Bitchfest: Essentialism

I don't think many queer-theory-head types read my blog (I don't mean people who are queer and like theory, I mean people who like queer theory), so I'm not going to get too deep into any of this, but I really like this cartoon by Barry Deutsch. A funny thing is that I've been thinking a lot about the overlap of agreement between some radical feminists and some conservative Christians for the past couple of weeks, although it has been less about transphobia specifically and more about sex and power issues in the general and categorical senses (which is not a substantively different thing to say, once you start picking it apart). Some folks seem to have misinterpreted Barry's cartoon as being a cheap shot, like, "Oh look, the radfems agree with the conservative Christians which makes them bad and wrong", which is not how I read what he's saying at all (although the agreement between such otherwise ideologically opposed groups seems to me to be where the biting humor of the 'toon is located). And I certainly won't speak for Barry -- fortunately he's clarified his own meaning.

The abstract thing that interested me about the cartoon is that the basis of the agreement in this case between certain groups of conservative Christians and certain groups of radical feminists is grounded in a kind of essentialist thinking that I find not only distasteful and inaccurate, but also dangerous.

A lot of people are heavily invested in various forms of essentialist thinking*. It sits near or at the basis of pretty much every kind of bigotry I've ever run across. Racists almost always have a whole belief system about how race and ethnicity are not only clearly biologically distinct categories (which, actually, they don't appear to be) but that they are also hierarchized and that god/nature made it such that one particular race is "better" than the other ones. Sexists overwhelmingly tend to believe that men and women are more like different species than different sexes (which is clearly bullshit).

Homophobic essentialists often have this belief system going on about how people are "supposed to be" heterosexual, and that we only aren't heterosexual when "something goes wrong". The specific flavor of the belief system usually governs how they perceive the "wrongness", ie, if they're religious it's all about sin, and if they're not it's usually all about nature or evolution, as if they have it on some unquestionable authority that queerness is a biological glitch, mistake, and/or psychological pathology. However people categorize it, though, the conclusion is generally that gay people need some kind of "fixing", or at least, aren't as good or properly made as straight people. (Bisexuality is terribly confusing to people who think like this, and ime they tend to say they "don't believe in it", which comes off to me like someone saying they don't believe in laughter, or snow.) Gender identity essentialists make the same moves with assuming that people's gender identities must line up with their genitals, such that if one is born with a penis, one is a man, period, full stop, and one can never, ever, no matter what one does, be not-a-man.

The most curious parts of essentialist belief systems, to me, are: 1) where people get these ideas in the first place about what sex organs, gender identities & roles, and sexual desires, etc. are "supposed to be"; b) why these "supposed to be's" are so fixed and immutable; and also) why, once their "supposed to be's" are questioned and upended by the experiences of other people, they continue to hang on to them like a life-raft in a hurricane, and wind up behaving in bigoted, sometimes violent ways towards other people as a result.

Further, because I'm kind-of into psychoanalysis in a sideways sort of way, it's very curious to me how frequently this stuff is about sex, whether in the sexual identity sense or the sexual desire/sexual behavior sense.

Another place that the essentialist left wraps itself around the back of the ideological spectrum and holds hands with the essentialist right, like some kind of abstract Möbius strip tease, is around the concepts of sexiness and sexual power. No matter which side it's coming from, adherence to this brand of essentialism tends to creates social systems in which women are constantly pressured and/or forced to reign in sexual desire and expression. Our very bodies are sexualized just by existing and we wind up taking shit from people for doing unavoidable things like bringing our boobs to a business meeting. At its ugliest, this belief system bolsters social structures in which people commit heinous acts of violence upon the bodies of women to control female sexuality and make all human sexuality fundamentally about male sexual pleasure.

Essentialists on the right seem to assume that women are inherently bestowed with some mystical "sexual power", either by god or nature, but that it's sinful and/or immoral (or at the very least, horribly unfair) of women to actually use this power for anything. Near as I can tell, from this pov the only "acceptable" expression of sexiness on behalf of women is when the woman performs sexiness to please her man with his permission. Which, as most feminists agree, is not sexual power at all, it's merely heteronormative obedience and another day in the patriarchy.

But essentialist feminists also seem to think that practically all forms of "being sexy" = submitting to The Man. And it's not like I don't get the whole thing about patriarchy desperately wanting to co-opt feminism, and capitalism in the patriarchy taking that attempt at co-opting feminism and adding insult to injury by creating a shell of feminism and turning that shell into a pink frilly thong stamped "FEMINIST" and which has roughly the same amount of social value/substance as the plastic in which it's wrapped. I get it. There is no revolutionary social movement possible that is immune from this sort of thing, though, so it's to be expected, and I don't really understand why anyone gestures at it as though it means something more than that capitalists are jerks and that sexists hate feminism.

Maybe I'm just running in the wrong circles but it seems to me that feminist essentialists tend to flip the fuck out over matters of gender identity, sexual desire, and sexual expression in near identical ways as the anti-feminist essentialists. It's not uncommon to see comments from feminist essentialists which argue that this concept of "being sexy" = submitting to The Man even reaches its dirty paws into homosexual sexiness, meaning that "sexy lesbians" are always and already existing for-men in an almost Hegelian sense (I know! Wtf? They also argue that "real lesbians" aren't sexy, or at least, "not sexy like that", to which I say, "Clearly, you have never seen me working a little black dress for the pleasure of another woman") and that whenever gay guys have penetrative sex or oral sex what they're really doing is dominating a female who isn't actually there but for symbolically. o_O

That it all goes to some very weird places isn't an issue for me, really, since practically all theory goes to some very weird places, and frankly, I'm weird enough to enjoy a lot of weird places. What bothers me most about essentialist assumptions, on the whole, isn't just that I think they're generally short-sighted and wrong, it's how wedded to these assumptions so many people tend to remain even after they are told repeatedly how much they are hurting others with them.

I can't be sure, of course, but I think this is a result of their basing their own identities on these assumptions, and that unraveling their essentialism is perhaps not a thing they can do without unraveling their senses of personal identity, the grounds they use to define who they think they are, and where they locate their own personal worth. That other people's identities are unraveled, that other people's worth is erased, doesn't seem to be enough of a motivating factor for them to reassess their belief system and question their ground floor assumptions, so in the end, I almost always wind up questioning their ethics, and there is a lot of conflict in this back-and-forth that I have no idea how to resolve.

(Blegh, I'm still so foggy that I've been working on this post for too long and I cannot tell how clear it is or isn't. I may have said something dramatically stupid and not even realized it, but I just had to get some of this stuff off my chest. Besides which, if you don't like the occasional sloppy bitchfest, you probably don't like me, either, heh.)
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*I blame Aristotle. What a dick!