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

Berlin Calling

Hi, I’m new around here. Let me introduce myself: First of all I was raised as a boy, tried to become a man (impossible as it may be) and I was for plenty of reasons doomed to fail. Now I try to fail more each day, failing gladly.

An important step in really acknowledging who I am (becoming) was moving to Berlin about 9 months ago to study at Potsdam University. The “Queer Capital of Europe” really deserves that soubriquet for a huge number of reasons: Thriving LGBT-scenes – although I have to say, there are a lot of L’s and G’s having Problems with the B’s and T’s and people of colour, queer or otherwise, so go figure – and the general gender-deconstructive madness when people from all over the world with almost every (sub-)cultural background imaginable meet, mingle and just do stuff together, not necessarily in the queer squat or the posh gay club and afterwards...

Nevertheless Berlin is, and has been for quite some time a place ridden with conflicts and contradictions of one kind or another where these political and societal conflicts and contradictions became and are becoming highly visible and, especially in the past, culminated in sometimes disastrous ways. Just for the sake of the argument: Take a walk on the squeaky clean Kurfürstendamm for example - passing by Gucci, Cartier, Hermes you name it (or rather, don’t), then hop onto the next U-Bahn and chances are you’ll see a homeless person timidly asking for money or food, or if she or he is lucky, selling a homeless magazine. Chances are he or she has an open leg. Chances are one or both legs are gone. There’s probably even a German flag on the wheelchair. Mind you, I don’t mean to be funny here. Get off the train again, and you just might run into a huge anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, anti-fascist demonstration. Or the TCSD for that matter. Same difference, politically. All the while less than a half-hour drive outside Berlin will probably take you to a town completely dominated by neo-nazis. Hell, the place I study at used to be a Konzentrationslager once. It’s quite true, but also cynical when Klaus Wowereit (the openly gay mayor of Berlin) said: “Berlin’s poor, but sexy”. Granted: He addressed Berlin’s precarious budget and tried to stress its creative and therefore economical potential, after all we live in an age when the cultural is one of the most profitable industries. However, in a city where precarity is distributed so unequally along the lines of *drumroll* race, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion that’s a terrible statement.

As much as I hate to cut this ongoing story short: Berlin can be a quite an overwhelming place and I’d like to share a bit of what is going on in this truly queer, beautifully diverse and often downright heartbreaking, infuriating place, aside from the big tourist attractions; the small everyday struggles, the big “important” ones and everything in-between in Berlin and elsewhere: Potsdam University has a lot to offer in terms of queer feminist academia. Potsdam in general has a lot to offer in terms of political activism and otherwise. Oh, and I’ll try to update you on what is going on in Poland where my mum was born. Here, Homophobia is a much larger problem than in Germany. I’ll stop ranting now and close with a short scene from a street café somewhere in the posher parts of Berlin Kreuzberg:



A Woman on a bike approaches the scene. There are two children, a boy aged three or maybe four, definitely a pre-kindergartner, blabbering permanently, and a girl, a year younger maybe just looking at the scenery that must pass by in the trailer attached to the bike. They pass by a café. MARY – not even dressed very girly this day - is drinking a coffee with her/his friends and some acquaintances. It’s somebody’s birthday. Always is.


BOY IN THE TRAILER (to MARY): Are you a man or a woman?

MARY (enthusiastically, bordering on joyful): I don’t really know, exactly! (It sounded catchier in German.)

Meanwhile, the group of three approaches the distance where you can only make out certain words. It doesn’t help that the boy still has the manner of speaking of a, well, pre-kindergartner.


BOY IN THE TRAILER: But…But…But?! Mom!?! …asked…man…woman…has to…


Everybody at the table laughs, some more heartily than others. The acquaintances seem a bit confused when they notice MARY is dead serious.

Meanwhile the woman on the bike and the two children in the trailer go on going down the street. The woman listens to what the confounded boy asks. She looks back at me and smiles knowingly. I hope. In Berlin that’s possible, at least.

dear katy perry...

I'm trying to write a dissertation, so please show some consideration and stop annoying me.

When you came up with this, I was mildly amused.

This was a bit worse, and I don't really understand why you're naked and rolling in candy either, but whatever.

But this? Really? 'You're so gay and you don't even like boys'? 'I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf while jacking off listening to Mozart'? 'You bitch and moan about LA wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway'? 'I can't believe I fell in love with someone that wears more makeup than...'? So you use 'gay' as a derogatory term. You think anyone who would rather read a book than jump around naked on a beach (or a candy cloud) must have serious issues. You're offended if anyone finds classical music more inspiring than your video for 'I kissed a girl'. And men who would have been described as 'metrosexual' in the early noughties seem to make you uncomfortable. That cracks me up. You realise you're engaged to Russel Brand, yes?

Who AREN'T you bashing? You're silly and unnecessarily offensive. Please shut up.

sex sells... books.

I wish I could browse this enticing retailer's shelves. It's one of these things that would never have come to my mind before I saw them. Is it really as bad as it looks? Is it worse? Do they sell porn in the left store and gardening manuals on the right? Is the women's section actually pretty much the same as the men's section, plus a few hundred insufferable romance novels with pastel coloured cover designs and a couple of first ladies' biographies? Do both sides sell standard works on military history and the financial crisis? Do both sell A brief history of time and Anne Frank's diary?

Even for the people whose world view this mirrors - would it be so bad to shop side by side with the mysterious other? It reminds me of unnecessarily genderspecific toilets and annoying books that just won't go away (think: Men are from mars...). I wish I could write an eloquent post about capitalism, stereotypes, stupid dichotomies, education and public spaces of consumption. But I'm tired, so I'll just share the picture with you and see what you think.

Picture courtesy of Anika (a friend who suffered many a boring lecture by my side in undergrad and, on good days, eloquently formed her despair into poetry that still adorns the walls of my old room). Taken in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

P.S.: If you saw a shop front like this, which side would you check out first? Would you browse both or only one? Would you have a good laugh and go buy your books somewhere else altogether? Do you think they have different criteria for employing staff in the two sections? How does Nashville feel about genderqueer people?

Capitalism and gender: would you pay £30,000 for the sex of your baby?

In the Guardian last weekend, there was an article on selecting the sex of your prospective baby. It's illegal in Britain, and according to the article people are spending £25,000-£30,000 on going to abroad for the treatment - that's a fair bit more than the average yearly wage in Britain. What on earth is going on?

These parents are “desperate” to have children of a particular sex. They talk about getting “sick of walking past Baby Gap and seeing these little girl outfits and just getting this pang.” It's interesting that gender is couched mostly in terms of consumption – later in the article there's a description of the bedroom of twin girls born due to sex selection (unsurprisingly, it's pink and frilly). The emphasis on consumption (rather than other gender markers such as, say, the sort of activities one might traditionally do with a child, or behavioural traits) is presumably down to the kind of people who can afford to do this – that is, the very rich – and points to some interesting avenues of analysis around gender and capitalism. What does it mean if gender is a kind of consumption? How might that link into the way that the “pink pound” has redefined sexuality?

The rich parents used as examples are, basically, bosses, and their attitude is not just down to consumption, but also to the way that has made them relate to the world: “Susan says, 'I used to be a CEO of a company... So you can imagine coming from that mindset and having a baby in your body, and your baby holding a secret and you don't know? In the nicest possible way, I needed to know.'” As an illuminating contrast, another (very different) prospective mother, who chose not to find out the sex of her child, says “If I knew, I would have projected a whole future for him or her. I'm excited about that lack of control.” This is getting closer to the heart of the matter: these parents are setting themselves up to define their children. The article rightly points out that sex selection is very much for the parents' benefit. What it doesn't go into is how that relates to capitalism, consumption, and (neo)liberal ideas about choice.

Although the article describes the extreme genderedness that ends up being forced on the children, it doesn't elaborate on what this might mean other than this attitude of trying to control the child, “chipping away at their uniqueness”. It mentions several reasons why people object to sex selection, some of which are salient (the missing girl babies of China and India) and some, um, less so (“the intrinsically virtuous course of nature” and “divine will”). But what is motivating this urge to control? And what is it, specifically, that they are trying to control? Obviously, it's not simply a case of control-freakery in choosing one or the other gender, but a reinforcement of the gender binary itself. Well, it seems glaringly obvious to me, but remarkably they manage to avoid any kind of critique of gender essentialism. The idea that any child should have all possibilities open to them, regardless of gender, is skirted round in a more general discussion of the parent/child relationship, and it's frustrating that they get so close to that sort of much-needed critique and still manage to un-gender it. There is no discussion of the possibility that people should be able to mix together gender traits, to switch around as they like, which is worrying given the heightened reinforcement of gender – in a gender essentialist society, that's tricky already, but if parents have spend £30,000 making you a girl, what are they going to say if you want to climb trees and refuse to wear dresses? What on earth are they going to say if you turn out to be trans? Making the sex of a child so important that it's worth £30,000 puts incredibly restraining limits on possibilites. It's frustrating that despite all the potential, an article like this can just... miss out the fact that capitalism and sexism (in the broadest sense of the term) cut out whole swathes of possible ways to be.

(picture courtesy of Sharon. I still like climbing trees!)