For Bryan:
"Let's try looking beyond the bodies, at the 'mise-en-scenes' of these transvestite self-portraits. Most of ten the subject chooses to pose himself in his domestic space, affording the viewer a voyeuristic glimpse into his decor and environs. The juxtapositions of the body and its social geography condenses the lived experience of gendered contradiction.... Surrounding the bodies in pornography are narratives: for example, the suburban melodrama set in the neat and decorous living room. The interior design, by an unseen wifely hand, says marriage, affluence, subterfuge. This isn't the East Village: this is clearly a place where gender codes are so punitively enforced that being exposed transgressing them -- Dad's wearing a dress! -- would mean humiliation, disgrace, and scandal. Viewing these photos, we're forced on to intimate terms with small scale social tyranny, with the burdens of secrecy and shame. These are the kinds of narratives that are so easy to disregard, if you -- firmly wedged into your assigned, 'normal' gender-binary -- smugly assume yourself to fall outside the policing of everyday life."
-- p 87, Bound and Gagged, Laura Kipnis
I want to take this one up when I look more carefully into Brown's work. Her focus here is on the policing of life via the state -- given the way that some forms of identity politics seek to encode the oppressed bodies and psyches of certain identities INTO the law itself. Women must be protected from pornography because the very definition of woman is to be harmed by it. there is nothing else that it is to be a woman, for Catherine MacKinnon for instance, than to be the fucked, men as fuckor. Women ARE fucked and thus must have that identity coded into the law in order that men can no longer fuck them. (simplified version)
This is nice an' all -- but kinda old news to me. What I'm more interested in, myself, is the policing of everyday life. How does this policing operate in ways that are just as powerful but we have no evilness to point to, per se -- in the same way we can say, "ugh. the state." How does this work in terms of an identity politics, which never gets beyond essentialism in spite of it claims to conceive of race, gender, ability, etc to be something that is "socially constructed" (not natural, but created by us, people). Which brings me back to Brown and finishing up the quote I posted earlier about middle classness as a form of identity politics -- with a twist. Here Brown asks, how does the middle class figure as a foil in identity politics, an identity politics that *requires* the middle class in order to makes its claims about exclusion, marginalization, cultural imperialism, etc. Does it want to be part of the middle class it so insistently critiques? Or what?
If there is one class that articulates and even politicizes itself in later modern North American life, it is that which gives itself the name of the "middle class" But the foregoing suggests that what this is not a reactive identity in the sense, for example, of "white" or "straight" in contemporary political discourse. Rather it is an articulation by the figure of the class that represents, indeed depends on, the naturalization rather than the politicization of capitalism, the denial of capitalism s power effects in ordering social life, the representation of the ideal of capitalism to provide the good life for all. Poised between rich and poor, feeling itself to be protected from the encroachments of neither, the phantasmic middle class signifies the natural and the good between the decadent or the corrupt on one saide, the aberrant or the decaying on the other."
(bitchnote: that's why I call the discourse, the "goldilocks approach" -- in between and 'just right' like a bowl of porridge.)
"It is a conservative identity in the sense that it semiotically recurs to a phantasmic past, an imagined idyllic, unfettered, and uncorrupted historical movement (implicitly located around 1955) when life was good -- housing was affordable, men supported families on single incomes, druges were confined to urban ghettos. But it is not a reactionary identity in the sense of reacting to an insurgent politicized identity from below. Rather, it precisely embodies the ideal to which non-class identities refer for proof of their exclusion or injury: homosexuals, who lack the protections of marriage, guarantees of child custody or job security, and freedom from harassment; single women, who are strained and impoverished by trying to raise children and hold paid jobs simultaneously; and people of color, who are not only disproportionately affected by unemployment, punishing urban housing costs, and inadequate health care programs, but disproportionately subjected to unwarranted harassment, figured as criminals, ignored by cab drivers.
The point is not that these privations are trivial but that without recourse to the white masculine middle class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their difference. If they thus require this ideal for the potency and poignancy of their political claims, we might ask to what extent a critique of capitalism is foreclosed by the current configuration of oppositional politics, and not simply by the "loss of the socialist alternative" or the ostensible "triumph of liberalism" in the global order. In contrast with Marxist critique of social whole and Marxist visions of total transformation, to what extend do identity politics required a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard that not only preserves capitalism from critique, but sustains the invisibility and inarticulateness of class -- not accidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled on one reason why class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, "race, class, gender, sexuality"?