This semester I've tried to expose the Tufts community to various aspects of queer issues and politics with which the majority probably never engages. I touched base with both theory and lived experiences through topics ranging from semiology and transfeminism to hate crimes legislation (HCL) and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). My intention was to bring attention to relegated voices and offer their perspectives and viewpoints as alternatives to the mainstream narrative, which didn't even really exist for some topics (i.e., biphobia, transphobia, prison industrial complex, transfeminism). And in the instances that my chosen topic was already mainstream (i.e., same−sex marriage, DADT, HCL), I tried to present it in a new light. I opened an inquiry on these topics with the intent to share ideas and standpoints that are radical in the sense that they are not given the space to be deployed within the larger space of public discourse. I did this because I firmly agree with Audre Lorde's wise words: "Difference must be not merely tolerated but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."
For this to happen, the multiplicity of queer voices must be heard. We queer folk have been pushed aside time and time again to the margin, a place where our voices, silenced and ignored, lack discursive potency. We holler and shout, articulate anger and indignation to no avail 'til our throats are raspy and torn from the exertion. We are peripheral annoyances, sometimes in partial view but never in focus unless caught like a deer in hostile gazes. Then the public pays attention to us as spectacles of monstrous intimacies transgressing and transcending Western binaries. Our bodies and self−expression, a patchwork of performativity and performance, meet with revile and disgust, two dear old friends we've yet to avoid. We pass them daily on the street only to later find them at our workplace, our neighborhood, in any social milieu and every institution. We even see them on TV and hear from them internally. Our psyches tragically resemble a colonized reality. We have internalized and engraved homophobia, biphobia, transphobia onto our bodies, mutilating and cutting parts off. Interventions often come too late, and our lives become just as immaterial as our identities.
Even still, sometimes or all the time for some, our "otherness" isn't legible and becomes invisible. We become a semiotic failure, subjects unable to signify their substance. When we pass as normal, we sample and perhaps delight in some privilege and savor the joys of heterosexuality. Yet we await the bitter aftertaste that results from the knowledge that the erasure, the tool of our masquerade, implicates society in the delegitimization and invalidation of our very existence.
Here, we run into the trouble of assimilation and acculturation. What does it mean to reproduce the structures of institutions of oppression and discrimination through our choices? Can we find the right balance between optimizing life's opportunities and subversive praxis? I don't have the answer, but these are divisive notions that disrupt the solidarity of our ranks. We must move beyond such facile categorizations and insist on inclusive and coalition politics. This is crucial, for we number few and far between, and the assault on our psyches and bodies continues and results in dehumanization, bullying, harassment, beatings, violence, rape, incarceration and death, especially for our trans family. Perhaps, it wouldn't be too farfetched to assert as Queer Nation's manifesto did, that "It is a miracle you [read: queer individual] are standing here reading these words" and a blessing, for it's time to move from the margin to the center.
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