Dr Sarah Keenan teaches and writes on property, feminist and critical race theory at SOAS School of Law.
This piece was originally posted on halfinplace and is reproduced here with permission and thanks.
This is the text of a speech I gave at the SOAS teach-out as part of the UCU strike on October 31, 2013:
It’s great to see you all here at the teach-out today. As you know, a strike is one strategy in trying to fight the neoliberalisation of higher education, but any political campaign that aims to fight or destroy something needs to also actively think about and start creating what it wants to build instead. By working together to make this teach-out happen the SOAS SU and UCU haven’t just helped to protest against unfair pay for university staff, but have actually created an open, free and diverse space where students and lecturers can discuss ideas, which is exactly the kind of space that we want our universities to be.
By doing that and being here at the teach-out today creating our own space, we are resisting the politics of inclusion. Those of us who are trying to achieve real social change need to be careful that we aren’t just asking or fighting to be included in systems and institutions that are already broken. That means for those of us who occupy marginal identity categories, that we need to avoid political campaigns that aim for our inclusion in systems and institutions that are elitist, and/or that are sexist, racist, homophobic, ableist or otherwise violent. Those systems and institutions weren’t built by or for marginalised and oppressed people, and inclusion in those systems won’t end structures of power that produce gross social and economic inequality.
Queer feminist politics is about challenging and deconstructing racist heteropatriarchal social structures, rather than being included in them. It is not about wanting more women CEOs or about wanting to have gay weddings. It’s about rejecting social and economic structures that limit what people can do and be in their lives and which produce a small class of secure, rich people and leaves others vulnerable to poverty, physical and mental illness, deportation and other kinds of violence.
Queer feminist politics is about challenging and deconstructing racist heteropatriarchal social structures, rather than being included in them. It is not about wanting more women CEOs or about wanting to have gay weddings. It’s about rejecting social and economic structures that limit what people can do and be in their lives and which produce a small class of secure, rich people and leaves others vulnerable to poverty, physical and mental illness, deportation and other kinds of violence.
Most of you have probably heard about the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign. This was an American campaign started by a middle class white gay guy called Dan Savage, aimed at lowering the rates of suicide among LGBT youth. A very wide range of celebrities, from Keisha to David Cameron, made videos for the campaign, telling queer and trans youth that life gets better as you grow older, and that they should hang in there even if they’re being bullied at school.
The problem with this campaign is that the idea that ‘It Gets Better’ is tied into a politics of inclusion that assures queer kids that childhood and high school bullying is the worst structural violence they’re ever going to face, and that once they finish school and enter the workforce their lives will improve. Now that might have been true for Dan Savage and other middle class white American gay boys who have the desire and the capacity to be highly paid, confident white men. Being gay is the major difficulty in their lives and once homophobic discrimination is overcome they can be fully included in racist, patriarchal systems and institutions that were always set up for white men to hold power, and that can now include gay white men.
David Cameron’s ‘It Gets Better’ video included him telling young gay and lesbian people that they could feel proud of who they are because gays and lesbians can join the British army. And Cameron also voted for the legalisation of gay marriage, which lots of the ‘It Gets Better’ videos also support. This represents a very depressing turn in LGBT politics away from queer feminist principles and towards inclusion. Two years ago Stonewall named the UK Home Office as their gay-friendly employer of the year. On their website it quotes Home Secretary Theresa May saying: ‘I’m delighted the Home Office is being celebrated as an employer which supports the diversity of its staff. This Government will continue to do all it can to tackle discrimination and help make this country a more tolerant and fair place for everybody.’ In second place was Lloyds Bank and third was Ernst and Young. This was a sad day for LGB politics (leave out the T because trans people are not represented by Stonewall anyway). The Home Office is an institution that actively arrests, imprisons and deports a wide range of marginalised and oppressed people. Lloyds and Ernst and Young are two of the biggest multinational corporations in the global economy that actively engage in financial practices that worsen the conditions of marginalised and oppressed people in order to increase the wealth of the superrich. Although they might be ‘gay-friendly’ employers, they are highly exploitative institutions completely devoted to maintaining structures of social and economic power just as they are now, with no interest in meaningfully changing the racist heteropatriachal conditions in which we live.
So from a queer feminist perspective, life doesn’t necessarily get better as you leave school and enter the workforce and get married. As you grow older, rather that schoolyard bullies, power is exerted by a huge range of intersecting and coercive oppressive forces, including capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. While schoolyard bullies can make kids feel sad and depressed, so too can capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy make adults feel sad and depressed. But those interlocking institutions are much harder to put a name to and much harder to fight than the school bully. As adults we are forced to work in jobs that are often repetitive and boring; we are forced to consider working at institutions like the Home Office and Lloyds and Ernst and Young; we are pressured to recreate nuclear families; and we are encouraged to spend our time competing with each other rather than forming friendships or alliances. As we become further and further entrenched in debt, in government bureaucracy and in normalised relationships, in many ways, it gets worse.
The best critique I have read of the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign comes from a local London queer band called Faggot, whose song title I borrowed for this talk today. In their song ‘It Gets Worse’, they point out that having powerful adults make videos telling queer and trans kids that it gets better just avoids those adults taking responsibility for improving systems of structural violence now. Instead, if LGBT youth wait until they’re older, they will also become caught up in systems that encourage them to just focus on earning more and getting married rather than on attempting to grapple with the fact that they might be different and that their difference could be part of a platform for a genuinely radical identity politics. They are encouraged to just wait it out and look forward to being included.
But for most queer and definitely most trans youth, for outsider youth who do not have the desire or the capacity to grow up and become highly paid, confident white men, they cannot look forward to being included, and nor should they. They can look forward to a lifetime of struggle for survival, and that struggle needs to involve building alliances and communities outside the system. It needs to involve building our own spaces, and forcing real change in the systems and institutions that affect people’s lives, rather than just adding to their diversity statistics.
So I will conclude with these lyrics from the song:
So to all you smug-ass grown-ups here’s my advice to you
Don’t accept a world that you have to creep up to
Cos if babies marriage and military are all I’m gonna want
Then I might as well just top myself and that defeats the point
Give me some hope for something I might actually want
Not just a few kids clinging on and a few smug pricks who made it to the top
Because one day we’ll tear down all this shit together
But not while your main aim is a promising business endeavour.
[…] Without charities like PACE, not only is the mental health of LGBT+ people at risk, but so is the broader project of ending systems of structural oppression and violence that victimise people in marginal identity categories. It is racist, heteropatriarchal social structures that make LGBT+ people, particularly those of colour, vulnerable to mental illness and suicide. 1 in 5 BME lesbian and bisexual women have an eating disorder compared to 1 in 20 of the general population. 83% of BME lesbian and bisexual girls harm themselves compared with 71% of white lesbian and bisexual girls. 76% of BME gay and bisexual boys have considered taking their own life compared with 56% of white gay and bisexual boys. The closure of PACE is not an isolated event. The impact of this government’s austerity policies and deep funding cuts to local authority budgets has seen the closure of a range of services for disadvantaged groups across the UK. The long-term sustainability of LGBT+ services is severely threatened. Yet specialist support services are needed because mainstream institutions and services are not only themselves facing financial difficulties, but, crucially, were not built for the marginalised and oppressed. […]
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