Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity - Or Death Transcript

Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity - or Death Transcript Date: Monday, 28 November 2011 - 6:00PM Location: Barnard's Inn Hall 28 November 2011 Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity or Death Dr Yvette Taylor In this paper I’m going to consider moments of US and UK sexual citizenship, situating this in terms of LGBT campaigning groups’ actions, institutional reactions and broader public relations, to make links between citizenship, community, diversity – and death. Reactions to and demands from LGBT presence and activism often work to re-create a dominant ‘we’, while the rhetorics of ‘diversity’ and ‘community’ are strategically deployed – implying inclusivity while exercising exclusion. The argument here is discussed in relation to two significant moments of citizenship formations and disruptions: the UK Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the inter- related movement towards demanding ‘rights’, ‘safety’, ‘protection’ and an end to homophobia, following the deaths of a number of queer youth in the US, particularly in relation to suicide of Tyler Clementi following a suspected act of homophobia. These examples are mapped onto my own research visit in the United States to explore landscapes of ‘sexual citizenship’, almost a year after UK empirical fieldwork was completed for Lesbian and Gay Parents: Securing Social and Educational Capitals (Taylor 2009). I draw on this project to make some comparisons between US and UK in (re)making ‘sexual citizenship’: I hope to make broader resonances rather than to ‘locate’ homophobia solely within the specific site, examples, spaces and bodies discussed here, whilst also trying to avoiding talking for ‘everywhere’ (specific US and UK examples). Research passages (or passings) highlight ethical entanglements which are not avoided in presenting as objective or self-reflexively aware so I want to situate my own position in this as I situate these stories and spaces beyond me. Recent policies in the US and UK context – such as the Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the repeal of US military policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – have been conceptualised as key moments of coming forward, whereby LGBT citizens have gained new public visibility and viable presence within a human rights framework. Yet the success of ‘the world we have won’ (Weeks, 2007) within these new presences often works to re-create a dominant ‘we’, as a classed and racialised construction, neglecting the intersectional dimensions of sexual citizenship (Taylor et al., 2010); I want to positions and identities. In celebrating new queer presences (legislatively, culturally and socially) the absence of ‘others’ must also be considered: queer and feminist literatures on the politics of grief, loss and mourning have shown the ways that some lives are already lost to public/activist/institutional concern, representing an outsider status beyond community and citizenship (Butler, 2004; Haritaworn, 2010; Taylor, 2010). Such debates and their complex implications came to the fore around the recent suicide of student Tyler Clementi at a US campus following a suspected act of homophobia. I argue that the creation of broader publics, as called upon by different actors in the demand for citizenship, community and diversity, can be seen as contradictory, relying upon and re-creating privacy as the proper concern and place of civil engagements. This is witnessed in responses to different queer deaths and the affective relations – from ‘hate’ to ‘love’ – which are generated interpersonally and institutionally in pinpointing blame, in moving forwards and in securing rights, as a moment of loss and possible gain. I ask which lives are already lost to public concern, to community activism and institutional comprehension, questions which I suggest are significant to the dis-junctures in diversity rhetorics and realities often enacted in community claims for citizenship. I arrived at Rutgers University in early September 2010 ready to research US sexual citizenship, hoping to situate this against earlier work on UK citizenship, and the intersections between sexuality and class in same-sex parental rights (Taylor,2009a). This sense of identification and community in what is the most diverse US public university according to publicity (‘Jersey Roots, Global Reach’) made me ponder on the advantages and disadvantages of such a strong version of sameness. The rhetorical appeal of ‘internationalisation’ and ‘diversity’ and the reality of elitism and exclusion within Higher Education has been widely commented upon, where institutions produce guidelines on ‘dealing with’ diversity (frequently invoking legal compulsion, employment worth and cultural variety). Yet many have pointed to the structuring of education as it solidifies, rather than challenges, social divisions, reinforcing a classed and racialised version of ‘community’. The significance of this to sexual citizenship, always played out within a broad landscape of inequality, community and diversity, became all too apparent in the suicide of a first year Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on 23rd Sept 2010. Clementi’s death came soon after two fellow students allegedly filmed him having sex with another man. In the official response that followed, it was asserted via an email from the University President that Rutgers is ‘ … extraordinarily proud of its diversity and the respect its members have for one another … ’. A two year project ‘ … focusing attention on civility in the context of one of the most culturally and racially diverse research universities in the nation’ was highlighted as a re-commitment to ‘the values of civility, dignity, compassion, and respect’ in shared, painful times (see Project Civility[1] at http://projectcivility.rutgers.edu/). I wondered what and whose pain would be shared, owned, claimed and forgotten? In recalling this my point is not to hold this young person’s life and death up as the shattering point of community: in the immediate days that followed, the media presence on campus put a spotlight on all; from fellow student residents to those researching LBGT issues. All were asked to convey what this meant, how to convey ‘Rutgers’ loss’ and what a suitable response would be – sometimes with a microphone emerging from nowhere to capture and quickly relay those thoughts across campus and country. Perhaps unsurprisingly many students began to resent such intrusion and the debate shifted from one of sexuality and LGBT rights to one of privacy for all Rutgers’ students. There was also an increasing tone of resentment against campaigning groups organising die-in events, speak outs and silent vigils: couldn’t ‘they’ just go away now and let things get back to normal, understood as a ‘cosy diversity’ where all had suffered and all were now included, of course (Ahmed, 2009). Responses were both highly visible – re-circulated again through the very technologies (cell phones, web cams) blamed as the bad objects of ‘today’s youth’ – and yet invisible, as homophobia was mis-placed in being situated entirely at Rutgers. This pinpointing removed responses from a historical, social perspective more able to account for homophobia and heterosexism. Most problematically, homophobia was seen to reside wholly in the bodies of the two young people accused of filming Clementi: two 18 year old students of colour, who then became the targets of racist abuse (Haritaworn, 2010, discusses a similar racialisation between ‘queer lovers’ and ‘hateful others’). The youtube clip ‘Targeting Tyler Clementi: Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei commit a Hate Crime’ captured and circulated such racism, where Ravi and Wei’s ‘hateful’ bodies are displayed in close-up with sinister music playing over the exposure of their ‘evil’ intensions. We are forcefully told over again that ‘A hate crime occurs when someone commits a crime with the purpose of intimidating someone based on their sexual orientation’. This may well be true, but it can be asked what other ‘hate’ might circulate? How might hate be situated not on individual bodies but within society more broadly? Viewing the online comments after the ‘RIP Tyler’ tribute, one certainly finds much continued hatred, now justified in the very name of building (the right kind of) ‘community’. Blame and praise circulates at these moments of community (re)building, as our points of success, shame, loss and gain. At a speak-out event I listened with disbelief at others’ disbelief: why didn’t these ‘minority’ young people simply know better? By being ‘minority’ they were dually tasked with a non-discriminatory stance towards all issues, as well as being the embodiment of institutional diversity. Formal institutionalisation and retraction of rights intersects with (in)formal structures of participation, including campaigning groups, differently effecting material and subjective claims-making (Taylor, 2007, 2009a). Within days of Clementi’s death, Garden State Equality, a statewide New Jersey LGBT advocacy group, demanded the accused students be prosecuted for hate crimes and given the ‘maximum possible sentence’. Campus Pride, a US nation-wide group for LGBT college students, also pressed Rutgers for the pair’s immediate expulsion with little mention of an investigation or disciplinary hearing. Online endorsements circulated as over 18,000 people signed up to press for manslaughter charges. Signatories called for the accused to ‘return to their countries’, ascribing homophobia

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