I’ve never been big into Ani DiFranco’s music. I tend to like my songs a little more…. sung. That being said, though, I do greatly respect her politics and her outspokenness about being a feminist.
Those who are fans, though, might especially appreciate this interview. In it, she quotes and elaborates upon one of her lyrics:
“’Feminism ain’t for women / That’s not who it is for / It’s about shifting consciousness / It’ll bring an end to war.’
I feel like we need to understand feminism more as a tool to mediate, counteract, to ultimately defeat patriarchy and restore balance to our government, our culture and our ways of thinking and structuring the world. I think we’ve had a very ‘masculine’ sensibility for a long time, and I think we need to go back to the roots of social imbalance. I think we have to try to right that first, and from there and all these more pressing issues will follow.”
This quote brings to mind an issue that I go back and forth about myself.
Namely, is the mainstream LGBT rights’ movement push for assimilation into marriage and the military a conservative goal or a radical one?
Both institutions have, historically, been imbued with gender essentialist stereotypes, male dominance, and the oppression of women. And yet, by (arguable) legal necessity, gay rights litigation has traditionally been premised on, to paraphrase, arguments of the “we’re just like you and we were born this way” type.
So, rather than pushing to make flawed institutions and flawed ways of thinking about gender and sexual identity better, the push seems to be to keep flawed structures intact while allowing more people into these structures.
Upon the legalization of same-sex marriage and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” will there be or has there been, to use DiFranco’s words, a shift in consciousness about our ways of structuring the world?
I think it is reasonable to argue that same-sex marriage subverts some of the gender stereotypes and expectations associated with marriage, but it’s not clear what effect, if any, this subversion will have on different-sex marriages.
Same sex marriage will help to solidify changes to marriage that have already occured. If marriage is viewed an establishment of a legal status that confers different rights and obligations to each member, different roles, then the idea of a same-sex marriage really is nutty. Consider the ancient Greeks, who famously extolled the virtues of same-sex love, but never instituted same-sex marriage becasue they never questioned the status of women or the purpose of marriage.But if marriage is viewed as a contract between two individuals who freely negotiate their own terms, the idea that the two people must be different sexes is nutty. Same-sex marriage could not have been concieved of without feminism, and accepting same-sex marriage as a legal institution will make the gains of feminism much harder to reverse.
So I actually *agree* with religious fundimentalists who claim same-sex marriage goes against all traditional concepts of marriage. I just think that is a good thing.
Upon the legalization of same-sex marriage and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” will there be or has there been, to use DiFranco’s words, a shift in consciousness about our ways of structuring the world?
Not in any fundamental way. The institutions will evolve to take inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness for granted, but nothing will particularly change other than the previously-excluded now get into the clubhouse.
“’Feminism ain’t for women / That’s not who it is for / It’s about shifting consciousness / It’ll bring an end to war.’”
Sure it will.
You know what the trouble with smash-the-patriarchy is? It isn’t that the patriarchy is this great best-of-all-possible-worlds thing. It’s that humans are an “archy” species, and “an” isn’t to be found in the prefix code table for any social organization larger than a few mutually-related or mutually-selected people living in relative isolation. You may, at considerable cost, convert the patriarchy into a matriarchy, or a gerontocracy, or a Christarchy, or an oligarchy, or some other interesting structure with a whole different set of hierarchies and new kinds of rules and novel (to us) structures.
But it’s still going to be an archy, there will still be wars, economic realities will still constrain human actions and dreams, there will still be “important” people and “little” people, etc. etc. etc.
It may well be worth it, particularly if a particular patriarchy is so odiously oppressive that it incurs social costs to its membership far in excess of the social benefits it delivers to some of the membership. But the idea that there is any kind of utopian reality just waiting for us to have the courage to shrug off the current shackles…nope. Just different shackles – maybe more comfortable shackles, maybe fairer shackles, maybe shackles that afflict the previously comfortable and comfort the previously afflicted – but shackles nonetheless.
First, I’d like to suggest that the dichotomy between radical and conservative is a false one – there are positions that can be taken between the two, such as the position of a reformer, who seeks not to abolish current social structures but to reshape them, I would argue that reformers are as necessary as radicals if any progressive agenda can be advanced.
One of the problems with radical ideologists is that they tend to not think beyond the revolution. They figure out that the current social structures need tearing down, but they usually do not provide constructive ideas on how to build new social structures – they assume those will emerge. But Robert is at least partially right – humans have a horrible tendency to create restrictive, oppressive societies. Liberty and egalatrianism aren’t defaults – they take a lot of work. And, more relevantly to the post’s topic, the social structures that will emerge will not be created from a tabula rasa – the people responsible for creating them will be the ones that have experienced the old ones. And they will carry some of the assumptions of older social structures with them, conciously or not.
It is imperative, therefore, that we work to improve the current social structures as we also work to question whether they are needed at all. If the institution of marriage is allowed to remain a domain of discrimination against homosexuality, this discrimination may well re-emerge in the non-partriarchal structures that may eventually replace marriage.
To put it another way, if the history of the twentieth century has taught us anything is that the more radical a social change, the less likely it is to survive. The current reactionary politics of the American conservative right are just one example of how social progress does not continue unopposed, not just by the power structures that exist at the time, but by new generations who resent the loss of privilege associated with the breakdown of unequal social structures in the previous generations. For progressive advances to mean anything, they must be sustainable – and that means that they must occur on all levels. It’s not enough for new structures to be introduced, the old structures must be reformed in the same time.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Eytan says:
I think that’s a good point. And to add to that, a radical movement is going to have to be very careful about the means by which the revolution is achieved. If it is achieved via violence and the perpetuation of other -isms such as sexism, racism, ableism, etc then those means and -isms will be legitimized in the new society.
At the same time, one of my main issues with the mainstream LG”BT” rights movement is that it’s not that… intersectional. I recently read a post at one popular gay blog that was celebrating the fact that all of the candidates for a city office were pro-gay and how great that was for “our” community. But, like, this blogger told us nothing about these Democrats and Republicans(!) other than the fact that they supported same-sex marriage. And, well, I’m just not sure many people, even within the LGBT community, have the relative privilege of same-sex marriage being the only issue they care about in a candidate.
I just sometimes wonder if some gay rights activists will see their work as done once, say, DOMA is repealed and, accordingly, continue to just not care about issues like racism, sexism, and any other -ism that doesn’t revolve around homosexuality.
I just sometimes wonder if some gay rights activists will see their work as done once, say, DOMA is repealed and, accordingly, continue to just not care about issues like racism, sexism, and any other -ism that doesn’t revolve around homosexuality.
Well, there are always going to be narrow-issue activists, who only care about their pet issues and will not lift a finger for others. That’s true of gay rights activists, but it’s also true of feminists, anti-racists, pro-choice activists, etc. That does not reflect negatively on those issues, nor does it invalidate the work those people do for those issues.
Fannie,
I like the fact that you’re willing to say this out loud in an environment where anything critical of the “gay rights” movement is construed as homophobic.
But…a huge, huge number of us — gay/queer activists — have been saying this for a very long time. I co-founded Against Equality, which was begun in order to archive a long queer history of dissent around marriage, the military, and hate crimes legislation. Visit us at http://www.againstequality.org and you will see that many queers have been making these point, in various, complicated and yes, intersectional ways, for a really long time. We haven’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg.
But to answer your question: yes, gay rights IS a conservative movement. Take marriage. There is nothing inherently radical about marriage, it disrupts nothing, even if you marry upside down, naked, hanging from a hot air balloon, and if your wedding vows consist of swearing to have at least one orgy a week with many people.
This is, of course, specific to the States, where marriage is a way for the state to funnel its neoliberal agenda – which is to say: to shift the onus of responsibility for a person’s health and well-being and education and everything else away from the state onto the nuclear family. That, in itself, is a feature of the deeply conservative and neoliberal state. If the gay marriage movement had a radical bone in its body – oh, hell, if it had a vaguely “progressive” bone in its body – it would have started by saying: “We will not stand for a state where the unmarried are denied rights so basic as health care.” In framing marriage as a right when it is in fact a disburser of privileges, the gay marriage movement manipulates facts, rhetoric, and emotions.
I could go on, about DADT and how it affirms a conservative view of the heavily militarized state as somehow good for us, or how hate crimes legislation increases the prison industrial complex by pretending that putting more people in jail is somehow helpful to “minorities” (even though hcl disproportionately affects people of color, who are the first ones to be slammed into prison for infractions against, oh, white people and the wealthy). But I will ask you to visit our site.
I’ve been plotting something titled either “Why Gay Rights Is A Conservative Movement” or “An Open Letter to Straight People to Drop Their Blinkers about Gay Rights”. Time to finish those up.
And I’m not assuming you’re straight, btw. I assume everyone is kinda or mostly or entirely queer unless proven otherwise.
We’d love to chat with you!
Yasmin Nair
In law school in 1996, I took a class on sexual orientation and the law, there were 2 professors and 12 students, I was the only straight. The most controversial topic we covered was marriage, a majority of the students favored marriage as a goal, but the dissenting group was substantial and included both proffs. I support marriage equality as an important goal, but I have really been shocked at the total lack of dissent about it on the left.
The other “issue” where I have been shocked at the lack of dissent in the gay rights movement since I took that class was around the claim that gays and lesbians are “born that way.” Most of the writers we studied in the class were social constructionists who derided that view as “essentialism”. I have never been clear why it matters: I oppose government discrimination based on religion even though it is a choice, and I would not let a psychopath off the hook for his actions even if he was born that way.
Hi Yasmin,
I’m vaguely familiar with the Against Equality movement, but I confess to not knowing much about it. At times, I get very sucked into the push for marriage equality without critically examining why, as your website notes, health care and economic rights have to be associated with marriage.
I have long been critical of the mainstream Gay Rights Inc. as being dominated by cis white gay men and, thus, prone to replicating problematic patterns of racism, sexism, and transphobia. Not because they’re necessarily EVIL, but because some within the community are very resistant to examining their privileges and biases and, in fact, can be pretty hostile to having those privileges and biases pointed out. There’s kind of this pervasive attitude that the oppressions facing cis white gay men, which are indeed legitimate, are the Most Serious Oppressions Of All Time.
I’m thinking of The Advocate’s clueless “Gay Is the New Black” issue, and Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign that implies that homophobic bullying is much worse than other forms of bullying.
Anyway, you’re right in assuming I’m not straight. I’m partnered with a woman. I only bring it up because I do think some would maybe assume that I’m not a part of the LGBT community for saying these things aloud and that it’s “not my place” to make these observations. So, I guess my point is that, from a personal standpoint, I feel that it is legally and morally unjustifiable to deny my partner and I the rights of marriage, but I’m also not entirely comfortable with the mainstream gay rights movement’s seeming view that DOMA/DADT repeal is the “end goal.”
In a related vein, I’m intrigued by the current discussion in New Hampshire (?) about replacing the gay marriage law with a sort of open category of civil unions, open to all gender combinations. The motivations are, of course, to keep gays out of the established institution, but I wonder whether such a law would have the effect of further, as Decnavda put it, “solidify[ing] changes to marriage that have already occured.” For that matter, by separating the religious/public/vow portion of the union from the legal/private/paperwork aspects, it might cause people to give a lot more thought to what the institution is, what part they’re really interested in, whose imprimatur they care about, etc. etc. Enough to turn the whole cultural construct inside out? I doubt it, but a little less invisibility to the strings, perhaps…