is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Hetero-Normativity and Indifferent Resistance, or: Are You Going To End Up Married to a Man Someday?
Hetero-Normativity and Indifferent Resistance, or: Are You Going To End Up Married to a Man Someday?
I was eating a lovely meal with an old friend in NYC last weekend, and we were discussing the various break-ups and get-togethers that have happened of late in our extended group of friends-in-common, when she said, "Hey, here's some news." I'm all, "?". She goes: "Y-- just got married." Me: "INteresting." Her: "To a MAN!" I'm all: "!". We laugh, too loud and too long. You see, Y-- was a man-hating lesbian, angry at the hetero-normative world. (You know, the world that makes it easy to be hetero and hard to be non-hetero.) Sure it's easy to be angry at that world, even if you are in a heterosexual couple and therefore in some way part of it. That world is oppressive and closed to innovation, and it has no room for you and your other-thinking ways. But some forms of anger at it are, well....
I say, "Wow. That is strange. [longish pause.] But maybe in retrospect it isn't so surprising." My friend: "Exactly." Me: "I mean, anyone who is So Constantly Angry about something like the hetero-normativity of the world is protesteth-ing too much, perhaps." Friend: "Yes, it all seems to make sense right after it seems shocking, doesn't it?" Me: "Because when all you do is react against something all the time, you are still determined by that thing, rather than being more free from it." My friend: "Exactly. We have wisdom, you and I."
There are things about which it is good never to stop being angry. But there also are things that aren't going away any time soon, which will always have some power over your life, like it or not. Sure, maybe we, the good guys, can change that over time. But how do we change it? I do not think that anger can do it on its own. And so I suggest this: the best thing you can do for yourself is carve out spaces within your world where that larger power cannot reach you. And then expend your energy toward that good space, making IT larger, instead of aiming your resistance ONLY at the monolithic barely penetrable overarching power source that is indifferent to your resistance to it.
Your indifference to it will give you more power to expand the sphere of what you value.
Turns out, some forms of resistance find their power in indifference to what they resist. Go figure.
But it is not all that easy, either. I know. Consider this: my friend, with whom I was having this discussion, she is a lesbian. Not of the angry-man-hating kind but certainly not of the could-end-up-married-to-a-man kind. And yet she revealed to me, laughingly but also seriously, that when she first got this news about Y--, she spent an hour or two asking herself, in jokingly funny but semi-mournful form, "Am I going to have to marry a MAN someday?" I understood her question immediately. It isn't a question wondering whether she might actually be straight. She is not. It is a question that takes stock of just how hard it is to live outside the oppressive dome of hetero-normativity in this society. "Am I going to have to marry a MAN someday?" I could phrase the question that way to myself, even though I might end up married, and happily, to a man someday. What the question really means is this: am I going to become part of this very structure against which I wish to assert my indifference? Is it really within my power to withstand that structure, forever?
It is a big question. It relates directly back to my meditation last week about how my friends�who are my family�will not get a family discount when they come and visit me for my birthday here in Quaker Bubble. And also what it means to be "not normal."Hetero-normativity, my friend. It is everywhere. Are you going to have to end up married to a man someday?
Remember that being married is not what is the 'enemy' here. It is possible to be a woman and marry a man without "ending up married to a man," you know? What the question, as stated, fears and wants to forestall is resignation to the inevitability to being married, and the power of marriage, and the lack of power of non-marriage. The question isn't even against marriage. It only wants there to be room, always, for other forms of kinship, friendship, relationship, love, all the things that give a life meaning. Why should there not be that room?!
It is difficult to live a life that most people will refuse to understand... a life that most people will simply not be able to see as a meaningful life. No matter how far you expand the sphere of your influence to widen the power you have to value what you love, it is unlikely that you will find yourself having escaped the larger power structures altogether. So part of your energy should be directed at what you value. And part of it will always be taken up with what you wish were otherwise. Sounds human to me. (It is even important and ethically significant that we cannot escape the material conditions of having to live together as human beings. But I digress.)
5:04 p.m. - May 01, 2006
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