The late, mannerist years of identity politics

[imomus]

1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)

2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.

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3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.

4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.

5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.

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6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?

7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."

8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."

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9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:

"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."

10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:

a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism

11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".

12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:

"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.

13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.

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14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.

15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.

16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".

17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".

18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

As your vintage Monty Python clips attest, identity politics has been in a mannerist phase since the late '70s. If this fact doesn't seem to have filtered down to the American education system yet, it may be because the US itself is in a late, mannerist phase.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Well, I love you. Might not mean as much coming from an ordinary cisgirl, but that's how it is.

[realrealgone.livejournal.com]

aha - i see you've removed the bit from point 4 that said

I consider that a step forward, politically: the emphasis on equality with men condemns women always to be in the shadow of a "pre-eminent gender".

your argument makes sense now - and yes, i think you're right.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You caught me in the "early, stammerist" phase of thinking the issue through!

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

This phenomenon is in full force in liberal/progressive groups at universities. I recall the short period during which I was involved with a campus group that focused on fair labor practices both at the university itself (working closely with the custodial staff, which at the time was not unionized) and in the community at large (helping to organize textile workers). What I ultimately found puzzling about this group is that "the leaders" (technically it was a consensus-based group with no actual leadership, but as often is the case, the same few people--graduate students--were always essentially running the show) constantly appeared to be engineering group conflicts that needed to be "dealt with." At the end of every meeting, one of the members would read off a tally, organized by gender, of who had made statements, who had asked questions, who had spoken out of turn, etc. And while the spoken message was that we should merely "be aware" of whether we were treading on others' feet, the subtext was that, if you're a guy, you need to seriously consider shutting up if/when you feel the desire to say something. There was this overwhelming frustration of feeling as though we'd somehow managed to move beyond the point where two people of different genders could say to one another "Excuse me, but I was still speaking," that a kind of dispassionate policing of speech was necessary in order to keep the peace. The phenomenon you describe--of sowing discord where none would otherwise have existed--ruled the day.

Part of me wonders if this phenomenon is exaggerated in the US, because it seems that hyper-individualism plays a big role in that kind of ego formation. But at the same time, I feel like it's also a clear sign of an as-yet unformed set of political arguments, the constant desire to sharpen one's talons, even if it means sharpening them on those who would otherwise be your greatest allies.

[(Anonymous)]

"sharpen one's talons"
Nice way to look at it. I think that's exactly what's going on here. People are looking for sparring partners but neglecting to mention that they're only sparring (and in the process forget it themselves).

[eptified.livejournal.com]

OK - just so I know, does this mean it's OK to say "nigger" now?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your post must have crossed mine, see above:

The jury seems to be out on whether "tranny" is offensive, though, and it certainly isn't taboo. The Boston Herald would never headline a story "Wife-killing nigger..." (http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20091126wife-killing_tranny_denied_electrolysis_for_time_being/srvc=home&position=also) for example.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.

Would you say that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (with food and shelter at the base and self-actualisation at the apex) is a proto-Reaganite/Thatcherite ideological construct?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a troubling question for me, because from an early age (circa 1980, a pivotal point in this argument, in fact) I bought into Maslow's hierarchy very explicitly, at face value, and using his term. I read Maslow in the Penguin Creativity Handbook, and it became my Bible. When I first looked around Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, I actually said to my new art student friends there (Keith, Keith and Graham): "This is great, you're allowed to self-actualize here!"

What you can say about Maslow's hierarchy is that it fits very neatly into Cold War ideology, and plumps for the side of individualism over collectivism. A lot of research I've done since into the "religion of creativity" (which is largely what prepares and makes possible the creative explosion of the 1960s) links it very explicitly with Cold War military research and specifically the Sputnik Shock (http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/creativity-and-the-sputnik-shock).

It is actually all too easy to link Cold War ideology and individualism with Reagan/Thatcher. I think Adam Curtis made the argument very convincingly. I felt like a dupe when I watched Century of the Self. At the same time, those ideas about creativity and self-actualisation formed me. They're at my core, and I will never be able to banish them. I don't know what would be left of me without them.

Perhaps it got resensitized

[(Anonymous)]

I'm totally behind the message that you don't get to take offense at anything you like; that you have to do a good-faith effort to make sure that the intent was intended to be offensive.

Another thing comes to mind though; clearly 'tranny' has been used in the good ol' days - Andy Warhol's Factory days - as a strategy for self identification. A conscious choice to *be* shocking in opposition to normalcy, as well as conquering your own identity. As these identities become more and more common, the culture around them changes, obviously, and the shock might not really be a positive part of the experience for the new bourgeois population of trans-anything. Not that your combative commenter seems to come from that point of view.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that so much changed in 1980, in terms of Thatcher and Reagan coming into power and people, at about the same moment, starting to talk in a fairly mainstream way about "sexism" and "racism" (as opposed to "sex" and "race", NB). David Bowie is my personal bellweather for cultural history in this period, and it's fascinating to me that we hear him, in 1980, in an interview on the Scary Monsters interview disk. saying:

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"The Japanese girl in [It's No Game]... I wanted to break down a particular kind of sexist attitude about women, and I thought that the Japanese girl typifies it, where everybody sort of pictures them as the geisha girl and very sort of sweet and demure and non-thinking, when in fact that is the absolute opposite of what women are like. They think an awful lot with quite as much strength as any man. So I wanted to sort of caricature that kind of attitude by having a very forceful Japanese voice on it, so I had a girlfriend of mine come out with a very samurai sort of feeling."

The first example of this kind of gender politics I'm aware of in Bowie's work is the song Repetition, on Lodger (1979), which is about domestic violence. His political tone changed very markedly between, say, Stationtostation (with its Crowley-Wagner tone) and Lodger and Scary Monsters, and I think it's because of certain people he met in Berlin, and specifically Kreuzberg, which would be one of the places where people were very sensitised already to the politics of sexism and racism (rather, again, than a wider politics of sex and race, which talk of sexism and racism tends to pre-empt, and this is what distinguishes it from the 1960s and 1970s identity politics struggles, which really did want there to be a wider conversation about sex and race, not just a series of new taboos).

But clearly also because Bowie always reflected the zeitgeist, and the late 70s was when this began to be a mainstream thing. The Let's Dance video also has a rather PC message about aboriginals in it, the China Girl vid has a thing about imperialism, and so on. By the late 80s, though, Bowie was doing something different; there's a back-to-basics, primal Iron John thing going on in Tin Machine, for instance.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Bowie talks here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd-zJpV34xk) about having his childish fascination with Arthurian legend and the Nazis argued out of him in Berlin by Germans whose own parents had been involved in the Nazi regime. I think the interview is from 1978 or so, and catches his political turn.

[(Anonymous)]

"this "self-actualization" [in the 1970s] led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s"


that's how time does

or

eyah teleology

but more seriously, if you are saying they are no different, that's to say they are essentially the same (and you have identified; fixed the common essence. but if you are saying one (the 70s) was really the other (immanently) (the 80s), then how do we know what the 80s really is (what the 70s really really is), except the 90s?

[(Anonymous)]

reader, i fucked up my first bracket

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, have you ever had intimate relations with a tranma?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Never mind a tranma, I haven't even broken a grandma's hymen yet! I'm an absolute beginner.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I think one thing you could explore more is the technological aspect of being transgendered. It seems as much a medical/technological category as a political one.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

12月29日に日本にいる予定ですか？

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No. Is there a February 29th in 2010?

[(Anonymous)]

Or you'll invite me.

[ohshitman.livejournal.com]

oh man, I've TOTALLY gotten the google "racism" ad!

check it:
http://www.blogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblogblog.com/?p=3695
Racism t-shirts? wtf?

[(Anonymous)]

Random: I feel much the same, though it seems we may have taken different routes after these initial ideas (hence my Vapournesia reference in another Click Opera comment). Not sure I like the idea of trapping human gender identity between a polar continuum, however fluid. Prefer to take a more humanistically de-anthropomorphising route, perhaps work in some ideas from Joan Roughgarden, toss in some of the 'speculative realists' for the hell of it.

Did I already ask if you were familiar with Edward Said on 'worldliness'? (My first encounter with his use of the term being in The Politics of Knowledge: http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/asistanlar/hist551/W9/said_politics%20of%20knowledge.pdf)

[(Anonymous)]

Missing pages in the essay archived here: http://books.google.com/books?id=merq6HPXPm8C

[joji-poji.livejournal.com]

This reminds me a little of when Zizek talks about how as a former citizen of Yugoslavia, prior to it's break up, ethnic jokes told by the different peoples of the country about each other were cathartic, helping to bond them. The only effective antidote to our antiseptic multiculturalism, he remains convinced, "is the exchange of obscenities, the practice of telling racist or xenophobic jokes in a non-racist manner".

[(Anonymous)]

There's a linguistic difference among English speakers. British, Australian and NZ speakers of English commonly add "y" to a shortened word but this doesn't happen so often in American English.

For instance, soccer star Ryan Giggs is often called "Giggsy". "Tranny" fits in to that kind of usage but it doesn't sound right to an an American ear just as calling Beckham "Becky" rather than "Becks" sounds wrong to an English ear.

Transgender is a word that grew in popularity in the US while transvestite has a long usage in the English speaking world. If you are talking with people who wish to establish that they have a gender identity disorder, which is what "transgender" tries to establish, and you use the word "tranny", it sounds as dismissive as if you called a young man "sonny". The "y" ending is used in English for familarity. Think "tu" and "vous"

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

"Becks" sounds strange and British to us, as well. We're more inclined to use linguistic formations like "D-Beck" to refer to sports icons. Of course, that kind of sounds like "d-bag" which, while perhaps an accurate name for David Beckham, kind of tarnishes the brand.

Like Freedom w/o Power?

[jdcasten.livejournal.com]

“18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.”

Sort of like “equal opportunity” that doesn’t end with “equal results” ?

beyond the male / female

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

A little late in the fray, but with all the questions about transience of propriety nay once has mentioned whether or not the public fund health care trans gender surgery.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

lol (http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/racist-moment-fantastic-mr-fox)

[celesteh.livejournal.com]

Is it really that hard to avoid using slurs?

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

aren't all pronouns slurs?

Oh thank god

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

I'm currently involved in a Soto Buddhist group which is having an internecine sexism argument right now. It's really kind of awful. While I understand that there are women Buddhists in particular places in the world (Thailand comes to mind) who are truly segregated and treated as inferior to their male counterparts, the group I'm speaking of is mostly North Americans and Europeans.

I'm tempted to borrow those Life of Brian clips just to leaven the squabbling a little, but I'm sure it would be seen as flip.

Pardon me for presuming, but it just seems to me that shutting up and sitting meditation is a lot more beneficial to everyone concerned than arguing about sexism on a messageboard halfway across the world, short of packing up and actually going to Thailand to take a stand (or take a sit, more fittingly).

It's especially misplaced because we are supposed to practice right, nondivisive speech. I can't think of anything more divisive or illusionary than identity politics. What a crashing bore.

Re: Oh thank god

[(Anonymous)]

What's left? Did you find the Nothing at the bottom of the meditation yet? It's all emotions and they're all about identity. You chase that zero and they'll chase that infinity. The rest of us will just sit in the middle and keep $core.

Your caption here:

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.tube8.com/shemale/with-of-each-set/176233/

a related read...

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

.. which you may've already read:

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond (http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm)