Why Pull The Trigger? Ctd

Adding to the theme of a recent thread, a reader wants to see more “feminists against dwelling on trauma, triggering”:

Here’s an essay by a famous queer feminist (Jack Halberstam, formerly Judith) that is getting a lot of positive attention on Facebook and Twitter that I think you should read. It’s an updated argument similar to the one Wendy Brown made in her very popular 1995 academic book, States of Injury, arguing that left identity politics should be very cautious about grounding itself in past harms. (We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and the argument against framing ourselves as victims is a very well known and widely embraced one – on feminist terms – and has been at least as long as I’ve been in academia. I’m a tenured Women’s Studies professor at a major research university now.)

Anyway, I think it might make a difference to see that arguments like this are popular (though still contested, of course, which is fine) and that feminist and queer scholars have a long tradition of querying the political and theoretical consequences of claiming victimization.

From Halberstam’s essay:

Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco:

“Trannyshack,” and arguments ensued about whether the word “tranny” should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is “angered by this trifling bullshit.” Bond reminded readers that many people are “delighted to be trannies” and not delighted to be shamed into silence by the “word police.” Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!

In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a “roman.” In a brave “coming out” speech, he says: “I’m not a roman mum, I’m a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I’m kosher mum, I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!