I have so many feelings

My wobbly living room table

…is covered in pipe cleaners, finger puppets, colored pencils, and books on Communism and poetry and vaginas. This is all very evocative.

JB on Semenya

And yet, if we consider that this act of ‘sex determination’ was supposed to be collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender’ (why wasn’t I called!?), then the assumption is that cultural and psychological factors are part of sex-determination, and that no one of these ‘experts’ could come up with a definitive finding on his or her own (presuming that binary gender holds). This co-operative venture suggests as well that sex-determination is decided by consensus and, conversely, where there is no consensus, there is no determination of sex. Is this not a presumption that sex is a social negotiation of some kind? And are we, in fact, witnessing in this case a massive effort to socially negotiate the sex of Semenya, with the media included as a party to the deliberations?

from : http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/11/20/judith-butler/wise-distinctions/

Marx vs. Butler: Rumble!!!! (or: Why I need a long-form blog)

Listened to Sherry Wolf give a talk at UIC over weekend, and the conversation left me electrified, if also prickling a bit under the skin. Wolf’s the author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation - which I now definitely need to read.

She argues (from what I gathered) that a lot of ideas generated by queer theory in the academy are not only irrelevant to the movement but also stymieing. As she sees it, queer theory divides us, reducing us to “atomized beings.” Through deconstructing self and stable identity, it then also destabilizes any effort to organize around common interest/identity.

Extraneous to this central question, there were several aspects of the discussion that annoyed me. For one, the bullheadedness particular to Marxists that everything, everything ever, boils down to class oppression. I completely agree that we need to talk about class MUCH MORE than we do, but I am not convinced that all identity-based groups can be treated as a “class” as per Marxist-feminism. If “gays” = a class, or “women” = a class, doesn’t this thinking iron out the intersectionality in identities?

Many audience members (not Wolf herself) were also dismissive of the academy in general (even though their socialist conference was at a university…), & in particular, of queer thinkers like Pat Califia (BDSM, fisting as modes of resistance, etc). And this I think is nothing new.

Ever since 2nd wave feminism (or even before?), a lot of progressive folk have polarized concrete reforms on one end, vs. more theory-based forms of resistance (think Betty Friedan vs. Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps). One audience member contrasted ’60s and ’70s “taking it to the streets” collective action with more “useless” efforts like re-imagining queer sex (Califia, et. al). I was startled that she ignored “the personal is political” — a slogan born in the time for which she seemed to have so much nostalgia.

“You can’t perform your way into a living wage or health care,” Wolf said. No, of course not, but queer theory never claimed to substitute social/political reforms or collective action. Wolf is not alone in criticizing a “pessimism” in its ideas — if there is no concrete self, how can that jumble of “atoms” unite with any other jumble to organize? I too have asked these questions. But much of my conclusions (tenuous though they may be) have been optimistic.

If queer theory challenges the identity markers that define us, it then also challenges our separateness. True, there’s nothing “constructed” or imaginary about lived oppression. But if we recognize that so many of the bases for (hetero)sexism/racism/__ism are constructions, it makes borders of identity (and so then, of community) all the more porous, blurrable. Maybe as a poet I am predisposed to all things “floaty,” but I will always defend the powers of thought, alongside concrete action, to re-imagine and yes, to queer our communities.