What is left to organize around if we don’t use identities? While postmodernism has been largely unable and unwilling to apply itself to the nitty-gritty of social change, you and I don’t have that luxury. We have a movement against gender oppression to mount.
What Butler suggests is that we allow identity to float free, that we stop barricading the gates of gender and encourage every-one to define themselves as they wish, even change their identity or invent new ones. Instead of merely tolerating this gender fluidity, a necessary evil, we accept the inherent instability of all identities and make it work for us. As new identities enter from the “outside,” e.g., stone butches, trans folks, drag people, and passing women, the category expands. The boundaries blur, shift, and open. Some women become indistinguishable from men. Some women become more distinguishable from women. Some fall off that specious male-female spectrum entirely, becoming totally new genders we haven’t yet named. Possibilities which our original feminism could not have foreseen or anticipated are created. Fluidity is transformed into a key feminist goal and an important liberatory tactic.
Our movement shifts its foundations from identity to one of functions of oppression. Coalitions form around particular issues, and then dissolve. Identity becomes the result of contesting those oppressions, rather than a precondition for involvement. In other words, identity becomes an effect of political activism instead of a cause. It is temporary and fluid, rather than fixed.
In practice, this means that if you identify as gender oppressed, or are interested in these issues, you’re welcome in the Transexual Menace. You don’t have to be a transperson, much less be judged one, in order to work within the Menace. Or, returning to the example which opened this chapter, if you’re opposed to rape, you fight all rape and sexual violence, regardless of what genitals or bodies are involved. The same goes for employment discrimination. You fight it regardless of whether it’s due to race, class, sexual orientation, abledness, or gender expression.
Groups as varied as the Christian Coalition and the Democratic Party have organized around issue clusters, such as abortion, welfare, and school prayer, but that’s as far as it’s gone.
I like to believe that if women, transpeople, or queers have learned anything from millennia of oppression, it’s the experience of outsiderdom, and how the suppression of difference can kill hearts, minds, and lives. So far, unfortunately, each of these groups has waged an increasingly narrow struggle for the few at the expense of the many. Oppression, painful as it is, is also a question posed by life to each of us: will your heart grow larger, so it holds the universal hurt, or will it grow smaller, so that, in the end, it can contain only your own?
Riki Anne Wilchins, “Why Identity Politics Really, Really Sucks”, published in Read My Lips: Sexual Subversions and The End of Gender
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