keyholez:

memesetc:

“Advances” such as gay marriage and the increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it — the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable others. Social negativity clings not only to these figures but also to those who lived before the common era of gay liberation — the abject multitude agaist whose experience we define our own liberations. Given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to foget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.

— Heather Love, Feeling Backwards

So: because some people had problems once, and some people still do, no one’s allowed to be happy or live their lives until some far future date when things finally turn out well (i.e. 100% gold-backed currency, a gay marriage in every pot, molecular nanotechnology, light-roast coffee)?

In my personal life I’m all about mental self-flagellation, but this is getting ridiculous. Do we really need the Heather Loves of the world to constantly remind us of the Troubles, lest we crack a smile now and then? This choir has quite enough preachers already, thanks.

Frankly I find it hard not to read this passage in the maximally cynical way. On the basis of style and content, I guessed correctly that this Heather Love is an academic (specifically an assistant professor of English at Penn). Specialties include queer theory and gender studies. Hm.

Who, do you think, feels most threatened by the prospect of widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities? A) Some crazy people with some weird beliefs about God? Yes, probably. But what about B) people who make a living speaking at great length about how there is no such acceptance, never was, and never will be, so please give me money and print my writings to prove that you feel bad about all this? B is certainly a far smaller group in terms of numbers, but they have A beat six ways till Sunday on status and fashionability.

It is impossible to prove this, but I believe it all the same: the actual mental algorithm that led to the composition of the quoted text was, basically, “Hm. Gay marriage is starting to go through in a lot of places, and demographically speaking it seems like a fait acocompli that in the near future homophobia will be a very marginal sentiment indeed. That…seems like a good thing. Shit, think, shit, think, shit, quick: what can I say to make this good thing seem bad?” This is not a reliable method for arriving at the truth. It is, however, a very reliable method for coming up with new topics for journal articles and preserving one’s sense that one is on the losing (but still fighting!) team, which many people seem to view as the only way they can continue to be cool. (Apparently Love’s Ph.D. dissertation was entitled “Failure as a Way of Life.” Precisely.)

This nagging anxiety about possible future irrelevance or uncoolness is also what motivates the silly, haphazard references to “the fat…and a host of unmentionable others.” It’s a rhetorical ultimatum — accept my argument about how all gay “”“”“advances”“”“” to date are fake and shallow, or I’ll barrage you with a list of sad people and/or losers, and then you’ll realize how oblivious and square you’re being (and also be forced to fund my Department of Fat and Unmentionable Studies).

Put differently: Heather Love is short gay people, even though she pretends to be long. If things keep going well for gay people, she is exposed to the risk of potentially infinite loss, so she works to disseminate the notion that it is immoral, ignorant, and superficial to perceive that things are going well at all. In trader-speak there is a term for self-interested sophistry masquarding as informed analysis, and it applies just as well to the world of academia: talking your book.

I don’t think this objection says much about the claim actually being made. I agree that it’s rather right: homonormative marraige probably isn’t going to be any more helpful than heternormative marriage. And this is part of a pretty long and I think on balance valuable dicussion that crosses multiple domains regarding the effect of mainstreaming on an identity group (or whatever). “You’ve got civil rights, why are you still whining about racism?” “We’v got civil rights, why should we worry about poors?” As far as always finding something else to worry about, I thought we liked that dude.

But yes, the incentive structure of academia is a little sketchy. If one can make a plausible case that a set of ideas might come purely out of calculated ambition and exploitation of sympathy for “unmentionables” (…?) it makes taking those ideas seriously more difficult. It might not even seem to those involved that it is so self-interested. Mulder wasn’t just trying to keep his job, he wanted to believe. Who knows which came first or if he can remember.

Being worried about all that and being worried about what might be retrogressive about marriage-as-liberation politics (and like, I mean…) are rather similar sentiments from a certain perspective. The gay marriage movement and the department of queer studies might be at odds with one another, but neither are things I’d do away with outright. And both have a lot of problems that start to come into focus once they’re considered in terms of their local, practical affects within the larger context in which they’re embedded.

It’s rough in this case because “studies” feed on “problems”, so identifying them seems like its something one might be getting tricked into. That’s why the rhetoric in this particular passage could be found objectionable. “The temptation to forget”, on its own, is a bit abstract as far as stakes go and an relatively easy thing to invoke. I’d bet (and hope), however, that the book delves further into what that translates into socially and politically.

And also, are you really saying you’re going to be happy without the gold standard?