Quotes from the named essay, found in Queering Anarchism:
Further, anarchism isn’t solely centered on crushing structures like capitalism and the state (although we anarchists certainly want that). Rather, we seek to smash all institutionalized hierarchies. We reject all forms of coerced domination. But imagine if capitalism, the state, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc., were “removed” (if only it were that easy)? What would remain? Unfortunately, not much, one could imagine. Anarchists, then, might also be creative. We might try to create new ways of relating to each other, new ways of relating to the non-human world, new ways of loving, knowing, playing, etc. If we don’t create these new social relations, then we will likely fall back on the current ones, at worst, and will not realize our creative potential, at best. Anarchists are often creating new ways of living and relating in the here and now.
An anarchist queer theory might also begin by attempting to tear down the borders between “identities” (as well as unpack their very existence/use) by showing that people are complex (as is the world) and are not easily categorized—at least not honestly.
I think it would also be better at dealing with the 'grey' areas of identities, regardless of what they are.
These kinds of displays are often referred to as “the Oppression Olympics.” People in these situations seem like they’re playing a game together—a grand contest to assert who is more authentic, more oppressed, and thus more correct. It’s at this point where identity becomes fetishized; where essentialist understandings of people trump good sense; and where a patronizing belief in the superiority of the wise, noble savage often overrides any sense at all. Often this tactic of agreeing with “the most marginalized in the room” will be used as a substitute for developing critical analyses around race, gender, sexuality, etc. This tactic is intellectually lazy, lacks political depth, and leads toward tokenization.
There is a point to allowing our experiences of various forcefully assigned identities to be at the forefront of conversations. People do have different experiences based on these social constructions and we should take these differences into account. But when they become markers of authenticity and “correctness,” it poses a problem for anarchists. After all, we seek to dissolve hierarchical relations, not create new ones formed from the margins.
Queer theory has taken up the disconcerting task of putting identity—and by extension identity politics—under a destabilizing lens. An anarchist queer theory might give us more effective ways of relating than the Oppression Olympics (a set of games no one really wins anyway). And in an anarchist politics of sexuality and gender, this means that care needs to be taken not to invert existing hierarchies, much like the Oppression Olympics do—making more authentic voices out of some over others and creating new hierarchies to replace old ones.
Folks who have desires that have been either literally outlawed and/or disapproved of culturally (not always an offense with less “consequences”) find themselves in a position of transgressing sexual norms when they practice their sexual desires (whether they “enjoy” challenging those norms or not). Challenging our own desires is an important step in trying to shed the institutionalized, directed, compulsory, organized, and controlled sexualities that have been made available to (and constituted) us. However, one can challenge institutionalized sexual categories and (available) expressions without necessarily having to swing the pendulum to the opposite side with their own sexual practices or with their expectation for others’ sexual practices. For instance, just because promiscuity is a non-normative sexual desire/practice doesn’t mean that to be in the act of challenging such norms that one must participate in promiscuity, per se. For instance, I can reject and struggle against the sexual/gender status quo without the need to physically embody/practice certain non-normative sexualities. Sexual acts themselves (or lack thereof) are not what we are challenging as queer radicals. We are struggling against sexualities and sexual acts being categorized and ordered into hierarchical systems that privilege certain practices/desires over others.
What’s peculiar about normative assumptions around sexuality and gender is their ability to be invisible. This is why we also need to struggle at the conceptual level; we need to not only smash the seemingly automatic jump to create and maintain status quos, but we also need to replace the notion of status quo with something else—perhaps an awareness of the very non-necessity of status quos governing consensual sexual practices and a very conscious understanding of the damage and limitations that these kinds of understandings can create and maintain.
One thing this means is defining in queer heterosexualities, to name perhaps one controversial example. A good question to bring this point home might be: Who is more oppressed, erased, and marginalized as a result of their sexuality—an upper-class white gay man living in the Castro or a poor, working-class heterosexual woman of color living in the Bible Belt who has a number of heterosexual relationships, is promiscuous, and is open about it and proud of it? Here we can imagine a heterosexual relationship perhaps being more marginalized in this context as compared to the non-heterosexual relationship that this scenario offers. This question doesn’t have an answer—there are a multitude of specific contexts that would affect both of these hypothetical relationships. What this question should do, however, is make obvious that heterosexual relationships aren’t always more acceptable or viable than non-heterosexual relationships. It may very well be that a non-heterosexual relationship that mirrors a normative heterosexual relationship may cause less trouble than a heterosexual relationship that involves non-normative sexual acts or manifestations of love that involve more than two people. I am not suggesting that other overlapping positions in society don’t affect these scenarios, of course they do. In fact, the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation of origin, location, culture, etc. will all affect whether someone’s style of loving is to be viewed as normative and acceptable or otherwise. This very fact highlights the point that the gender-specificity of a relationship (“straight” or “not”) isn’t always the axis of acceptance or not. We can see that there are very real ways that heterosexual relationships or styles of loving (or making love) can very much stand in opposition to the “normal,” whereas non-heterosexual relationships and ways of loving can very much mirror the “normal” and may not subsequently be scrutinized nor understood as “abnormal” (of course this will be heavily determined by multiple and overlapping positions, oftentimes typified by race, class, gender, and location). It makes sense then to develop “queer” as a relational term vis-à-vis the normal rather than an identity marker that’s just short for “LGBT” (or some lengthened version of the alphabet soup).
In queer theory, the very idea of the queer is a shifting terrain that cannot be pinned down to some single definition. Rather, queer can be understood as what is at odds with the “normal” or legitimate. This being the case, there is nothing in particular to which queer necessarily refers, which makes queer an identity without an essence. In this way, as demonstrated above, we can look for hierarchies within heterosexual relationships or ways of loving. A heterosexual relationship of two cisgendered and monogamous people who keep their sexuality indoors is quite different from heterosexual ways of doing relationships that involve non-monogamy, public BDSM, or selling sex for money.
I did a small survey at Syracuse University in the fall of 2010 and found that the overwhelming majority of students interviewed believed it was fine that children were raised by two people of the same sex if they were in one monogamous relationship. However, at the same time they also believed that children have no place in the home of someone who is heterosexual but has more than one relationship or is involved in a relationship that consists of more than two people. In this case, the genders within a relationship weren’t a factor for judging acceptable environments for children to be raised in, but the type of relationship was a factor. Same-sex relationships were fine, as well as heterosexual relationships, but only if they were otherwise normative. Both same-sex or heterosexual relationships that were non-normative, in this case involving either more than one partner or more than one relationship, were not deemed appropriate for raising children. Obviously with this scenario we can see how non-gender-specific ways of loving were the problem for those interviewed, not the gender involved.
Queer, by definition, is an ongoing and never-ending process, so this piece certainly isn’t intended to be the last word on queer thought or practice.
