shimmer

Towards the end of this charming documentary on Idyll Dandy Acres, in the midst of an obligatory heartwarming montage segment, comes this telling little fragment:

It comes at a strange time in the video. MaxZine, who is speaking here, is featured rather prominently throughout the entire thing: chopping wood, wearing dresses, juggling, cooking, etc., in general being cute and charming and a maybe a little silly. In short, he is being portrayed in the very way that he warns against in this short segment, until he – knowingly or unknowingly – calls the filmmakers out on it.

His choice of words is fascinating: “If we create too much of a romanticized vision of what IDA is, it might make it harder for us to deal with making it what we really want it to be.” That is, the idyllic nature of IDA, its potential to exist as this sort of fantasy world of peaceloving eco-queerdom, is as much of a trap as it may be a goal, for this image would be so pervasive that it would preclude those living there from actually creating what IDA can really be. In order for IDA to remain a model towards changing the “greater society,” those living there must always be able to “figure out how to work on ourselves” – they must not be entombed in the image/expectation of paradise. For once this happens, IDA loses all of its radical potential and becomes a neutered freak sideshow prancing around somewhere in Tennessee.

This reminds me of two recent events, both of which bothered me: the introduction of a third “gender” on Pakistani ID forms and the glitter-bombing of Newt Gingrich. In both cases, deeply dangerous or outright reactionary actions are taken at face value as positive developments, or, worse, as “radical.” In the case of the Pakistani ID forms, which I have already written about, the third category normalizes/neuters the Pakistani trans community, annihilating their radical potential and rendering them a band of flamboyant tax-collecting eunuchs. In the case of the glittering of Newt Gingrich, an action that is quite funny but ultimately politically useless is taken by some as a “radical queer” action, which presents the specter of the normalization/neutering of the radical queer community.

Throwing glitter on Newt Gingrich is not radical and does not queer. It is not radical in the sense that it is politically uninformed (insofar as it specifically addresses none of Gingrich’s policies, only his presence at an anti-gay event, which is a surprise to no one) and presents no possibility of any actual change. It does not queer because it deals in absolutely no way with the multiple layers of power and hierarchical relationships that make Newt Gingrich somebody who actually matters in the world. Throwing glitter on Newt Gingrich does not cause one to wonder why Newt Gingrich commands so much media attention, why his backwards rhetoric and hollow proclamations are taken seriously by anybody. If anything, this action strengthens his image by making him the butt of the oldest (and therefore easiest to dismiss) practical joke in the book: dumping a bucket of water on Teacher. In this scenario, Teacher remains Teacher and student remains student; the hierarchy not only maintained but, in fact, stratifies further, as Teacher is later shown to be wiser, better than student, who disappears into detention (is escorted into the elevator) while his/her fellow students are neutered into a band of reprimanded, subservient subjects (a band of glitter-throwing freaks). When this story was reported on the news, for instance, it was reported – as the Pakistani third category was – more in the tone of a cute human-interest story than as an actual news story: “Oh, look at this goof who poured glitter on Newt Gingrich, isn’t that cute/funny?” By doing nothing to challenge the dominant conceptions of Newt Gingrich or the queer community (it would be naive to assume that there is not a dominant conception of the queer community, and that this dominant conception does not involve precisely men throwing glitter), does this not present a perilous opportunity for the queer community to be entombed in glitter, stratified, neutered?

A true queering of Newt Gingrich should involve an action that blurs his subjecthood, that untethers him from the obtuse power structures that make him who he is, that causes, if even for a second, the Real to rush in and make us pause and consider the veracity of the pervasive image he has built around himself. To remain radical – to remain queer, even – queering must entail, as Judith Butler puts it, “exposing the alterity within the norm,” a calling-into-question of the ways in which we relate to each other via the creation of a liberatory space between the norm and itself (91). Glitter-bombing Gingrich is funny, and may have been momentarily humiliating for him – and empowering for us – but it fails to put him in flux; it fails to open any kind of space anywhere, political or otherwise.

What is presented most clearly by the Gingrich situation and consummated by the Pakistani situation is a trap: queer normativity. It is vital that we not fall into this trap and become, as the Pakistani trans community has, normalized/neutered into a harmless, apolitical “third way”: heteronormative, homonormative, queernormative. Perhaps the way to do this is to, in Miwon Kwon‘s formulation, “recognize a commonality based not on identification but on distance” (293); to explore the potential of a community based on embracing how we are not the same, rather than how we are. For the radical potential of the queer community lies in our very fluidity, our lack of a common history, a common myth, a common homeland: we are a community of others, a paradox that empowers us with an incredible agency, an agency through which we can – and we must – constantly reimagine the ways in which we live in our bodies, with each other, in the world.

In an essay on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kwon, hoping to liberate him from the morass of being a “gay artist,” cites Michael Warner‘s concept of the “humiliating positivity of the particular.” The only way for a public based on commonality to function in the face of difference – the particular – is by conferring a false positivity, in the form of a marked commonality, on difference, all the while maintaining that that said difference remains a mark, a flaw (291). This operation, tied to the tragic notion of “tolerance,” is necessarily humiliating, for it transitions a marked subject into a nonsubject.

The notion of tolerance is and always will be tied to the notion of poison; to tolerate something is to avoid being killed by it via a process of neutralization. In a social regime based on commonality, those who are different, sexually or otherwise, represent a deadly threat, a poison; the only way for this social regime to survive is through what Warner calls the “minoritizing logic of domination” (Kwon 292). Through this logic, the majority cauterizes the radical, poisonous potential of a particular group of others by marking them as such, by creating a static image/expectation of their subjecthood that is then vigorously promoted through media representation, legislation, etc, removing them from the majority and placing them into an easily manipulated pool of marked subjects. This marked subjecthood is a particularly frustrating and limiting place: dominated by the prevailing image of who one should be, it becomes difficult or impossible not only to be who one is, but also to be taken as who one is. This is perhaps what James Baldwin refers to in this passage from “Sonny’s Blues”:

“…their heads bumped abruptly against he low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives…and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.”

That is, the image/expectation to which they have succumbed – their subjecthood as dictated by media representation – creates a false sense of community which removes their agency, their ability to consider and effect their real lived situation. Their identification, that is, with the humiliating positivity of their particularity renders their rage impotent, their lives futile.

A “gay artist,” therefore, is less threatening than an artist who, perhaps unexpectedly, is gay. A “gay artist” belongs to an accepted/dominated group of marked others and therefore cannot poison the common – the notion of “artist,” in this case – with his difference. Further, to promote oneself as a gay artist is to identify with the very process of minoritization through which one is being dominated. To call myself a “queer artist,” that is, and to surrender to the dominant image/expectation that may or may not signify, would be to negate the radical potential of my actually being queer. For if I accept this qualification, if I allow my alterity, my particularity, to be subsumed by the norm, rather than use it to expose the norm, my agency – my ability to determine for myself who I am and how I will relate to the world – is lost. I become humiliated, my rage becomes impotent; I am a nonsubject, a neuter.

Moreover, the process of marking queers as such is complicated by the fact that our community does not share a common physical/visible trait of any kind. We must, in fact, mark ourselves through the process of coming out. This would seem to present a rather difficult conundrum: in order to avoid becoming a marked subject, in order to avoid the inexorable slide towards becoming a nonsubject, must we remain silent about who we are? If, by coming out, we mark ourselves, become part of a humiliated populace held in sway by the norm, how should we then proceed?

At present, there seem to be three options: a politics of repression, a politics of inclusion, or a politics of exclusion. None of these options are viable. A politics of repression, striving towards invisibility, is counterproductive, irresponsible, and cowardly: the “ex-gay” movement, for instance. A politics of inclusion, striving towards becoming tolerated by the norm, represented at present by the perhaps well-intentioned but certainly misguided push towards legalizing gay marriage, results in the dismissal of wide swaths of the community (those who are not monogamous, those who simply have no interest in getting married, etc) and involves a sort of political amnesia (marriage, a religious institution, should not be a function of the state). A politics of exclusion, striving towards complete dissociation with the norm, is similarly impotent: it dismisses wide swaths of the community (those who are monogamous, those who have an interest in getting married), and involves a sort of political naivete (the dominant majority will be happy to see you go). Moreover, the politics of inclusion and exclusion both acknowledge the norm as such by defining themselves in relation to it, and in so doing further stratify notions of normality, whether they be hetero-, homo-, or queer-based. These politics, therefore, do nothing to call into question, obviate, or obfuscate the ways in which we relate to each other and the world around us.

Instead, we must take advantage of the agency inherent in the act of marking ourselves. When we come out, we lay claim to the universal by momentarily taking over the primary instrument of subjugation that the dominant majority uses to define the borders of the universal. This causes, I believe, the same effect that Butler describes when she discusses the reclamation of hate speech: an “admission of a sense of difference and futurity into modernity that establishes for that time an unknown future, one that can only produce anxiety in those who seek to patrol its conventional boundaries” (161). We rupture the norm, creating a liberatory space in which we have agency over the terms of our future, and operation that necessarily provokes anxiety in the dominant majority. In order to control its anxiety, the majority compels us to identify, to align ourselves with a pre-authorized image/expectation of marked subjecthood: are we “L,” are we “G,” “B,” or “T”?

In an open letter to those pushing for gay marriage legislation, Kate Bornstein demands that they acknowledge the “Q for queer and Q for questioning,” the “S for sadomasochists…I for intersex…F for feminists, and another F for furries,” that they “make room for genderqueers, polyamorists, radical faeries, butches, femmes, drag queens, drag kings, and other dragfuck royalty too fabulous to describe…”  (14). Perhaps, though, the truly radical thing to do would be to eschew these categories altogether, to embrace not what we have in common with a specific identity/unit of control but our distance from it. For it is within this distance, within the blur of queer, that we maintain the agency we claim in the act of coming out, the ability to decide for ourselves how we will live in our bodies, with each other, in the world.

A social regime of identification is, and can only be, based on a paradigm of binary oppositions. This binary, “us” and “them,” is created through sweeping narratives which ascribe a common point of origination, a common history, and a common trajectory toward a specific utopia. They establish, in short, a line to follow. To assist in following this common trajectory, different roles are established, supported by what I have been calling image/expectation, a handy selection of authorized ways of being that correspond with this path. In this paradigm, I submit my subjecthood to the tidal wave of narrative: I “go with the flow.”

Attempting to create counter-narratives only reinforces this paradigm, as does the attempt to reject it outright. These attempts only create new usses, new thems, new lines to follow that are just as restricting, if not more so, than those that already existed. The only way to break this paradigm is to baffle it, to blur the lines, to embody – as Jacques Rancière describes the ideal work of political art – “the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle” (63). I believe that this is the very rupture we enact when we come out, when we take control of the terms by which our subjectivity will be determined. Coming out is not a proclamation of intent but a declaration of difference, the opening of a distance between myself and the image/expectation of myself; and it is within this “effort toward difference” that the paradigm is baffled (Barthes 51). When we come out, that is, we in a sense substitute ourselves for a message; we respond to the command “you shall” with the statement “I am.” The radical potential of the queer community lies in this nonsensical assertion, in the proclamation that the message is that there is no message: there is only me and you.

Queer shimmers at the edge of the universal. Queer is not a singular narrative, but is rather a complex system of heterologies made up of the myriad forms in which we do not fit in the given framework of sexuality; it does not lead to utopia, but rather blooms into a heterotopic space where the future remains forever unforeclosed. As such, queer as an identity is blurred; it is an identity that fails to identify. When I say I am queer, I say I do not equate.

To identify as queer, therefore, is to enact a short-circuit between identity and agency. When I identify as unidentifiable, when I say “I am” in the face of “you shall,” I liberate myself from the future proscribed to me by embracing the distance between you and I; I cause the “mark of separation,” as Roland Barthes would have it, “to cancel itself” (195). This intimate space of distant proximity is one in which the future can breathe, in which both you and I retain our ability to locate ourselves in history and ascertain for ourselves how to proceed – after all, it is only across a distance that we may reach out and touch each other. Coming out is thus necessarily political: in the act of self-(dis)indentification, we mark ourselves as political subjects endowed with liberatory agency. We must not relinquish this agency: there is too much at stake.

Queer simply, profoundly demands that we maintain our agency in the face of the totalizing sweep of the dominant social regime. By assuming a radical agency in determining how we shall inhabit our bodies in the world, beginning with coming out, we enact what Slavoj Zizek calls “[p]olitics proper: the paradox of a singular which appears as a stand-in for the Universal, destabilizing the ‘natural’ functional order of relations” (Zizek 70). When we substitute, that is, “I am,” for the norm, the abstract, the Universal, the narrative “you shall,” we destroy the false distinctions created between us by a regime of commonality; we embrace the real, intimate distance between us: “our connection and beholden-ness to one another not only as indefinite strangers but because we are indefinite strangers”; we shimmer (Kwon 293). Across this shimmer, we are finally able to locate ourselves in the atemporal crush of the norm and become aware of our historical necessity – whatever that may be. Queer, that is, queers “being who you are” by obviating the fact that actually being who you are is, in fact, a radical political act. Queer, then, is much more – or perhaps much less – than glitter-bombs: it is a push towards a total reorganization of the ways in which we live in our bodies, with each other, in the world, by simply – radically – being who we are.

Cited:

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Scribd.com: p 1. Web. 18 June 2011.

Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Print.

Bornstein, Kate. “Open Letter to LGBT Leaders Who Are Pushing Marriage Equality.” Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage. Ed. Ryan Conrad. Lewiston: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010. 11 – 14. Print.

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Kwon, Miwon. “The Becoming of a Work of Art: FGT and a Possibility of Renewal, a Chance to Share, a Fragile Truce.” Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ed. Julie Ault. New York and Göttingen: steidldangin publishers, 2006. 281 – 316. Print.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. Afterword. The Politics of Aesthetics. By Jacques Rancière. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 69 – 79. Print.

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