Personal/political musings from a Canadian activist and writer. From May 2004 to July 2005, when the author lived in the U.S., the site was known as A Canadian Lefty in the Land of King George. Here are a few words about the current name.
The recent efforts to promote lesbian and gay marriage also promote a norm that threatens to render illegitimate and abject those sexual arrangements that do not comply with the marriage norm in either its existing or revised form. At the same time, the homophobic objections to lesbian and gay marriage expand out through the culture to affect all queer lives. One critical question thus becomes, how does one oppose the homophobia without embracing the marriage norm as the exclusive or most highly valued social arrangement for queer sexual lives? Similarly, efforts to establish bonds of kinship that are not based on a marriage tie become nearly illegible and unviable when marriage sets the terms for kinship, and kinship itself is collapsed into 'family.' The enduring social ties that constitute viable kinship in communities of sexual minorities are threatened with becoming unrecognizeable and unviable as long as the marriage bond is the exclusive way in which both sexuality and kinship are organized. A critical relation to this norm involves disarticulating those rights and obligations currently attendant upon marriage so that marriage might remain a symbolic exercise for those who choose to engage in it, but the rights and obligations of kinship may take any number of other forms. What reorganization of sexual norms would be necessary for those who live sexually and affectively outside the marriage bond or in kin relations to the side of marriage either to be legally and culturally recognized for the endurance and importance of their intimate ties or, equally important, to be free of the need for recognition of this kind?
-- Judith Butler (Undoing Gender, p. 5)
I know people who fit the entire description. I was raised among them -- klansmen, gay-bashers, wife-beaters, and child-rapists with a penchant for incest, as well as moonshiners, cardplayers, snake-handlers, and revival preachers. Some are relatives by blood. All are relatives by water, air, and dirt. Our bodies are made up of elements from the same piece of ground. Through endless cycles that dirt perpetuates itself. We arise from it and return, and it circulates through these permeable membranes that individuate us temporarily and to some small degree. It won't do to claim that I have no part in the ugliness that that version of historically constructed whiteness entails. That would be a lie.
...
In the meantime, though, I realize that it makes me very angry that there is so little room in our society for the notion of a well-educated, decent, peace-loving redneck. It makes me angry, because I know why that's the case. Rednecks serve a distinct and very valuable function for well-educated, sophisticated, overtly nonviolent white people: Rednecks bear the stigma of white-ness, the ugly part of whiteness, so that middle-class people with college degrees don't have to. If I take off the boots and speak in standard English, none of my white, well-educated associates believes I might harbor any racial prejudice or be guilty of doing any harm to nonwhite students or employees in my charge. I'm assumed to be fair and upright and free of unenlightened attitudes or assumptions about any racial group. But if I put the boots back on -- in other words, if I claim my own specific embodiment -- suddenly I'm available to be held responsible for all the racism that lurks in this country. Not by black people -- most of whom, I've found, are on to this ruse -- but by educated white people, people who want to have someone to point a finger at so that they never have to examine the institutionalized forms of racism that their actions reinforce on the job and the street every day, so that they never have to question or work against a system that rewards them for who they are.
-- Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures, pp. 173-175
Posts
