Some context on this: the idea of monosexual privilege has been a hotly debate subject among bisexual people on tumblr. This post came on the tail end of a loooong debate involving a lot of people and a lot of different views. For more background: read these posts by Shiri Eisner, this post by pareia, and these discussions on tumblr.
This is the post as it appeared on my tumblr on Jan. 26, 2013.
I’m adressing this post to the people I argued with yesterday over
the concept of monosexual privilege and in particular to Shiri Eisner,
as the creator of the monosexual privilege checklist. It is based on
yesterday’s discussion and today’s clarification from Shiri Eisner on the intent behind the checklist.
I would like to make it clear that I write this as a bisexual woman
who is very interested in bisexual politics and devotes a lot of time to
thinking and writing about it. My stake in this is that I would like to
see bisexual politics that are revolutionary, that speak to our
experience as bisexuals, that are well thought out and well reasoned and
useful tools for bringing down the binaries – in short, I want the same
as you. So please do not dismiss my arguments here as privilege-denial,
or as internalized monosexism.
While you see two different axes of oppression, one straight-queer
and one monosexual-bisexual, I (and others, but I can only speak for
myself in this post) see only one straight-queer axis of oppression with
different consequences for the different oppressed groups and a degree
of horizontal hostility as a result of that.
In one of my many, many, many posts on the subject of monosexual privilege yesterday, I said the following:
So far, I have seen no examples of monosexual privilege that
is generally available to gay people. Some of it is available to white
middle-class cis gay people who conform to heteronormativity, some of it
is available to gay people only in LGBT spaces. The former is an
example of the privileged group extending privilege to a select few of
the non-privileged as a reward for buying into their ideology, the
latter does not count as it is a subspace separate from mainstream
society.
This got buried in a wall of text and nobody responded to it so I’m
putting it in its own post and bolding it. I will add that another
category exists: rights that the gay community had to fight tooth and
nail to have, which we don’t have yet because our problems haven’t been
prioritized. I would argue that hard-won rights (especially those that
are relatively recently acquired and only in a specific set of
countries) have no place on a privilege checklist. If necessary, I am
willing to go through the checklist point by point and show that each of
them belongs in one of these categories.
Now I should add that I am well aware that monosexual privilege is
not claimed to originate in the gay community. However. If you construct
a group of people as a privileged group by virtue of sexuality, it has to make sense to talk about that group as privileged by virtue of their sexuality.
If what you describe as monosexual privilege is not available to
everyone you define as monosexual, even when taking the other axes of
oppression into account, it’s time to look at who actually holds the
privilege in question. In this case, I think it clearly is
heterosexuals. The reason why those of us who criticize the idea of
monosexual privilege focus so heavily on lesbians and gays in relation
to this is twofold. 1) We all agree that heterosexuals hold the
privileges listed and 2) it is when we apply the concept of monosexual
privilege to gays and lesbians as subsets of the proposed monosexual
group that we see how little sense it makes to talk about them as
monosexuals.
The monosexual privilege checklist was accepted by many, including
myself, without critical thought. It speaks of the unique problems faced
by bisexuals and it was such an emotional experience to see it all in
list form that I didn’t initially question the chosen template, or its
implications.
Since then, I’ve seen a lot of criticism of how prolific the format
of the privilege checklist has become, how it’s used on all forms of
oppression without taking into account whether the form of oppression in
question actually fits the original model. This has become widespread
and many people now don’t realise that when you create a privilege checklist, you are implying an underlying axis of oppression with your non-privileged group on one end and everyone else at the other. The
format of the privilege checklist cannot and should not be divorced
from this political analysis of oppression, or it is meaningless.
Think of the first privilege checklist, the white privilege
checklist. It was created to show white people how they are privileged
in ways they rarely even think about. Behind it is an analysis of racial
oppression that shows white people as privileged over all other racial
demographics. This is true regardless of how various non-privileged
racial groups are oppressed in different ways, or receive varying
degrees of provisional access to the privileges described, because
whiteness is monolithic. Because regardless of intersecting gender,
class or sexuality oppressions, it makes sense to speak of a relatively
uniform white experience. Because I, as a poor person, a woman, a
bisexual, a person with a mental illness, living in a country with a
vastly different racial history and social dynamic from the US, I can
still read the white privilege checklist and have my mind blown by all
of the privilege I never realised I had. It works because although
whiteness is mostly never considered by white people, white people are
still a group with clearly defined membership, even though it mostly
becomes clear through definitions of who isn’t white.
This is not transferable to the idea of monosexual privilege. There
is no monolithic group of monosexuals. It is not a concept except in our
minds as bisexuals. Heterosexuals may see gays and lesbians as less
threatening on some levels (as expertly pointed out by Kenji Yoshino in
his essay The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure) but they do not
experience straights and gays as one group. There is no cohesion there
as there is with whiteness. The extent to which gays and straights have
common interests in the suppression of bisexuality is still, as Yoshino
describes it, a subconscious contract between two groups with different
motives, investments and privileges. It is still a contract between one
privileged group and a minority. Intersectionality doesn’t even begin to
explain the complete lack of cohesion in this supposedly privileged
group.
So here is my problem. If the unique situation of bisexuals does not
fit the privilege-oppression framework in the sense of bisexuals being
oppressed by monosexuals, and if this framework is not even necessary in
order to describe and explain the unique experience of bisexuals or the
interests of gays and lesbians in bi erasure, why should we use it?
It’s faulty, flawed, oversimplifying and unnecessary. It brings far
more harm than good. And to be honest, it feels appropriative to me.
I’m not saying the list should be completely chucked. With a few
changes, it could be a list of consequences of bi erasure. A list of
specific oppressions for bisexuals under heterosexism. Shining a light
on bi specific oppressions is a good thing, a necessary thing. It does
not need to be a privilege checklist to do that.
Here is what I suggest: we can talk about bisexual erasure and
biphobia as a consequence of heterosexism and sometimes an expression of
horizontal aggression. We can even talk about monosexism as a subset of heterosexism
in which bisexuality is specifically targeted for the threat it
represents to heteronormativity. But if we talk about monosexism among
gays and lesbians we should make clear that we are talking about
internalized shit and attempts to make an oppressed group look more
palatable to the privileged group (homonormativity).
No comments:
Post a Comment