Item about the end

I watched a National Geographic Television show about how the world slowly goes back to nature after, for some reason, humans cease to exist. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but spring break offers the opportunity to house sit for rich people with cable.

The gist of it is, people are gone, some animals die, some thrive, but there are nuclear disasters from unkempt power stations. Winter comes. More animals die.

It's interesting to think about the apocalypse without humans. It makes me think about being alone. Another feature of my post-apocalyptic obsession is that it corresponds with my overwhelming feeling of loneliness (as a tangent, I've been considering the performative of the subject alone). Things don't look so good after the apocalypse. It's cold, carcinogenic, and packs of dogs are aggressive. There's nothing to eat. I might get frightened out of this obsession, but this interest in the end has a point.

Hope for the end is hope for a new beginning. When one has hope for the possibility of survival after the end, there is hope for today; hope for tomorrow. As it is, no such hope exists. It's important to realize that something worse is possible.

Living in the apocalypse

I throw around a lot of vaguery surrounding my notions of the apocalypse. In fact, I am so evasive about defining the event or transformation itself that I am continually discredited on the basis that I do in fact not know. So here is is: I do not know. But as you may have guessed, I have an idea.

I like to think that the apocalypse is survivable, such that I can entertain notions about what lies beyond recognizable, reliable structure. Through the transformation, my body will remain intact, but the trauma of it all, and the ensuing loss of self will act perhaps as a rebirth, a coming back to the body. I am not certain if I will be alone in my survival, though I hope there will be others, if only to stare back, nod, to gesture wildly and meaninglessly. The transformation will make the sustenance of my body particularly important. Questions about the reality of existence will be irrelevant.

The event is a process. It is a turmoil that transfigures bodies and minds to death, obscurity, and powerlessness. All things, breaking down, no longer contain the edifice of fixability. Hopelessness and fear are real, and break down all chance for resistance.

The apocalypse is the subjugation of bodies of difference. Our existence, though recognizable, is not known. We live in no time. Some fear that we will bring an end to all things good, holy, and reliable. Our ability to survive, teeming in carefully quarantined space, is remarkable, but our inability to coalesce, reform, or speak out reinforces our position in constant apocalypse.

This being said, one hope is that our bodies can be liberated from the castigations of our colonizers. No means for this liberation exist, and thus our hope is the end. The end when we all become bodies of difference, minds of inexpressibility, and our only chance for survival hinges on one another. I invite the apocalypse because it is already living in my body, transforming my guts, slowly breeding senselessness, bound up in my skin, that cannot be revealed. Not yet.

Stuck in the past

The perfect person is a man who has melted away like a candle into the past. I can see him, perhaps even talk to him, and yet he is very gone. I can wax poetic, memorialize him like an object from a Keats poem, but that brings him ever more distant. I am not worshiping a god, I am loving the man that got away.

After the end, I am stuck in the past because it is my only will for survival. Living now, as I am, I am stuck in the past for the sake of vanity, for the sake of hope: I hope that he will believe my love for him; I hope that he has not forgotten me.

Love is a vanity that does not reveal itself easily. It may become apparent by its enduring self sustenance, or it might be fully realized in the pain it causes. Regardless, it is a vanity, self-serving and wrought with land mines, "slings and arrows," and other hapless calamities that might otherwise warn us against it.

To my detriment, I live now. I live in a seemingly recoverable past whose footprint presses me to the ground, without explanation, and spits on my face. I believe the lie of a better future for us all as dare to ask, "what is in it for me?" The answer is that there is no hope, that I should continue to read books and believe in the rhetoric of change, and die the slow and silent death of closetry. The point is this: when I am loved and I do love, my love has a political location, a legitimization by the popular consensus, "this is what is also correct and real," but when it is me, fraught and alone, is there any consideration for my existence? Do I exist? Is there any thought for the person alone who does not wish to start a family?

The solitude after an apocalypse is very comfortable. Again, it is also very frightening, but not for the same reasons. Comfort is the way of the known, discomfort is the way of the unknown. I wish to seek this out.

An Intellectual Obsession

You may or may not know that I am currently obsessed with the apocalypse. Not so much about the nature of its occurrence, but with the nature of life after the apocalypse. I enter this realm of thinking with hope for the very radical reorganization of norms, whose persistence have dragged us into closets, silenced us, lain prohibitions and punishments upon our bodies, which have killed us. I look hopefully towards after the end because if I am not dead, I can pick up the pieces of the puzzle without regard for the picture on the box. My virtues and my flaws, my ability to express, my laziness, will not only be the ground work for who I will to become, but will indeed be the naked truths of being. Nothing will appear as it did; I will not be able to rely on appearances as the justification for my judgments. Lost, I will find something different, potentially horrifying, and necessarily transformational; after the end, beyond the boundary of time lies the spaceless space and timeless time of the abject.

Having crossed beyond the boundary of knowable time, all that is is that which should not be. After the end we do not consider ourselves lucky for what we have survived. Survival, our new occupation, is luckless. Life at times does not seem preferable, or perhaps never is. We shall never know.

And all the same, I am hopeful. Beyond the end, I carry nothing with me but my body. Its intactness is the only proof of transition. Unlike heaven or hell, I carry with me my body. Perhaps I will be the most in my body as I have ever been. Perhaps others will recognize my body as the only mark of my existence, rather than the color of my skin, hair and eyes, rather than the characteristics that differentiate me as man or woman, child or adult, king or peasant. The meaning of freedom is a contract between my body and the environment, and power is a consequence of proper nourishment, the intensity of the sun, of shelter. Performative constitution hinges on my ability to survive in every circumstance, not simply to survive homophobia, sexism, racism. A new indiscernible law of unnatural nature will prevail, its instability fascinating, its countenance to be feared.

I will not be afraid. I have known unjust fear. I have corrected my body, my language, I have edited my desires and hidden my past, complicit in the edicts of fear. I have crept to not be detected, and I have closed my eyes and watched companions, lovers, friends and strangers be berated and scorned. I know fear. I confront it when I leave my apartment, and it does not leave my side until I have locked the door behind me. After the end, I will not be afraid. I will have a body free from prescription. I will have a voice free to speak. No matter these things will not last. After the end, nothing lasts. Everything is done lasting.


...For this installment of my studies, I will be writing about the development of my obsession with the post-apocalypse. Central to this work is the question of how I came to see the end as the best solvent to oppression. Admittedly similar to the politics of separationism (a perspective I find myself coming back to over and over again), the post-apocalyptic politic starts with a people without place, though goes further to investigate a people without people. It is, after all, that those of us who occupy a space in the abject are close to invisibility. I am speaking specifically of multi(fill in the blank) identities, whose realization is neither this nor that, whose very being provokes fear and anxiety in a racially (sexually, etc.) structured status quo. My own understanding of my identity is central to this project. This is exciting and frightening. I refuse to allow fear to close doors leading towards my future, towards the end.

A question about colonized identities...

I was doing some freelance reading in Making Face, Making Soul, and I came to notice that a colonized identity is a very important starting point for understanding difference. The underlying notion of a colonized identity is that a dominant colonizer penetrated, defiled, literally or figuratively raped the subject of the colonized identity.

My question is this: can queer identity be seen as colonized? My initial impulse is to suggest that there is a strong parallel if you agree that the oppression if sexual difference is indicative of a certain sexual violence. There is no doubt that sexual others are subjected to sexual violence under many contexts.

Another aspect of colonized identity worth thinking about is the possibility that, while queer identity exists in large part to confront dominant dichotomous constructions of sexuality, these constructions frame the ways in which many see themselves, and dictate how these subjects are visible. Gay identity, I would argue, is a colonized identity. Its construction is somewhat contingent on the constitution of its members, however dominant, hierarchical discourse continues to define the reality of gay identity. Gay identity is colonized by its history of being named, categorized, represented - through the mechanisms of health, science, psychology, religion and the state - without regard for the subjects at the center of the identity.

The colonized/colonizer dynamic is very important in the texts from women of color/third world women. bell hooks uses colonized next to the word oppressed to underscore that oppression is not/cannot be understood simply as an abasement of a group by a dominant group, rather that the dominant group created the conditions by which the oppressed/colonized group came to experience oppression.

An open letter to a new father named Amon.

A former co-worker recently had a beautiful child, and not days later we had this interchange:

I posted this photo
His comment was as follows:

"that's so gay or something"

Well, yes, he's right. It's gay or something. No doubt about that. But I didn't feel like that definition belonged to him.

The thing is, though, I have a great love for Amon. He's always been a good person to me. When we come to disagreements, like when he tried to tell me that Ron Paul was the best candidate for prez, we had a productive conversation. Amon listens to me. And that's why I sent him this lengthy response to him comment on my picture:

Congrats on the new baby. I don't even know. It must be something else.

The purpose of this message is to iterate how important it is to be careful about your use of language. When you call something I do "gay," I have no choice but to read it with an air of homophobia. I am not, and I can't underscore this more, calling you homophobic. I am saying that, without knowing the true context, and the basic intention of my appearance in this image, it is rather offensive to hear you call it "gay." I've been abused by that particular word, and as much as I've proclaimed it to be my identity, it has also been used to hurt me; it has been used to make me something less than I am, a human.

I only mean to address this so that we can come to an understanding. "Gay" quotes a desire that is different from the norm. As we both grew up, however, it also came to mean "stupid," "inconsequential," "wrong." These are definitions I resist in my skin. These are the definitions that force many of my "gay" brothers into closets, not because they are merely afraid, but because they know that violence is real; they know that violence is a threat to their lives.

I am one of the lucky ones. Maybe I have been in the right places. Maybe I have been amongst the right straight people who, like you, who are willing to judge me on the simple basis of our own interaction and not on the assumptions we are lead to make about each other. I do not perceive violence in my everyday life. This is not to say that there are not those of us who don't.

To be personal, I would like to propose this to you. It might seem distant, easy to dismiss, but I urge you to pay attention, if for no other reason than that if my parents had listened to this, I would not have had such a hard time accepting myself for who I am. Amon, imagine your beautiful child grows up and discloses to you that she is a man, deep in her heart, or that she is a lesbian, or that she might be bisexual. It happens to countless parents in this country, and many of these children are exiled from their homes, literally made homeless, because their parents don't believe that they can understand. Many of these children are the fucked-up examples of the bad-gay, the person my parents originally feared I would be become when I came out. The children literally, without homes. Or will you be the parent of sublime loving acceptance? So my question is this: which parent will you be? Will you be dismissive, will you deny the truth of your child's self-definition, like my own father? Will you be the callous father, casting your child off to be a drift wood in the tides? Will you be the loving father who is, indeed, a father above all?

I am not, of course, making my advocation unknown. I am who I am, but I have seen so many of the people in my life ruined by the hateful homophobia of their own families. I would suggest, by all means, that you prepare yourself for a charismatic, deep fatherhood, that is nothing if not loving. Without love, you are nothing but a sperm donor. You didn't, after all, carry the child and go through the pain of her emergence.

Your's, with love,
Mike

What's with me and third world lesbian feminists?

I started doing work this week with Nohemy around three anthologies: Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldúa; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Morgana and Gloria Anzaldúa and; This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating.

This is not the first time I've done work in This Bridge; for some reason, this particular work keeps popping up in a lot of the theory work I do. I think I'm attracted to its content particularly because it's a comfortable, familiar text. It speaks some of the silences of my various closeted identities, as a person of color, as a multiracial/multiethnic American, as queer (in the definition that invites problemitization).

Renée Martínez grounds her identity as the central battleground for peace in her essay "Del puente al arco iris: transformando de guerrera a mujer de la paz–from bridge to rainbow: transforming from warrior to woman of peace," which appears in This Bridge We Call home. Writing nearly 20 years after the publication of the original Bridge, Martínez notes her appreciation for the text not as a guide, but as a companion. This familiarity, this affinity has always been my particular experience with Bridge, but I couldn't express as well as Martínez. I want to be able to do the same project as the brave companieras whose words trickle over me like water: I want to write my soul/write for change.

Identities are difficult. Often, we are made to choose some over others - the choice requires negotiating closet doors and silences, hiding and confronting, constructing a "me" location that appears to be coherent and may well endear itself to its audience. I make a specific choice in this regard every day. The questions that inform my choice are many and difficult: is it safe for me to be queer? will denying the authenticity of my whiteness compromise my credibility? will identifying myself as a feminist among men put up defensive barriers? It seems at time like the only times I am everything I am all at once are the times when I'm alone, or the times when I'm dreaming. I'm asking a question: what does the politics and activism look like for a queer man of color? Are they feminist? Do they embrace disability rights? Are they socialist?

The location of these fractured identities is one, whole body. Therefore, I'm suggesting that an arena, a battlefield, a playground for the interplay of these identities is in my skin, beneath it. In this way, I am the politics of a queer man of color. The distinctions made regarding my identities, while painful, do not break me in half. My tendency to be self-destructive when things get intimidatingly complicated, to have questionable sexual experiences, to drink, downing out the immediacy of my problems, create the only tangible scars. Through it all, I am intact, and I occupy a space, a bridge perhaps, that is neither here nor there, between yet never in.

Martínez offers the imagery of the arco iris–rainbow to explain how her struggle to sort through her identities lead her from warrior to peacemaker. Her project is a radical care of the self: a bridge, trodden upon, immobile, takes the abuse of time and circumstance; the arco iris is illusive yet inspiring - its feet straddle a great distance. The work that must take place between warrior and peacemaker is the work of reflection that takes place in the arena of self care. Divisions are real in the world we occupy, but there is great power in realizing that these divisions do not cause us to come undone. The very fact that we wake up every morning, more or less intact, contained in one skin, is proof positive that we are not captives of division. Foucault would lead me to believe that we are only captives of our identities if we consent to our own captivity...


My next work will be an investigation of activism, fighting, and peace. Is it impossible to fight for peace, or is the battle, as Martínez suggests, a battle for a claim to a whole self. These questions and more to follow.

...So there's this faggot...

“…So there’s this faggot…”

I’m implying abasement; I’m replicating the same sexist, homophobic hierarchy that continues to narrate my status. I’m a faggot. There are many other faggots in the world. We share nothing but a label, but in that, in the loaded oppressive force it has, we also share the experience of being a target of objectifying hatred. The power of the word is transformative, perhaps in the associations if brings to mind, the memories of violence, or the pain of exclusion. Its use (re)assures my position as other, a certain inhabitant of the margins.

I’m not the only one. There’s a certain kindred faggotiness in the air. We recognize each other. We may ignore each other. We’re there, all the same. The faggots.

A Radical Brotherhood: Love and Respect, Care, Relating, and Community

It is not my habit to use words like "love" or "respect" when I do work in queer theory. The theory's academic grounding makes such things difficult. It is with humanity that I address these topics now, for without this project, I am lost. My theoretical mental space, when denied heart, is not full. It does not in essence come from me, rather, it is merely a rough tracing of my true intention.
My intention is to imagine community, relatibility, a sense of identity, and an ideal world constituted through love and respect. This will take place on three levels. First, I will outline a project of the care of the self, not a prescriptive, self-help work-it-out-for-yourself care, but as a general understanding that a full self cannot function lovingly and respectfully until care is given to the self. Secondly, this care will translate to our relationships, how we relate and care for each other with love and respect. Thirdly, I will transform this care into a sense of radical community.

Pain
We continue to hear it, some every day, some every moment. Some of us say it to ourselves. "Faggot." It has the power to unsettle, to disrupt, to force us into conformity. It may call to mind a flood of painful memories of violence and exclusion. We might recall when we have used it to negate, abase, or to hide. It is a word of unquestionable power. Its cultural visibility, its profile, its clout all seem to be current.
I start here to consider for a moment how one might care for himself in light of such an oppressive force, which may stand for violence, but which certainly stands for exclusion, and voices the strictness of gender and polices the norm of heterosexual sexuality. The implied recipient of such a word may or may not participate in any of the implied practices of faggotry, but he may all the same be damaged by the word's use.
In light of the word's profuse existence, it would be unreasonable to suggest that we can ignore it, "take it with a grain of salt" - care of the self incorporates the circumstances of the environment with the goal of love and respect for the self. Showing love and respect for agents of change and resisters of oppression is easy. Showing love and respect for the agents of hate and oppression is difficult. It must be done. Homophobia comes from many places, and many of those places are not the ground of hate. Misunderstanding, a lack of exposure, closets, replication of normative behavior, fear, and memory, not to mention a complex web of these factors as well as too many more to list all are at the root of homophobia. While the product of homophobia in the use of a word is hate, it does not follow that hateful people promulgate hate. It is rather a system, set in a current location, that reproduces the language and outcomes of hate. I refuse to believe that the victims of homophobia (i.e. everyone) are the target of a discrete group of hateful people. Every time we are complicit in the acceptance of hateful language, we agree in some sense to the proliferation of hate. This is not always a choice. The threat of violence, or other things that create deeper scars (alienation from family, exclusion, loss of jobs and loved ones) always stand as barriers from speaking out against hateful language.
We are, however, often in a position to risk a certain loss or exclusion that will be recoverable. What is at stake on one hand is an uncomfortable situation, a look, forms of social criticism, or reputational concerns, but on the other hand, at stake is our radical freedom. I don't believe that I could make the choice any clearer. When we experience inexplicable moments of strength, we must be opportunists for the sake of our freedom. When we are weak and afraid, we must stand in quiet, even clandesdine support of our brothers who can fight, who are strong. Self care is self knowledge. We can learn when and why we experience our own strength, and this knowledge is powerful. We will know how to prepare for the necessary confrontation for the sake of our freedom.

Some Critics of Queer

A brief overview of the arguments against queer. I have used Jagose for the summary, and have made additional comments.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: NYU Press, 1996.

Destabilization

Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope note that queer works to generalize marginal sexual identities. Their particular fear is that lesbian identity, which had previously been marginalized in the feminist movement, would be co-opted by the use of queer, another strategy using lofty, poststructuralist theory to disguise while patriarchal hegemony. Other critics lament the disappearance of identities (chiefly lesbian and gay) whose legitimacy has not yet been realized or appreciated (i.e. Terry Castle, 1993). In some cases, critics understand the importance and usefulness of queer in the gay and lesbian studies discouse, but express the fear that it has come at the wrong time. These critics are working in the early '90s, and while their criticism reads today as somewhat reactionary, a critical analysis of queerness continues to seem relevant for some specific reasons I will list:

- National gay and lesbian strategies rely an the stability of these two categories (gay and lesbian) to advance the agenda of "equal rights." Queerness upsets the apparent unproblematic representation of classes of people for whom equality is desired.
- Queer has a self-marginalizing effect, and its use as a title for discourse engenders exclusionary theoretical practice, both as opponents say within the myriad queer subjects, and from other critical theorists, other types of scholarship, and certainly from mainstream or popular discourse.
- Of particular interest to me in this endeavor is the way queer makes people feel. Assuming that its radicalism is a part of its functionality, the discourse may exclude people that have not yet come to terms with other identities such as lesbian, gay, trans, bi, etc. In lieu of a pervasive societal homophobia, perhaps queer upsets the wrong boundaries.

The Gay Generation Gap

A simple explanation offered as to the reasons one might contest queer comes from the very relevant observation that queer is the buzz word, and even perhaps the hope of a new generation. It follows that memories of the slanderous use of the word exclude previous generations, for whom again the terms is offensive and conjures up the pain of coming to age in sexual silence, perhaps encountering solidarity through a disease epidemic, and having to have previously fought for the legitimacy of "gay" or "lesbian" identity. Only time will (has) show(n) the degree to which this critique will hold.

- As a member of this so-called new queer generation, I think it is important to continue to evaluate the term and its uses. This is one reason I'm interested in faggot. Its negative effects are still palpable in my mind. I still react emotionally and physically to its utterance.

Political Utility

In an era of "gay marriage," the political utility of queer is an important criticism. Fighting for queer rights or engaging in a queer agenda again linguistically constructs queer as other in a potentially damning way. There is also perhaps no subject of queerness, and therefore it may be difficult (in a discourse of rights) to identify the subject of these rights.

- As a counter to the political utility argument, I might suggest that the burgeoning list of identifying acronyms is equally cumbersome and may delegitimize the core for whom they represent.

Naming Strategies

From within the world that might certainly find the most comfort in queer, the critical theorists, comes the criticism that queer is useful because it shifts the focus of discourse from the subject to politics, a move that fosters a certain anonymity of the subject. Queer functions, then, purely as a discourse, and it becomes difficult to claim such a thing as queer rights. It certainly becomes almost impossible to define a queer community or a queer politics as doing so fixes a center to something that is constructed to be dynamic.

Power, the Mainstream Media, and Faggot

I read Details magazine cover to cover while I was traveling over the break. The January edition profiled the top 50 most powerful people, ideas, and institutions of 2007. Can you guess which loaded word made the top 10?

9 // The Other F-word
Age: Forever young
If you take a look back, it appears that 2007 was the year of the F-word—but not the one you’re thinking of. America’s rent-a-quote harridan of hatred, Ann Coulter, used the word to slag presidential candidate John Edwards. Presidential candidate Bill Richardson used the Spanish version (maricón) to slam a guy on the Don Imus radio show. Controversy exploded after Isaiah Washington allegedly dropped the F-bomb on a fellow cast member of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a word that anyone who ever spent time in an American school yard is familiar with: faggot. But some bullies grow up, get famous, and keep on using it. “I hate gay people,” blurted former basketball star Tim Hardaway. Tucker Carlson bragged about having given a dude who tried to tap toes with him in a men’s room a taste of his bow-tied brutality (“I . . . hit him against the stall with his head, actually”). Hmmm. The word faggot, it seems, is on the tips of a lot of men’s tongues. They can’t stop thinking about it. Without it they’d be lost, and that makes you wonder who really has the power.

The full list can be found here.

When a magazine for men (writ large) notices the import and significance of this word, are we encountering the potential for discourse or the all-too likely reconstitution of its power position? It's worth a thought. Apparently this word is more powerful than the Iraq war veterans who are currently speaking out against the war. Accuse them of being faggots, and their credibility goes out the window.

Faggot

The purpose of this blog is to practice theoretical writing that avoids the loftiness for which I'm well known. I will be crass, base, hopefully a little offensive, and I will include other media such as videos, images, and references to other blogs and websites.

Melissa and I are doing work on Queer as theory, practice and politics. The inquiry has lead me to start meditations on faggot - is there a theory, practice and politics of faggotry? In my experience, the answer is yes. Faggot practice, for instance, is the insistence on non-normative masculine gender performance, as well as transgressive sexual (we don't need to get too specific) practice - acting like a faggot. The politics of faggotry is in our insistence to be represented without the liberal strategy of downplaying or demeaning our behavior. At the same time, the political faggot resists being codified in his behavior. Effeminate gay men on television are not faggots. They are characatures of our ideal constitution - weak, unimportant, comical, useless. The political faggot insists on his legitimate representation. The theory of faggotry will be my next project. It may borrow from the theory of Queer, although it may stand to counter it.