YKIOK?

[bcholmes]

I have two computers that I use on a regular basis: one at home and one at work. I've just updated the .sig file of the computer at home. I've thrown a nice Ani quotation in there:

'cause I know the biggest crime
is just to throw up your hands
say this has nothing to do with me
I just want to live as comfortably as I can

- "Willing to Fight"

I've been thinking a lot about radicalness, lately.

Seven or eight years ago, I started talking with an ex of mine after a hiatus of several years. We'd both changed a lot, and were catching up on each other's lives, and she said something that's stuck in my brain ever since. I was talking about my conversion to feminism, and she shrugged her shoulders in a dismissive way and I was really surprised. Eventually, while talking about that, she talked about how she felt that feminism had lost its radical potential. She said: "What if feminism managed to get equal pay for equal work, and still nothing was right with the world?"

I think there's a lot of shorthand in what she was saying. Her point didn't really acknowledge the plurality of feminisms and the existence of Mary Dalys and Catherine McKinnons. But, yeah, sometimes it seems like the movement that I think of as feminism isn't as radical as was once imagined.

Heck, I've sat through panels at uber-cool places like WisCon where people were openly contemptuous of radicalness. "Who's to say that there's something wrong with our society? Isn't that a value judgement and value judgements are baaaaaaad." Remember, we're supposed to be nice and liberal and non-judging and just repeat the mantra: YKIOK.

And I have similar reservations about trans politics, too. There are huge divisions in the trans community about what form trans politics should take. On one had, we have people like Susan Cook and the whole "women born transsexual" movement who say that all trans folk need is full legal recognition as their correct gender; after that, everything like marriage rights fall into place. On the other hand, we have people like Riki Anne Wilchins who believe that the whole idea of legal recognition of gender is flawed ab initio and needs to be thrown out.

And so when I hear the more conservative elements of the trans movement arguing for full legal recognition of gender, I think "what if we get that, and still nothing was right with the world?" Transfolk who argue against the more radical positions in trans politics say that throwing out gender isn't an achievable goal. People just won't change that way. Radicalness is self-marginalizing, and won't go anywhere as a result. Because, let's face it, the mainstream still sets the agenda about what discourses are really listened to.

And this is what Audre Lorde meant when she said that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".

Around about here, my head starts to hurt. My sympathies clearly lie with the more radical voices in the trans community, but I'm well aware of just how unpalatable radicalness is to so many people. I try to think up a parallel saying to David Suzuki's "Think globally, act locally".

Hard problems. Hard, hard problems.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

huh, wait, so i should get rid of the bras and wear the see through shirts without them? would that be helping?

;)