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Sunday, September 19, 2010

Why the Radical Gay Agenda Has Its Assimilationist Moments

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a reader troubled about my celebration of Lady Gaga's recent public activism against the U.S. military's anti-gay "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy writes:
I would much rather see the queer community renounce and oppose the military en masse.

Sure, I'm personally dedicated to nonviolence myself (I was trained in nonviolence by the King Center in Atlanta, and teach peace theory to college students to this day) and anti-militarism, too, since I think military hierarchy and the maintenance of an imperial archipelago of global military bases and state secrets and military budgetary priorities is among the most profoundly corrosive anti-democratizing forces in our Republic, together with the predominance of the sociopathic corporate formation with its relentless marketing fraud-hyperbole, proprietary secrets, and commons capture. Indeed, if Amor Mundi has a consistent villain it is corporate-militarism, the interdependent neoliberal/neoconservative circuit that is consummated in my view in the ideology of anti-ecology/futurology.

Just for the hell of it, let me add that I happen to believe that the institution of marriage is a vestige of human trafficking and that it promotes the false, often outright pathological, romantic fantasy of the Other that will Complete us for us.

And yet it is crucial to grasp that the specific exclusion of queer folks from these prevalent institutions -- marriage, the military -- functions primarily to marginalize and precarize queers, and that one struggles to include queers precisely to overcome this marginalization and precarization.

Those of us who would struggle against militarization and possessive affiliation delude ourselves if we think there is anything radical about collaborating with the incumbent-authoritarian status quo in the ongoing exclusion of queer folks from these practices and formations. That is just another supple heteronormative patriarchal ruse, I think, of which incumbent-authoritarian formations always have endlessly many effortlessly ready to hand simply by virtue of their prevalence.

Only when queer folks are welcomed into conventional marriage and into the military, and as queers, only when we are fully legible as good citizen-subjects, and yet resist and reject these, then and only then will our repudiations and elaborations specifically as queers take on the force of radicalism in my view.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> . . .the Radical Gay Agenda. . .

Dale! Did you know that homosexually-generated CO2 is a primary
cause of global warming?

It's true -- I saw it here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/21/climate_change/

Do you think it's because gays talk too much?
(What would Greg Louganis say?)