Trimmed from a post in the bisexuality thread:
When I said independance from gay and straight communities, what I actually should have said was independance from the rules and restrictions of those communities. And its our obsession with labelling that makes people believe that the straight and gay communities are seperate entities that only exist apart from each other, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Gays and straights and everybody inbetween walk the same streets together on the same planet. We could start a whole other thread on what we even mean by the word community.
That is not the way I was talking about "community" at all. I'm thinking about community and group identity as tools that people use for dealing with oppression. The 'gay community' has a certain set of rules and boundaries because it has been set apart from the 'straight community' by straight people for so long (i.e. with the criminalization of homosexual activity, which only just ended in Britain and the US in terms of world history, and which is still strong in many parts of the world).
It's our obsession with grouping and labeling ourselves that create these social "realities." It doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't, but for the moment it is. I will draw a parallel with race, right now, although I am explicitly not trying to compare sexual identity with racial identity. Most physical anthropologists and biologists acknowledge that race is imaginary. It has no significant biological existence, as such. Race exists as a social construct, but as a social construct it has real effects which can't be tossed off by a pat "labels are imaginary." If everyone were to simultaneously become enlightened/immanentize the eschaton or whatever, and miraculously all agree at the same moment that labels were not real, then they would no longer have power and race-based oppression would disappear. In the meantime, the "reality" of the label is irrelevant to its real-world effects, which in the case of race is to still marginalize people with dark skin in literally every nation in the world.
You talk about bisexuals going underground to integrate themselves into one community or another, and i know this does happen with certain people but that just seems sad to me. Why would anybody want to limit who they're friends with just based on who they have sex with? And what would be the point of forming a bisexual community? Do we really need more social segregation?
Again, you think I mean something different by community than I actually intend. I am a member of the queer community. This does not mean I don't interact with straight people, have straight friends, live with straight people as flatmates, date straight people, concern myself with the oppression of straight people of color and straight people of economic disadvantage. It means that, beyond this broader society, I also have a more intimate society with whom I can (for instance) talk about things that are unwelcome in straight and mixed company, and with whom I can organize to create change in laws and policies that affect my communities. Thanks to the label I can say to someone whom I otherwise might never meet, "We have a common interest in protecting certain rights. Therefore, please help with this activity designed to protect those rights." This does not remove me from the rest of the world, it makes my living in it more effective.
The only reason any of this is a social reality is because so many people want it to be. Its in our nature to segregate ourselves off [blah blah crabcakes], but this is something that has to be overcome if there's ever going to be any kind of peace and togetherness in the world.
While I agree with you that labeling forms the basis of a lot of oppression, it seems to be the case that human brains are hardwired to think that way. We can break out of it for moments at a time, perhaps, but I think it will take thousands of years (if we have that long) to transcend it altogether. And I think of the current label-happy craze called identity politics as a step in that direction, making everyone think about labels so much that they are bound to realize they're hogwash given a little time and effort. I just don't expect to see this in this lifetime, and right now identity politics is useful to me. Does it also imprison me? Hell yeah. But I was already imprisoned by the need to think hierarchically and structurally (ie using labels) in the first place; the "label craze" lets me see my prison better, and I think in the long run that will be useful in breaking the walls down.
Also, when I see oppression happening that is based on labels, and people using these labels to fight oppression, and this is happening now right outside my window, I get very impatient with people who say "labels are imaginary free your mind." This, to me, ignores that labels are having real social effect, and this can't just be dismissed with a wave of the hand. "Labels are bad abolish labels" has a similar infuriating effect on me. Sure, we can abolish labels, but we can't do that and continue to talk on message boards. It requires a total revolution in the way people think and act, and this cannot occur in time to save the lives of the people in Iran who are labeled homosexual and then offered their choice of execution.
Also, as I said in the bi thread here, oppression happened before the label in some cases. People were executed for having sexual intercourse with people with the same genital configuration long before the label "gay" or even "homosexual" appeared on the scene. Before Christianity, even, if you want to get technical. So is the label to blame, or does it just illuminate a problem that already existed? |
