Last night I saw ‘Cock’ and it
made me think.
True, that’s what often happens
to me on Friday nights.
Only this time ‘Cock’ was a play at The
Theatre Centre.
It was funny as hell.
But the play made me think about
identity politics and of course what is wrong with the world and why we are all
going to hell in a hand-basket.
The play
‘Cock’ sends the message that sexual identity politics are (is?) not important.
It doesn’t matter whether people are gay or straight. People fall in love with a
human being, not a gender, and everyone is truly multi-(or omni) sexual.
I have lots
of problems with this; basically because it’s not true.
But more
important -- the ideas in ‘Cock’ are part of a new trend that presently flowers
fiercely both inside and outside of academia:
the ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’. These days it’s very hip to be
against identity politics -- and very old fashioned to speak about straight vs.
gay, or male vs. female. The trans movement and the bisexual movement send the
same ultra-universal, ultra-inclusive message. If you identify as male or
female, straight or gay, you are simply boxing yourself into an oppressive
corner. Labels punish people. So why not live in a world without labels? In an
ideal world, there would be no need for such exclusive categories such as gender, and there would be no sexual categories. We would be free
to love whomever we pleased.
This new
anti-identity trend has put the feminist and queer communities in a unique
dilemma. I know women today who still speak proudly of the special experience
of being born into a woman’s body in a patriarchal culture. These women are now
being told by some trans-activists that for women to talk of themselves proudly
as Cisgender women (i.e. women born with vaginas and assigned as female at
birth) is oppressive.
Hm. What ever happened to women’s
lib? To feminism? I guess that’s over.
And Gay Liberation
is, of course, necessarily over too.
But what’s
ironic about this new ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’ is that it promulgates
the same mistaken ideas that were the foundation for Gay Liberation. You see
the founders of Gay Liberation did not predict that the happy result of their
policies would be a totally ‘gay world’ (all right-wing hate literature to the
contrary). What early gay-libbers desired was a world without sexual identity categories where everyone loved whom they
wished and sexual identity did not matter.
Suffice it
to say, that after nearly forty-five years of gay liberation and nearly fifty
years of feminism in North America, we do not live in a genderless world, or a
world without sexuality categories.
But my big
question is this: was this utopia ever possible? And is it even desirable?
For all these
future fantasies are based on a very human delusion – that people everywhere
are all, basically the same.
In our
global, tolerant world, (which is of course also rife with hate and religious
fundamentalism) we like to pretend that everyone is the same. But this deluded
utopian vision simply helps us avoid the very thing we are all afraid of, that
deep down we are all fundamentally different.
It is this human
‘difference’ that is one of the most frightening things about being alive. Yes
we might all be very shocked with how our neighbours -- and even some of our
friends -- think, feel and act, deep down in their ‘private lives’ (to quote Noel Coward). But the challenge for
humanity is to somehow not only be tolerant, but to learn -- from the vast
differences that threaten to separate us on a daily basis.
I do not
wish to deny that there is much hate directed at trans people and
bisexuals, and that the hate is unfair
and it should stop. But the answer isn’t to yearn for a genderless, ‘sexuality-less’
world.
The answer
is not that we are all the same, but that we must somehow come to terms with
how we are all so frighteningly different.
