POLITICAL MESSAGE

UNAVOIDABLY INTERTWINED

We recognize that we exist not only as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people; we exist not only as individuals with marginalized sexual and gender identities, although our actions are often reduced to them. We exist as individuals within a tapestry of intertwined identities and positions - as social actors whose actions go beyond the identities we take up as our own, as well as the positions that are imposed on us. As such, we exist and remain only interwoven with other people, social groups, and social structures, all of which leave traces and inscriptions in and on our bodies.

These social traces and inscriptions are often marked by asymmetry and violence. This violence and asymmetry is considered legitimate due to our ‘unsuccessful’ fulfilment of social demands for more normalcy, privacy, silence, non-visibility, and political compromise in the name of being considerate and ‘respectful’ of the dominant social order that excludes us and merely rations us political table scraps. Such demands for ‘something more’ are in reality demands for something less – less political action; less political demand; less vocalization; less existence. Pushing for something less forms a limited political horizon, bound by already-existing and framed by the weight of the history of oppression. Something less must not satiate us; it demands the isolation of a movement - an isolation which is already compromised, subordinated, and domesticated by social power relations that do not function based independently on sexual and/or gender identity, but rather within the greater complexities of intersections: we are LGBTIQ+ people, who are homeless, unemployed, non-white, disabled, elderly, poor, etc.

Demands for a bit less (of us, our political actions) requires overlooking the fact that as social actors, we are inevitably intertwined and that we can effectively fight the systems of exclusion as they arise and sustain themselves - in the interconnectedness of the social systems, institutions, groups, and ourselves. Thus, the rejection and transcendence of a bit less encompasses much more than just fighting oppression on the basis of gender and sexual identities. In fact, this rejection is a grander fight against the social mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion, and their reproduction on the basis of class, age, skin colour, nationality/ethnicity, etc. - aspects which are often presented as less relevant or even irrelevant when it comes to the LGBTIQ+ movement and community.

These struggles are ours, and not only due to the heterogeneity of LGBTIQ+ persons and its very own  exclusionary social systems. The intertwinement and relationality of us as social actors demand from us the recognition of the same characteristics in our struggles: their intersectionalities and intertwinements.  Namely, various forms of marginalization enforce and stabilize the existing social order by mutually strengthening, consolidating, and intensifying one another. Recognition of such interconnectedness is a grounding call to solidarity, the aim of which is not to gain a place in the ‘universal’ (if and when the universal is conceived in complicity to dominant norms of whiteness, maleness, middle class-ness, etc), but to establish collectives capable of recognizing the particularities of social groups, and thus, of destabilizing dominant constructions of what is deemed normal, right, and possible. It is a call for solidarity that does not come at the price and the expense of particularities.

We reject the bit less that is expected of us and imposed by society in the name of the never-ending and never-sufficient assimilation in which we disappear. We reject being complicit in various exclusionary social systems that expect us to act one-dimensionally and even in opposition to other marginalized social groups.

We want and demand something more, a demand which recognizes the insufficiency of political crumbs and reaches further by opening up and expanding the political horizon into previously silenced and suppressed alternatives of actions, politics, and coalitions. Something more begins to fall within our reach when we recognise the unavoidability of intertwinement, on the basis of which solidarity, worthy of its name - that is to say, solidarity which is not occasional and one-sided, but rather reciprocal - solidarity, which is not merely a starting point of political action, but also its continuation – can be built.

For Pride Parade
Nina Perger