Speaking Out.

This constitutes a redrafted form of a piece of writing I had considered worthless. That I had considered it worthless speaks of the very oppressive systems which limit our ability to speak of ourselves within an intersectional framework. Our selves are of no worth within an academic framework which seeks to silence us and to take upon itself the model of the 'correct' way to theorise.

Speaking out is an act of rebellion.

Why read theory when we are hungry: Reading with and through bell hooks and Hélène Cixous.

This is a narrative of my first exposures to critical theory. This is not a narrative confined to academic settings. This is a narrative which is set on trains, in the waiting rooms of Gender Identity Clinics and in dark corners of public houses which constituted some of the few places where I and those like me where told explicitly that we where safe. This is a narrative of theory as liberation, as the measuring out of my (and other’s) confinement and the search for a way out.

In ‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom’ bell hooks[1] states that ‘I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location of healing.’ (Hooks 1994, 59) I was desperate, I was hurting and I came to theory and found a way to understand the forms of violence that surrounded me. I found in theory a way to become the subject of my own analysis.[2] Theory allowed me to move beyond the condition of ‘living under the sign of the ‘unliveable’ (Butler 1993, xiii) and to create a space in which I could be, in which I could live.

‘The pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living.’

Theory gave me the tools to fashion an identity which stood in opposition to that forced on me as a Genderqueer person, an identity enforced by medical gatekeepers who withheld treatment for those who were not deemed to be performing their gender properly. Butler allowed me to understand that gender is an ontology without a core, an ontology sustained through its performance, a series of ‘fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.’ (Butler 1990, 185) I was being asked to enact and enforce a boundary which constituted me as other, as non-subject. Butler gave me a way to form an identity which forsook ‘a sense of ‘the normal’ (Butler 1990, 189) to ask ‘what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself’ (Butler 1990, 189) and to enact my own subversive performance of gender.

For people living with oppression theory becomes not an abstract tool but a way to ‘name our pain and to theorise from that location.’ (hooks 1994) To read in hooks of a woman who found release in theory and to tell hooks that before this point ‘there has been so much hurt in me’ (hooks 1994, 73) is to see myself finding a model for not only the pain but the radical possibilities that had been formulating within myself.

To reiterate: theory gave me the tools which allowed me to understand that I was living within a system of oppression and the tools to critique these systems, to escape their control and to form a stable sense of self which sits in opposition to them. Theory gave me life.

There is a tension in the examination of my own relationship to theory. This tension arises when moving from a discussion of self to a discussion of others. A critical understanding which frees me but not others fails to fulfil the ‘radical requirement’ (Freire 2017, 24) Freire identifies as a central component to liberation, the need for the systems that create oppression to be overthrown.[3] This is something I have tried to do in my life, the real lesson of critical theory, and something that I knew before I read Freire. As bell hooks states: ‘When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice’ (hooks 1994, 61) the separation of theory and praxis only exists if we see theory as a discrete process which comes into being by the process of naming and learning[4] (hooks 1994, 61/62) but, as Cixous makes plain ‘We are in the burning bush. We are born in the burning bush…We are nailed fast by events.’ (Cixous 2005, xvi) To exist within systems of oppression is to be ensnared with or without recourse to theory. Theory is not a practice which occurs within academia and which academics must somehow find a way to translate into action out with the academy, it is a process and a way of being which liberates us as both individuals and as a collective. It is a process and a way of being which allows us to see that we are constructed and to call to those who would oppress us and demand that they acknowledge ‘the seams and sutures in yourself.’ (Stryker 2011, 86)

[1] In both the body of the text of this chapter and in my references I have chosen to respect the form bell hooks asks for her name to be written. I feel that there is a degree to which I must apologise for being a white academic using her writing without reference to the community she specifically addresses. This would be compounded by misrepresenting her identity.

[2] ‘This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’ but who form the constructive outside to the domain of the subject.’ (Butler 1993, xiii)

[3] I am reminded of an act of radical liberation pedagogy. I was unemployed and applied for a temporary loan while waiting on benefits, knowing I would spend hours in this process I took a copy of ‘Gender Trouble’ with me to read again. While waiting with a group of women one asked what I was reading and when I told her she asked what it was about. I explained Butler’s theories, and this sparked a truly radical conversation which resulted in several of them women vowing to change how they brought up their children in response to Butler’s work. Theory is a tool of the oppressed to achieve liberation and that ‘any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public (hooks 1994, 64)

[4] Of importance here is hooks’ observation that the act of naming is a privileged act which ‘may obscure what is really taking place’ and can be said to constitute part of the structure of white supremacy. (hooks 1994, 62-63)

References:

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London; Routledge Classics.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London; Routledge Classics.

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics.

Freire, P. (2017) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from the Portuguese by M. B. Ramos. UK: Penguin Modern Classics.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York and London; Routledge.

Stryker, S. (2011) My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning Nr 3(4), pp. 83-96