Queer (in) Crisis: A Discussion in the Sussex University Occupation

5 March 2013

The following was presented to a group of students and staff at the Sussex University anti-privatisation occupation.  It is not meant as a comprehensive paper, but is rather a series of ideas that facilitated a really helpful discussion—the notes of which will be posted shortly.

– This project grew out of a series of unanswered questions from the Critical Issues in Queer Theory course, and also partially out of several encounters with activist and filmmaker Sarah Schulman.  This is not to accredit the potency of our critical endeavours to Schulman, anything but; but rather that our questions arose partly as a reaction to her dismissal of the possibility for radical potential in today’s LGBTQ communities—if such a thing even exists.  Schulman does, however, believe that the current historical moment is in a new state of crisis or disaster and that this is filled with ungraspable potential.  Why is crisis given this status of potentiality?  When we think about crisis and its potential what is it that we mean?

– Firstly, I would like to think about crisis and in its current popularly recognised forms.  What is the “financial crisis” and how does a queer perspective alter or inform our knowledge of it?  How does our recognition and definition of crisis differ from the mainstream?  On one hand, queer people are subject to increasing pressure and stresses as a result of the management of the crisis.  But on the other, our ordinary experience and negotiation of crisis-framed lives results in an ability to recognise the “financial crisis” as the further entrenchment of a fundamental and perpetual crisis rather than just a particular economic crisis.  We are able to see this instance of economic-catastrophe as just another struggle in a series of diverse struggles against our continuing systemic oppression.  Queer people are constantly making do and getting by in such a way as to say that the spectacular recognition of crisis is a bourgeois and heteronormative understanding of crisis.  Our queer experience enables us to understand the financial crisis as not just a crisis in the management and regulation of capital, not just a crisis in the mode of production, but rather as a further proliferation of the very ordinary everyday crisis-moments of living within certain parameters of  perceived norms and exceptionalisms.

– The “financial crisis” allows us to think about the relationship between queer and capital.  Perhaps it is possible to say that this crisis is a queering of the ordinary relations of and to capital.  It is important to note that this financial crisis is occurring as an intensification of divisions, that it involves the ‘disintegration of the guiding narratives of futurity and social expectation and the breakdown of our reproduction as subjects, that it involves the crisis of the individual atomised reproduction of the capitalist family unit’ (pp. Bæden), and involves the promotion of felt-experiences in crisis arenas of public feeling and affective confusion and deliberation.  These are all queer modes proper.  Can we assert, then, that crisis is a queering of ordinary relations and positionings?

– But what of a crisis in our own communities.  What does it mean to be a queer person subject to—and a subject participating in—this process of privatisation, whether at the university or in another locale?  How can we think about privatisation and queer people, privatisation and queer modes or theoretical models?  Apart from the fact that there are most probably queer people within the work force affected by privatisation at this university—queer people who are subject to different pressures in different ways to heterosexual people[1]—the broader practice and ideology of neoliberal transformation is evidenced within the queer community itself as a crisis.  The Queer (in) Crisis project represents within queer studies an insistence on procedures of capital and an understanding that neoliberal economic practices and ideologies are subjecting queer communities to greater divisions.  The queer in crisis—or the crisis in queer communities experienced as the marginalisation of queer potentials and possibilities—occurs as a consequence of the work of normalcy to empower itself by rehabilitating sites of queer disruption or potential sites of heteronormative breakdown and exposure.  By this we mean, “homonormativity”.  Homonormativity is a consequence and demonstration of privatisation, and occurs as a process of rehabilitation and recognition, through the implementation of rubrics of inclusion and liberal equality.  For example, the civil rights movement that asserts marriage as the priority of gay lobby groups without ever challenging the moral and antisexual underpinnings of homophobia.  It is worth noting that homophobia does not originate in our lack of full civil equality.  Homonomativity has been theorised by Lisa Duggan as the ‘new neoliberal sexual politics’ that hinges upon ‘the possibility of a demobilised gay constituency and a privatised depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’.  It is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative norms but upholds and sustains them.

– In accordance with this new homonormativity, prominent lesbian and gay rights organizations increasingly embrace agendas that vie for acceptance within contemporary economic and political systems, thereby abandoning their earlier commitments to economic redistribution and protecting sexual freedoms.  This shift has made strange bedfellows out of lesbian and gay rights organizations and social conservatives:  both of which endorse normative forms of queer expression.  ‘The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, are all replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity and an inability to realise one’s self as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change’ (pp. Schulman).  It is helpful here to draw an analogy to gentrification, as Sarah Schulman does, whereby a certain bland and vacuous uniformity, centred around privileges and assimilation, asserts itself as the priority of queer communities via a concrete and psychical  replacement process resulting in the further displacement of already marginalised queer peoples.  How can we say that this process of homonormativity is a process of management; how is it a form of crisis-management and what effect will the current permeations of crisis, financial and environmental, have on this process?

– This process of homonormativity as privatisation occurs as a result of the attempt to manage possible sites of interruption or domesticate and regulate disruption in times of extraordinary precarity and extends to the regulation of the expression of appropriate feelings and behaviours.  As a side note, at what point does a contempt for bourgeois morality in the battle against the appropriate become self-neglect?  How are queer feelings implicated in this process of privatisation?  What does it mean to make your feelings public?

– How can we build communities around anti-social publics, how can we interpret this sense of disunity or crisis in the queer community, how can we utilise this conflict, is it even plausible to think of ourselves as situated outside of these neoliberal economies and contingent assimilationist modes?  Where does the potential for political action and the realisation of the utopian demands that we constantly make on ourselves comes from in the “financial crisis”?  Does it occur as a result of a queer agency enabled by market confusion?  By that I mean, is our political or a-political potential the result of a position that itself is dependent on forces outside of our control—i.e., the collapse of financial markets?  Demanding attention be placed on the material is one way to realise potentialities, but actively understanding ourselves as people implicated in those economic taxonomies regulates the symbolic value that we ascribe to ourselves as excessive and heterogeneous agents.  I do worry that this anti-social turn that accredits illness, the infected, and the traumatised is without coherency.  To what extent do the methodologies that we utilise and the goals or unthinkable projects we embark on occur as a result of a crisis that we take advantage of?  Is this what we mean by the potentialities of crisis?  Is this why queer is a crisis mode—because it takes advantage of the crisis-situation?

– ‘Critics interested in the ways structural forces materialise locally often turn the heuristic “neoliberalism” into a world-homogenising sovereign with coherent intentions that produces subjects who serve its intentions, such that their singular actions only seem personal, effective, and freely intentional, while really being effects of powerful, impersonal forces, but also that if persons are not fully sovereign, they are nonetheless caught up in navigating and reconstructing the world that cannot fully saturate them’ (Lauren Berlant).  What is the role of queer within this dialectical description?  Is the queer political crisis one whereby our status as crisis-harbingers is in doubt?  Are the more fruitful crises elsewhere in our community such as the battle between the potential for insurgency on one hand, and the potential for another restructuring of class society on the other rendered difficult, redundant, or implausible by this attribution to neoliberalism a sovereignty?  What do we do when we posture queer as a subject subject to neoliberalism without seeing ourselves as practictioners participating within particular neoliberal solutions?  Or does queer experience as a proliferation of immediate personal crises and battles render this comfortable attribution of sovereignty to neoliberalism a heteronormative practice?

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[1] The occupation must recognise that perhaps “the family”—that rhetorical device used in much occupation literature and speech—who are supported by the worker, and which is subject to crisis under these privatisation measures, needs to be engaged with, or queered.