By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Remember that scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacka are trapped in the garbage compacter room and barely escape as it closes in ominously on all sides?
That's the perfect metaphor for Identity Politics 2008 -- all of us minorities trapped in a shrinking box of trash in which the crushing walls represent not just society, but community inquisitors demanding our qualifications. Are we gay enough, black enough, female enough to deserve liberation?
This week, the sacrificial queer was Mike Buse, chief of staff of Senator John McCain. Mike Rogers outed the guy on his blog, while encouraging a call-in campaign to the right-wing group Focus on the Family asking readers to "thank them for supporting John McCain even though he has gay Americans in high places on his staff, including his chief of staff."
You can imagine the outraged fundamentalists, the angry phone calls to the McCain campaign, all the homophobic hate generated against Mike Buse. Maybe next Rogers'll get a list of McCain staffers of color and encourage people to call the John Birch Society. Hell, why not call the Klan if it'll help bring down McCain?
Just a couple of weeks ago, a huge wave of so-called feminists unleashed their misogyny and hate against Sarah Palin, attacking not just her politics, but her very existence. Wendy Doniger's Washington Post article declared that despite her baby-producing womb, Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman..."
The National Organization for Women's Kim Gandy actually issued a press release announcing that "as the chair of NOW's Political Action Committee, I am frequently asked whether NOW supports women candidates just because they are women. This gives me an opportunity to once again answer that question with an emphatic 'No.'"
Apparently it's the "National Organization for Only Those Women Who Agree with All Our Policies."
I'm not above bigotry-tinged sneering myself, dismissing the 2000 Republican National Convention packed with black faces, and Bush's "Cabinet of Color" as mere sideshows to attract black and Hispanic voters to the Republican Party. I nodded in agreement when I heard Colin Powell or Condi Rice get called Oreos and traitors by other people of color.
At the time, it didn't bother me when black Maryland conservative Michael S. Steele was pelted with Oreos, called an Uncle Tom, and portrayed as a black-faced minstrel during his 2005 bid for U.S. Senate. No problem, said black Baltimore Democrat, State Senator Lisa A. Gladden. "Party trumps race, especially on the national level." Except when, as earlier this year, it's Jesse Jackson accusing Obama of talking down to black people and "acting like he's white."
Stanley Crouch, an African American writer, thinks the greatest threat of identity politics is that it blinds participants to context and interconnectedness. We don't see the national debt, the dangers of selling out to corporations or unions, or the problems of competing with China and India in the global marketplace. "Though they live in the United States, those are not their problems. Identity politics is independent of our common fate as Americans."
Increasingly, I think the greatest problem in identity politics is that most of the focus these days is on the "politics," claiming territory, enforcing ideologies, and excluding anyone whom the gatekeepers determine don't meet the one or two acceptable ways to be gay or black or female.
We dispense with "identity" any time it's inconvenient. In fact, we are disturbingly comfortable using tools of bigotry against each other like when activists like Mike Rogers (and Michelangelo Signorile) incited homophobia against McCain's gay staffer or when black Democrats throw race-based insults at conservative politicians of color.
Feminists refusing to acknowledge Sarah Palin as a woman incite misogyny against all of us and create echoes of those times dykes (and poor women, and women of color) have been excluded from the women's club. Frankly, NOW still prefers we pass. Mouth the right platitudes. Never admit to having shot at squirrels with a BB gun. Pretend that our primary issue is abortion.
I'd dump the cesspool of identity politics if I could. The conundrum is, to end prejudice, and make change in society, there's no other choice but to suppress our individuality and organize around that artificial "identity," even if the color of our skin, our reproductive organs, or sexual orientation hide nearly irreconcilable differences.
To succeed at all, we need to start from scratch, reject politics, reject hate, find our few inches of common ground, plant respect there.
Showing posts with label identity politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identity politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Remembering Things Change
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
One thing you have to have as an activist, or even a voter, is the bottom-line belief that change is possible, and not just for the worse. I base my own belief on observations of nature. I guess you could call me a Darwinist.
Putting aside the evolution of our species, it's inarguable that water carves its way through rock even drip by drip. Rivers change course. Unexpected things and people emerge. There are Ghandi's sometimes. Sometimes two-headed calves. I'd been on the verge of forgetting until last week when I suddenly saw a boar in the Fountainebleau forest.
My girlfriend heard something moving, caught sight of the tusks and shouted for me to look, which made it run faster. What I saw was actually a piggish blur, charcoal black, and light on its feet. Before that we'd seen little bits of rumpled up soil all over the trails where some creature had been rooting, and here and there strange hoof prints that seemed to come from a small horse with toes.
It was sheer luck we saw one in the afternoon. Most of the spottings are at dawn or dusk, and we wouldn't have been in that part of the woods at all if I hadn't gotten us lost. Maybe I should do that more often. Don't look, but leap. So often what we see with our eyes is paralyzing. Like the news on TV.
Lately, it's Kenya at the top of the hour, where in a matter of weeks a contested election has degenerated into a bloody mess. The TV shows corpses lying in the road, currently the end sum of political scores. I wonder how soon it will be before the news breaks of masses of women getting raped, and queers lynched. Those old depressing wartime favorites.
I can't watch anymore, those high and low tech wars, the slaughters and assassinations. There's the U.S. election where the candidates remind us of the inherently dirty nature of politics where compromise, ambition, and power leave their own ugly marks. I shouldn't blame them when it's really too many years of Bush-watching that has instilled in me a perpetual and numbed self-loathing.
I'm an American after all, and America these days is synonymous with the Iraq War that destabilized the whole Middle East, and Bush's "War on Terror" which was really a war on civil liberties that gave free reign to pretenders like Putin. Now, the stock markets everywhere are collapsing thanks to the receding American economy. In short, we have a President whose inverted Midas touch turns everything to shit.
So, I was surprised to be surprised by the boar fleeing through the woods. And on Saturday I saw something even more astounding, the report that in Morocco one hundred intellectuals had published an open "Appeal for the Defense of Individual Rights" in a dozen journals, calling on the state to react to the "climate of intellectual terrorism" and denouncing the trial and conviction of six men "without proof" that only took place at the instigation of a rampaging mob.
In November, when a rumor of a gay wedding hit the streets of Ksar El Kebir, so did thousands of Islamists who demonstrated and clashed with police until civic forces caved in to the pressure and several men were arrested. They were summarily convicted, and the sentence upheld on appeal last week, though some of the sentences were slightly reduced.
The vitriol even among the usually more balanced press matched the hysteria we've seen in Egypt and Namibia. What a hate campaign. The sermons from the imams would curl your hair along with the violence of the demonstrators who have been primed for years to act on behalf of the "moral" and the "pure."
In Morocco, it's not just queers under attack. The letter stated, that for the last few years, there's been an increasing campaign against anybody, who "because of their taste, beliefs, opinions, or personal choices, are accused of 'offending Muslim sensibilities' and 'menacing traditional values of Moroccans.'" The offenders, mostly journalists, writers, artists, and fighters for human rights, are excommunicated, and crowds are encouraged towards physical violence, "In other words, to threaten lives."
Intellectuals had to do something. Queers are the canary in the coal mine for human rights. If they sacrifice us to the mob, even worse will follow. What surprised me, here, was that in the accompanying explanation of this open letter for personal liberties, the community of mostly heterosexual intellectuals admitted that one of the last straws for them had been, "the scandalous 'homo hunt' at Ksar El Kebir," bringing us openly into the room, and declaring solidarity. "You aren't alone." For a change.
One thing you have to have as an activist, or even a voter, is the bottom-line belief that change is possible, and not just for the worse. I base my own belief on observations of nature. I guess you could call me a Darwinist.
Putting aside the evolution of our species, it's inarguable that water carves its way through rock even drip by drip. Rivers change course. Unexpected things and people emerge. There are Ghandi's sometimes. Sometimes two-headed calves. I'd been on the verge of forgetting until last week when I suddenly saw a boar in the Fountainebleau forest.
My girlfriend heard something moving, caught sight of the tusks and shouted for me to look, which made it run faster. What I saw was actually a piggish blur, charcoal black, and light on its feet. Before that we'd seen little bits of rumpled up soil all over the trails where some creature had been rooting, and here and there strange hoof prints that seemed to come from a small horse with toes.
It was sheer luck we saw one in the afternoon. Most of the spottings are at dawn or dusk, and we wouldn't have been in that part of the woods at all if I hadn't gotten us lost. Maybe I should do that more often. Don't look, but leap. So often what we see with our eyes is paralyzing. Like the news on TV.
Lately, it's Kenya at the top of the hour, where in a matter of weeks a contested election has degenerated into a bloody mess. The TV shows corpses lying in the road, currently the end sum of political scores. I wonder how soon it will be before the news breaks of masses of women getting raped, and queers lynched. Those old depressing wartime favorites.
I can't watch anymore, those high and low tech wars, the slaughters and assassinations. There's the U.S. election where the candidates remind us of the inherently dirty nature of politics where compromise, ambition, and power leave their own ugly marks. I shouldn't blame them when it's really too many years of Bush-watching that has instilled in me a perpetual and numbed self-loathing.
I'm an American after all, and America these days is synonymous with the Iraq War that destabilized the whole Middle East, and Bush's "War on Terror" which was really a war on civil liberties that gave free reign to pretenders like Putin. Now, the stock markets everywhere are collapsing thanks to the receding American economy. In short, we have a President whose inverted Midas touch turns everything to shit.
So, I was surprised to be surprised by the boar fleeing through the woods. And on Saturday I saw something even more astounding, the report that in Morocco one hundred intellectuals had published an open "Appeal for the Defense of Individual Rights" in a dozen journals, calling on the state to react to the "climate of intellectual terrorism" and denouncing the trial and conviction of six men "without proof" that only took place at the instigation of a rampaging mob.
In November, when a rumor of a gay wedding hit the streets of Ksar El Kebir, so did thousands of Islamists who demonstrated and clashed with police until civic forces caved in to the pressure and several men were arrested. They were summarily convicted, and the sentence upheld on appeal last week, though some of the sentences were slightly reduced.
The vitriol even among the usually more balanced press matched the hysteria we've seen in Egypt and Namibia. What a hate campaign. The sermons from the imams would curl your hair along with the violence of the demonstrators who have been primed for years to act on behalf of the "moral" and the "pure."
In Morocco, it's not just queers under attack. The letter stated, that for the last few years, there's been an increasing campaign against anybody, who "because of their taste, beliefs, opinions, or personal choices, are accused of 'offending Muslim sensibilities' and 'menacing traditional values of Moroccans.'" The offenders, mostly journalists, writers, artists, and fighters for human rights, are excommunicated, and crowds are encouraged towards physical violence, "In other words, to threaten lives."
Intellectuals had to do something. Queers are the canary in the coal mine for human rights. If they sacrifice us to the mob, even worse will follow. What surprised me, here, was that in the accompanying explanation of this open letter for personal liberties, the community of mostly heterosexual intellectuals admitted that one of the last straws for them had been, "the scandalous 'homo hunt' at Ksar El Kebir," bringing us openly into the room, and declaring solidarity. "You aren't alone." For a change.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Globalization, Rappers and Queers in Gay Paree
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
810 words
When it comes to American culture, you need comic strip words in big, fat letters like POW! and BLAM! for what we do to other people, or our own for that matter.
In France, half of the top hip-hop videos of last Sunday were American, including one P.Diddy, two Snoop Doggs and Miss Fergie Fergalicious singing about how hot she was, but not promiscuous. I went to a "queer" film festival later in the day where the name was not only American, but half the films.
This is a little more complicated, though, than McDonald's supplanting little cafes with mass-produced frites. It's a testimony to the strength of identity politics in the U.S.
In the case of rap, it has given --mostly men-- a short-cut to a Black identity, especially in France, and Cuba and other centers of the African Diaspora.
The musical genre itself has an accessible tradition of defiance, social commentary, and failing that, rage. Then there's the style, all the doo rags, baggy pants, Sean Jean jackets, and the bling. Wearing it all together is like wrapping yourself in a flag. You don't have to keep the beat.
I was on the subway the other day with a young black gansta wannabee pacing up and down the platform, and scaring all the rainbow of nice bourgeois Parisians, even though if you looked twice you could tell the baggy pants and doo-rag were a costume on him, a kind of carapace.
Maybe that extravagant shell is enough in a place like France which is so conformist that even its nonconformists conform to a particular mode. In France, they say the impetus for it isn't so much to erase people, endorse racism, or homophobia, but to preserve the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are supposed to put everybody on the same ground as everyone else, neither higher or lower.
Frankly, most of us could get behind that idea. The failure of it has emerged as a main theme of French rappers who use this quintessentially black American form to assert their Frenchness and take on the myth.
I wasn't exactly taking notes Sunday when I stopped to watch the video countdown, but I was struck by one from a North African rapper rhyming about how even if he left the place, he was born here, the cité was his, and France would always be his home. It was too sweet for me with sun shining, green grass growing, and a beautiful brown woman getting black and brown men to shake hands, but nevertheless he was claiming space.
Another video had some white-looking guy getting incensed about a hip-hop song playing with the idea of France profound or the real France of the countryside. The song is playing on one radio and he turns it off, then it's coming from a car below and he leaves his apartment to go downstairs and turn it off there. After that, someone walks by with it playing on his headphones, which he grabs and smashes.
Then it's on a little radio that the women turn off when he approaches, but after a split second of silence, the women themselves begin singing. Then it's playing again in the taxi. And so on and so on. The "listeners," white and black and brown, finally sing, if I understood correctly, that they were the real France profound and that the bottom line was respect.
Some gay people turn to the U.S., too. The French assaulted American academics with Lacan and Derrida, and we return the favor with Judith Butler and "queer" studies. After seeing a couple of shows this week at the queer film festival I wasn't sure the French had come out ahead.
If you can set aside (try to) the homophobia and misogyny, and endorsement of random violence, what hip-hop offers is a mode of defiance, pride, a built-in attitude that encourages the disempowered to take on the powerful. It may not lead anywhere in the long run, but it's readymade, and anyone can tap into it.
All French people get with "queer" is some uprooted English word, apparently conveying the vague idea that there could be liberation and equality on the margins of society.
Some of the films in the "queer" festival were powerful (Black Nations, Queer Nations). Most were not. They were almost all old, and taken together, positively dusty. Worse, everything I like about the word got lost in the cultural translation.
Like with hip-hop, "queer" carries with it, or used to, flamboyance, shock value, energy, defiance, even joy, because it was rooted in a homo-identity like dyke or fag or drag queens that we built in the streets, risking our necks sometimes to be ourselves.
Queer was not a department of study in a university, an area of research, a retrospective. Look forward, or not at all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
810 words
When it comes to American culture, you need comic strip words in big, fat letters like POW! and BLAM! for what we do to other people, or our own for that matter.
In France, half of the top hip-hop videos of last Sunday were American, including one P.Diddy, two Snoop Doggs and Miss Fergie Fergalicious singing about how hot she was, but not promiscuous. I went to a "queer" film festival later in the day where the name was not only American, but half the films.
This is a little more complicated, though, than McDonald's supplanting little cafes with mass-produced frites. It's a testimony to the strength of identity politics in the U.S.
In the case of rap, it has given --mostly men-- a short-cut to a Black identity, especially in France, and Cuba and other centers of the African Diaspora.
The musical genre itself has an accessible tradition of defiance, social commentary, and failing that, rage. Then there's the style, all the doo rags, baggy pants, Sean Jean jackets, and the bling. Wearing it all together is like wrapping yourself in a flag. You don't have to keep the beat.
I was on the subway the other day with a young black gansta wannabee pacing up and down the platform, and scaring all the rainbow of nice bourgeois Parisians, even though if you looked twice you could tell the baggy pants and doo-rag were a costume on him, a kind of carapace.
Maybe that extravagant shell is enough in a place like France which is so conformist that even its nonconformists conform to a particular mode. In France, they say the impetus for it isn't so much to erase people, endorse racism, or homophobia, but to preserve the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are supposed to put everybody on the same ground as everyone else, neither higher or lower.
Frankly, most of us could get behind that idea. The failure of it has emerged as a main theme of French rappers who use this quintessentially black American form to assert their Frenchness and take on the myth.
I wasn't exactly taking notes Sunday when I stopped to watch the video countdown, but I was struck by one from a North African rapper rhyming about how even if he left the place, he was born here, the cité was his, and France would always be his home. It was too sweet for me with sun shining, green grass growing, and a beautiful brown woman getting black and brown men to shake hands, but nevertheless he was claiming space.
Another video had some white-looking guy getting incensed about a hip-hop song playing with the idea of France profound or the real France of the countryside. The song is playing on one radio and he turns it off, then it's coming from a car below and he leaves his apartment to go downstairs and turn it off there. After that, someone walks by with it playing on his headphones, which he grabs and smashes.
Then it's on a little radio that the women turn off when he approaches, but after a split second of silence, the women themselves begin singing. Then it's playing again in the taxi. And so on and so on. The "listeners," white and black and brown, finally sing, if I understood correctly, that they were the real France profound and that the bottom line was respect.
Some gay people turn to the U.S., too. The French assaulted American academics with Lacan and Derrida, and we return the favor with Judith Butler and "queer" studies. After seeing a couple of shows this week at the queer film festival I wasn't sure the French had come out ahead.
If you can set aside (try to) the homophobia and misogyny, and endorsement of random violence, what hip-hop offers is a mode of defiance, pride, a built-in attitude that encourages the disempowered to take on the powerful. It may not lead anywhere in the long run, but it's readymade, and anyone can tap into it.
All French people get with "queer" is some uprooted English word, apparently conveying the vague idea that there could be liberation and equality on the margins of society.
Some of the films in the "queer" festival were powerful (Black Nations, Queer Nations). Most were not. They were almost all old, and taken together, positively dusty. Worse, everything I like about the word got lost in the cultural translation.
Like with hip-hop, "queer" carries with it, or used to, flamboyance, shock value, energy, defiance, even joy, because it was rooted in a homo-identity like dyke or fag or drag queens that we built in the streets, risking our necks sometimes to be ourselves.
Queer was not a department of study in a university, an area of research, a retrospective. Look forward, or not at all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
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