Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

It seems that when one or very few members of a minority make a mistake or are a jerk then they seen as representative of that entire group.

For example one Transperson (Argentine, Woman, Master etc) acted in this or that way so I hate all Transpeople (or whatever the group is). This is not reality.

Individuals do not speak for the whole.

Yes, we "represent" our group in the same way we are supposed to "represent" our parents, and should ac t right. But I hope I am not held as representative of all adoptees or women or Lesbians etc.

We need to stop thinking things like..."well I was raped by a redmeck white woman", so I hate all redneck white women. and when I say "we", I mean I need to stop.

YES!

I want to piggy back off this by saying that I have felt hurt when I have seen femme threads on here where some people have talked about men with a broad brush, and a negative one at that. And since it was in the femme zone, I felt I couldn't and shouldn't come in and say, "Hey, as a transguy I want to say that not all guys are like that. I'm not like that!"

I also want to say that I, personally, try to keep in mind that we queer people, LGBTQ, etc. all know what it is like to be marginalized and oppressed by the hetero-normative, non-trans, homophobic, white-centric, racist and patriarchal dominant culture of our respective countries. We all experience it on one level or another, or on multiple levels. We need to stick together and stop attacking each other! I have said this several times before and I will keep saying it. Stop the madness! lol.

I try my best to listen to the concerns and issues of others, and put myself in their shoes. I can't always relate to what everyone is going through because I don't always have the same exact experiences. But I have to take someone's word for it when they say they feel marginalized. However, sometimes, given all the facts, I can see that there are times when such feelings are based on miscommunications or misperceptions of the facts. One person says one thing, and another person assumes there is an intent in those words that simply isn't there, and then feels upset.

Here is a personal example for me: I have been told that I could never understand what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism, and my comments were dismissed. My point of view is, yes I will never know exactly what that is like, it's true. However, I do know what it is like to have a hard time getting employment on the basis of who I am and what I look like, being passed over for promotions, stared at in public places, treated as if I am less than human, had my property vandalized, called hurtful bigoted words, etc. It's not exactly the same, but it's something. And I will never understand any better as long as no one tries explain it to me. I would love for someone to say, "Drew, these are the experiences I have and this is how it effects my life and makes me feel." As a white person who doesn't experience the receiving end of racism, I want to understand better. And I want others to understand better what it is like to be me and what I go through too. All it takes is an openness to listen, and the patience to explain without judgment. The same goes for sexism, and all the other -isms.

I have more to say but I have to get going now. I will be back later. Great topic AJ!!

[The_Lady_Snow]

I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow

I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was an not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

Yes.

And I think of morality as strictly about doing right by each other as human beings. To me, singling out people and excluding them and harassing them with finger wagging because they are different from you is immoral behavior. Favoring policies that keep the rich richer and the poor poorer is an immoral stance. Anything that creates a strata of civil rights where some have more and some have less is immoral. Racism is immoral. Sexism and homophobia and transphobia and ageism are immoral. Those are all immoral things because they are unfair and harm people in some really significant ways.

I agree with you Aj, that this is a different way of thinking of morality than the religious right seems to. The whole, "the bible says it, I believe it and that settles it!" kind of thinking isn't what I consider moral. I think it's more like using religion to justify one's prejudices and bigotry. That kind of hypocrisy makes me mad because there is no reasoning with people like that. But those people don't have the market cornered on morality; in reality they are lacking it in the most fundamental ways.

[Slater]

So much good stuff in this thread already.

I wanted to put together a coherent post that had some sort of discernible structure and flow. Yeah, that ain’t happening tonight. So instead I’m just going to throw a few disjointed thoughts out there and shoot for coherence another time.


We are no longer – as a community – as embattled as we were a couple decades ago, which is not to say that things are swell for everyone, but in general as a community, we are not bobbing in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks and clinging to a half-deflated life raft like we once were. And I think maybe that is some of where the rush to cast the victim and oppressor roles that Medusa mentioned comes into play. We’ve come to expect sharks, so we see them around every corner (and yes I realize the middle of the ocean doesn’t technically have corners). We sharkify each other in part because we are accustomed to battling sharks.

Somewhat conversely is the phenomenon that AJ and Heart and others have talked about, whereby things stand unchallenged that should be challenged, or if they are challenged, the response is defensive and dismissive. And I think they are right when they talk about needing to build the community around shared values or morals instead of just around identities. But I also think there is simply not enough education on anti-oppression. I think most all of us are familiar with general concepts but I am talking about understanding the mechanics of how oppression functions and learning how to do the work of combating it.

One other thing that I’ve been thinking about, though I’m not quite sure how this fits in to this discussion, is that we need to stop pretending that broadened inclusiveness is always free in every circumstance. That is, sometimes, in some situations, there is a cost. That doesn’t mean the inclusiveness isn’t the right thing to do or isn’t worth the cost, but maybe acknowledging the cost might make the process easier for those who are paying it.

For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.

I want to be clear that, for me, it was never about thinking transmen should not be part of the community. It was about wanting to hold onto a word that named my experience. I know some people think the naming thing is or should be unimportant, but I don’t agree. I think it is vital for marginalized groups to have words for themselves, words that represent their existence and specific experience in the world. When I was in college and newly out, I had a friend who was from a rural part of China. She could scarcely comprehend coming out to her parents because in the dialect they spoke there were no words for lesbian or gay or even homosexual. There were no words at all that named her reality. It was clear how lost and helpless she felt even thinking about how to begin that conversation with her parents. Our names matter.

I came to understand the reasons why butch was being used by some transmen. I do understand. But I will say that I appreciate it when a male-identified person uses the term transbutch. To me, that clearly connects them to the butch identity and community while at the same time acknowledging and respecting that the female tradition of the word.

I realize I’ve wandered a bit far afield from the topic of the thread, so I’ll try to bring it back around. If one of the things we are talking about is how to better coalesce our various groups into a united community, I think we need to honestly acknowledge that sometimes broadening definitions or scopes can mean something is going to be lost along the way, sacrificed to the process of change. While this doesn’t mean the change shouldn’t happen, it might at least be worth considering what, if anything, is being sacrificed.


Considering I can hardly stay awake I should probably stop here. Hopefully in the morning I will not have horrifying realization that I should have stopped long before now.

Great thread, important discussions, looking forward to more.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by Slater

snip
For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.

What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.

[Slater]

Originally Posted by Liam

What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.

I should have been a bit clearer in what I was saying. It’s certainly true that gay men use the word butch. I don’t know for sure whether they adopted it based the usage in the lesbian community although it doesn’t actually matter to what I was trying to say, but wasn’t quite explicit about.

I wasn’t talking literally about the collection of letters b-u-t-c-h (which is of course also used as a first name), but with the distinct identity of butch that exists in our community. While butch is used by gay men, it has never coalesced into an identity and community the way it did among lesbians. But regardless of the nature of its usage among gay men, it occupies in a separate part of the cultural landscape than the butch identity I was speaking of, so in that sense they might as well be different words. A little bit like life forms that may share a common ancestor but evolve distinctly on neighboring mountainsides.

So what I was talking about was the butch name and butch identity that exists is our part of the cultural landscape, the one on our mountainside. That butch identity was a female identity. That butch identity has changed to no longer be a specifically female identity.

I don’t know if that makes what I was saying any clearer or not. Hopefully it does. My intention in bringing it up in the first place was merely as an example of the way a change, even when it makes sense for the community, can mean the loss of something that is valued by at least some members of the community. And I think if we were better at being mindful of that and acknowledging it along the way, we might be able to incorporate changes with a little less friction.

[Nat]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it.

YES

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

This I mostly agree with - I like your definition of harm-based morality.

I've wondered many times what it would be like to wake up and know that yesterday I committed a terrible crime. I have dreams like this too. (I have a very low likelihood of committing a terrible crime). I have thought and thought about the difference between a person before and after s/he commits a violent crime - are they the same person?

I tend to think so. I judge. But in (my) perfect world, I would rather judge the behavior and not the person. I'm not sure where that discomfort with judging people comes from, but it is perhaps from an emotional rather than a logical place. At least, I think the murderer benefits from compassion more than s/he benefits from judgment. And I think society benefits more from the compassionate treatment of criminals, while the crime is still punished. More later, work calls.

[Novelafemme]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Novelafemme

Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos

When I was in the military we were taught that if we captured the enemy whatever else we might do we do NOT torture. Ever. It is a war crime. If given an order to torture, it was our *duty* to refuse to carry out the order and support our superior to the next in the chain of command and, if possible, relieve the officer giving that order of his command because giving an illegal order is prima facie evidence that one is unfit for command. Has torture been used by nation-states and by monarchs before them? Yes. However, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is quite clear on the matter of torture. We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions and by Constitutional mandate we are *obliged* to conform to it.

George Washington, who explicitly forbade torture, had it right. If we torture their people, they can torture our people. They might torture our people even if we do not torture theirs but if we torture theirs we make it a near certainty that our people will be tortured.

My saying that there was a time when torture was considered out-of-bounds does not mean that torture did not happen anymore than saying that murder is out-of-bounds means that murder never happens. But it was once the case that any commander who gave his troops an order to torture would have been relieved of command. There was a time when we, the American people, would have demanded the impeachment of any elected official who signed off on torture. It was once the case that we prided ourselves, we differentiated ourselves, by our NOT torturing.

Cheers
Aj