The violence of western narratives and practices surrounding normative LGBT+ rights has been stated, thought about, and felt by many people. Christine M. Klapeer’s chapter “LGBTIQ rights, development aid and queer resistance” in the Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, edited by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam, highlights the imperial and colonial dynamics of said discourse. You can see the issue summarized in the meme below:
As many assume, capitalism and racism go hand in hand, of which then the states in which corporations profit off LGBTQ+ propaganda use it to craft a narrative of “civilised” and “progress”. We see this clearly in the recent debates over the World Cup taking place in Qatar. Sir, if your state’s history is colonisation and genocide, even if gay marriage is legal in your country, it makes neither its history nor marriage as an institution any less evil. So if you’re from a Western state and think the whole world should think and act like you, get off your high horse and consider questioning the perpetuating colonial praxes and subjectivities. Just because there is not a supranational institution denouncing European and Western “human rights abuses”, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any. The violence is extreme, but obscured. To the point in which we might think how we have sex is not political.
The danger of this form of internalised pinkwashing aids in crafting popular support amongst settler colonies, explaining how a queer person in the US could support Israel because of its same-sex open-minded narrative. Just a narrative, rather than “reality”given that same-sex marriage is not even legal in Israel, showcasing the extent of the propaganda efforts from this colonising, murderous state. A colonial project born of the British Empire, trained by it in colonizing strategies. Spooky huh? What this article seeks to shine light upon, or think through together, is what are the connections between normative LGBT+ discourses in the West and the colonisation of life, believing everything is connected, including the liberation of bodies and land? The fight against compulsory heteronormativity is an anti-colonial struggle. We won’t be free until Palestine is free. Until settler-colonies like Spain, the US, Canada, Australia, give back stolen land and exploited life.
So what can the gays do? Maybe shifting coloniser and colonised paradigms and dynamics. Whilst a binary that, as binaries do, probably reduces to two an infinite array of “in betweens”, although as a friend once said, even the sentence “in between” connotes two. Following this paradigm of master and slave, we see what are heterosexual logics, or logics of domination, common in LGBTQ+ discourses in the West. Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery, a book I cannot recommend enough, reminds us through feminist, queer, dehumanist deconstructing ways how we have internalised, and reproduce, hierarchies based on our bodies to control and master the “self and other”. These are clear in the most visible representations and discourses of LGBTQ+ in the West, representing mostly gay men, lesbians if perpetuating heterosexual logics and the family structure, and white-washing what is the work of mostly queer radicals, not liberals. How many gay men can you name? Quite a few right? Well it gets harder with lesbians, and even harder with Transexuals. Stormé DeLarverie, Marsha P. Johnson, Audre Lorde, and all the names that barely made it into “history” are not something we have to know, especially when “History” as a discipline is a white supremacist narrative that obscures everything and everyone else. Maybe we should craft a sense of (un)comfortability with unknowing, uncontrolling. Dislocating power.
Lesbianism has been thought of as a tool in dislocating power. But going back to the coloniser, colonised binary, why reduce lesbian sexual dynamics to “top” and “bottom”? Or “switch”, as a best case scenario. This not only perpetuates a dynamic of domination but also works within the sexualisation of lesbianism. Why further categorize what can simply be an erotic exchange of energies, or simply be. In a non-pornographic, non-tabboo, way, in which sex is not something to hide, be embarrassed of, but a sacred ritual, whether with yourself, a partner(s), friend(s), how you wish to live your sexuality. In Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, she shared with us how there are “many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling”. This powerful and transformative force is not compatible with western LGBTQ+ discourses, in which if you’re lesbian in the mainstream, its as a worker, wife or mother. bell hooks describes her queerness as “not who you're having sex with, but about being at odds with everything around it". Normative LGBTQ+ rights discourse in western states revolves around who you’re having sex with (telling you what and how sex is through porn), not being at odds with anything and perpetuating everything around it, from capitalism, to colonialism and patriarchy. The structures queer people have dedicated their lives to resisting, aware it is for a broader cause, the fight for all life when the degradation of life seems all around.
We find our strength and hope in collectivity. We are collectively struggling, resisting, surviving, and living, corporations and states will pinkwash, greenwash, whitewash, and ultimately, kill. But there are more of us. From the river to the sea.
Inspired by Lola Olufemi’s Feminism Interrupted and Imagining Otherwise, here are some resources, including links to songs, that I would like to share with you after writing and reading this together. Take care
Websites:
Songs:
Somos Sur, Ana Tijoux
Revolutionary and leaving the past, Immortal Technique
Indigenous Cosmology, Bobby Sanchez
Woman, Little Simz and Cleo Sol
West, Althea & Donna
WOW, Mabiland
Words of Wisdom, Tupac
Self, Noname
Super white man, Jowan Safadi
Books:
Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
McKittrick, Katherine, ed. 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375852.
Dussel, Enrique. 2011. Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History. Reclaiming Liberation Theology. London: SCM Press.
Lorde, Audre, 2017. Your Silence Will not Protect You, Silver Press
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