Homophobia in High Schools and Colleges

It exists.

It is not just the work of a “few bad apples” but is, in fact, deeply structural and institutional. In prepping my poetry classes this summer, I have been looking through a variety of websites geared toward middle and high-school students. Invariably, even prominent gay and lesbian poets tend to be put back into the closet. For instance, one site notes that lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich was married and that her husband committed suicide. Not a single word about her lesbian relationships—which far outlast her marriage.

But that is another topic.

I am far more interested in a comment left on the above lined article by “gay grad student”:

Gays just need to quit playing the discriminated card and start acting like role models—a superior group that others should strive for. Look at cultural creation, especially urban regentrification—gays lead the way. Cities that are ‘cool’ generally have a big gay population, and cities that aren’t cool, try to court gays, at least, if they are smart. People need to be out and proud, but not just in the sense that they ‘are gay’; they need to be assertive about our low crime rates, high education, and cultural creativitiy [sic]. If we told kids the t.v. they are watching was produced by a dominant group—gays—they might start thinking differently.

Unfortunately, “gay” here defaults into implicitly white and relatively affluent. Presumably, gays should avoid “playing” the “card” that has been so unsuccessful for blacks and women. Indeed, they should play the “superior.” The gender, race, and class politics of this assertion are so obvious that they need little comment.

Being “gay,” for this student, has little to do with the class and racial politics of “gentrification.” Indeed, that some gay individuals may be left disenfranchised by gentrification seems beside the point. Cities court populations with money. It should be noted, of course, that many cities with “big gay” populations also tend to be prohibitively expensive. Here, gays are “cool” because they represent urban wealth and trends.

I’m not on board.

I’m not sure “we” need to romanticize “gay” life to give it worth. “Low crime rates, high education, and cultural creativity” all sound remarkably interesting, if, I think, empirically inflated.

Two things bother me most about this sanitized model of “gayness.” It offers no critique of heteronormativity, no critique of normativity at all, without which “gay,” at least for me, becomes an empty signifier filled with pretty colors and nice-smelling flowers. Gay as tourist attraction is something I can—and do—live without.

Moreover, it refuses to understand the way queer lives are constantly being sanitized, histories erased and individuals re-closeted so they can have worth. Stripped of any objectionable content, gay might become “cool.” Yet, this “cool” becomes complicit with a homophobic logic of erasure and invisibility. (See gayprof on the gay character in The Starter Wife).

If nothing else, history should teach us that a résumé of accomplishments never guarantees social approbation.

mess of pottage?

I may be a luddite. Perhaps touched by a little too much unwarranted nostalgia. But.

Am I the only one troubled by the eagerness with which apparently “very many” Kenyans wants us to become a “world-class economy” which offers extensive (and overly-expensive) “tourist packages?”

Is this desire the equivalent of selling our birthright for a mess of pottage?

Here, perhaps, the ideological critique of a Marxist-inflected postcolonial perspective runs up against what often seems like a more pragmatic developmental agenda. As my brother might put it, ideas bang against reality. Marxist-inflected it might be, but as more astute minds have noted, a certain Marxist posture is all-so-attractive to a certain middle-class subject.

Away from, but informed by, the realm of “high ideas,” I wonder at the glee with which “we” receive ideas and assessments by foreign “experts.” Tom Friedman’s comment that Kenya might become some kind of economic animal, for example, was a source of incessant, and annoying, debate in the pages of the Daily Nation. More recently, a Harvard professor’s views on Kenya’s “potential” as a haven for “investors” were received with perhaps too much fanfare. (I leave aside, for the moment, the well-known ideological conservatism of economists. And also our fetishization of “Harvard.”)

While, on the one hand, the idea of a “prosperous” Kenya should seem welcome, I am troubled by the assumption that foreign investment will secure “our” future. The few visions of 2030 of which I am aware seem driven by an urge toward wealth, less so the extension of much-needed services to populations who may not be able to afford them.

I am probably the least suitable person to ask about “birthright” and “culture” and “tradition,” and those may not necessarily be the right frames through which to elaborate my discomfiture. Perhaps I simply continue from my previous post in asking about the rise of that most troubling of contemporary phenomena: middle-class philanthropy.

At my most alarmist, I understand vision 2030 as consolidating the importance of middle-class philanthropy.

“Where are the . . .?”

If only the “most oppressed” people would start blogging. Perhaps there’s a displaced lesbian mother of 10 whose “husband” was beheaded by Mungiki in the same week that she was forced out of her home by government agents intent on stealing the forest land on which she was “squatting,” and she is in especially dire straits because 5 of her children carry life-threatening diseases, ranging from malaria to AIDS. And, on top of it all, she is illiterate.

She really needs to start blogging. Because, otherwise, how will we know what she is going through? How will we “feel” her pain and join her “struggles” for justice? Without “hearing the voices” of “victims,” how can we “respond?”

I am often baffled by our demand that “abject” subjects speak to us in accents that we understand. As used by Julia Kristeva, abject refers to dirt, vomit, shit, that which we produce and discard. Butler’s readers will recognize the abject as an “individual” who does not fully materialize as subject, or, in my rendering, never makes the “transition” from discarded and invisible object to subject.

Of course, the tragedy here is that “we” continually abject individuals, render them invisible, even as “we” want to “recuperate” them to make a point about contemporary life. But the point is often lost. This is a well-known argument.

I am more concerned with our continual desire to hear (I want to write Caliban—I need to stay away from the Caribbeanists!) let’s call her “Wanjiku” speak, even as her moving lips simply allow for our dubbing, translation, voice-over. (Watchers of Anderson Cooper and Christiane Anampour have vivid examples.)

It is less the fact of “dubbing” or “voice-over” that disturbs me so much as our continual search, and all-too-brief encounters with people we otherwise discard. Street children in Nairobi (do they still exist?) become targets of short-lived sympathy when profiled in the papers or featured on national and international news reports; they are to be avoided when one actually walks the streets. (Or leaves the country to walk on other streets, in which cases they become occasions for a troubling, sanitized nostalgia; even though, foreign streets often smell no better.)

It is also the willful blindness with which “we” continue to chase after, ask about, demand to hear the voices of “the most oppressed” in ways we understand and can value—good for a documentary, an editorial, a feature piece. (I am articulating, my own sense of shame at middle-class philanthropy, one that is willing to chastise “big business” or, in Kenya’s case, “corrupt politicians” but remains indifferent to its own complicity with exploitation.)

In my perverse fantasies, $100 laptops will allow the “poorest children” of the world to blog. Like elaborate game characters, they will enter “our” world. Mastering “our” language, they will gain a hearing. As we helpfully translate, transcribe, dub over, and create “moving” documentaries (moving away from our subjects, that is) about those who are finally “emerging from the shadows.”

From “a recovering racist”

To black folk everywhere: “When you remain trapped as a victim, your belief in yourself and ability to solve very real problems is hampered.”

Committees

Perhaps my Presbyterian background prejudiced me, but I am constantly amazed by the Kenyan ability to form committees at the drop of a hat. It is, I venture to say, one of the more idiosyncratic of our national talents.

Elites acting like themselves

And the Nation gets it right (and so wrong).

Elite schools, it appears, are moulding intelligent Kenyans who would steer the country to higher economic growth rates.

Of course students at “elite schools” think about the bottom line. It’s their class destiny. To see it as a mark of hope for the future of the country, however, is to buy into the absurd trickle-down theory being peddled by leaders and, to my chagrin, bloggers.

Another gag-worthy article

Thank you, NYT.

Coloring Democracy

Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men. This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself.
—Madison Grant, 1920.

Popular discussions of assimilation tend to foreground cultural issues: dress, language, food, behavior. To be an American one must act like an American. (I know better than to use American to refer to US citizens, but using US citizens is awkward.) Of course, as pro-immigration rallies and reactions to them showed us, becoming American also requires one to break all ties with an originating country and its politics. As the refrain went, “they weren’t flying American flags.”

During the late 1910s and through the 1920s, Madison Grant was one of the most articulate advocates of immigration restriction. His 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, a racial elegy based on World War I, drew on the emotional resources of war-induced nationalism to argue against diluting “Nordic” blood with less noble strains, those of non-Nordic immigrants (Jews, Italians, Japanese). As the war ended, the book became a bestseller, going through at least three revisions and being reprinted at least 10 times. In the fourth edition, Grant took credit for enabling the discussions that led to the passing of what is, perhaps, the most restrictive immigration law in US history, the Immigration Act of 1924.

I am especially interested in his idea that democratic ideals are color-coded, a claim that seems to go against the popular notion of democracy. That a popular, US-based notion of democracy might go against a Classical ideal is a debate I am vastly unqualified to enter. But a niggling feeling tells me that the Classic, and classist, trace persists in US ideals.

If we have moved away from Grant’s anti-immigrant stance, in law if not in spirit, we have yet to address his sense that black, yellow, brown, and red “men” will destroy, subvert, or otherwise corrupt “democratic ideals.” Moving away from a US context, so far as the tether of empire allows, it is striking to see how often “new” and “emerging” democracies are faulted for not having the “right” kind of democracy, how, that is, the US—Nordic-based?—remains the standard for what democracy should be. Underlying such critiques is Grant’s sense: that democracy is color-coded, race-coded, blood-encoded.

More striking, at least for me, is the sense that a differently “raced” or “colored” population will produce a strikingly different ideal of democracy, one that may be incomprehensible to Euro-American critics. Of course, given the financial fetters of empire (wave to IMF, World Bank, Euro-America “lenders”), this very illegibility is always cause for censure, a reason to say that “democracy” has failed.

On Genealogy

People who are going to be
in a few years
bottoms of trees
bear a responsibility to something
besides people

—Lucille Clifton “Generations”

In no particular order, I have been thinking about environmental activism, animal rights (courtesy of my exchange with alexcia and reading Coetzee), and queer interventions into a domain termed “the natural.” Lucille Clifton’s poem seems to be the perfect starting point.

What might it mean to “bear a responsibility to something / besides people?” Almost immediately, I am reminded that the term “people” remains contested. One of queer studies early interventions, borrowing from feminism and race scholarship, was that queers were often defined as not-people (“abject” in Judith Butler’s adaptation from Julia Kristeva; as an aside, I’m still not sure how to relate Butler-Kristeva’s “abject” to Spivak-Gramsci’s “subaltern”—I’ll leave that to smarter minds). In our day, arguably, the distinction people/non-people operates most perniciously along class lines. (If nothing else, the gory photographs of Mathare residents being treated like Mau Mau suspects should give us pause.)

But Clifton is asking her readers to look beyond anthropomorphism, to question what it might mean to “bear responsibility” to a tree. To understand, for example, that what we put into our bodies returns to the environment and may have the potential to kill or nurture trees and their unrelated species-progeny.

For me, the poem is especially welcome at a time when, as Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant point out, the reproductive family, as concept and material, authorizes repressive legislation. One need only say that “the family” and more specifically “the children” are threatened and it seems we are ready to roll over and let politicians have their way.

I use a deliberately sexual figure of speech to highlight how our complicity in the name of safeguarding the sacred family is always simultaneously an affair or rape that violates the very concept of family. Along class lines, this is most apparent when lower income individuals become military fodder; but, it also extends to legislation that, in attempting to “save” families, creates stunted growth in any number of areas.

It is telling that, at least in the US, “the family,” has less been the site of affection than the home of paranoia. Equally telling is that this paranoia has often been fostered and nurtured in political rhetoric. (Love your child: track her movements on her gps-rigged cell.)

I have moved away from Clifton, but not, I think, by too much. For the mechanisms that foreground the family as the sacred site of protection, as the excuse for all political decisions, are quite often the same ones that refuse to “bear a responsibility to something / other than people.”

What might it mean to consider genealogy as a non-anthropomorphic practice? Or, even to consider genealogy as a practice that allowed for “non-people” to be included? I don’t mean in the casual ways we talk about the faithful family pet (and even that has various race and class overtones). How might a focus on the “unlike” enable a different practice of living? Do I owe the tree at whose bottom I might rest the promise of being good manure?

I remain stuck on the indefinite “something.” I also defer a complete reading of the poem as I will be teaching it this summer.

Two by Two?

I know the Ark was big. Very big. So big that it was, well, big. Perhaps BIG. Or, even better, B.I.G. But, I still wonder how Noah got all the animals to fit . Weren’t there moments when he looked at something, considered it ugly (he was the new Adam, after all), and barred it from entering? (Thus being the most influential velvet rope bouncer of all time).

What if the female of the species was prettier? Or if the male had more impressive plumage? Are we sure Noah didn’t practice some form of “you’re hot, you’re not?”

Well, Science (always with a capital S) may have an answer: Parthenogenesis. Now, those who, unlike me, actually completed their degrees in bio-sciences know all about parthenogenesis. For laypeople like me, it simply means that one member of a species can reproduce without “aid” from another member. (virgin births all around!)

As I said, this is not new. What’s new and increasingly important is the extent to which parthenogenesis happens, especially in creatures once understood to be on the sexual reproduction side of the binary (Std. 6: sexual and asexual reproduction).

Perhaps Noah took a lot of singles on the Ark; maybe there really was a singles’ scene, “Hey, nice feathers,” “Thanks, nice fur,” and perhaps it was then that the oddest looking creatures were “born.” (Yes, I’m queering the Ark. Though, c’mon, it’s already a pretty queer space anyway.)