Here I'm going to attempt to tackle what is, really, way too large a topic to be covered in any single diary, so I ask you all to please forgive both any omissions and the likely obscene length of what I am about to write here.
I've been thinking a whole lot lately about identity: about how and why we choose to attach certain labels to ourselves, how much we really have a choice in the matter, and what role our identities and the communities that come with them play in our activism, social awareness, and politics, particularly in the GLBT community (as it's the one I know the most about) and pertaining to gender issues (as I think about them constantly).
To talk about this, I'm going to very, very briefly descend into my personal interpretations of many of the feminisms and stages of the GLBT movements of the past. I also want to bring in some examples on why it is that some of us question the validity of the categories that our politics have come to rely on.
Labels are very funny things, and things on which many people frankly spend very little time or thought. That's a luxury, and I'd argue also a curse, of being straight, white, and fitting well into one's gender: the "feminine" straight woman and the "masculine" straight man seldom have to think about gender categories for the simple reason that the categories they would place themselves in are something of a cultural default. They are "normal", and we don't spend time studying or discussing "normal" people, now do we?
The rest of us generally do have to think about labels at some point in our lives.
It is precisely the rejection of that "default" position on which the adoption of an identity is based. Feminists, for example, have for ages spent a great deal of time fighting for spaces and discussions focused specifically on women, and with very good reason; because all discussions that are not specifically about women are assumed to be discussions about men, it is necessary to split off. Battles over workers rights, for example, are seldom assumed by the folks involved to also have connections to women's rights, just as the national discussion on "freedom" in Iraq at the moment largely ignores the realities for Iraqi women. The "melting pot" idea ignores the reality that in any large group, the subgroups with the highest place on the social totem-pole tend to dominate all discussion. So the rest of us find our own spaces, with our own discussions focused on our own issues. This is, IMO, both healthy and necessary.
This scales outward to more communities than those focused on women's issues, and it is partially a matter of pride in self and community, and partially a matter of not wanting a community's issues to be ignored by being swallowed up by the larger concept of that "normal" default. Many of the politics of women, queers, and people of color of the last few decades have been about differentiating ourselves from that default position, about creating our own spaces and having pride in our own communities as distinct from the mainstream "default" identity. As part of this effort, we have taken on layer after layer of various categories, spent countless hours discussing the confluence and conflict between racial and gendered and gay or lesbian identities, and finally often risen up proud of those various categories we fit into, proud of our communities, and ready to rage against the blending together of all of us into any one blurry mass... a mass that, thousands of feminists will remind you, is likely to ignore the issues for Black disabled lesbian mothers, for example. And those issues really are very important.
But there's also a problem here. And that problem is that the lines between identities are, themselves, often undefined and fluid. Any one of us can put ourselves into boxes within boxes all day long, and in the end we come to the inescapable realization that while we may accept those boxes and love being part of a community, the only one we really ever fit into completely is the one that encapsulates nothing more or less than our entire individuality. A box of one.
And here, after all this babbling of mine, is where conflicts may often arise, because when we define our communities and work on our politics based on identity and categorization, we run into problems with the many people who, through that individuality, defy the limits of our boxes.
I'm going to use one specific example with which I am personally familiar, though there are many, many others that come up. San Francisco has a huge gay pride parade, the last Sunday of every June, which I'm sure quite a few of us have attended. Some of us may also have attended the Saturday evening Dykemarch, which came about, as I understand, largely because many lesbians saw the larger parade as being largely about, by, and for gay men as our community's default, for a whole lot of reasons somewhat peripheral to this diary. So we have a march of our own the night before, that is specifically for women; women march, men are welcome to come and stand on the sidelines and cheer us on, and many men do so.
This was, in my opinion, a vital step in lesbians standing up for their own community within the LGBT community, and I march in the dykemarch every year that I can.
But problems arise here, and that's because, well, the category of lesbian is ever-squishy, and even the category of woman is squishy, too.
What do you do about: someone who spent years and years active in the lesbian community, fought hard with other lesbians, for whom the lesbian community plays a central role in identity and in friendship, and who has now come out as transgendered, is taking testosterone, and yet still feels a huge connection to the lesbian community and still wants to march? Are they still lesbians? Are they still women? Does it matter if they are not women, but were? Many of these folks do in fact march, and though I sense that the controversy has died down considerably, this was a pretty big issue in the dykemarch for several recent years in a row. And this is largely, also, a personal issue for me as I consider myself trans (though that distinction, too, has problems for me) and will likely want to march during and after my own transition in whatever form that winds up taking. This particular case is one that seems largely resolved at this point, but I discuss it here in a more hypothetical sense: why should or shouldn't they march? Should they, can they, still feel connected to a community in which they've been involved likely for years, what meaning do the boundaries have, what does it mean to be trans and what does it mean to be a lesbian?
What do you do at the Michigan Women's Music Festival when women who used to be men show up at your gates? What about men who used to be women? What about people who intentionally don't really fit into the categories of men or women?
These questions become impossible to avoid. And they are far more than theoretical or hypothetical questions; we're talking about politics surrounding real people within real communities. At the foundation of these questions is an intensely personal issue: what does it mean to be in a category, to be proud of that category, and yet to be able to recognize that that category is largely a matter of self-identification which may be both fluid and squishy?
I refer to myself as a lesbian, as a woman, and sometimes as trans (and therefore occasionally as a man). These would seem to be contradictory, but I would argue only to the degree that we have not allowed the boundaries of those terms to be as fluid as the identities of the people they supposedly encapsulate. The reality is that, while I think the distinctions between all of those different categories do have their uses in political organizing and developing communities, they also contain a great danger: by making our categories rigid, and by ignoring the natural fluidity with which many people approach their own identities, we ignore the needs of a great number of people who quite simply are never going to "fit" in our classification system. Am I a lesbian? Certainly, in my mind I am; I've been involved in this community since I was very young, and it is a label I have become quite proud of as I've gotten more involved, as I've developed my awareness of our shared history and our shared fights. But there are those who would tell me, in no uncertain terms, that this is necessarily in conflict with calling myself transgendered. That I feel no internal conflict over what I consider to be a matter of details and language is beside the point to some.
Most often, I get around the potential for conflict by calling myself queer.
The word "queer" is often used as a kind of shorthand for the LGBT community, as a way to be inclusive without having to speak every category, a way to recognize our common history and battles regardless of whether we are L, G, B, or T. The word may mean far more than that, though, and in many circles has come to mean two other things as well: one, a recognition that the boundaries of the categories themselves have many, many shades of grey, shades that are, again, not just theoretical, as many actual people live lives that defy easy categorization. The other meaning is related, but in a sort of funny way; to be Queer is largely to be proud to defy those categorizations, as in, I'm not just a person who happens to be a lesbian, or who happens to be trans, but I am proud to be someone who screws up your tidy little world of sex and gender. This is sort of the opposite of the injection of LGBT issues into mainstream culture, the opposite of "I'm just like you but I like women" or whatever; I don't want your mainstream culture, and I'm not going to even place my identity on your terms. I reject the very premise that I'm in just another box that may be moved from "abnormal" to "normal".
That the categories often have a necessary time and place is, to me at any rate, self-evident. But I also feel that, as more and more people come forward who defy the categories we've created for our activism and for our politics, for the whole foundation of our communities, we're going to have a lot more work to do questioning the validity of those categories as a whole, and developing, hopefully, an understanding of our connections and of our communities that is very much larger and more able to handle the fluidity of identity than the one on which we have based ourselves in the past.