In Summary...

As I read over my blogs for this class, the one theme that consistently strikes me is that of community identities: how to create them, how to name them, and who to include. Perhaps this is an obvious theme to choose, but seeing as how the gay community has struggled to find a community since the possibility of a community even came up (or out), it seems like an important and meaningful one to chose.
To me, the hardest thing to overcome when talking about community identities within the gay community, is having to overcome the idea of being outsider. Any queer identity is based on the fundamental notion of being different, of not being mainstream, of being something else, and something other. Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall says in her essay “Bitches in Solitude” that

“Identities focused around not being something else as opposed to being something are the result of feeling attacked on all sides; they’re an attempt to consolidate ground that feels threatened.”

She goes on to talk about how, at least in the lesbian community, this consolidation has turned into an ever restricting ‘who’s a real lesbian?’ game, in which a community with strict rules and binding manifestos tries to limit their numbers in order to keep some semblance of similarity, or connection while simultaneously trying to transgress boundaries and fight for equality. Alisa Solomon, in “Dykotomies: Scents and Sensibility” talks about 1989 lesbian newsletter which published a long list of things the lesbian community needs to do be all-inclusive, yet many lesbians found this long list of rules to be completely ridiculous, completely suffocating, and ultimately against the point: the overwhelming number of ‘inclusivity’ rules actually turning away more women than including women.
However, this question of community identities is in no way limited to the lesbian community. One of my first blogs, “To Box or Not To Box” talks about the difficulty currently in the transgender community, which further demonstrates this difficulty. I still have not found answers to the questions that I pose in that blog, and I still don’t understand quite how transgender warriors who wish to conform to one gender or the other, who often desire to fit into traditional gender stereotypes can fight alongside the gender-fuck crowd who’s ready to topple over the oppressive dichotomy that gender presents. As Kate Borenstein points out in her book, Gender Outlaw, both of these groups ultimately point out the “silliness” of the gender system, and in one way or another seek to dismantle it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that its any easier to come up with one unifying name, or one unifying community.
Furthermore, the creation of a gender-fuck/queer identity has led to confusion over lesbian butch identities, as I bring up in my blog, titled “My Butch Identity”. While these two groups have much in common, perhaps especially in terms of appearance, their ideologies are different, making it nearly impossible to try to group them under one umbrella term. Esther Newton’s point, and my own feelings, about wanting to be a woman, and wanting to be butch, simply do not fit in with the idea of erasing gender altogether, although its possible and likely that for many women, these two ideas could be relatively synonymous.
Another couple of blog posts, “How Far We’ve Come” and “It’s an Individual Thing” respond to a debate that concerns the entire ‘queer’ community: assimilationist vs. radical. Although, as I mention in these blogs, I think, in many ways, this debate has turned into a celebrate vs. respect debate, its yet another way that the gay community is split apart, another way in which we find ourselves too big to fit under one name.
I am not trying to answer these big questions. I am not even trying to talk about these individual issues, but more trying to approach the ever-elusive community identity. Of course, the truth is that the gay community is every bit as diverse as any other community, including ‘the’ white community’ or ‘the’ heterosexual community, but I suppose that yet another privilege that comes packaged with being in the majority is that you don’t have to find a community label that fits everyone. There is a natural assumption that, of course, the heterosexual community is too diverse to try to include under one label, and certainly, no one would try to make the statement that ‘all heterosexual believe in…’ though people do that with the gay community, and other minority communities daily. Philosophically, of course, it makes sense to me, yet it still seems like an ultimately futile, and counter-productive search. Talking about our differences, figuring out ways to be inclusive without being exclusive, welcoming and joining other people’s communities, and banding together to work on a variety of issues seem like more productive paths to take. But then, again, I’m an idealist…