Queering the Boundary

A paper for presentation at Bi Con 98, and working towards the book, Marginalia: edge identities and the virtual community

This paper has a lot to do with begin­nings: it speaks about the com­mence­ment of a par­tic­u­lar type of queer politic in the Sydney com­munit­ies and sig­ni­fies the first public enun­ci­ations of cer­tain con­cepts which I am work­ing towards in the form of a book, to be called Mar­ginalia: edge iden­tit­ies and vir­tual com­munit­ies.

Cat­egor­ies are tra­di­tion­ally placed in oppos­i­tion to an undif­fer­en­ti­ated mass. Without cat­egor­ies, we will be in the morass, the mire, the shit, swamped, over­whelmed. Ego is rep­res­en­ted as erect, dry, tower­ing —  Mag­rit­te’s rock held high and safe above the teem­ing waters below. Lacan notes that dreams of the “I” usu­ally rep­res­ent it as “a fort­ress or sta­dium — its inner arena and enclos­ure, sur­roun­ded by marshes and rub­bish tips”. Men suf­fer­ing from shell shock were given treat­ments until they dreamt of them­selves as fort­resses and were then pro­nounced cured.

The pre-exist­ence of undif­fer­en­ti­ation allows for its “oppos­ite”, iden­tity, to exist as a neg­at­ive relativ­ity (not-Man, not-Child, not-Het­ero­sexual). “We have only to under­stand the mirror stage as an iden­ti­fic­a­tion,” says Lacan.

What hap­pens if we change the terms of ref­er­ence? Let us talk about hyper­dif­fer­en­ti­ation instead. In order to main­tain the pat­ri­archal binary opp­pos­i­tion (Same/different), the third option, hyper­dif­fer­en­ti­ation (diferrent/different/different over and over in a loop, a super­molecu­lar loop) must be mis­named and presen­ted as fear­ful, a teem­ing, wet, undif­fer­en­ti­ated uncon­scious that must be care­fully dried out and marked out in well organ­ised cat­egor­ies for easier sorting.

The “his­tory” which I am about to relate to you is a story which I am going to read crit­ic­ally. It is my story, my his­tory, and I’m sure there are some here who “were there” and for whom this his­tory is dif­fer­ent from “their story”. Non­ethe­less, I am attempt­ing to relate a the­or­et­ical form­a­tion and not so much a polit­ical his­tory, although the two are inter­twined. I also feel that our oral tra­di­tions as queer and fem­in­ist com­munit­ies are not as strong as they should be.

What I want to exam­ine are the twin ideas of com­munity and iden­tity. In par­tic­u­lar, I want to exam­ine some of my own exper­i­ences of identity/community:

For those of you who don’t know me and feel it is import­ant to know the pos­i­tion from which a person is speak­ing, I gen­er­ally describe myself as someone who desires people with long hair, regard­less of their genitals.

So: Once upon a time, both far and near to here, in 1991, there was a con­fer­ence called Queer Col­lab­or­a­tions. It brought together “non-het­ero­sexual stu­dents” as the poster said, and had a debate within its extens­ive pro­gram on bisexu­al­ity. This par­tic­u­lar ses­sion was one of the most heated and intensely dis­cussed ses­sions of the con­fer­ence. After it, five of the par­ti­cipants (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, myself, Norrie-May Welby, Cath Lawrence, Adrian Miller and Anna Brown) decided to form a group to address some of the issues that had come up in the conference.

There were ten­sions within the group to start with: some mem­bers came from an aca­demic philo­soph­ical pos­i­tion which argued for a post­mod­ern fluid­ity of iden­tity, while others came from a polit­ical prac­tical pos­i­tion of act­iv­ism with its dis­course of rec­ti­fy­ing imbalances.

That aside, the group in the end agreed on a number of things: it would be a col­lect­ive, and decisions would be made by con­sensus; it would be open to any­body of any gender and sexu­al­ity; it would attempt to provide a place for people of all per­sua­sions, but par­tic­u­larly bi and trany, to social­ise without fear or pre­ju­dice; and finally, it would lobby polit­ic­ally for changes with regards to gender and sexu­al­ity dis­crim­in­a­tion. The thing even had a name: Love Is Bound­less or LIB, an attempt at a cute pun, so we could call ourselves Queer LIB, and have it come out as Queer Love Is Boundless.

Meet­ings were held, parties were had, t‑shirts were prin­ted. The whole thing was grow­ing and became more and more suc­cess­ful. Finally, a Mardi Gras Fair Day stall had us all set for our first vis­ible non-“gay & les­bian” Mardi Gras Float. We had a ball and we tossed cards off the back of the truck. These cards, prin­ted at one of those el cheapo machines at a rail­way con­course, read “LIB — for a queer com­munity with out pre­ju­dice. Bi people and Tranys welcome.”

At next month’s meet­ing, response was over­whelm­ing. At first, we were enorm­ously pleased. How­ever, then dis­cus­sion star­ted. People didn’t like the name of the organ­isa­tion, and someone pro­posed a vote. Over the protests of some of the ori­ginal mem­bers that the group was a col­lect­ive and wasn’t run by votes, the meet­ing decided to change the name of the group to Sydney Bisexual Sup­port Net­work, as you can ima­gine, a group with a very dif­fer­ent agenda. Over the next couple of weeks, things got some­what ugly, with some people extremely happy that the group was back on a sane foot­ing, and others dis­traught at the change. While every­one saw the need for the new group, many mem­bers were con­fused as to how the old group had been simply “taken over” instead of having a new group form. The worst was when I said to one long time member of the group “I’m going to start LIB again: this isn’t LIB,” and got told “Ros­anne, face it: LIB is dead. We’ve taken over. Just let it lie.” I left the group, others who had pre­vi­ously left when it had been LIB returned, hap­pier with the new struc­ture, and from there someone else would have to take up the chro­no­lo­gical polit­ical his­tory, because I was no longer in the loop. If you are inter­ested, you should prob­ably talk to Cath Lawrence.

After that, the little mer­maid walked pain­fully on her new legs which cut her like knives, and longed for her old life in the sea. The end.

What is the point of this story? As i said, what I want to exam­ine are the twin ideas of com­munity and iden­tity. Spe­cific­ally, I want to exam­ine the dif­fer­ence between iden­tity and prac­tice, a concept of “truth-in-labelling” if you will, and how com­munit­ies are policed.

I posit the following:

• that iden­tity relates to notions of similarity;
• that iden­tity relies on uni­form oppos­i­tion to an Other;
• that iden­tity cre­ates com­munity; that the dom­in­ant group does not form an iden­tity since it has noth­ing to oppose and there­fore does not form com­munity but is rather seen as Soci­ety or Culture;
• that com­munity is useful as a shel­ter against soci­ety but fails in times of change;
• that it is there­fore neces­sary to develop mean­ing­ful altern­at­ive models of res­ist­ance to homo­gen­ous soci­ety or the het­ero­gen­ous communities.

How does an iden­tity form? I posit that the notion of iden­tity appeals to a Lacanian idea of the Same. For Lacan, iden­tity is estab­lished in what he calls the “mirror stage:, when the little boy sees him­self in the mirror. “We have only to under­stand the mirror stage as an iden­ti­fic­a­tion” he says. Iden­tity in this ver­sion is essen­tially a phal­lic concept. It is also at this stage that the little girl is sup­posed to identify her­self as lack­ing. Do you identify with my story? How?

How is it that you, that I, that we, create this/these iden­tit­ies? It is a ques­tion that is often asked in queer circles: how do you identify? But far too often, people answer with names rather than processes.

Let me start by defin­ing some terms: when I say the names “gay” or “les­bian” or “straight” I am spe­cific­ally refer­ring to a set of iden­tit­ies that have been con­struc­ted. How­ever, the pro­cesses — sleep­ing only with men, sleep­ing only with women, fuck­ing any­thing that moves, fuck­ing only men with short hair in toi­lets and the woman I’m mar­ried to, fuck­ing only effem­in­ate men and butch women, wank­ing about blonde bitches in high heels — these are a set of prac­tices, as opposed to identities.

So how does iden­tity arise? How do you identify? You find a mirror of/for your­self and say “that is (like) me”, you make a simile, from a sim­ilar, a same­ness — and then: “that is not (like) me”. Iden­tity is static. Iden­tity is only stable while stand­ing in front of that mirror.

A gay-iden­ti­fied person is someone who spe­cific­ally pos­i­tions him­self within a set of gay ideo­lo­gies. To my eternal frus­tra­tion at the inad­equacy of labelling and the fear of policed com­munit­ies, such a person may fre­quently have bisexual prac­tices and not be will­ing to admit it. The same goes for the straight-iden­ti­fied person who sneaks out to have sex with same sex part­ners. These are both closets. Iden­tity is dan­ger­ous inso­faras it hides practice.

Prac­tice is much easier to do, though less easy to describe if you’ve already fallen into the iden­tity trap. Prac­tice makes it neces­sary to talk about pro­cesses, inter­ac­tions, con­nec­tions, links, flows.

Freud and Lacan argue that without iden­tity, there is only undif­fer­en­ti­ated mass. But, accord­ing to Cath­ryn Vesseleu, “both Irigaray and Deleuze are crit­ical of [Freud’s] sys­tem­atic reduc­tion of [sexual] dif­fer­ence to a prin­ciple of iden­tity”. From a Deleuzian point of view, the devel­op­ment of the “I” is about speeds and intensities.

Conclusion

When iden­tity is talked of, com­munity is not far away. Com­munity can be defined as all the people who see them­selves as the same as you, that they are all dif­fer­ent in the same way from the great Same which is Soci­ety, the one non-defined term, the white, middle-class, het­ero­sexual man. So, all com­munit­ies are of neces­sity com­munit­ies of the oppressed: the queer or gay or les­bian com­munit­ies, the women’s com­munity, the Croa­tian com­munity in Aus­tralia but not in Croa­tia, the black com­munit­ies prac­tic­ally every­where. For a long time these have been argued as pos­it­ive, rein­force­ments of iden­tity and reas­sur­ances of same­ness even within dif­fer­ence from the Same.

It is for this pre­cise reason that com­munity is prob­lem­atic: it is a bas­tion against undif­fer­en­ti­ation, a foot­sol­dier in the ser­vice of the grid, care­fully mark­ing out the bound­ar­ies between cat­egor­ies, accord­ing to what the mirror says, accord­ing to what you look like.

If, on the other hand, praxis is used, then com­munity is replaced by con­stitu­ency. Con­stitu­ency describes the helix of all who par­take in a cer­tain praxis, like a math­em­at­ical set in a Venn dia­gram. Instead of choos­ing to be (a) part of one com­muntiy, a person can exist across mul­tiple con­stitu­en­cies, because a person has mul­tiple prac­tices. In every act or cross­ing (trans-action), we become con­stitu­ent of that group.

We change the group by par­tak­ing in it, because the group does not exist out­side of the people who con­sti­tute it, and is influ­enced by the con­flu­ence — the flow­ing with — of which other circles over­lap, which other con­stitu­en­cies are affected/effected by the par­ti­cipants. Instead of the stasis in com­munity, with rules of con­form­a­tion like a border with a guard patrolling it, con­stitu­ency exper­i­ences con­tinual flow and change.

This is best demon­strated on-line in an Inter­net chat room, where the concept of what makes up “gaySM” changes accord­ing to who enters and leaves the room at any given moment.

So, how does this relate back to the story? From my telling, LIB was an attempt to over­flow the cat­egor­ies and bound­ar­ies and estab­lish a con­titu­ency. There were no real mem­ber­ship rules: LIB was who­ever was in it. How­ever, accord­ing to Deleuze, the State machine will always reter­rit­ori­al­ise the lines of flight, new points of depar­ture must always be estab­lished, spiralling, and so the desire to be the same, to belong to a com­munity, reas­ser­ted itself. Rather than do away with cat­egory, the oppressed bisexual group sought solace — note the use of the word “sup­port” in the ori­ginal name the group came up with to start with — in the same­ness of their dif­fer­ence. The danger, as Mas­sumi points out, is that this group now begins to police its edges, to determ­ine what it means to be a “good” bisexual. Reclaim­ing this stable pos­i­tion in front of the mirror does not des­troy the mirror, and the whole show will just start again: there are already people uncom­fort­able with the terms and strug­gling on the knifeblades of our labels.

The only option for escape is to speak through the cracks in the mirror of iden­tity, widen­ing them slowly, allow­ing chaos to seep in unnoticed.