Chang Hall’s analysis of LGBT people as grounded in narration is a nicely elegant way to conclude our study together on contemporary LGBT history and experience in the United States. I think her piece brings together several strands of the conundrums of identity, the problems of organizing around a dynamic category like LGBT, and yet, acknowledges the power and force of identity for us in the contemporary world.
Outside of our classroom, the world is still viciously homophobic in myriad ways. Lesbians, gay men, and transgender people are everyday violently attacked physically, beaten and murdered, denied housing and economic opportunity, and struggle to survive on an emotional and spiritual level. At the same time, everyday, lesbians, gay men, and transfolk celebrate themselves, rejoice in their communities, experience true joy and happiness, and participate in varying degrees with dominant culture in collaboration and conflict.
This tension between quotidian joy and quotidian violence is reflective of the discursive struggle traced out by Chang Hall, between community and individual, between cliques and the larger idea of LGBT, and building coalition on diversity. True diversity, of course, is always fraught, and negotiating that diversity is also always difficult work. This is one reason as to why debates within the LGBT community over reflecting the diverse faces of the community are historically cyclical in their drama: the same questions keep coming up because the same diversity keeps presenting itself as a challenge to both the fantasy of universal community and the imaginary roles that LGBT folks play out, of outlaw and assimilationist, in our communities.
As we have discussed often, LGBT people fall into the middle of these debates, largely, live within the didactic structure, and therefore, any putative solution is also highly idiosyncratic, individual, and unique. Yet, that fact does not stop the desire and need for building effective coalitions within LGBT communities and with the dominant culture to press both a civil rights agenda as well as perhaps envision a Carpenterian role for LGBT people in the transformation of our world into someplace better.
Personally, I do feel that LGBT people, through their experience and insight, can offer dominant culture a new way of imagining love, relationships, and sexuality. This does not discount the often deep and divisive questions around those concepts within LGBT communities themselves. Especially for gay men, where we continue to be surrounded by a culture of narcissistic pleasure and profound ennui, these concepts of love and relationship have been lost in the fury of sexuality. Similarly, but differently, for lesbians, the notions of womanhood, femininity, and sisterhood often meet the trauma of patriarchy, and the challenges of building feminist consciousness and community under the aegis of misogyny can exemplify itself in strange, disconcerting, and painful personal politics. Debates among transfolk about alliances with lesbians and gay men, and whether or not trans is a medical-psychological disorder or a social identity create disagreements and antipathies within trans thinking.
All of this, of course, happens against the backdrop of dominant culture, which on one hand tolerates LGBT communities as part of the larger communitas, but simultaneously has deep suspicion and yes, loathing of LGBT people. Physical violence against LGBT persons is one indication of this loathing. Yet another aspect of this loathing, albeit a more civilized form, is the debate over extending civil rights protections to LGBT people. Dominant heteronormative culture is, however, not static, but as dynamic as LGBT identity in its shifting and changing nature, which only adds dramatic tension to the high-wire act of negotiating identities in a representative democracy such as our own, where collective identities are held in suspicion at the same time as they are deeply powerful.
Chang Hall’s perspective that identity is narration is a useful way of thinking through our various identity positions, whether they are sexual, gendered, economic, or racial. How we write our story of identity is both individual and collective, is grounded in the body and powered by our mind, and dependent on self-conception as well as social acknowledgment. The power of Chang Hall’s idea, however, and what is not to be lost, is realizing that on many levels we write ourselves into both our individual narrative and the larger dramatic project of collective identities. And if we are indeed the authors of our stories, than we can change direction, plot, narrative, and dramatis personae, if we want to badly enough or are forced to by circumstance or situation.
We are actors, not participants, in our own drama. The recognition of this narrative role has the power to change the world, and I would argue that it is exactly that recognition, that LGBT people can change their worlds, that has driven contemporary LGBT cultural politics since the 1950s, and continues to inform who we are, who we become, and where we are going today.
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