privilege while remaining invested in often-unreachable American ideals of upward mobility, White working-class individuals have been effectively mobilized in support of post-9/11 conservative political developments. Left unaddressed are the disconnects between these individuals’ experiences and those of the wealthy, elite White men who are most directly linked with dominant power. The article begins to expose this disunity, by highlighting the discontent working-class families of 9/11 victims have expressed as they are largely shut out of a decision-making process controlled by powerful White male politicians and businessmen. The desire for an “appropriate” memorial at Ground Zero has come into conflict with the need to reestablish commercial office space on the site both to keep the Port Authority (the site’s owner) financially solvent and maintain the Port Authority’s contractual obligations with leaser/developer Larry Silverstein. These conflicts represent a unique fissure between the goals of global capitalism and militarized U.S. nationalism – a fissure in hegemony.

As if to resolve these tensions, the article virtually glorifies Silverstein, who as the self-made son of poor immigrant parents epitomizes the “American Dream.” Delighting in Silverstein’s eccentricities, the Times describes him as “a genuine New York character.” And although the Times understands itself as “apolitical,” celebrating Silverstein purely as an entertaining character study, this notion of a “genuine” New Yorker speaks to particular constructions of the “authentic” American. The article reinforces the notion that any White male could become Larry Silverstein if they possessed the necessary drive, asserting that despite their class-based conflicts, White American men are ultimately more connected than disconnected. Through the figure of Larry Silverstein, American “unity,” the unity of White capitalist heterosexual patriarchy, is ultimately preserved.

Queer as Folk and Queer Temporality

I have a confession to make.

I appreciate "Queer as Folk."

That is, I do not solely consume the series as escapism; at times I actually take it seriously, and I do not always temper my enthusiasm with the requisite disdain.

It seems to be customary within both educated progressive Queer circles as well as within sophisticated cultural mileus to dismiss QaF outright, either because it is understood (by progressive Queer circles) to uncritically celebrate "shallow" urban gay male cultures or because it is deemed (by sophisticate cultural milieus) lowbrow and contrived. And should one own up to one's enjoyment of the series, it must always be acknowledged as a guilty pleasure. This may all appear self evident, as QaF is a soap opera, and it goes without saying for many that soap operas themselves should never be taken seriously.

And indeed the series has been artistically inconsistent, repeatedly pushing the limits of credibility with arbitrary "issue" storylines that sacrifice character continuity. Who could forget "out and proud" Emmett Honeycutt's sudden and inexplicable 1st-season descent into self hatred as a member of an "ex-gay" movement, or the fourth season storyline chronicling Justin Taylor's overnight tranformation into a gay vigilante (itself a wasted opportunity for more complex consideration of radical activisms... but perhaps sympathetic and layered representations of radicalism are too much to ask from any mass cultural text.)?

Politically, too, QaF is often reprehensible. Brian Kinney's rapid consumption of top-of-the-shelf capitalist lifestyles goes uninterrogated as "up-by-the-bootstraps" American mythologies are reinforced through the characterization of the working-class but always-unflappable Debbie Novotny, who serves as the series' moral and ethical center... In QAF's atrocious gender dynamics, women provide nurture and stability while men occupy public space as doers and actors. Despite the fact that both of its lesbian characters possess interesting careers that might provide ample material for storylines (Melanie is a human rights lawyer, Lindsey an art dealer), QaF's writer's can find little more for them to do than argue and breed (in addition to mothering the men themselves, "Mel and Linds" mother the children of multiple male characters), rarely allowing them to exit their domestic sphere. QaF's writers proved so unable to conceptualize broader lives for these women that they even reversed an earlier story detail that prevented Melanie from becoming pregnant, as every dyke ought to have a baby. Also, QaF's generally white-washed world is intermittently punctuated with racial "exotics" who provide sexually suggestive comedy, have little dialogue and possess sufficiently "ethnic" first names.

Nonetheless, as the first mass media product to depict a homocentric universe, to cast Queer characters as the stars of their own lives, "Queer as Folk" has many saving graces, particularly where its sexual ideologies are concerned. To use the language of Michael Warner, the series doesn't just combat the stigma of gay identity, but also the shame of homosexual sex. The show's characters frequently espouse a sexual ethics that is similar to what Warner calls "dignity in shame," recognizing their own hypocrisies and inconsistencies rather than making exclusive claims to "appropriate" sexuality. One particularly strong second season episode critiques gay moralism as officials from the local Gay and Lesbian Center refuse to give Brian Kinney a deserved award because of his past indiscretions and reputation; a well-known gay writer advocate of sexual "respectability" is exposed as a compulsive barebacker; and an upstanding and committed suburban couple (who coincidentally resemble a similarly upstanding couple on the fictional TV show "Gay as Blazes") are revealed as swingers. My favorite story arc involves the 3rd season mayoral race of a homophobic police officer who powers his campaign through an attack and crackdown on Queer public spaces. When the stories are character-driven rather than arbitrary, the show's underrated cast (Scott Lowell, Peter Paige and Sharon Gless are particularly strong) absolutely shines. Scott Lowell's depiction of Ted's struggle with meth addiction was particularly riveting (although his subsequent recovery was botched by oversimplification).

"Queer as Folk's" final season -- which my boyfriend and I just finished netflixing -- presents the series at its best and worst. True to QaF form, the denouement is ignited by an implausible, out-of-left-field melodramatic event that at least provides a much-needed shot of adrenaline and allows several actors opportunities to impress. Most of the season presents an obnoxious and reductive binary between "assimilationist," pro-marriage "Stepford Queers" and anti-marriage pathological party boys with "Peter Pan" complexes. The anti-marriage position of Brian Kinney is characterized as reactionary immaturity rather than a principled ethical concern over sexual hierachies.

But by the final episode, the series has once again redeemed itself and provided a surprisingly strong message about Queer diversity and difference (with the aforementioned limitations w/ regard to class, race and gender still present). In one beautifully executed sequence, Michael Novotny, the victim of a recent hate crime, is invited to speak publicly about his experiences by an HRC-esque political body whose spokesperson is a slick Lesbian congresswoman. Michael is mandated to speak to heterosexual audiences as a father and Queer "family man" who is essentially "just like them." His mother Debbie arrives in her usual get-up, a garish red wig and vest covered in gay-friendly political buttons, accompanied by a group of individuals from the diner where she works, including "trannies," "leather daddies," "bears," and other individuals who serve as archetypes of non-conformist and hyper-visible Queer identities. At the congresswoman's behest, Debbie and co. are asked to move from the front to the back row of the auditorium, so that they will be invisible to the television cameras. An incensed Michael throws out the speech provided to him by the press conference's organizers, declaring that in many ways his life is indeed very different from the lives of the press conference's heterosexual audience, as well as from the lives of many other Queer persons. Difference, he argues, is enriching, and it is difference, not similarity that should be the impetus for social and political validation of Queer communities. Although Michael's speech is overly simplistic and somewhat sentimental (lacking a sophisticated analysis of power), it is grounded in what I believe should be the foundation of all Queer politics -- an acknowledgment of both Queer communities and the dominant culture as sites of difference rather than similarity. Although the co-option of the language of the diversity by a text as diversity-impaired as QaF may prove dangerous (I am reminded of the early Ani DiFranco song where she sings, "Your basic average superstar/is singing about justice and peace and love/I am glaring at the radio, swearing/saying that's what I was afraid of."), I believe the speech is useful if it encourages the show's Queer viewers to value pathologized, hyper-visible Queer identities and question the limitations of the strategies of organizations like HRC when they exploit the politics of shame.

Brian Kinney and Justin Taylor's romance also "concludes" on an insurgent note. Brian and Justin choose to cancel their impending marriage ceremony after they realize they are both uncomfortable with the sacrifices marriage will force the other individual to make within their character and life goals. With Brian's encouragement, Justin decides to move to New York to pursue his burgeoning art career. As Justin prepares to leave the apartment for the final time, he declares to Brian they they will inevitably reconnect in the future. Brian reminds him that there is no guarantee that this will happen. Justin notices that Brian has still not returned their wedding rings. He says (paraphrase), "We do not need rings or vows. We already know we love each other." Brian regards Justin with a penetrative gaze that is simultaneously paternal and romantic and says, "You've finally made it. You're the best homosexual you can be." Their final love scene is intense and almost threateningly intimate.

Many of QaF's most literally-minded viewers may interpret this as little more than a "goodbye sex" scene. I saw more. I was reminded of Judith Halberstam's notion of "Queer Temporality." Halberstam argues that Queers possess a unique relationship to time, as many of us never experience the events used to mark the passage of time within heteronormativity, ie engagement, marriage, childbirth, etc. It has been argued that soap operas themselves challenge heteronormativity as the serialized storytelling format constantly disrupts the linearity of heteronormative narratives. On soap operas, happy endings are constantly disrupted. When a couple declares they'll be together forever, it is almost a certain guarantee that their relationship will soon be torn apart by infidelity or catastrophe. Heteronormativity is rarely conclusive and always under threat. As Brian and Justin's love scene draws to a close, Justin dissolves from the frame, leaving Brian naked, prone and alone, haunted by Justin's spectre. Intimacy is simultaneously illusory and tangible. Justin and Brian's final scene celebrates Queer temporality, affirming that their love is simultaneously "outside time," and temporally grounded. Outside time, they produce something that exists intangibly and eternally. Temporally grounded, their connection is fleeting and immediate. Rejecting rings and vows, Brian and Justin also reject heteronormativity's "guarantees" of stability, dependability and permanence, validating alternative forms of intimacy and connectivity. In its final moments, "Queer as Folk" suggests that Queers may possess a special reverence for the magic of the momentary -- a remarkably sophisticated message from a supposed guilty pleasure and contrived mass cultural text.

Giuliani and the Politics of Shame

I'm reading the final chapter of Michael Warner's "The Trouble with Normal," which is all about zoning laws and crackdowns on sex shops and related establishments in New York City under Giuliani in the late 1990's, and as I'm riding home on the train, I'm becoming angrier and angrier about conditions I can't really fight and realities I cannot change, being as this all took place nearly 10 years ago.

But somehow I've never drawn Warner's connections between market capitalism, the corporatization and privatization of public space and sexual moralism/ the politics of shame. Because gay urban space has always been presented to me as homogenous and mass commercialized, it somehow never occurred to me that there was a time when more localized but sexually explicit businesses and more open public spaces facilitated a "gay ghetto" whose inhabitants stood in starker contrast to the mass media's construction of the upper-middle-class White gay male whose hegemony I've always resisted and understood as inextricably linked with these same "ghettoes."

And what makes this chapter of Warner's book particularly intense is that all this shit was going down during my formative years, the era in New York history when I was most intimately connected with the city. And strangely, a great deal of my anger is directed toward my ignorant adolescent self, who regularly walked down the cleansed and threatened Christopher Street strip and by the boarded-up piers completely unaware of the politics in progress. I was, however, well aware of the Starbucksification of Manhattan -- my sophomore year of high school, I wrote a short story for my English class about the spread of corporate retail and dining at the expense of local business, including such details as the opening of the Times Square Disney Store juxtaposed with the death of a young female sweat shop worker in one of Disney's Haitian factories. I was also aware of Giuliani's increased policing (as opposed to protection) of neighborhoods of color and the entrenched racism of the NYPD; the Amadou Dhiallo shooting and subsequent arrests transpired during my junior year of high school. The crackdown on New York's homeless communities was an additional issue that garnered my concern.

But the sexual implications of Guiliani's regime-- and their intersections with White supremacy, capitalist imperialism and patriarchy -- were beyond me. Had I been more aware, I might not have spent an additional six years wondering how heteronormativity (back then I still employed the term heterosexism) was linked with racism and classism and seeking to establish (I was unaware of the work of Queer theorists/feminists of color like Cathy Cohen) more meaningful connections between these systems. When I was aware of Giuliani's moralistic actions, I saw them as beneficial. I actually remember thinking that although Disney might be an evil corporation, it was preferable to have pornography and sex work out of New York City, as both were inherently exploitative and demeaning. News stories about Giuliani's attack on dancing in bars without cabaret licenses seemed more humorous than threatening.

I was raised to fight identity-based GLBT stigma but see gay promiscuity as a pathology in need of correction. This disconnect lead to many years where I loudly proclaimed a politicized gay identity while remaining deeply afraid of actual gay sex. I wonder if a similar condition befalls many of my Queer peers who have been raised in bourgeois liberal urban and suburban settings. We've been taught to accept gay identity but condemn all forms of incorrect gay sex such as promiscuity, fetish, or sex outside of long-term relationships. Some responsibility for this sexual shaming falls directly upon the mainstream, professionalized, corporatized GLBT rights movement of the 1990's. I also think of the youth groups that provided many of us with our first experiences of GLBT community , where contact with older generations of Queer persons was deliberately withheld in order to prevent incorrect and supposedly damaging occurrences of intergenerational sex. Notwithstanding the fact that many of these intergenerational sexual relationships have themselves historically been sites for imparting histories and resistance strategies from generation to generation, this generational disconnect has many additional consequences as most of our generation choose to fully reject Queer history without ever truly becoming acquainted with its players (it should be mentioned that the HIV/AIDS-related deaths of one generation's men is also a factor in lack of trans-generational contact).

My last summer in New York, when I got my first fake ID and started going to bars, I never realized that those dingier or more colorful establishments that most terrified me might offer some of the richest remnants of more resistant, "stigmaphile" (to use Warner's term) Queer cultures of the past, individuals whose stories might have assisted me in constructing a richer Queer identity rooted in more autonomous sexual morals and ethics as an antidote to the sexual shame inculcated by my pro-gay rights but anti-gay sex mother. Instead I wasted time in sanitized lounge-style candlelit bars decorated with corporate images of magazine model beauty, unaware of all the ways I tacitly supported Giuliani's policies of moral crackdown. And that's a genuine shame.

Queer Antiracism

Earlier this week, Peter (my "clipping service, as he is fond of calling himself) forwarded me an article from the New York Times about an internet "flame war" involving White gay pop/rock musician Stephen Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields) and music critic Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker. Although the situation itself is complicated, involving multiple events occurring over a two-year period, the argument revolves around Frere-Jones's contention that Merritt's musical tastes, published both in the "New York Times" and in "Time Out New York" when Merritt served as a critic for that publication, are a reflection of his White supremacist racial bias. Although Frere-Jones is not himself a Black male, the article emphasizes Merritt's distaste for hip hop, whose prototypical performer (as constructed in the dominant culture's consciousness) is a hyper-heterosexualized Black male. In so doing, the article perpetuates one of U.S. dominant culture's most insidious and damaging oppositions: the effete White gay man (Merritt is described as "diminutive, gay and painfully intellectual") vs. the Black heterosexual misogynist. Rather than being attributed to a dominant cultural system that prizes the White middle-class heterosexual union and its "nuclear family" above all other relational models, homophobia is located in the bodies of Black men, who are understood to be inherently violent. In an era of increased consciousness of "gay rights," this lets White heterosexual liberals off the hook for counteracting homophobia, as their homophobia is projected onto a racially "othered" body. Additionally, it provides more fodder for the "cultural deficiency" arguments that justify modern-day American racism. These arguments -- which have their roots in earlier "sociological" studies like the Moynihan report -- attribute racialized inequalities such as poor healthcare, education and housing; joblessness; incarceration and HIV/AIDS to the cultural "insufficiencies" of people of color. In the case of poor African Americans, these "insufficiencies" are almost invariably sexualized, as African Americans' inability to successfully emulate the ideal White middle-class heterosexual nuclear family (an ideal that they can never fully achieve, as it is always already White) is identified as the source of inequalities (this perspective is presented in detail by Patricia Hill Collins in "Black Sexual Politics. The histories of the Moynihan report and other sexualized constructions of African Americans can also be found in the work of Angela Davis, Barbara Omolade and many, many others).

The article incites rather than clarifies, failing to critically explore whether interrogating White individuals' musical tastes is an appropriate or useful site for exposing these individuals' White privilege. The one perspective the article does offer on this question is limited -- Slate Magazine's John Cook decries "the dangerous and stupid notion that one's taste in music can be interrogated for signs of racist intent the same way a university's admissions process can: If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights." Slate's perspective is based upon a conflation of anti-racism with civil rights. But in an era where racism is primarily cultural rather than legal (although there is clearly still legislation based upon fundamentally racist assumptions, such as TANF "welfare deform" and the criminalization of "crack mothers."), Slate sort of misses the point of Frere-Jones's critique. Insomuch as our likes and dislikes can be a reflection of acculturation, perhaps it is indeed valid, as Frere-Jones suggests, to "to look at [our] own preferences and find something that [our] consciousness was not letting [us] in on?"

Also this week, I received an email from an individual who has frequently challenged me on issues of race and privilege. In this letter, he suggested that my friendship choices reflect my White privilege. By maintaining a predominantly White Queer friend base, he maintains that I have tacitly contributed to racialized divisions within my University's Queer communities. My initial reaction was defensive: The persons who are now closest to me are the persons who have been the most consistently present when I most needed them, who have been the most loyal, who have called me most frequently to remind me that they miss me and wish they could see me more often. I have not chosen my friends on the basis of race. I have chosen them on the basis of merit. A typical White liberal reaction. Racially homogenous friend groups are common, was my next (also somewhat defensive) thought. Isn't it better to acknowledge my friend's White privilege than to self-righteously declare that "some of my best friends are Black"? But acknowledgment of privilege is only an introductory step -- antiracist actions must follow to render this acknowledgment meaningful. The individual who wrote this letter suggested that I had taken the "easy road" to "Queer social comfort and acceptance." In one sense, this criticism is valid. As a White-privileged person, if I only befriend those with whom I find it "easiest" to get along, I am unlikely to move outside my comfort zones. Experiencing discomfort is necessary for dismantling White supremacy.

At the same time, befriending people of color or adding racially diverse music to my collection should not be understood as antiracist activism. At home in our apartment, when I jam to Jill Scott or loudly echo Meshell Ndegeocello's invitation to "step into the projects where I found love," Peter will accuse me of appropriating Black music and culture. Because I do not believe in such a concept as "pure" culture (that is, I believe all cultures interact and feed off of one another), I am sometimes reluctant to give too much credence to critiques of cultural appropriation. However, cultural exchange is also shaped by relationships of domination and imperialism, and it is indeed violent when dominant cultures "lift" from marginalized cultures elements that they find useful while continuing to subordinate these populations. Shortly after I became "Diversity Outreach Coordinator" for our campus's Queer student group, a White Queer female friend approached me with a workshop request. Rather than discussing White privilege in traditional terms, she wanted us to discuss what she identified as the more complex "privileges" that various persons experience for various reasons. She used the example of her Black female co-workers, whose ideal body image she perceived to be less constrictive than the one promoted within White popular culture. These Black women, she asserted, valued natural curves over the rail-thin imagine of female beauty presented in mass culture. Viewing them within the context of their Black female friend community, she understood them to experience a "privilege" she did not experience within communities of White women. Although these women were able to assert alternative beauty standards within their own community, Black women's bodies remain "deformed" within dominant culture. What my friend called "privileges" were in actuality developed strategies for survival and resistance.

As White-privileged persons, to simply assimilate people of color into our pre-existing lives proves problematic. We are like the 1st world gay male traveler who visits the "third world" to experience its "natives," enjoying a sexual freedom unavailable within his own nation. The problem isn't sexual freedom, but the unequal distributions of power reinforced by exoticism. True to colonial form, the relationship is non-reciprocal. The gay traveler usurps the "native's" sexuality while doing nothing to assist him in securing similar freedom and mobility (this analysis is taken from/influenced by the work of Jacqui Alexander). Having multiracial friends and listening to multiracial music means nothing if it is not accompanied by antiracist activism.

Which brings me to our contemporary situation. By pitting White gay men against heterosexual Black men, the New York Times creates and fuels antagonisms that are damaging to both antiracist and anti-homophobic "causes." When I highlight the limitations of "identity politics" or challenge the notion that race, sexuality or gender are fundamental components of our "identities," people sometimes think I am being a pretentious elitist, or worse, invalidating individuals' connections to their gay or lesbian identities or racial/ethnic heritage. I certainly do not mean to discredit the resistant power that comes from celebrating marginalized cultures. Rather, I believe that understanding race and sexuality as processes in which we participate rather than "parts of who we are" is often politically necessary. It allows us to understand White supremacy and heteronormativity as inextricably linked rather than separate and unrelated oppressions that are happening simultaneously. When I (and generations of feminists and Queers of color who have influenced my thinking --my statements on "identity politics" are especially influenced by Cathy Cohen.) say that race and sexuality "intersect," I do not mean that racism and homophobia are "similar," or that there are people of color who also happen to be gay. I mean that they are fundamentally constitutive of one another: White supremacy cannot exist without heteronormativity, and vice versa. Predominantly White Queer organizations shouldn't undertake antiracism because it will make us appear inclusive. We should undertake antiracism because it is absolutely necessary for Queer liberation. We cannot simply fold people of color into our preexisting "gay rights" agendas as though they are new CDs that demonstrate out diverse tastes, banners advertising our progressivism. We must dismantle White supremacy by shifting the definition of what we understand to be Queer activism to include antiracist causes -- Black women's disproportionate HIV infection rates or welfare rights, to provide two examples. Incidentally, both of these examples demonstrate the heteronormative values that structure American racism.

At the end of his email, my acquaintance hoped that I'll "continue to be challenged, learn, and grow every day," because "it's never too late for anyone to change." For my sake and ours, I pray that he's correct.