Unrelated note: thanks to those who responded to my "what's in your name?" question. I have some followup comments for Andie that I hope to bring up shortly.
A quick preface: Brian collated quotes from a bunch of people together in his response (perhaps to overcome the 3-post quota) unfortunately without attributing the sections. Below I respond to those parts of his message that quote me, and respond to it. None of the other material quoted in Brian's post, before and after the following sections, was from me.
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 5:46 PM, Brian Charles Dauth wrote:
>
>> I am not sure what there is to get here.
>
> The fact that in anti-queer culture, the likelihood of violence
> against
> queers increases. In fact, if you want to help the elite do its work,
> you oppose efforts to end sexism, racism and anti-queer hatred.
>
The first sentence is pretty obvious at least to me, as is the need to work against such bigotry. Regarding the second: it is the contrary point that is of significance here, me thinks: if you oppose efforts to end X, Y, Z do you halt the elite doing its work? IOW, if A participates in efforts to end sexism, B in efforts to end racism, C to end anti-queer hatred, and so on, does the work of the elite get halted? I believe not, if that end is the sole motivation of the effort, for reasons I stated in my earlier message. This does not imply that I think that oppression (or substitute your word of choice here) is more than the sum of oppressions.
>> A [genuine] question: what is the basis of solidarity? Surely it is
> more than back-scratching?
>
> Why does it have to be more than that? By working to alleviate the
> real life oppression I suffer and my doing the same in return, a great
> of solidarity can be brought about (you have to unattach yourself from
> your keyboard to do so, of course).
Don't be condescending, for you do not not what I do when I am away from my keyboard. And nor should it matter. Ignoring the wisecrack in the hope that it is only that, the question that follows from the idea of solidarity as back-scratching is that (a) I am absolved of having to support any gay rights (or other) struggle if I calculate that there is no likelihood of payback for my cause (say "animal welfare"), (b) I can be easily bought off: the "elite" only need to offer me a better deal than the gay activists do, (c) without some predefined shared notion such as [at least] "commitment" we are stuck with a bootstrapping problem (w.r.t common action).
--ravi