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Rejecting Identity, Resisting the Normative!

Discussion in 'LGBT Later in Life' started by DesertTortoise, Aug 21, 2013.

  1. DesertTortoise

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    The problem with narratives as explanations is that they force elements into regimented orders that distort the interaction of time and memory (memory being essentially, timeless), and assemble representations of “identity” patched together out of a multiplicity of unstable positions. It may be fair to say, that that is their purpose, their social role. Every story, then, is an act of violence. I think this is especially true of narratives of self-revelation—which purport to reclaim what has been repressed, healing what had been a conflicted and divided subject. This is typical of the stories we use to fabricate our own identity.

    I found myself doing exactly this, wondering how to reconcile a life time of socially normative sexual relationships with where I find myself now—openly Queer and gay. It was useful to some degree: rescuing pieces of my childhood and adolescence. But the assumption of a continuity of desire, covered over or denied, is a narrative fabrication. As though I had been playing a role false to my real nature, and only in coming out of this metaphorical closet, did I begin to realize my authentic sexual identity.

    Narrative would have us believe that the child is father to the man, when it is more the other way around. This belies the inherent multiplicity of the self, where identity may fasten to and empower one part, in effect, raising it to the level of Self-in-the-world, and then to another, and all of this in constantly evolving flux-- in relation, not simply to our past, but to everything around us.

    Narrative selects what is important to generate itself, and excludes whatever seems to weaken profluence and narrative coherence. Applying this to our lives, that which is excluded may well be as. or an even more powerful causative factor than what passes through the filter. In my case, what I had been leaving out was just that. This had little to do with overcoming unconscious censorship. It was rather, a matter of changing the story by connecting what had been discontinuous elements—creating a new constellation, a newly fabricated ‘identity.’ Here, I see the entanglement of narrative-making and identity—an inescapable dependence, such that identity is a form of closure and erasure, an eradication of the multiplicity of a more fully realized life. I want then, to reject the story I’ve been telling myself and broadcasting to others. Identity is an end-stop. A period punctuating an end-stop. For myself, that means writing QUEER in caps, and gay in lower case. I see now how the hundreds of posts I’ve written on my blog, criticizing and attacking representational, ‘realist’ fiction (along with my political radicalization) were as important a part of this process of Queering what I’d thought of as my identity, as reclaiming memories of sexual experiences with boys in my early adolescence. If there is any common thread, it’s been resistance to the Normative and its pressures on multiple fronts. The very definition of “Queer.”
     
    #1 DesertTortoise, Aug 21, 2013
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2013
  2. greatwhale

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    This is brilliant.

    Though in narrative form, with all its inherent weaknesses you do convey and highlight the broken reed we use to beat our opponents: those who claim that what we are is a choice.

    You touch upon identity: that it is a story that we compose out of the elements of history and desire that populate our past, and the story then crystallizes a new narrative of self-repression. I do indeed subscribe to that narrative, but knowing full well that it is selective and imperfect.

    I agree about the multiplicity of the self, some have argued that there are truly permanent things in our natures from birth. That children do have the nubs and shoots that will become what they are, a destiny, enmeshed in their physical and psychic beings.

    Others have argued that there is no essential core. That our narratives are like the multiple layers of an onion, no core, just shells within shells. Identity then results from the narrative into real-life, I see your point, but my point would be that narrative is a limited expression of who we are and serves, as you say, a social function.

    The "multitudes" that Whitman says he contains are real, but why reconcile them, or explain them? They just are, and if I am gay (not in capital letters, I'm quite careful about that) it's because it answers something else other than the need to explain.

    There's a kind of harmony and completeness that comes with "being" gay, that demands the narrative in the first place: it just feels right, which may seem to be a trivial thing to say, but that "good" or "quality" feeling cannot be defined, it is the ultimate mystery; creating and obliterating the division between subject (myself) and myself as object to be contemplated at a distance.
     
    #2 greatwhale, Aug 21, 2013
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2013
  3. DesertTortoise

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    That harmony and completeness (though I'm not sure about the complete part :slight_smile:, something I never experienced until I came out.
    I go over this... thinking about it, cause I wasn't repressing the homoerotic. It was there, conscious--but felt no need to think I was anything but 'straight,' until news of the death of a childhood friend unleashed a 4 month crisis. I see it now as confirmation of what I believed all along--that in this world of hierarchal power, of violently enforced divisions and catagories of identities--everything is political. What we experience around us, enters us, shapes our inner community. What this crisis amounted to--was a power shift, an interior revolution. The straight part was fused to the hierarchal order--even while not being aware of it, the crisis was like a street battle with the oppressed multiplicty rising up and taking on the Normative police force. Barracades and burning cars.... and then it was over. There were no cops... I had made them up and they vanished when I no longer felt the need to have One Identity in command... the Queering of my self.
    I'm happy--and in my own skin--in a way completely new to me.
     
  4. greatwhale

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    Only Old Walt Whitman himself could answer this (Part 51 Song of Myself):

    The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
    And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

    Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
    Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
    (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

    I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
    Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
    Who wishes to walk with me?

    Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?