Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[The_Lady_Snow]

I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow

I'd like to share the word 'morals' is like a trigger, it's cause of the way it can be used to demean. How Aj used morality was an not so triggering I'm trying to figure out why...

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

Yes.

And I think of morality as strictly about doing right by each other as human beings. To me, singling out people and excluding them and harassing them with finger wagging because they are different from you is immoral behavior. Favoring policies that keep the rich richer and the poor poorer is an immoral stance. Anything that creates a strata of civil rights where some have more and some have less is immoral. Racism is immoral. Sexism and homophobia and transphobia and ageism are immoral. Those are all immoral things because they are unfair and harm people in some really significant ways.

I agree with you Aj, that this is a different way of thinking of morality than the religious right seems to. The whole, "the bible says it, I believe it and that settles it!" kind of thinking isn't what I consider moral. I think it's more like using religion to justify one's prejudices and bigotry. That kind of hypocrisy makes me mad because there is no reasoning with people like that. But those people don't have the market cornered on morality; in reality they are lacking it in the most fundamental ways.

[Slater]

So much good stuff in this thread already.

I wanted to put together a coherent post that had some sort of discernible structure and flow. Yeah, that ain’t happening tonight. So instead I’m just going to throw a few disjointed thoughts out there and shoot for coherence another time.


We are no longer – as a community – as embattled as we were a couple decades ago, which is not to say that things are swell for everyone, but in general as a community, we are not bobbing in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks and clinging to a half-deflated life raft like we once were. And I think maybe that is some of where the rush to cast the victim and oppressor roles that Medusa mentioned comes into play. We’ve come to expect sharks, so we see them around every corner (and yes I realize the middle of the ocean doesn’t technically have corners). We sharkify each other in part because we are accustomed to battling sharks.

Somewhat conversely is the phenomenon that AJ and Heart and others have talked about, whereby things stand unchallenged that should be challenged, or if they are challenged, the response is defensive and dismissive. And I think they are right when they talk about needing to build the community around shared values or morals instead of just around identities. But I also think there is simply not enough education on anti-oppression. I think most all of us are familiar with general concepts but I am talking about understanding the mechanics of how oppression functions and learning how to do the work of combating it.

One other thing that I’ve been thinking about, though I’m not quite sure how this fits in to this discussion, is that we need to stop pretending that broadened inclusiveness is always free in every circumstance. That is, sometimes, in some situations, there is a cost. That doesn’t mean the inclusiveness isn’t the right thing to do or isn’t worth the cost, but maybe acknowledging the cost might make the process easier for those who are paying it.

For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.

I want to be clear that, for me, it was never about thinking transmen should not be part of the community. It was about wanting to hold onto a word that named my experience. I know some people think the naming thing is or should be unimportant, but I don’t agree. I think it is vital for marginalized groups to have words for themselves, words that represent their existence and specific experience in the world. When I was in college and newly out, I had a friend who was from a rural part of China. She could scarcely comprehend coming out to her parents because in the dialect they spoke there were no words for lesbian or gay or even homosexual. There were no words at all that named her reality. It was clear how lost and helpless she felt even thinking about how to begin that conversation with her parents. Our names matter.

I came to understand the reasons why butch was being used by some transmen. I do understand. But I will say that I appreciate it when a male-identified person uses the term transbutch. To me, that clearly connects them to the butch identity and community while at the same time acknowledging and respecting that the female tradition of the word.

I realize I’ve wandered a bit far afield from the topic of the thread, so I’ll try to bring it back around. If one of the things we are talking about is how to better coalesce our various groups into a united community, I think we need to honestly acknowledge that sometimes broadening definitions or scopes can mean something is going to be lost along the way, sacrificed to the process of change. While this doesn’t mean the change shouldn’t happen, it might at least be worth considering what, if anything, is being sacrificed.


Considering I can hardly stay awake I should probably stop here. Hopefully in the morning I will not have horrifying realization that I should have stopped long before now.

Great thread, important discussions, looking forward to more.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by Slater

snip
For instance, there was a time when butch was considered a specifically female identity. And I admit, when I first heard male-identified people using butch, I felt like something was being taken away from me. While it’s obviously true that male-identified people using the term does not prevent me from identifying that way, it does change what the word means and therefore it changes what I am saying about myself when I use it. When people talk about feeling erased, maybe that’s what they sometimes mean. The femaleness of butch was, to me, an integral part of it. It described a particular, and highly marginalized, way of being female in the world. And then it didn’t; it meant something else.

What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.

[Slater]

Originally Posted by Liam

What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.

I should have been a bit clearer in what I was saying. It’s certainly true that gay men use the word butch. I don’t know for sure whether they adopted it based the usage in the lesbian community although it doesn’t actually matter to what I was trying to say, but wasn’t quite explicit about.

I wasn’t talking literally about the collection of letters b-u-t-c-h (which is of course also used as a first name), but with the distinct identity of butch that exists in our community. While butch is used by gay men, it has never coalesced into an identity and community the way it did among lesbians. But regardless of the nature of its usage among gay men, it occupies in a separate part of the cultural landscape than the butch identity I was speaking of, so in that sense they might as well be different words. A little bit like life forms that may share a common ancestor but evolve distinctly on neighboring mountainsides.

So what I was talking about was the butch name and butch identity that exists is our part of the cultural landscape, the one on our mountainside. That butch identity was a female identity. That butch identity has changed to no longer be a specifically female identity.

I don’t know if that makes what I was saying any clearer or not. Hopefully it does. My intention in bringing it up in the first place was merely as an example of the way a change, even when it makes sense for the community, can mean the loss of something that is valued by at least some members of the community. And I think if we were better at being mindful of that and acknowledging it along the way, we might be able to incorporate changes with a little less friction.

[lettertodaddy]

Just a quick note before I dash off to work. They decided to block logins to this site the other day.

One of the things that makes me feel like an outsider these days is the assimilationist politics of groups like the HRC and Marriage Equality USA. When I was younger, my queer friends and I were all about trying to create alternative notions of family. The idea that the family you chose was just as viable and important as the nuclear family you were born into. Family could take on all different shapes and sizes: it could be a partnered couple, a triad, a free-for-all multilayered polyamorous collective, or it could be just you and your cat. But the foundation of that was trying to break down the patriarchal, heteronormative concepts of marriage and family that have been used to punish queer folks for eons.

I was married (to a man), but even then marriage didn't sit right with me. I probably got out about 8 years too late, but it was that experience of being "heterosexually" married that made me realize that I'm more interested in dismantling the institution of marriage and remaking it into something radically different.

I came out of that relationship looking for similar rhetoric from queer communities and thought leaders, but now all I see is people fighting to be "as good as" straight people, fighting for assimilation, fighting for their slice of the two-parent, two-kids, house in the suburbs, subaru in the driveway, and mortgaged up to their eyeballs American dream. I'm left standing on the sidelines thinking "this is not what I was fighting for."

I am not out to malign anyone who wants this sort of arrangement for themselves. My issue is that if I'm seen as not being on board with marriage equality, that I'm looked at as some sort of traitor to the community. And I'm not sure what that means for my continued participation in it, or whether that means I've overstayed my welcome.

Did the process of rethinking and reshaping queer community that we've been going through for all of these decades lead us to whitebread, non-threatening, average lifestyles? What becomes of those of us who don't want that?

[Nat]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it.

YES

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

This I mostly agree with - I like your definition of harm-based morality.

I've wondered many times what it would be like to wake up and know that yesterday I committed a terrible crime. I have dreams like this too. (I have a very low likelihood of committing a terrible crime). I have thought and thought about the difference between a person before and after s/he commits a violent crime - are they the same person?

I tend to think so. I judge. But in (my) perfect world, I would rather judge the behavior and not the person. I'm not sure where that discomfort with judging people comes from, but it is perhaps from an emotional rather than a logical place. At least, I think the murderer benefits from compassion more than s/he benefits from judgment. And I think society benefits more from the compassionate treatment of criminals, while the crime is still punished. More later, work calls.

[Novelafemme]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

I like to think because it is not a scolding. As SA Ma'am pointed out, the right-wing--at least in America--has spent a long time claiming that the queer movement (and the Left generally) has no morals or thinks that there's no such thing as morals. We have, as she points out, delivered ourselves into their hands. This is not to say that the word isn't going to taste strange on our tongues. It will for a while. It will because we ceded space that we did not need to. At the time, the reasons seemed like good ones. The laboratory of the real world, I think, shows that it wasn't. At the end of the day, theory (we should avoid using moral language) was not in agreement with experiment (human beings use moral language and need to do so).

I think the difference in how I'm using moral is that I'm talking about how we treat one another. One could use ethics but I really want to reclaim the word moral. At some point in my lifetime, the Left just surrendered on the issue of morals and so this allowed the religious right to frame the word 'moral' in a way amenable to them and their goals. Thus morality became about whether one was anti-gay, whether one was anti-choice, whether one believed that women should be subservient and submissive to men and whether one believed in corporal punishment, etc. This allowed other things which my parents would have understood as moral issues to no longer BE moral issues. Rapaciousness and avarice? Once upon a time these were considered ethical blemishes now they are things to brag about between the covers of Forbes or Business Week. Cruelty and torture? Once upon a time we thought these things beyond the pale, completely beyond the pale. Now it is something for law enforcement to fairly boast about (Sheriff Arapaio in Arizona) and for politicians to wax poetic about on the floor of the US congress.

I think we need to reclaim the language of morality, not shirk from it. Because morality is about *behavior* not *being*. A murderer is not some class of person who has never killed, one's behavior makes one a murderer. This is completely different than saying that, for instance, homosexuality has any intrinsic moral weight. It does not. So we are right to judge the murderer harshly because all one had to do to AVOID being a murderer was to refrain from murder. Murder harms people and so we have a vested interest--as a society--for making it abundantly clear that the behavior is unacceptable. Who does homosexuality harm? No one. Because it harms no one--and I'm in favor of a harm-based morality instead of a, say, holy book based one--it has no moral content. It is therefore inappropriate to claim homosexuality is immoral, as the religious right does.

We can talk about morality without being prudes, we just have to be clear about what we mean when we start using moral language.

Cheers
Aj

Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Novelafemme

Hi AJ,

I'm a little confused about the portion I highlighted in blue. Cruelty and torture have long been a systemic means of coercion and oppression utilized not only by our Armed Forces but by hegemonic powers by in large since the beginning of time.

More later...gotta go pick up the kiddos

When I was in the military we were taught that if we captured the enemy whatever else we might do we do NOT torture. Ever. It is a war crime. If given an order to torture, it was our *duty* to refuse to carry out the order and support our superior to the next in the chain of command and, if possible, relieve the officer giving that order of his command because giving an illegal order is prima facie evidence that one is unfit for command. Has torture been used by nation-states and by monarchs before them? Yes. However, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is quite clear on the matter of torture. We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions and by Constitutional mandate we are *obliged* to conform to it.

George Washington, who explicitly forbade torture, had it right. If we torture their people, they can torture our people. They might torture our people even if we do not torture theirs but if we torture theirs we make it a near certainty that our people will be tortured.

My saying that there was a time when torture was considered out-of-bounds does not mean that torture did not happen anymore than saying that murder is out-of-bounds means that murder never happens. But it was once the case that any commander who gave his troops an order to torture would have been relieved of command. There was a time when we, the American people, would have demanded the impeachment of any elected official who signed off on torture. It was once the case that we prided ourselves, we differentiated ourselves, by our NOT torturing.

Cheers
Aj