race-class-sex

Forgive me if this is disjointed.  I did a lot of reading while recovering and a lot of absorbing, but this was written in a storm at a campground somewhere in North Florida. 

Otherness.  The otherness of queer, the otherness of not-white, the otherness of not-bourgeois, the otherness of not-in-power.

“A feeling of inferiority?  No, a feeling of nonexistence.”(Fanon, 139) - the otherness of not-white, of being a black man in a white man’s world .  This is the same idea expressed by the Paris is Burning men, who have class-race-queer all working on them at the same time.  There is one time, one place where they can win, where they feel a success, not measured against greater society, but against each other.

Compound race with gender, and we have Bell Hooks’ Where We Stand, Class Matters.  Getting a husband is the only key to a woman’s respectability – and she cannot do this, according to her father, if she is too educated.  To be respectable (as opposed to respected, which is reserved for men, white men), is to remain in line sexually – heterosexual, married, producing children.

In Borderlands, not-white otherness  is again compounded with gender.  The author feels a connection to her past, her class, her race, her home, in contrast with the white world into which her education has taken her.   

Growing up in the “wrong” class and white is still an “otherness”.  The sacrificial activism, the suppression of her own sexual preferences within her queerness (butch/femme dyad, etc) in order to blend into the “right” class was how the author at one time responded to the compounding of class and queer.

The people got along fine without “sexuality”, without discourse, and, yet, Foucault tells us that the bourgeoisie in the 19^th century finally had economic reasons to force its sexuality, its regulations on the proletariat.  But, he clarifies: “we must say there is a bourgeois sexuality, and that there are class sexualities.  Or rather, that sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its successive shits and transpositions, it induces specific class effects.”(Foucalt, 127)  

Indeed, sexuality and class and race have been all mixed up since it became convenient for the power/suppression cycle.

The personal note I feel compelled to add: this a place in which I have no experience, even though I could pretend my work and my food-stamp childhood gave me class cred.  I have primarily worked in working class jobs (janitorial work), but I never truly experienced class otherness, because my childhood poverty was what mother called “student poverty” – in other words, poverty by choice while she pursued a PhD.  There is no sense of inescapability in janitorial work when one’s mother is a professor and one’s father narrowly escaped a PhD, but chose to work with his hands and live rather like Baba, and that is pretty much what I do, myself.  This isn’t to say that there isn’t a stinging pain of inferiority when people treat the janitor like a piece of shit.  But it’s not a lifelong struggle – it was a choice, albeit a strange one.  If we want to bring psychiatry into this, then there's more to tell.