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The wisdom and complexity and general willingness-to-dialogue-and-explain of various people's (especially GGM, alas and id entity) responses to this thread make me feel all squee-ish. There is hope! And I really like the 'crabs in a barrel' metaphor. That's the best way I've ever heard someone explain the vagaries of capitalism and identity politics.
My take on this problem of equating different orders of oppression is that power simply doesn't work in the binaristic way someone like Riane Eisler says it does. As people have variously pointed out, the world can't be divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed: the presence of discriminations against some people within 'oppressed' communities bears this out. Power is not binary, but fluid and nodal: it agglomerates in particular sites and in particular ways, between particular groups or individuals. This also has a lot to do with the histories of how racism and homophobia and transphobia work. As you might notice when you start looking at those histories in a micropolitical and material sense, when you get down to it no 'struggle' is united, and every struggle operates according to its own context, rules, the knowledges and discourses that are invoked, etc. What I mean by 'a material and micropolitical sense' is that looking at specific and everyday practices, little moments, rather than the stock narratives we are taught about as 'history' will give you a really different and much more heterogeneous grasp of 'events'. For instance, that phrase, the 'civil rights movement' -- where politically disparate groups are commonly lumped together as if they had similar political objectives and philosophies, just because they were around at the 'same time': Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, etc. That phrase on its own obscures a whole history of resistance and opposition and debate within Black communities about how to fight.
Now, there might be similarities between particular struggles, but there's also a politics at work about who has the power to make those comparisons, and how conveniently it fits into an assumption that something like 'racism', eg, is historical and 'over'.
I'd like to throw in a different order of comparison, now, which does arguably different work... In my PhD research I've been looking at how lots of people want to talk about transpeople as 'migrants', and articulate trans experience as a form of 'migrant' experience. On the surface, it sort of 'makes sense' to talk about crossing gender as a kind of geographical crossing. There's this one essay I'm thinking of where the author takes almost every aspect of trans existence and supplies the equivalent experience in migration terms, ie gender clinics are 'just like' Ellis Island because both act as regulatory sites for policing who is allowed through the gates of a nation, or of a gender, respectively. It works, to a certain extent, and at the same time I find it ludicrous and incredibly appropriative of 'migrant' experience...
I have a theory about this: it's not about saying that the phobic structures that police and oppress migrants in any particular place are history or 'over'. Instead, this way of talking about trans experience capitalises on the way that being a migrant is one of the most marginalised subject positions a person can get thrust into, and a generally recognition of that fact.
So, why is this? Being the most marginalised is a kind of capital different groupuscules use to differentiate their own interests/needs from the generalised mass of 'oppressed' subjects. The 'crabs in a barrel' situation encourages people to draw equivalences between their own and another form of oppression because discourses about how to end oppression -- discourses about how to 'win justice' or rights, etc -- are already a kind of claw-weapon the crabs use to crawl over each other. In a weird way, talking about trans experience as migration makes the discrimination against gender variant people intelligible to a 'popular audience' (or, the state, increasingly).
At the same time, that metaphor appropriates and lessens -- cheapens -- the reality of global migration and border controls. Having to see a shrink for two years so you can have surgery is not the same as being locked up in a detention centre on an island, or in the desert for unlimited amounts of time while the authorities process your asylum request. Buying black market hormones is not the same as trying to swim the distance from Ceuta to the Spanish coast in freezing cold water when your children can't swim, so must be left behind; or using an upturned table with an outboard motor to cross from Cuba to Florida, trying to outwit coastguard patrols. Being trans is no picnic, but I would never equate my experiences with the experience of people who have had to do that shit.
More importantly, the equivalence renders invisible the specificity of how migrants might also be gender variant, and the particular issues posed by that experience. Heaps of Brazilian travestis spend years at a time working in Italy, for example, and Italian migration departments were actively targeting Brazilian travestis for deportation as far back as the late 80's and early 90's. To outwit the authorities, the Brazilians would fly to somewhere 'neutral' like Belgium or Spain on a tourist visa, then try to cross illegally into Italy, where they would overstay their already invalid visas, and return home when deported, or when they'd made enough money doing sexwork to buy houses or get rich. I sourced this information from Don Kulick's excellent book Travesti*, published in 1998, before Italy joined the EU: it's probably harder to get in now -- the equivalent would be flying to one of the sattelite EU states, I guess, or a state on the border of the EU like Turkey where it's easier for a poor, non-white, 'third world' travesti to get a visa. (Sorry, this is my thesis research and I tend to get a bit geeky/overloady with the information at times.)
This is a very specific example, and one I obviously feel quite passionate about, and quite possibly totally incoherent. I'm trying to offer another way of looking at the problem. Does it make sense to anyone?
*Link squirm: there's a transgender superstore asociated with Amazon? WTF. |
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