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When people make claims about the fact that amputees will be offended by 'stump fucking' references, I wish the person saying this would stop using amputees as a rationalisation for wanting 'stump fucking' not to be written... Is 'victim' status always premised on the basis of identity?
THANK YOU OMG THANK YOU that is exactly what I was trying to get at. (Warning: rambling post follows.)
I was thinking about this recently, when I was co-teaching with a woman whose style and vocabulary made the classroom a very heteronormative, binary-gendered place. When I've talked about it, there's been a temptation - to which I've succumbed - to frame my problem with it in terms of the exclusion of me (and, potentially, of any queer students). Like: and so X would say 'We'd all like a handsome boyfriend, wouldn't we, girls?' and I would be like SITTING. RIGHT. HERE. But actually, it's not about me sitting right there. And I was thinking about this one day when I read one of those 'PC Gone Mad!!' articles about a student groups' pressure to desegregate toilets at some US university, which was couched in this kind of 'well, obviously, that's a nice idea, but we don't actually have any trans students, so we shouldn't do it'.
And I think this is what I mean. That, whether there are any trans students or not, the point of desegregating toilets is to say that it's not okay for people to feel justified in policing people's access to pissing technology on the basis of their gender presentation. Those acts of policing are invisible to most normatively gendered people, but that doesn't mean they don't go on. It's not just trying to make visiting the bathroom safe for non-normatively-gendered people, it's trying to deprivilege the binariness of normative gender by saying that you can't have the success or the naturalness of your gender confirmed to you by your VIP-style swanning past the invisible-to-you barrier to the men's/women's toilet. And the same in the classroom situation: it's not about whether I'm sitting right there, or whether there is or is not a queer or questioning student in the class who may or may not be made to feel unsafe by heteronormative remarks. It's about saying, your access to the information and learning in this class is not made easier by your conformity to compulsory heterosexuality.
Similarly with the amputees. It's not about whether someone with an amputated limb might one day come onto barbelith, see the stump-fucking thread, and leave in horror: it's about whether we want to say this thread only is open to you on the basis that you are able to treat stump-fucking as something that is inherently and deliciously icky. (The s-fing thread is actually a bad example, because it was oddly framed and I never read it anyway. Never mind. Sorry. Onwards.)
Anyway, the question about on what basis threads are accessible is still an open question, I think - it's not that every thread can be framed in such a way as to open it to everyone in the whole world. But this is as far as I've got on my thinking about how to frame these debates and make these ethical decisions without constantly having to tie those beliefs and feelings and decisions to a specific type of body/identity. Which I feel very suspicious and worried about. I know that the position from which someone speaks [sorry, Mr D, writes] is a huge part of the performative force of their statement - a huge part of what their writing does. But I think most of the time we can (and do) take that into account without, um, reifying that position or bringing in a notional amputee in whose name we say that we don't want the words stump-fucking to be written.
(It's a live issue for me at the moment because I know that I and several of the other female-identified posters on Barbelith who have been mobilized around the Feminism 101 thread, its fallout, the Woman-Friendly Barbelith thread, etc, have very different ideas of what it is to be 'a woman' and on what terms/basis we write 'as women', and I'm concerned that some of those positions are being lost and spoken-for in a way that might become very policing.)
And finally: sorry about the imperfections and ramblingness in this post. If I don't post relatively fast at the moment, though, I won't post at all. |
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