Shame is the Name of the Game

The concept of shame is a concept that has arguably had a strong impact on communities of individuals that are “different” and for the communities for which these “different” communities are defined against. These communities of “difference” are “shamed” for not being normal, for being different, for not following the straight and narrow by which the “normal” communities define themselves. Politically such communities of difference can unite and fight back to show that “they” are not abnormal, but in actuality…to borrow from Andrew Sullivan “virtually normal”…“we are just like you”. These communities, in making this claim, seek legitimation, recognition, and rights – important things indeed. Yet, in making this claim towards normalcy, what is given up? What is lost when communities or the voices that can speak for a community displace the “negative” the “shameful” in order to be like the rest, to be recognized as, in part, human?

As the “gay” community celebrates the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots – for all intensive purposes the event that is considered to have started the modern gay rights movement – I want to think about the negative, the shameful and how in displacing such things, something is lost. As the trannies and queens of Stonewall fought back, harkening in the gay rights movement, so the story goes…Pride set in. It was with Pride gays, lesbians, and the rest of the gang could march down the streets, assert their rights, fight for those rights, and be recognized, at least by some, as subjects. Yet, as the movement continued, this Pride arguably began to displace some of the shameful antics of those “queers” so that the others might fit in and get their piece of the American Pie. I was reminded in a recent interview of Edmund White in Out that the movement has changed drastically from the days of Stonewall. White notes that the leaders of the movement have shifted from the “political radicals” to the “stuffy middle class gays”. And it is arguably these “middle-class gays” that now determine the focus of the movement – namely marriage and adoption rights. Yet, in fighting for these “rights”, other issues are left untouched, except by those political radicals still out there. And in this, those who started the movement, those who were the one’s most often violated, most often visible again have taken the backseat. The queens that threw the first heel, the trannies and street trash that made up much of the Stonewall crowd are still waiting for their turn, still living their “shameful” ways…while the “stuffy” gays buff up their “rights” to be like, well to be normal.

I was reminded of all this recently when attending a Pride celebration with a friend. This friend had never been to a Pride celebration before and in many ways was rather surprised at the event…the costumes, the skin showing, the public intimacy, the “freaks”…were all a bit much for him, perhaps even making him uncomfortable as we sought refuge in a trendy sushi bar whose clientele was much more middle to upper class, and arguably quite white. However, I do not want this to accuse him as an individual for this discomfort, to psychologize him and his unease because this was not about him as an individual but about the bigger issues and the tensions between Pride and shame. Having seen only the “good” gays represented in television and the “bad” gays either made invisible or pathologized and shown to not be “representative” of the “community”, it makes sense that Pride festivals for many “gays” are uncomfortable because everyone and everything comes out of the woodwork. The space of Pride is rather queer…it is not “straight”, it is strange and in such strangeness it is rather fleeting…but a mere day when “I” can do things in public I cannot do in most other “spaces”. Yet, back to the discomfort and how such discomfort seems to emerge when the “good gays” see that which is considered shameful, excessive, bad taste…causing the Pride celebration to become splintered and/or at times “cleaned” up to become a “family” event.

The queer space of Pride struggles with itself as different bodies seek different things…as some bodies seek to show the “good” side of things, the “family friendliness” of the gays while others seek to disrupt these notions, to challenge the normative family to expose, to play with something different…leaving me to ask…Why must Pride be a family event? Why must “we” cater to the concept of the, I would argue “straight family” to celebrate Pride or to be a legitimate public event? One could feasibly think about different concepts of the family, often created by different facets of the “gay” community and how perhaps these families are the ones that deserve to have space, to have an event catered toward them that is in a public space? What would it mean to argue for the legitimacy of these “families” or does arguing for such legitimacy rely on the normative structures, forcing these “queer” family structures to become “normalized”?
I ask…Since the “straight” family has so often abused the “gay” body by kicking them to the streets, by sending them to therapy…why not celebrate the families that the “gays” create, the houses, the connections that are made as the abused bodies of many gays repair their wounds, their losses, not to be victims of the family…but as creators of new families…of families chosen, not born into? And in some cases, families that are “blood” related with the advent of HIV/AIDS and the family tree one could feasibly construct with the line by which one’s infection has followed…(see my earlier post of HIV/AIDS and Family bloodlines)

For more interesting work on Shame see:
Leo Bersani. Intimacies. 2008 (see also Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave” 1988)
Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 2004
David Halperin. What do Gay Men Want: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity. 2007.
Heather Love. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. 2009.

Family Blood Lines - The Queer(ed) Family

We often times talk about one's family blood line. It is blood that creates the family line in the cultural imagination. The old adage "blood is thicker than water" seeks to illuminate that family ties bind and no matter what stay with one in the best of times and the worst of times (or so it is thought). This of course gets murkier as families become hybrid with step, half, and adopted siblings, each in a different way challenging or transforming the "blood line" and the concept of family.

But, I am not interested in the traditional family blood line, rather I want to think about how transmission and family operate in perhaps a different way when one examines HIV/AIDS. HIV is transmitted. It is transmitted through blood. It thus in a queer way creates a family blood line. Yet, this family blood line is not recognized as such because the blood through which transmission occurs and the genealogy that is present is occluded by the ways we tell history and its absence often times of the sexual encounter. What I mean by this is that the transmission of HIV through sex, does not just transmit the "virus" but also transmits a line of lives, the stories of those who had that "virus" as part of their body and transmitted it to an other...thus creating this web of connections and a "family". 

Why don't we talk of this family though? Is it because this family is seen as consisting of lives often times not wanted within the traditional family - kicked out of homes for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender? Is it because we have moral panic and hysteria around HIV/AIDS seeing it as causing death, rather than providing new ways of living, new modes of intimacy? I do not of course want to imply that HIV/AIDS is just a "gay disease" as it is something that impacts the lives of all - we all live with HIV/AIDS. Yet, if this is so, we do not want to admit it, rather we seek to distance ourselves from the possible disruption that these new families, these new family trees cause in our lives where the traditional family and its values dominate the political, religious, and moral realm. What then could the families look like if we did a genealogy of the family one acquires with the acquisition of HIV? What connections and relations could be formed if we looked for our family through the blood line created within/through HIV?

Perhaps we can look at it this way...we often times see reproduction as the transmission of life and HIV/AIDS transmission as the transmission of death. What happens if we change the frame at which we look at these issues to see them differently, queerly? Is not reproduction inevitably the transmission of death as that which is birthed will suffer and will die even in our feeble attempt to touch immortality through reproduction? Is not the transmission of HIV/AIDS not the transmission of life, providing those who have died previously because of the virus to live on through the bodies of others who acquire it - providing life and living in new ways not yet imagined along with space to create activism and possible lives hidden from view because of the HIV/AIDS panic(s)? 

I of course do not want to imply that reproduction is just the transmission of death but it is not just the transmission of life...it will produce death, just hopefully out there in the future when "we" don't have to see it or grieve it because we ourselves will have died. And I of course do not want to deny that HIV/AIDS does produce and has produced suffering and death (often times hand in hand with political and economic apathy) but it does not just produce these things. It also produces new modes of being and doing life with a "virus" that has historically created a space of shame...

My thoughts then are meant to perhaps re-think about the family and see that the virus transmitted often times through the act of sex creates a family blood line similar but queerer than the blood line often times thought of. I do not mean to deny that this virus can be transmitted through violence, through accident, through lies BUT that is the same for reproduction as not all "babies" are born out of choice, but sometimes by accident or through violence.