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Lots of stuff here. Thanks, Rosa.
Coming from the marriage/single brouhaha: what surprised me was that on the one hand, the questions were defended as being clearly "meant" to be inclusive, easily adaptable to other 'lifestyles', etc, while on the other hand, the level of emotion and the vocabulary in my reply were ruled inappropriate because they carried a perceived "political" and (unhappy/angry)emotional dimension. Haus had already raised the political point that marriage was a legal and social issue rather than/as well as a lifestyle choice, so it looks to me as though it was the *combination* of the personal and the political that was to be excluded from the thread. Flux later insisted that Ganesh (in his example) should just have answered "no" to the marriage question, since it was a "yes or no question" - which kind of undermines the idea that the thread was designed to elicit some sort of information about people's lives and feelings, rather than a statistical breakdown of the legal/economic status of barbeloids.
JtB's response, that I am "seemingly incapable of depoliticising my life", suggested that there should be a way to live, experience and talk about one's life that was detached from politics or ideology. As if ideology was not operating in the very structures that determine what would be an appropriately "depoliticised" reponse: an ideology, for example, that sees sexual relationships as in the "private" rather than the public domain.
The whole process whereby an "appropriate response" in a given context is defined and policed is a political process - sleaze's point about "the artificial boundaries of small talk". A 'hey, why can't we all play nice and get along' attitude seems to suggest that prejudice and normalization somehow operate outside the level of individual encounters, as if, for example, racism only "happened" when the BNP had a rally.
Obviously there are large-scale, "political" structures of racism, sexism, class oppression, homophobia, etc, and one way to do battle against them is to engage in traditionally political activities (lobbying, consciousness-raising, marching, etc) and hope that once the structures are vanquished, the individual examples and expressions of prejudice/normalization will vanish of their own accord. Even then, though, you're left with the question of what to do in the meantime when an everyday encounter brings these structures into play, and how to negotiate that without trying to "convert" the other person/people but while still trying to find room to challenge the structures which make it impossible for one to speak or be heard on one's own terms. I tried to talk about this ages ago in a thread in the Conversation on 'whiteness & temping' & would be overjoyed if anyone had any good strategies/examples/theory around this.
This is a very depersonalized response, isn't it? Well, the marriage/single thing has felt very 'personal', in that the objections to my original response feel like attempts to exclude my own particular, individual, personal response to the questions - the political being personal rather than/as well as vice versa. And I feel personally threatened when people try and downgrade the importance of theory and politics to my life. If I depoliticized my life, I wouldn't have one.
In terms of the centre/margin question: I'm actually pretty central. White, middle-class, not visibly gay (or not often, or tending to be in spaces where my clothing/appearance does not cause a reaction), not in a relationship and not having sex or looking to do so, so not having to negotiate visible coupledom/expression of sexuality issues. This is, obviously, a very privileged and safe position to be in, but it does mean that I am constantly faced with dilemmas about when, where and how to *make* my sexuality visible, and when, where and how to attempt to reject or undermine the set of privileges and assumptions that being white and middle-class brings with it. |
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