More equal than others
Jul. 25th, 2013 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI really, really wanted to go Bicon this year, because it was in Edinburgh and because katieastrophe was organizing and because I've been promising myself for years I should make it one of these summers. In the end I didn't make it, not because I was too angsty but because I was just purely too busy and a bit short of cash. I mean, it's all for good reasons, my job is going really well and I'm supervising an undergraduate summer student (who is a darling), and I've already had one foreign trip this summer and I'm planning another for after the summer project finishes and before term starts. So I can't exactly complain, but I can't help feeling slightly wistful that I wasn't there.
Also, I ended up spending the weekend of Bicon doing really really heterosexual things. First of all helping out my in-laws with family obligations, then having a brief but delightful romantic date with my male husband, and making at least a token effort towards celebrating 15th Av, the Jewish romantic love day. It was just the same week that the UK passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill into law. So lots of my social networks were full of celebrating progress in gay rights, while a minority were complaining about the exclusion of non-heteronormative Queer people.
Some links against marriage equality:
I absolutely do seek justice for people who are less heteronormative or generally more marginalized than I am. Until the recent couple of weeks I hadn't really considered the idea that marriage equality might be actively harmful for Queer people who don't want to or aren't in a position to get married. I was thinking that legal recognition of same-sex marriage was a step in the right direction even if not going far enough. I can definitely see the argument that it might cause gay and lesbian people with otherwise fairly cushy lives to give up prematurely on what should still be a key political struggle. And I can definitely see the argument that extending legal marriage to a slightly broader group of people contributes to further marginalization of people in relationships that don't look like conventional marriages.
People mocked politicians for declaring that "same-sex marriage is a fundamentally Conservative value", but to some extent it's true. It's legal support for the patriarchal idea of a nuclear family; in many ways it seems like a pure historical accident that political conservatism has been associated with homophobia. Me, I've never been a rebel, much less a revolutionary, I'm thoroughly bourgeois and respectable and generally accepting of authority and the status quo if it brings stability. Of course, in spite of my definite plans against it, I did end up married. The fact that I now have the hypothetical right to marry a woman makes me feel happier (hypothetical because I don't have the legal right to marry anyone unless I divorce my husband, which I have no intention of doing). It makes me feel like I'm a full citizen within my country, like my community accepts me. However, that was kind of the only barrier between me and perfect mainstream acceptance; I can very well understand why people who have much more significant barriers might resent people like me. Particularly since I married a man when same-sex couples had only the inferior option of a legal equivalent of marriage rather than actual marriage, for the rather trivial reason that I wanted to get married on 29th February and I didn't want to wait until 2016.
Truth is I got married because I felt like it, unlike a lot of people I had no real need of the institution of marriage. I am slightly shocked by how many advantages I've accrued from making that choice. On the one hand, I would like those advantages to be available to couples of any gender combinations. In a few years, taking part in in-laws' family events isn't going to be a particularly heterosexual thing, just like participating in conventional romance rituals isn't a particularly heterosexual thing any more. That doesn't really help, and people are starting to convince me it may actually damage, people who don't want to devote their lives to a single partner, people who are doing something more original than just following the well-worn grooves of commercialized romance and dating which are after all full of pretty toxic and gender oppressive expectations.
In some ways I have something closely kin to straight privilege. Passing privilege, heteronormative privilege. I have this weird kind of doublethink going on, on the one hand my life has never been appreciably worse because of my sexual orientation, and on the other I can list a load of negative experiences that most straight and gender conforming people wouldn't have experienced; I'm not sure how both those things can be true at once! Partly because having a generally cushy life in other ways, being middle class and generally perceived as normal in most respects and so on means that I can see occasional bits of homophobia as just one-off incidents rather than as a systematic disadvantage. I am afraid of falling into the trap of wanting to claim / appropriate the shiny bits of Queer culture – not so much the rainbows and the musicals and the slightly off-beat flamboyant and gender-challenging fashion, but the sense of community and camaraderie – but without actually being in meaningful solidarity with people for whom being Queer isn't just a fun quirk of identity but a real source of problems in many areas of life. I definitely don't want to be among the people who give up because "we" have marriage equality now.
katieastrophe was organizing and because I've been promising myself for years I should make it one of these summers. In the end I didn't make it, not because I was too angsty but because I was just purely too busy and a bit short of cash. I mean, it's all for good reasons, my job is going really well and I'm supervising an undergraduate summer student (who is a darling), and I've already had one foreign trip this summer and I'm planning another for after the summer project finishes and before term starts. So I can't exactly complain, but I can't help feeling slightly wistful that I wasn't there. Also, I ended up spending the weekend of Bicon doing really really heterosexual things. First of all helping out my in-laws with family obligations, then having a brief but delightful romantic date with my male husband, and making at least a token effort towards celebrating 15th Av, the Jewish romantic love day. It was just the same week that the UK passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill into law. So lots of my social networks were full of celebrating progress in gay rights, while a minority were complaining about the exclusion of non-heteronormative Queer people.
Some links against marriage equality:
- The ever wonderful Meg Barker of Rewriting the Rules summarizes the positives and negatives of the UK marriage equality situation: Opening up and closing down
- Stavvers has a great summary of the concerns of minority Queer voices, and argues for liberation rather than equality.
- auntysarah lays out in great detail how the new Same Sex Marriage Act doesn't create equality at all, since it not only ignores and excludes trans people, but actively makes their legal position worse.
- This really powerful essay from the blog A Paper Bird contemplates the harm done by facile "marriage equality" campaigns on the international scene: “Equality” has become the be-all and end-all of LGBT aspirations. A Paper Bird discusses in considerable detail the reality of racist and colonialist violence; the article contains both images and detailed descriptions of murders and torture, but every brutal, unflinching word is directly relevant and important.
- ETA: The person whose locked post inspired me to think about these issues has given me permission to quote her piece anonymously: Heteronormativity is not equality
I absolutely do seek justice for people who are less heteronormative or generally more marginalized than I am. Until the recent couple of weeks I hadn't really considered the idea that marriage equality might be actively harmful for Queer people who don't want to or aren't in a position to get married. I was thinking that legal recognition of same-sex marriage was a step in the right direction even if not going far enough. I can definitely see the argument that it might cause gay and lesbian people with otherwise fairly cushy lives to give up prematurely on what should still be a key political struggle. And I can definitely see the argument that extending legal marriage to a slightly broader group of people contributes to further marginalization of people in relationships that don't look like conventional marriages.
People mocked politicians for declaring that "same-sex marriage is a fundamentally Conservative value", but to some extent it's true. It's legal support for the patriarchal idea of a nuclear family; in many ways it seems like a pure historical accident that political conservatism has been associated with homophobia. Me, I've never been a rebel, much less a revolutionary, I'm thoroughly bourgeois and respectable and generally accepting of authority and the status quo if it brings stability. Of course, in spite of my definite plans against it, I did end up married. The fact that I now have the hypothetical right to marry a woman makes me feel happier (hypothetical because I don't have the legal right to marry anyone unless I divorce my husband, which I have no intention of doing). It makes me feel like I'm a full citizen within my country, like my community accepts me. However, that was kind of the only barrier between me and perfect mainstream acceptance; I can very well understand why people who have much more significant barriers might resent people like me. Particularly since I married a man when same-sex couples had only the inferior option of a legal equivalent of marriage rather than actual marriage, for the rather trivial reason that I wanted to get married on 29th February and I didn't want to wait until 2016.
Truth is I got married because I felt like it, unlike a lot of people I had no real need of the institution of marriage. I am slightly shocked by how many advantages I've accrued from making that choice. On the one hand, I would like those advantages to be available to couples of any gender combinations. In a few years, taking part in in-laws' family events isn't going to be a particularly heterosexual thing, just like participating in conventional romance rituals isn't a particularly heterosexual thing any more. That doesn't really help, and people are starting to convince me it may actually damage, people who don't want to devote their lives to a single partner, people who are doing something more original than just following the well-worn grooves of commercialized romance and dating which are after all full of pretty toxic and gender oppressive expectations.
In some ways I have something closely kin to straight privilege. Passing privilege, heteronormative privilege. I have this weird kind of doublethink going on, on the one hand my life has never been appreciably worse because of my sexual orientation, and on the other I can list a load of negative experiences that most straight and gender conforming people wouldn't have experienced; I'm not sure how both those things can be true at once! Partly because having a generally cushy life in other ways, being middle class and generally perceived as normal in most respects and so on means that I can see occasional bits of homophobia as just one-off incidents rather than as a systematic disadvantage. I am afraid of falling into the trap of wanting to claim / appropriate the shiny bits of Queer culture – not so much the rainbows and the musicals and the slightly off-beat flamboyant and gender-challenging fashion, but the sense of community and camaraderie – but without actually being in meaningful solidarity with people for whom being Queer isn't just a fun quirk of identity but a real source of problems in many areas of life. I definitely don't want to be among the people who give up because "we" have marriage equality now.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-26 04:21 pm (UTC)Oh, thank you. This is something I feel kind of strongly about. In England, where I lived for about four years, I'm instantly marked as Irish; in Ireland, where I grew up, under "Will you be perceived as Catholic or Protestant ?" where no other options exist, I get filed as Catholic; in Montreal, where I've lived this past decade, I'm Anglophone rather than Francophone. The last of those three has much less unpleasant potential failure modes than the other two did in my younger days, but still, when I'm in the US I'm non-consensually passing for white-as-unmarked-state, and I am a long way from comfortable about it, or about the assumptions it sometimes gets.