‘assimilationist’ seems to conflate a bunch of different complaints:
- “This person/organization/movement priority seems to be trying to buy respectability for some members of our group at the expense of other members of our group!”
Marching in Pride in stuffy grey suits might communicate ‘see? some gays are normal stuffy grey suit-wearing folks like yourself’ but also can lead to ‘I don’t mind gays, I just hate it when they’re really effeminate and act all gay and stuff’. I am not sure how the benefits of having some people realize “oh, some gay people are just like me” compares to the costs of having some people go “oh, I can still discriminate against gay people if I make it about how they act/dress while proclaiming my support for the good gay people”. And I don’t think it’s okay to say “don’t wear a stuffy grey suit to Pride, people might use you to justify their prejudice against other gay people” but maybe it’s good to say “if you’re feeling implicit social pressure to wear a stuffy grey suit to Pride, we have radically fucked up”. Relatedly…
- the same things are becoming prized in LGBT+ spaces as are prized in mainstream spaces! this means that spaces which used to be safe and affirming for a certain kind of person have ceased to be that
This seems like it frequently happens and is bad. The problem is…mainstream society really honestly doesn’t prize those things in LGBT+ people, so “you have all of society, leave us out of it” leaves people alone and without support. Ideally we’d have spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to get a job, buy a house, and parent together and spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to live in a modified lighthouse with six of their best friends and host frequent kink parties and spaces that are affirming of LGBT+ people who want to live in a studio apartment, have lots of casual sex and plan the revolution against capitalism.
Those need to be different spaces. And I completely understand the pain and frustration that a person experiences when their space, the community where they felt supported and understood and at home, starts getting modified into a community supportive of a different sort of person. I think it’s fair to say “this community is for people who want to have lots of casual sex and plan the revolution, please make a different group to plan weddings and talk about how to get a mortgage”. But big community events, including Pride, should include all of those subgroups.
- other LGBT+ people are wrong
I have seen people say that acknowledging the existence of Republican or Christian or Zionist or anti-feminist LGBT+ people is assimilationist, or that those people creating support groups for themselves is assimilationist. I think sometimes they mean by this that an influx of those people would bring about a painful version of the above “the community ceased to be what I needed from it” problem. But sometimes they seriously seem to just mean “those people are wrong and outgroup”, and in that case I think you should just make your criticisms of Republican or Christian etc etc people in general and not try to come up with an explanation of why it’s especially bad for LGBT+ people to be that way. I have yet to see such an explanation which wasn’t honestly pretty gross.
Likewise, not sure why critiques of monogamy and amatonormativity need to start by yelling at two men who are getting married instead of yelling at, like, society.
- a way of expressing general disagreement with a person whose opinions are more mainstream than you
This is why I have mostly given up on the concept of ‘assimilationist’. Lots of people seem to use it to mean “I disagree with you, and your opinion is more socially acceptable than mine, so I will accuse you of being an assimilationist”. Saying “you’re throwing some people under the bus” or “you’re modifying the community norms” seems to make the discussion more tractable and productive, so let’s cut to the chase and do that instead.
OK, but now I actually do want to live in a queer lighthouse. Are there queer lighthouses, or spaces which support queer-lighthouse-building? Are any of my followers interested in joining my cult sea-stead phallus-shaped-lesbian-domicile perfectly-ordinary-home?
*cough* @nenya-kanadka *cough*
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