In Response to The Gravity of the Uninitiated

In response to Bubbler's post "The Gravity of the Uninitiated"




You've written:
"The root of the problem here (and source of the symptom) is that a label [such as the words 'gay' or 'queer'] that is watered down becomes a becalmed idea."
I actually see a different root of the problem: In that some people experience the inclusion of multivariant definitions to a word or an identity-label as a 'watering down,' and others experience this inclusion as coalitionary, empowering, and nourishing.

And once again, we don't have to 'pick one'. Inclusion can be both a 'watering down' AND a 'liberation', depending on a whole host of factors, such as context, and even how we simply happen to be feeling that day (and indeed, perhaps any pre-existing relationships we may have with anyone in the room).

You've also written:"I fully acknowledge and revel in the incredible passion and warmth of a discussion like this - there's this hope to be inclusive, to move as one, which I find attractive."

And I would also like to acknowledge that we share in this attraction to a politics of inclusion (of diverse manifestations of 'queerness'), one which can and did involve incredible passion and warmth.




and you continue with:
"But there's also this sense of breathlessness - something encountered in art galleries where the blurb on the side of an art piece acquires this almost hysterical academic voice to validate itself and its own interpretation."




Well:
At the risk of re-inscribing any degree of condescension: This stuff is hard.

Like you, I was pretty uncomfortable with some of how the evening went. More accurately, I felt annoyed and upset. I was rather confronted by some of the roles that I saw us all falling into: Exasperated "Educators", the defensive "Uninitiated", some desperate "Pastoral" attempts at integration, bringing it back, centering, humble reminders of our common humanity...




More personally:
One of the ways that I have come into my own political consciousness (rightly or wrongly) is through an "academic voice", which I think you correctly point out can and does sometimes lead to a vanguardism which, in its own way, becomes a hindrance to the inclusion and emancipation that we are all (at least in theory) committed to.

You make an important, emotive point here about the importance of keeping knowledge accessible, rather than available only to the ranks of the initiated.

That said: Language is always simultaneously, and paradoxically, inclusive and exclusive: It includes those who speak it, who learn it, who feel liberated by what its parameters paradoxically enable, and excludes those who do not speak it, cannot speak it, do not want to or cannot learn it (either from lack of access or from righteous indignation), and who thus may experience neither its full limitations nor its transformative liberations.

On one level:
Part of what's involved in doing this anti-oppression work is precisely that our preconceived ways of knowing or understanding the world along the lines of race, nationality, ethnicity, spirituality, gender, sex and sexuality (and so on) are completely and utterly broken open.

Also, a la Alika's poem in "Pariah" -->
"Heartbreak opens onto the sunrise 

for even breaking is opening 

and I am broken, 

I am open. 

Broken into the new life without pushing in, 

open to the possibilities within, 

pushing out. 

See the love shine in through my cracks? 

See the light shine out through me? 

I am broken, 

I am open, 

I am broken open. 

See the love light shining through me, 

shining through my cracks, 

through the gaps. 

My spirit takes journey, 

my spirit takes flight, 

could not have risen otherwise and 

I am not running, 

I am choosing. 

Running is not a choice from the breaking. 

Breaking is freeing, 

broken is freedom. 

I am not broken, 

I am free. "

Brokenness is Freedom. And in this, we are Free...
And, as I tried to express during film night, this freedom is not always pleasant...

What are the alternatives?
All of us have been so broken, at various points in our lives, around any number of diverse, sometimes all-consuming issues.
And all of us have yet to be broken, still, further.
And in this brokenness, we may derive new languages, new ways of being with one another.

All of us, in a sense, have to be fully 'Uninitiated', from all that we have known, and indeed even all we have yet to know, before we can see that wellspring of true liberation, beyond all language: That shines through the cracks. Deconstruction does not only end in rubble...

May we all be Beginners with one another.