Horse and Carriage again

My dear friend Manky posted this link on FB recently along with Helen Razors recent article about the 'trash the dress' trend in big weddings lately. the jist of both being that Marriage is an institution already trashed by hetties, so there's nothing to lose in queers being allowed to share the party.

Manky has also shared articles which criticise the massive amounts of pink cashola and queer energy directed towards marriage equality campaigns. And it's a really toughie, because pink dollar politics aren't really radical, but dodgy, assimilationist and ultimately restrict queer activism to a 'tolerance' model, whereby the best we hope for is to be assimilated into hettie society rather than explore the really radical possibilities of queerness to challenge the really crapola basis of straight capitalist society which ties love and desire into a binarised model of gender and a privatised model of property ownership. Queerness fucks with both.

However, while I have a right on radical analysis of such things, I'm still negotiating how that works with the way I am in the world. Maybe the points I'm going to note below merely prove this analysis right, that Queer Marriage is merely a means to enable tolerance of queerness, and it's containment within hettie society.



The above shot is of the splendiferous cake that my mate Elyss made for our wedding last month.

I have many strong personal reasons for marrying the woman of my dreams. Like many queers in coupled unions and in polyamorous collectives we are passionately in love and committed to each other and our relationship. We also have a rapidly diminishing family unit consisting of one surviving parent (mine) as well as some cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides.

We had a wonderful ceremony in the garden with about 100 people present, including about 12 biological relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins). We were both given away by non-related older female friends, and we both had a range of chosen families of various ages and genders. For me this isn't a particularly queer thing, as my closest friends, the ones I call 'family' are straight. It is feminist thing though - because it derives from a particularly feminised experience of family - or alternative families that women are forced to develop when they break from the family structure.Both of us grew up with single mothers so we were both brought up by a network of family friends, and both of us have maintained and developed various non-biological families since. My Mum was too sick to attend so she sent a speech mentioning the biological family of Renaissance Girl and (typically) missing the point of who the celebration was for, and about.

Getting married this time was for me, a way of publicly and privately acknowledging our relationship as the foundation of our adult lives and the centre of the kinship networks of friends that we have chosen and continue to choose to be a part of our lives. Maybe I lack imagination, but I can't think of any other way to make such a firm public statement about who we are and how we 'do' our family, or make it, or how they make and constitute the fabric of our lives. It was also a significant healing moment as many of Renaissance Girl's mothers friends were able to come and enjoy the garden and home of Renaissance girl's recently deceased mother. Now it is a truth rarely told that death doesn't bring people together, but often drives them apart. people really don't know what to do with their own grief, and have no idea how to 'support' someone else who is grieving.

Maybe it's the Irish in my that thinks that if you want to bring people together it's better to hold a big party rather than a big funeral, but I also believe that grief releases a lot of love, and there has to be a space for that to be expressed in a positive and creative way. Asking people to make food or create a contribution to the wedding meant that we had a day that was profoundly social, in that it was something socially created and shared among a group of people. We had the world's best wedding cake, a wonderful CD, incredible food, a great sound system and playlist, a beautiful wedding album, plants, cookbooks, portraits, photographs and lots and lots of other things made by people we know and love, and who showed us they loved us.

The above is all easily palatable and I have no political quandaries about what we did, or how, or why.

It's been very weird though to realise just how 'straightening' marriage is in the real world. "I'm getting married" made coming out at work incredibly easy. A few of my colleagues blushed when I clarified that my betrothed was a woman rather than a man, but they all chipped in and gave us a wedding present. (I really love my workplace). Marriage is something that lots of people can share and speak about. the wedding rituals and the mention of a spouse all act to ensure that my identity at work is as a fully fledged adult and functioning member of adult society. As a single 'out' lesbian I would be aberrant, with the slippery status of queer desire not containable within the heteronormative conventions of straight socialising. My gender makes it easier because I am 'womanly' at work - I'm not really a 'femme', but I'm certainly not butch, and I do easily pass as straight in straight society. So by being married, my queerness is contentedly eunuchised, and I become a working wife. The fact that I am a wife with a wife shrinks into a minor detail.

While I criticise this situation, in reality it's a great relief and makes my life easier. Marriage is a nice easy bridge into the straight world, and it creates a nice friendly space where straights get to be 'right on' and tolerant, and queers get to be palatable and contained and integrated, rather than single and slippery and seductive.

Is this what I want?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and chewing my nails, and.... I think that actually the question is not so much about queers versus straights, but a broader question of feminism. the thing that really shat me about interdependent relationships recognition was that it was based on a profoundly anti-feminist model of union - where ALL property and finances were completely merged. It was FUCKED!

I have a fantasy that Renaissance Wife and I will maintain our financial independence and continue to split bills and partake in groceries and household duties in a way that respects both our needs to remain as two distinct adults. We share our lives and our love, but we don't own each other and don't intend to. I believe that the feminist model of relationships that refuses the feminisation and disenfranchisement of one member of the relationship for the benefit of the other is a good one. Feminists are forced to create kinship structures because to be isolated in the world as a single woman or a single mother without the crutch of a masculine 'half' (actual or imagined) is almost unbearable. Maybe all the queer marriage movement needs is a strong dose of feminism. Maybe all the world needs is a feminist movement again. where did we all go?

Bastille Day

Today I was part of a fine mob that strode the streets for the sake of citizenship, respect, human rights and land rights. Instead of truckking in down to CAPITAL - we decided to all catch an extra 3 hours post-kooky sleep and head over to the block.

Inner west trains weren't running so I took shanks pony through the sunny barrio down to redfern - and stood around nervously waiting for the posse to show, wondering why the only other honkies were rag weilding trots and sleep deprived deviants....

OK - I know about the latter - I've waxed lyrical on the discrete powers of a mrginal life - a contingent slippery impossible existence - how it promotes a move towards the life affirming desires and death defying activism.

I don't want to define kooris and queers according to some negative slave-like 'alterity' type blanket. I don't think we are 'united in our oppression' and I don't believe that our 'oppression' can be compared - in fact I think it is obscene to do so. sitting in bed with my ADSL, angsting over my PhD - waxing lyrical about my funky friends I met either at university or on a university funded international research tour - REALLY cannot be compared to the monstrous state of affairs experienced daily by aboriginal australians - either as fukked over members of the stolen generations or as currently being fukked over members of remote communities.

Also the ontology of queerness is about individual movement, social mobility (or motility) - the basis of being able to move through and remake space according to desire and connection - whereas the ontology of indiegeneity is about having access and connection to LAND - a specific relationship to very specific spaces that link blood, bodies, memory and desire - and how that is constanty fought for against the colonising push to evacuate land from people, history and memory and turn it into a free floating speculative signifier: mining 'investment' or tourist dollars or 'real estate' - all as slippery and seductive as my own fantastic flights between genders, bodies and becomings.

so i don't want to pretend that I can evade the problematic condition of my own whiteness, my own social privilege and the type of subjectivity in which I, as someone socially mobile, sexually fluid and and intellectually active am implicated.My position, however crusty and critical - is still 'avant-garde' -and I am part of the thin edge of the beige wedge that gentrifies areas like Redfern and Spewtown and disperses the 'marginal' or non recuperable populations... like indigenous people... who belong to and are and own the land.

Im interested in how my own condition of mobility, movement, of blighty diasporic becoming can engage with the condition of fixity, belonging, custodianship of space. i'm interested in how my own mad psychogeographies of NEVER being here Of marching on bastille day - not in 1789 but in 2007 and not in paris but in redfern, and amongst people still unable to deal with the events of 1788, but using the language of 1789: good hold humanitarianism 101 - to stare down neocapitalist monstrosity in the face - can actually produce something DIFFERENT, and maybe better.

so - what I'd say - or guess at what united me today was hearing the brilliance and power of the aboriginal speakers. Of hearing really cogent political analysis, really well researched FACTS and sympathetic engaged analysis of the 'little children are sacred' report and how it is being used as a political football by Howard (and Rudd). And witnessing the fact that for the many indigenous people that are fukked over and fukked up - there are many who continue to be brave and wise and brilliant.

And you won't see any of it in the herald, or on the ABC or anywhere mainstream - that seems to delight in giving bad news that makes people feel even more powerless and isolated and silent than we actually are.

so this is a funny segueing link between the personal and the political - because I WENT along - not only as part of a civic gesture of solidarity and of protest - but to be reminded that indigenous australia is still alive, kicking dancing, speaking, acting and thinking critically about land, sovereignty, human rights and whatever it is this nation could be apart from an increasingly viscous little penal colony.