Vogue Dissent

I am angry

I am angry that I am to feel guilty when someone exercises violence over me. I am angry that I am supposed to defer to their “knowledge” and their “authoritative credentials” that I lack because those credentials are never assumed to mean that they inform and conform my subalternity. I am angry that I am to validate the knowledge that actively seeks to disempower me, when that knowledge was produced by academics of white privilege and positions that shape and create policy. And I am angry that if I challenge this I am considered “oppressive”. I am supposed to accept that this knowledge is valid by virtue of it being created in places of authority I lack. And most of all, I am angry because I have been shaped to feel guilty about making others uncomfortable.

When a white academic informed by the politics of Empire like Wendy Brown writes in Wounded Attachments:

What this essay is not is a partisan position in the argument about the virtues and vices of a contemporary political formation called “identity politics,”

and then:

and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated,

“people of color” as separate from all the other. Not lesbians of color or gays of color or women of color. “people of color” as a unified category, “the blob of an undefined underclass”.

Yet, I am supposed to accept her a priori exoneration. Because she says so, I am not to read her paper as a violent expression of Empire and a further expansion of white supremacy. It is “not” because the author says so. And any reading that implicates my subalternity and challenges that statement is invalid because of places of authority?

And I am angry that this is the way knowledge is produced. Something as precious and necessary and vital is produced behind closed doors where it cannot be interpellated. And then placed behind paid walls where only the few have access while those who dare share it outside the approved ways can be taken to court for crimes against copyright. Even though that same knowledge will be used against them to de-authorize them further. Because such is the hierarchical nature of this mode of production.

Take all that white queer theory and swallow it whole. Get an indigestion of whiteness and hegemony. And maybe while your gastric juices are doing their work and you feel bloated and begin to fart because of the decomposed nature of what is perpetuated as “knowledge”, be aware of how said knowledge is used to execute violence. How these theories are not informed by queerness but by whiteness and Empire.