Queerness And Next System: Opening Up The Discussion

While the agenda above is no doubt a strong jumping-off point for those committed to queer liberation in a next system, it is far from a comprehensive agenda for the future of queer systems design thinkers. Even as advocates endeavor to secure the priority civil rights I’ve identified, they will be forced to contend with even thornier questions — three of which I offer up here.

Before advancing too far beyond the policy area, it’s worth first noting that attempted LGBTQ legal and policy reforms in the past have sometimes run afoul of a deeper, more insidious hurdle for engaging LGBTQ folks: the urge to categorize, label, and diagnose.

So long as a next system design includes the role for a state apparatus, LGBTQ advocates and their supporters will need to consider the ways service-administering bureaucracies interface with gender and sexual minorities. Under the institutional arrangements undergirding most contemporary welfare states, governments — by necessity — create administrative networks to determine access to benefit programs around housing, food assistance, medical care, and retirement. In doing so, administrative bureaucracies routinely impose categories of “deservingness” to differentiate between those who are deemed fit to access particular services and those who are prohibited from accessing them. While these processes strive to be value neutral, they remain predicated on a series of judgments about what type of people exist, how they express their identities, and the ways those identities conspire to render them more or less deserving of the state’s concern.

At the center of these sorts of programs is a failure on the part of administrative apparatuses to understand and account for non-normative gender and sexual expressions. As trans legal theorist Dean Spade writes in Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, a disturbingly large number of LGBTQ people face “a series of interlocking problems related to being basically unfathomable to the administrative systems that govern the distribution of life chances: housing, education, health care, identity documentation and records, employment, and public facilities” among them. The various administrative spaces inventoried by Spade have an important commonality: their continued functioning depends on the production of “stateness” created by and enforced through documentation, demographics, and quantification.

For some it may come as a surprise that identity — even in our more politically correct age — is not something one can shed easily and repurpose to fit one’s needs. As any LGBTQ person knows well,de jure equality mandating respect for queer lives does not always translate into legitimate respect for queer bodies in the public square. Challenges to validating one’s identity can become even more arduous for trans people whose gender presentation fails to live up to straight society’s expectations. For these people, functioning in society is dependent upon one’s ability to pass — that is, one’s ability to “perform” gender in a way that appeases rather than offends the sensibilities of a medical practitioner, clerk, government official, or bureaucrat that controls one’s access to a particular good or service.

As any LGBTQ person knows well, de jure equality mandating respect for queer lives does not always translate into legitimate respect for queer bodies in the public square.

For trans people seeking government benefits, this process of appeasement now includes extensive municipal, state, and federal paperwork that requires one to secure a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria (the term endorsed by the American Psychological Association and indexed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to describe a trans person’s sense of possessing a gender identity that fails to match up to the sex their were assigned at birth), and in many cases undergoing state-required gender-affirming surgeries (procedures required by many states to confirm one’s ‘transition’ to the ‘other’ sex: for trans people living under these regimes of sexual control, these requirements amount to state-sanctioned coercion regarding their bodily, reproductive, and sexual autonomy). They must also possess enough class and social status to access medical and legal establishments to find allies in the process of filing required paperwork, be able to afford to do so, and then find a willing clerk to process document changes.

This bureaucratic process of becoming “fathomable” to the administrative system often takes months if not years. Moreover, its successful completion is contingent upon the ways a handful of individuals — from nurses to doctors, from benefits clerks to lawyers — read the text that is the body of a queer or trans person. This effort to compartmentalize queer bodies into a predetermined set of gender and sexual boxes is the analog of physical and verbal violence deployed against queer and trans people to compel them to police their own behaviors, appearance, and mannerisms.

Pressure to articulate one’s identity in terms that make sense to the state is a historical artifact of the modern age. The origins of this process of “making oneself known” to the state dates back to the late 1800s and the birth of demographics as a field of social science research. With the human population beginning to skyrocket in the nineteenth century, economists began to create models to predict the ways population growth might sustain or outpace agricultural growth and the impact those shifts might have for productivity. (See, for instance, the now-disproved studies of Robert Malthus on overpopulation.) As these concerns around the economic viability of increasingly balkanized nation-states were folded into studies of military readiness, estimates of military-aged males, and the first population censuses, the modern study of demographics was born. Over time, social scientists came to use studies of “the population” to justify policies of sexual repression, eugenics, and racial oppression so as to protect the health of the social body (i.e. “the nation”).

The increasingly scientific nature of these efforts was not purely objective, however. As Spade writes, “Foucault helps us understand how producing stateness through population-level programs (including taxation, military conscription, social welfare, education, immigration) always entails the mobilization of ideas about what kind of life must be promoted and what kind of life is a threat and must be left out, rooted out, or extinguished.” Queer and trans people have long found themselves on the losing end of that formulation and have therefore grown weary of attempts by institutions — particularly institutions invested with power by the state. Hence, under the current U.S. state apparatus, it is within these administrative bureaucracies that queer people — particular trans people as well as queer and trans people of color — can expect to encounter the most difficulties in obtaining their rights.

 How can a state ensure those at the margins receive adequate care without coercing them into a particular way of being?

For those seeking to design systems that acknowledge queer and trans peoples’ unique way of world-making, the question must become not just how do we build mechanisms of service-provision that reach LGBTQ people living at the margins, but how do we do so in ways that allow for the self-definition of those in question. Theorists may present inclusivity in their work but still contend with the fact that, as Spade has it, “Trans people are told by the law, state agencies, private discriminators, and our families that we are impossible people who cannot exist, cannot be seen, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere.” My concern here around categorization isn’t so much an argument against a redistributive welfare state arrangement so much as a caution to those without a substantive critique of social democracy. My hope is that, by bringing this critique to bear on theories to be formulated under the banner of the creation of “next system” designs, proposals might come to center queer and trans voices in new and innovative ways. For now, it remains true that any political or economic system that derives its sense of economic justice from the administration of particular benefits must then contend with this difficulty: how can a state take concrete steps to ensure those at the margins receive adequate care without coercing them into a particular way of being?

 

At a purely conceptual level, one of the most interesting themes for future discussion around queerness and The Next System must be the possibility queerness introduces into systems design spaces. By mining the history of trans and queer resistance to heterosexism and cisnormativity, systems thinkers can find example after example of queer folks using a variety of theoretical and applied tactics to challenge dominant narratives of form, representation, and politics while forging resilient communities. Given the audacity of the goal of creating a next system and the hard work to ensue, it’s important that systems thinkers consider not only the desired outcomes of their work but the process of community care which will determine who we are when we finally get to our realistic utopia.

By mining the history of trans and queer resistance to heterosexism and cisnormativity, systems thinkers can find example after example of queer folks using a variety of theoretical and applied tactics to challenge dominant narratives of form, representation, and politics while forging resilient communities.

Queerness  understood as a framework to approach both activism and intellectual work is a relatively new invention dating to the early 1990s. At about this time, a generation of scholars steeped in the language of poststructuralism found themselves struggling to theorize a way out of the bind created by the explosion of global neoliberal capitalism, an unparalleled boom in information technology, and a re-emergence of cross-cutting social movement activity. Drawing on the legacy of feminist thought, the Frankfurt School of critical theory, as well as activist-inspired formulations of LGBTQ identity, these scholars coined “queer” as a sort of social-political orientation towards the world, expressed through subversion of the accepted. Not only did “queer” carry with it the potential to describe a range of gender and sexual minorities without exhaustively naming them, the term also served another purpose: the reclamation of a slur often hurled at the LGBTQ community. “Queer” quickly became an adjective used to describe a set of individuals, organizations, and communities as well as a verb used to describe the act of subverting, contesting, and thinking back against powerful, normative centers of power. As such, “queer” came to describe those who sought a liberationist agenda as compared to the assimilationist political desires of certain mainstream, monied, and disproportionately white “LGBT” organizations. By calling yourself “queer,” moreover, one signaled not only a sense of militant nonconformity but also a refusal to be constrained by existing social and political realities.

Aside from its strictly political interpretations, however, “queer” retains a clear artistic, or rather, stylistic dimension as well. For many queer people, their membership in gender and sexual minority communities constitutes the lens through which they’ve developed more encompassing political, economic, and social critiques. Their efforts to define themselves in ways that seem authentic — regardless of whether those ways elude straight society — is a testament to their creativity and commitment to imagining new ways of existing in the world. Queer people often believe that expressions of gender and sexuality are fluid, ever-changing, and that they ought to be free to self-determine the ways they exist in the world, regardless of society’s expectations. Their refusal to allow their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to become the sole means through which they engage in activism has found purchase in the multiracial, socio-economically diverse queer community.

As  CJ Cohen argues, “queer theory stands in direct contrast to the normalizing tendencies of hegemonic sexuality rooted in ideas of static, stable sexual identities and behavior.” It’s by resisting efforts to “be known” through categorization, classification, or assimilation that queer movements came to serve a vital purpose for the Left and all movements seeking collective liberation: the holders of spaces of possibility which envisioned worlds free of cis-heteropatriarchy, hierarchy, and — in many cases — capitalism. (What queerness should not be understood to do is to create space for solely individual rather than collective expression of autonomy, human flourishing, and political possibility. In “Sacrificing Queers and Other ‘Proletarian’ Artifacts,” Robin Podolsky discusses how conventional Leftists have thrown up their hands at queerness as “self-indulgent distractions from struggle” plagued by “bourgeois decadence,” instead of marginalized communities with a unique approach to social change.)

It’s by resisting efforts to “be known” through categorization, classification, or assimilation that queer movements came to serve a vital purpose for the Left and all movements seeking collective liberation.

The revolutionary personal and collective potential of queerness for connected movements for transformational change has yet to be sufficiently explored. Yet, its relevance continues to be underscored. As queer theorist Michael Warner writes, the experience of coming to terms with a queer identity requires an individual to re-invent one’s relationships to a series of institutions that structure human lives, thereby making claims on the power structures that govern one’s life:

Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body. Being queer means fighting about these issues all the time, locally and piecemeal but always with consequences. It means being able, more or less articulately, to challenge the common understanding of what gender difference means, or what the state is for, or what “health” entails, or what would define fairness, or what a good relation to the planet’s environment would be. Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queer.

Warner’s description of queer self-awareness bears quoting in its entirety not because of its exhaustive list of the ways queers must resist co-optation and dominance but in its more subtle conclusion that queer people, acknowledging their contested identity, do the daily work of making these spaces whole, of crafting their own paths through and around institutions that exist to exclude them, and in so doing create ways of living in the world that open up the possibilities for others. The fact that heterosexism can be found or implied so universally across our shared patrimony shows that the experience of living a queer life in a queer body necessitates a daily reimagination of the world not just at the abstract, structural level but in terms of immediate, individual experiences. It’s that negotiation of power dynamics both internal to a queer person and external to the world which I believe makes a queer framework instructive for and essential to the visionary, dynamic work of imagining the “next system.”