We're here, we're Queer...

...And we won't pay £9,000 a year!

Seriously though, I've been wanting to talk about the way that queer politics, interact with economic justice politics, because the connection is not really that obvious.

Most of you will have heard about the student protests across the country since 10 November, in opposition to fees and cuts to education and other public services. The National Day of Action on 24 November saw walk-outs, sit-ins, study-ins, demonstrations, and student occupations of university buildings -- about 20 universities (including 6 unconfirmed, but likely) across the UK have been occupied by students, in opposition to the cuts. 30 November will see a Scotland demonstration. What I've found encouraging has been the participation from secondary school students and sixth-formers. Many of the protests across the country have been led not by students at universities or colleges of further education, but by school pupils fighting for their future. This makes sense, since they'll be even more affected by the education cuts than current further/higher education students, but the response even from young teens has been overwhelming.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about though, is the kind of focus we put on our protest. When we march with banners and chants about education cuts, it's a great way of drawing attention to our personal investment. That's good in some ways -- it gives our protest the "human interest" that journalists love. But the downside is that what we are talking about, and what the media is talking about, is cuts to higher education -- the cuts that mostly affect people from middle class background (university hasn't been accessible to the poorest for a long time), and not, say, cuts to housing benefit.

This presents a curious dilemma. On the one hand, it's absolutely legitimate and important for people to say "I need to be able to pay rent, and put food on the table, and these cuts will stop me doing that, and for that reason I oppose them", and young people are particularly affected by cuts to education, rising debt, unemployment, etc.

On the other hand, it accentuates the problem of those who most need to be protesting not being able to, for various reason, or not being listened to.

There's a further issue though. And that's that if we accept that our tactical role is only to oppose tuition fees or higher education cuts, we've already lost, because we've already accepted the premise that education is an individual privilege, not a social good or a public investment. Education benefits everyone. Healthcare benefits everyone. Social housing benefits everyone.

Why they benefit everyone is an interesting question (but a long one, so it's another post -- or feel free to comment in the, well, the comments), but brings us onto what kind of future we, as young adults, want to grow up in. What kind of world we want to bring our children up in. These cuts aren't just for the duration of the economic crisis -- David Cameron has made that clear. These cuts will shape the coming decades -- our adulthoods.

So what I would like to see more of is discussion of the kind of society we want -- not just in terms of the minimum wage and the highest tax bracket, but what we want the structure of society to be. And this is where queer politics is relevant. I don't want a world in which some people just scrape by. I don't want a world where welfare is a social safety net. I don't want a world where some kinds of upbringing, or family units, or heteronormative lifestyles, are considered to be inherently better than others, and the stigmatised ones are financially or socially penalised. I don't want a world in which the concerns of materially-privileged teenagers heading for university are more important than the concerns of unemployed teenage single mothers on benefits. I think movements for economic justice can learn a lot from queer politics, by examining the unspoken premises in our campaigns.

In other words, what queer politics can contribute is this: what kind of lifestyles are we upholding as the ideals in a campaign for economic justice? Are we assuming that everyone comes from a two-parent two-income middle-class household and that that family is ideally placed to support them financially, practically, and emotionally?

As Queers Read This puts it:

Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred.
[...] And now of course it means fighting a virus as well[...]. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It's not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It's not about executive directors, privilege and elitism.

Which I read as saying that queer rights movement requires not privacy, but a change in the structure of society, and structures of oppression and privilege (of which economic deprivation/privilege is one).

Or, if you prefer, we could take a different leaf from the queer politics book, and say that the similarity between the struggle for economic justice and the queer rights movement is that in both, Silence = Death.


--IP