Let’s take the example of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is a good example of a political group that also represented a fluid, changing, and diverse collection of agenda’s coming together. But, because this movement had so many different identities and political agendas being represented at once, it didn't actually change much of anything on Wall Street. One such critic pointed out the movement’s incoherent ideas by comparing two signs he saw protestors holding side by side (link). One said, “All Private Industry is Theft” which would imply a communist view of private property and the other said, “Tear down this Wall (st)” which alludes to Ronald Reagan’s famous speech where he demanded that communist leader Gorbachev liberate East Germany from communism. Clearly these two activists weren’t on the same page concerning the type of political change they wanted to see. It seems like a good possibility that this sort of thing could happen within political activists who identify as queer. It is not out of the question to imagine a lesbian feminist who identifies as queer and a bisexual man who participates is BDSM and identifies as queer to have different, or even opposite ideas around queer politics.
Jagose seems to even acknowledge this potential lack of political efficacy that the lesbian and gay liberation movements sought. She writes “Lesbian and gay faith in the authenticity or even political efficacy of identity categories and the queer suspension of all such classification energize each other…” (132). So, if we break her language apart, it seems as if she’s saying that queer, although not politically effective as a political group or coherent identity, can still benefit gay and lesbian movements. Although, she doesn't really say how so that’s not a great argument for queer contributing to the process of creating political or social change. On the same page, Jagose again presents queer as something that would be inherently conflicting with political effectiveness, “ queer theory curves endlessly toward a realization that its realization remains impossible” (131). Can you image that as a political group’s slogan? “We want to work towards a realization that will forever remain impossible.”
Although it seems that the whole point of queer is that it can encompass a vast and continuously changing plethora of sexual and gender identities, I think that in order for it to realize any kind of political activism it will have to conform to some kind of coherent political ideal or identity. I think this because, if your theory can potentially mean almost anything, it means practically nothing. I’m not saying any of this to discount the positives of queer theory or queer as an identity in general, but just that political activism does need to be someone structured to make any kind of political change.
Your point at the end of the second to last paragraph remains a pithy one, and one that does make a very good point. Be careful, though, not to conflate the political aims of gay liberation/lesbian feminism and queer activism, for these early movements did coalesce around a central, clear, and articulatable purpose.
ReplyDeleteWhat your post really got me to think about, though, and this is something that many queer thinkers, activists and theorists talk about, is how embracing this kind of indeterminism opens up a different sense of what counts as political (which is also true of Occupy Wall Street). Both these movement purposefully don't want to engage with politics as usual. It's true, I think, that they also don't entirely succeed. But they both have helped shaped a new way of looking at the political realm that I wouldn't discount entirely.