wiseMusings

Ever since broadcaster Aldrin Sampear tweeted about the undesirability of feminism towards potential allies in response to a disagreement on Twitter, it got me thinking about the politics of palatableness.

Should oppressed groups, and the individuals within them, be palatable to the groups that oppress them? Is desirability a core requirement for obtaining social rights? If it is, should it be?

To answer these questions, I will turn not to feminism (although I identify as a feminist, under Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s definition of recognising a problem with gender norms and absolving to fix it). I will turn to the LGBTQ+ community, and the homophobia that ensues around the world.

This will not be an attack on Aldrin Sampear. In fact, he doesn’t feature in the discussion to follow. He was merely a catalyst for a broader discussion about how oppressed groups ought to act in order to gain social acceptance.

Mithu Sanyal claims that, “to oppress people, it is essential to make them believe that they aren’t worth the same – rights, empathy, love – as others.” This is evident in society’s response to the LGBTQ+ community. While there has been growing acceptance as the decades roll on, there is still an underlying oppression at play that exists. Here in South Africa, the dichotomy is even starker because of the constitutional provisions that give us our right not to be discriminated against.

The oppression is one that fundamentally attacks our sense of being, and attempts to keep us forever at the margins of society. Who carries out this oppression? Everybody, from families, schools, churches, and workplaces.

They all, explicitly or implicitly, take people in the LGBTQ+ community to be ‘the lesser’. This idea is so pervasive in most societies that we receive it from an early age. We are made to believe that living out a fully human life as a queer person is inferior to the ‘better’, more universally accepted heterosexual mode of being. Shame, coercion and even violence are used as tools to erode our self-esteem if we do not stick to the script.

For those of us who are stubborn enough to spill through the cracks, we are caught in the ultimate bind: we intellectually know the value of living an honest life. However, being constantly told that we are the lesser does have its costs.

It can lead to internalized homophobia, infighting within the communities we choose to create for ourselves, and a general sense of fatigue. What comes up less often in queer activism circles is that it is tiring to live in a world where everybody is starkly opposed to your very existence. You stick out like a sore thumb. You are the anomaly; the freak.

So, then, are we surprised when we see high incidences of the terms ‘straight-acting’ and ‘masc4masc’ (a masculine-presenting gay man expressing a desire for only other masculine-presenting gay men) being bandied about within the queer community?
Are we surprised when gay people withdraw from the larger gay rights movement, because constantly having to affirm yourself drains you? Are we surprised when people submit to society’s high bar of heterosexism, and its eternal attempts to reinforce it into our minds, just out of pure fatigue?

If we are surprised, then we shouldn’t be. This is the natural consequence of oppression – even when no physical agents are present, they have done enough work to ensure that the oppressed can oppress themselves.

The most bewildering thing about this isn’t even that, though. It is what happens after one has become more palatable to the straight gaze (or when a non-white person is more palatable to the white gaze, or a woman to the male gaze).

They still face attacks upon their person. They are still seen as inferior, regardless of how comfortable they seem to make their oppressors feel. Because the defining factor that makes homophobic people dislike gay people isn’t whether or not they “flaunt it for everyone to see”. It isn’t that they’re open about their sexuality. It is that they are gay.

No matter how masculine-presenting a gay man can be, no matter how he chooses to present, the same “potential allies” who will hoist him on a pedestal as a shining example for homosexuality will be the same people calling him a “moffie” and “isitabane” behind his back. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

That is why I do not take the discussion of palatableness seriously: I do not want to live for my oppressor’s approval. Since I’ve already subverted expectations by coming out as queer, why not go all the way and resist their expectations entirely?
And even if I see their approval as useful, in the sense that queer people can get more allies, then I will find that I am still on the backfoot – only now, I have participated in my own subjugation, and placed undue standards on those I claim to represent (“why can’t you be more like Caitlyn Jenner? She engages in rational debates with us. You just shout!”)
In effect, I’ve done the exact opposite of what I wanted.

To be clear, I don’t find people who do this to be particularly wrong, or evil. They may have good intentions such as winning over allies and making the movement stronger.

However, a movement that is shaped by the emotions of its allies is a toothless movement. It is a prop in the allies’ hands, to be used as they see fit. So when they, in the liberal tradition of gradualism, want us to fight for our rights in a way that comforts them and we go along with it, what’s the point of the movement? Why does it exist in the first place, if not to fight for the oppressed group and their interests?

In the archives of this blog, there is an article I once wrote called “Society’s Box”. In it, I wrote about how our actions as oppressed individuals are shaped by this desire to fit in the box that our oppressors constructed for us.

Sure, our movements – be they feminist, LGBTQ+, animal rights, and so on – are not monolithic. Sure, we’ll differ on views from time to time. Sure, some of us will engage in behaviours that might earn the wrath of others within our own group. That is the consequence of individual agency being a core feature of the movements we seek to construct – we all don’t think the same, and acting differently from each other will happen.

But we must exercise caution. Who do our behaviours benefit? How is this view explicitly or implicitly propagated by those who want to put us in a box? Does this set of behaviours lead us closer to being straitjacketed into a mode of being that is not ours?

Or does it liberate us, and give us a common thread from which to galvanize despite our diverse opinions, palatable or not?