“We” in LGBT: Deconstructing the Multiple Self and Conceptualizing Radical Politics

Alen Toplišek WE IN LGBT: DECON“TRUCTING CONCEPTUALIZING RADICAL POLITICS THE MULTIPLE “ELF AND We are born into this world believing that our identity is a concrete, petrified and natural(ized) essence of who we are. We are not encouraged to strive to find our true self through challenging, questioning, subverting, ironizing the perception of the self that we hold which is imposed, regulated and maintained by the self-evident and totalizing structures of domination. Each human being is a body of multiple socially constructed identities. One can be a female student born in a low income Muslim family who never wants to get married and have children. One can be an old black man who separated his wife after 30 years of marriage in order to be able to spend the rest of his life with his male lover. There are identities we are born with biologically or born into by specific social conditions and most of them can change over time and space. These conceptions of identity are always becoming, amending, being modified, subverting the self. While recognizing the significance of multiple different identities in distinct social contexts, in this essay I will turn my attention to the (in)visibility of a particular social identity that is still very contentious and controversial in many parts of the world today – that of sexuality. The main issue of my concern will be uncovering the invisible, the ignored and the abnormal by making it visible, acknowledged and acceptable in a public space of appearance. What I will try to resolve is the question whether lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity politics can be reconciled with a broader radical political project that seeks to open up a space for imagining alternatives to the current system we live in. I will approach this seemingly irresolvable agency/structure dilemma by exploring Judith Butler’s “double path in politics”, amongst other concepts she has devised. In the first part of my essay I will discuss the conventional heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality in order to elucidate the complexity of the self in a subject. I will then emphasize the need for more visibility of LGBT people in order to transform the dominant regulatory norms 1 Alen Toplišek of recognition. Here I will then ask myself who is the “we” in LGBT? Thus, I will call into question the particularity and intentionality of this visibility in light of the social materialities and hegemonic structures that condition the relation of a subject’s sexual identity to other constitutive identities of that subject. I will then present the Arendtian critique of identity politics in order to uncover its limits. This critical analysis will enable me to put forward some propositions for a new politics of LGBT activism and gay rights movements. In her book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler (2004, 42) writes that “[g]ender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has.” She thus rejects the essentialist view and rather regards gender in a social constructivist or performative1 sense as “the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place.” Butler stresses that “masculine” and “feminine” are not the only variations of gender as the conventional binary thinking would like us to think. A discourse that only recognizes the naturalized dualisms of masculine/feminine, male/female can be thought of as performing “a regulatory operation of power” that endorses and normalizes the dominant norms and structures and prevents the possibility of their disruption (ibid., 43). It is important to note that Butler’s concept of “doing gender” is not merely a question of cultural construction or a petty elitist quest of extending personal freedoms, but it also aims to represent how reality can be reconstructed and challenged by its performativity (ibid., 30). Now turning to the analytical distinction between gender and sexuality, Butler (1999, xiv) is strongly in favor of drawing such a distinction if by it we mean to oppose heterosexual normativity’s ordering of gender. This argument also works in the opposite direction: gender ambiguity and subversion do not determine sexuality. Therefore, there is no correlation between different permutations of gender and (non-)normative sexuality. Like gender and sex, 1 In philosophy of language there are two different kinds of speech acts: constative and performative. The function of constative statements, on the one hand, is only descriptive, declaring something to be the case, which can be either true or false. Peformative acts, on the other hand, seek to change the world and cannot be deemed true or false (Wilson 2011). 2 Alen Toplišek sexuality is also culturally constructed through repetitive performative acts, regulated within the heterosexual framework of “the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine” that intends to uniform a seemingly natural and coherent gender identity by means of conforming to the heterosexual imperative (ibid., 43). The heteronormative regimes and discourses reproduce and reinforce themselves by restricting alternative conceptions of “heterosexuality”, “homosexuality” and “bisexuality” and their subversive potential.2 This is why the Derridean deconstruction of the structures of gender and sexual identity is so significant – it demonstrates how gender and sexuality cannot be reduced to the imposed dominant conceptions of what it is to be a (wo)man (Cornell 1992, 280). In a world where gay men can still be criminally prosecuted if they engage in “homosexual activities” or even face death penalty, where lesbian girls are rejected by their families and thrown into the streets for bringing dishonor upon the entire community, where transgendered people are wantonly killed in the broad daylight just for failing to conform to the dominant and naturalized social norms of behavior and appearance, there seems little reason to having to justify the necessity for giving more visibility and recognition to LGBT. By alluding to Spinoza’s principle of self-persistence 3 and Hegel’s notion of desire for recognition,4 Butler (2004, 31) claims that persistence in one’s own being is only possible if we are receiving and offering recognition. The norms of recognition, the function of which is to (de)produce the notion of the human, normal and acceptable, determine the possibility of us being able to persist in our own being. Without these norms recognizing our existence, our 2 Butler then goes on to question what performative subversions might challenge the constant reiterations of the heterosexist and phallogocentrist logic and their naturalized ontologies, which she further discusses in the final sections of Chapter 3. 3 “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.” (Spinoza 1883, 97) He calls this specific striving to persevere in its own being, this power of each thing by which it does anything, or strives to do anything, conatus (Garrett 2008, 12). 4 Hyppolite (1996, 76) explains Hegel's dialectic of desire and recognitions as an operation by which selfconsciousness comes into existence: “And this operation is essentially an operation on and by another selfconsciousness. I am a self-consciousness only if I gain for myself recognition from another self-consciousness and if I grant recognition to the other.” 3 Alen Toplišek place in the world, we are not (formally) recognized as subjects, as possible beings, since they prevent us from reaching that very possibility of being human, of being able to act 5 within the prescribed models and channels of participation. Although we are made to believe that the opposite is true, these regulatory norms of domination are malleable to change which means we are able to alter what is categorized as human and what is not. Perhaps talking abstractly about these subversive and altering changes does not fully reflect the seriousness of the issue, but when we put it into context, we see how the current international norms recognize only certain kinds of violence as impermissible, how only certain lives are deemed valuable and worth protecting, how only certain deaths are lamentable and reported on in the state media. When it comes to asserting lesbian and gay human rights, notions such as international justice and fairness somehow lose their meaning and significance. Since 2008, however, when a small group of states finally decided to draft a declaration to call for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly,6 the tide slowly started turning. On 15 December 2011, the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released the first ever UN report on the human rights of LGBT people. The report outlines numerous human rights violations, including “killings, rape and physical attacks, torture, arbitrary detention, the denial or rights to assembly, expression and information, and discrimination in employment, health and education” (OHCHR 2011). Homophobic and transphobic violence is often perpetrated by organized groups of religious extremists, paramilitaries, neo-Nazis, extreme nationalists, as well as family and community violence. The findings of the report are hardly any news, but what is notable is the recognition and visibility that the LGBT activism has successfully managed to acquire through persistent action, campaigning, lobbying and informing in an 5 I will further elaborate on the possibility of political action and its performative function later in the essay. General Assembly. 2008. General Assembly Adopts 52 Resolutions, 6 Decisions recommended by Third Committee on wide range of human rights, social, humanitarian issues, GA/10801, 18 December. Available at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/ga10801.doc.htm (16 December 2011). 6 4 Alen Toplišek environment that is rigid and still very much premised upon state-centered realism. Our very being and persistence in that being depend on the complex and changing social norms that recognize and include personhood of some, but reject and exclude the personhood of others that are deemed irrelevant, non-human. Judith Butler (2004, 32) puts it down perfectly when she says: In effect, our lives, our very persistence, depend upon such norms or, at least, on the possibility that we will be able to negotiate within them, derive our agency from the field of their operation. In our very ability to persist, we are dependent on what is outside of us, on a broader sociality, and this dependency is the basis of our endurance and survivability. When LGBT activists and groups talk about the human rights of LGBT people, they are not trying to assert rights by seeking some individualistic autonomy. Butler rightfully argues that our persistence depends on “a broader sociality” and on the norms of recognition supporting our endurance and survivability. However, when we talk about rights, we assume that the personhood of LGBT people, to whom the rights should attach, is already constituted. Thus, the global struggle for rights is not just a struggle for rights that we demand to be recognized for us, but it is also a struggle for us to be conceived and treated as persons, as any other human being. The struggle for assertion of rights is therefore more radical as it pushes for a social transformation of the very concept of personhood by interrupting and subverting the political process that defines the human. While acknowledging the deficiencies and limits of the discourse/practice of human rights, it nonetheless succeeds to “avow[s] our dependency, the mode of our being in the hands of others, a mode of being with and for others without which we cannot be” (Butler 2004, 34). We should now ask a very pertinent question: who is actually the “we” in LGBT? This descriptive term purports to represent lesbian, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, but apart from their sexual or gender identity, these persons also bear other types of identities that 5 Alen Toplišek shape their lives and the way they sustain their viability as human through the apparatus of dominant social norms and structures. The liberal wing of the LGBT movements around the world, which is majorly present in the Western world or “developed” countries of the North, seems to be speaking for the middle class citizens of their respective countries, they seem to be addressing the voters in the next elections, the taxpayers who pay for social services and the functioning of the state administration, the consumers who attend Gay Pride parades in big cities, the politically averse youth who only cares about having fun and looks after satisfying its individualistic desires. The liberal activists in the West have been fighting for equality and equal opportunities for LGBT citizens in their respective countries, but have failed to call into question the dominant liberal concepts of citizenship and the legitimacy of established political structures.7 In addition, more often than not the LGBT movements and organizations only manage to speak for the “L” and the “G” in this ontological category. And when they do remember to include bisexuals and transgendered people, there is resistance and factionalization within the diverse LGBT community. While I am not claiming that these internal differences and rifts are necessarily detrimental to the movement – on the contrary, these differences should be cherished as they represent the “ungrounded ground”, as Judith Butler (1992, 16) would put it, for political contestation and “a space of permanent openness and resignifiability” – they do indicate a necessity for a flexible and modifiable descriptive identity category. The LGBT community needs not always to act as a homogenous entity that is supposed to be unified by the articulation of its common element. I say not always because I do understand that this perceived and pragmatic “unity” of the movement is necessary by the way representational In putting together my critique of liberal LGBT activists' naïveté and lack of critical thinking, I have rephrased Chantal Mouffe's critique of liberal feminists (Mouffe 1992, 373). In this aspect, as in many others I am sure, the two liberal strands share this prevalent “uncriticalness” towards essentialist and totalizing rationalities. 7 6 Alen Toplišek politics work and that identity politics is crucial in political demonstrations and legislative efforts to make demands in the name of LGBT people. But at the same time we have to be careful not to disregard that these identity categories in identity politics “are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such exclusionary” (ibid., 15–6). This is the very reason Hannah Arendt opposed conceiving politics as an expression of shared identities such as race, color, ethnicity, nationality or gender. Honig (1992, 227) explains that Arendt perceived political communities based upon a common particular identity as leading to the closure of political spaces of possibility and new beginnings, homogenizing and repressing plurality, “which is the condition sine qua non for that space of appearance which is the public realm” (Arendt 1958, 220). For Arendt (1958, 214) this “unitedness of many into one” was inherently antipolitical as it represents “the very opposite of the togetherness prevailing in political /…/ communities”. She gives an Aristotelian example to elaborate her point: a commercial community doesn’t consist of an association between two physicians, but between a physician and a farmer, “between people who are different and unequal” (ibid., 215). Arendt asserts that equality in a public realm – a space of appearance where people stand together in equality, but not in sameness, as each human being is unique, each capable of new beginnings, interrupting the seemingly inexorable structural processes and setting politics off on a different path – is innately “an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes” (ibid.). Arendt’s emphasis on political action and human togetherness shows the centrality of performativity in her political theory. Arendt’s philosophy, however, came under heavy criticism for her uncompromising clearcut distinction between the public and private sphere. She insisted that matters of life and death, food consumption and satisfaction of other bodily needs, laboring and working all 7 Alen Toplišek belong to the dark, extra-political space of the private realm.8 The brightness of the public realm, on the other hand, was ready to embrace the noblest of achievements and fruits of human faculties, of which Arendt perceived speech and action to be the most political. 9 Yet, what about those who do not have the possibility or the means to engage in this togetherness of a space of appearance? And how do we account for those who are not recognized by and thus invisible to the current power structures of domination and suppression of plurality? Those who remain outside the political sphere, do we just accept them as the collateral damage, as bare life of politics and power? Butler (2011) claims that if we accept this premise of “depoliticized forms of being”, “the destitute”, the “unreal” and “unrealized” being outside of the sphere of public realm, then we uncritically accept the dominant ways of defining and conceiving politics as legitimate. Such an assumption fails to recognize those forms of political agency that take place in the twilight zone, in the darkness of the private realm, domains that are considered pre-political, anti-political or to be on the other side of the political. Embarking on Butler’s double path of politics or keeping the Honig’s multiple sites of critical leverage open is the way the LGBT and other identity-based movements should be taking. To think you can remain in an outsider position, from where you can safely criticize and independently judge the political matters is a misleading view. No one can really ever be an outsider as we are always in some way or another characterized by and implicated in the dominant political structures and processes. The commonality of our humanity needs difference, since there is no identity that wouldn’t be constituted on difference. 10 While identity matters when it comes to putting forward claims for recognition and visibility, it should not constrain us and foreclose the possibility of conceptualizing and creating 8 For more on the private realm, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 50–1, 62–3. For more on the significance of speech and action in the public realm, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 25 – 26, 207–8. 10 Kevin Inston (2010, 42) on Rousseauian and Lacanian view of identity and difference. 9 8 Alen Toplišek alternative plural spaces of multiple identities. We should not let the established political structures set the limits of what counts as politics and continue (re)producing exclusions and the new destitute. What I am arguing for is that we should keep on speaking about how the human rights discourse works for LGBT people and how it doesn’t, what it is to be human and pursue imaging an open set of fundamental and universal aspirations of humanity. At the same time, in order to trigger the transformation of dominant social norms, LGBT activists need to step together and form alliances with other radical struggles and movements that seek to disrupt the seeming normalcy and consensus of the status quo. All the while, we should constantly keep our identity categories open to deconstruction, subversion and reconceptualization in order to expose the limitations and boundaries of their inclusivity and modifiability. References cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Republished, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 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Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics. In Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 369–84. New York, London: Routledge. OHCHR. 2011. Discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity: Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, A/HRC/19/41, 17 November. Available at: 10 Alen Toplišek http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/19session/A.HRC.19.41_English.pdf (16 December 2011). Spinoza, Baruch de. 1883. The Ethics. Republished by Forgotten Books, 2008. Available at: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MOCyibX0ZHsC&lpg=PP1&dq=spinoza%20ethics (16 December 2011). Wilson, Colin. 2011. Queer theory and politics. International Socialism, Issue 132. Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=759&issue=132 (13 December 2011). 11