Sunday, April 15, 2012

On internalized oppressiveness [with edits]

"The thing about patriarchy -isms of all varieties is that individual men, gay and straight, persons whom are put in positions of privilege by the existence of that -ism are often really wonderful people who you love deeply, but they have internalized some really poisonous shit. So every once in a while they say or do something that really shakes you because you’re no longer totally certain they see you as a human being, and you feel totally disempowered to explain that to them."
You might ask, why the edits? Don't I recognize patriarchy as a valid thing to be fought against? (Of course. That's a fight I will join any day, with certain parameters.) Do I have a problem with feminist statements? (Not as a rule, though there are often problems with feminist statements.) Do I have to make everything about race? Can't some things just be about gender? (1. Broadening the statement doesn't necessarily make it about race. There is classism, ableism, cissism, heteronormativism, and basically an -ism for every extant social category, though X-centrism may not have a recognized name as of yet. 2. Can water be just about hydrogen? Can the Earth be just about the land? Can education be just about schooling? Can a person be just about one of their bajillion social categories? No. Just no.) Well then why?
Because so many parts of me felt validated by this statement. Yes, gender was a part of my response, but so was race, so was class, so was cultural capital, so was sexual activeness, so were various little facts of my daily existence that become addressed in problematic ways in various social interactions. I applaud its creator for addressing the invisibility-rendering-ness of patriarchy so poignantly, but I felt like the levels of resonance I felt with the statement meant that it deserved expansion.
Does my expansion come at the cost of poignancy, though? Does broadening statements like these to target multiple arenas of oppression take away some of their force?  

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