“A queer has two options available to hir: stop being queer, or live as a warrior.”’
I’ve begun to think in dualisms, which historically I hate, since returning to a normative world. A queer person may either stop being queer, live as a warrior, or leave mainstream society altogether, live in a place like Short Mountain or Mount Zuni. I live in Windsor now, though, not Short Mountain. My bark must be worse than my bite so I don’t have to bite, but my bite must be worse than it was so I can keep on barking. Every day is a reminder of an unequal society, made all the more strikingly obvious to me by my forays into better communities.
You may ask, if you’re unfamiliar with my blog, why I would leave a place I obviously see as paradisiacal and come to Windsor, Ontario, a town best known for automobile production, failed economy, and it’s bootlegging reputation during American prohibition. The long and the short of it is, I’m in school. One of the classes I’m in is Society and Warrior Cultures, an interesting class with a good teacher that I chose mainly out of concern for the language I find activism and justice adopts most often (fight, battle, defendant, war, warrior), and a hope that the relation between these ideas and warriorship would be illuminated for me through semantic.
I envision a cavern with much rock formation. The kind where no matter where you shed the light, no one part of the cave is ever fully lit- that is how I see my feelings towards my own emotional and psychological experience with activism and particularly queer thought- is a warrior what I am? Do I want to be a warrior at all?
I’ve opened this article with the sentence “A queer has two options available to hir: stop being queer, or live as a warrior.” More and more I begin to believe that within mainstream society this is true. For one, if queer is a practice, or a relationship between sex, sexuality, gender and society, then one can certainly choose their relationship. Can choose to be straight or gay. The second option, to live as a warrior, rings particularly true when the wording is considered.
Read it, it's good!
To live as a warrior. Through this class we have discussed what it means to be a warrior, versus a fighter or soldier. The word warrior carries with it, for most that hear it, an association to some code of honour. It holds more to this concept than it does to physical combat. We refer to warriors every day. For example, within the queer context, “Gender Warriors” by Leslie Feinberg, a book intersecting gender identity and warriorship throughout history. We don’t mean queerdos that fought. We mean something… more.
And we relate to that something more. We relate to that sense of something greater, we sense without being told what it would be like to live as a warrior. To live as a warrior tells of a way of living that is the way of the warrior, more than any act.
And there is no question to a queer whether there will be a reason to act or not. Queer is a struggle for most, getting there and defending it once we are ‘there’. We feel a sense of internal struggle when we see images of Joan D’Arc donning men’s armour. We feel, every day, the struggle. The struggle to survive, be hired, make enough money, be accepted, be allowed so many things given to dominant social groups as though they were nothing. The freedoms some would take for granted when we wouldn’t dare enter for fear of how the law, as queerphobic as most of it’s subjects, wouldn’t treat us. If you are someone perceived as queer, you will face struggle- or stop being queer.
Instead, those who remain queer learn to fight. Even if not fight for, to fight because. Before we are ready to flagship our politics and our rights to dignity and humanity, we find ourselves fighting, on fist or word or paper, because we are queer. Because we are under attack, and the option of non-resistance, the option of ‘not stop being queer, or become a warrior’ is fail. Because without a code of ethic, without a sense of righteousness, even defending yourself begins to feel hollow and infinitely tiring. How much attack can a person take without lifting a shield before they either repent their queerness and subvert to a less confrontation, less conflict bound politic, or die?
Our days are met with violence. Physical violence, emotional, religious, spiritual, intellectual, and legal violence, in ways that are subtle, and in ways that are not. The nature of social hierarchies is to make ‘others’ out of the oppressed. Oppression is intersectional, and Queer as it manifests in the West, as Queer critical theory, represents an aggressively oppositional response. Be that response a knife, a lawsuit, or a journalistic tenacity, it is an art of war we eventually adopt.
And is that what we want? I say I resent the skin I have had to grow back coming back to the mainstream, that I resent the kinds of tough that children have to be when they are told that they can’t wear something because they are ‘the wrong gender’. Is this connection to violent words like war and fight really something we want so close to our hearts when we ‘fight’ for change?
This discussion isn't limited to queer fight. The same can be said of feminism and other anti-oppression movements.
I am learning to see warriorship as a thing of grace, of art, and sacrifice- discipline. But all the while I am still seeing that through all these graces and arts, whether glamorized or not at all, there comes to be a lust. A warrior begins to enjoy his martial art. It becomes a way of balance when applied properly. I can accept that the practice of these powers are healthy for the mind, the body, and most importantly, the spirit. It is not ability to fight that I have difficulty with- it is better to have fought and survived than to have decided pacifism and died. Perhaps it is not the distaste for the method that holds me back… But rather, how close I feel that the fight brings me to the heart of what I fight against. Because the heart of my opponent is the same as mine. If I as a queer warrior begin to enjoy the struggle as a martial artist might enjoy his discipline, what prevents my heart from becoming a mere reflection of the desire in the heart of my enemy?
I am grappling with this and unsure of anything. I am a patient person, willing to wait for an answer. This blog is not a manifesto. It’s a conversation, and no content will ever be removed when it no longer represents my opinion or standpoint. I believe it is always useful that way, and that the conversation is more useful than the dogma that can result like sediment. But I still want to get closer to clarity, or to a properly lit cavern or whatever. I think if we combine our floor lamps and headlights and candles we can get a lot closer to it together. And then maybe we can clean the cave the fuck up!
Posted on October 13, 2010
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