Melancholia and Moralism

Just finished reading Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, by Douglas Crimp (2002, The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.

This is a series of essays Crimp has written, from 1987 through to 2002. Crimp was sexually very active in New York City during the 1970s and early 80s, but remained HIV negative until very recently. He was also a founding member of ACT-UP and Sex Panic! and these essays confront the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 80s and early 90s. He critiques the false opposition between "so-called ordinary homosexuals and a marginal group of sex radicals" (p. 298) and mourns the denigration of gay culture because of the continuing spread of HIV/AIDS.

In light of his own recent seroconversion, he reflects about the illusion of safety and the very real possibility that some will contract the disease, no matter how well informed and responsible they may try to be. I really like this paragraph:

"How might queer theory help us [accept the possibility, even the inevitabily, that some of us will fail]? How does saying that we are human differ from the conservative journalists' traditional humanist view that we are no different from anyone else save for whom we choose to love? The answer to this question is as complicated and disputed as all the work of queer theory occupying the sehlves of our university libraries. But I will attempt to shorten the answer to a few sentences. Queer theory, like much recent postmodern theory, tells us that humanity is not a unversal and natural condition of being but a contingent and cultural construction of historical, social, linguistic, and psychic forces. Knowing this, queer theory also knows the political urgency of understanding how and why we are denied our humanity within and through those very forces. The abjection of homosexuality is not a simple matter of ignorance to be overcome with time, education, and "progress', but a deep-seated psychic mechanism central to the construction of normative subjectivity and thus of social cohesion. Armored with this understanding, we can protect against sacrificing our humanity in the very act of struggling to get it recognized, or purchasing it at the cost of another's humanity, which is the perilous ethical cost of accepting the regimes of the normal. What queer theory has yet to learn is no less urgent: how do we make what we know knowable to legions?"

And what makes Crimp think the legions would have any interest in knowing it? But I agree with him, insofar as there does seem to be an attempt to gain the acceptance of the heteronormative culture by stressing that, fundamentally, we are no different. It is our difference that I celebrate and aspire to. I often feel disappointed that my own lifestyle probably looks so "normal" except for the gender of my partner, and wonder if I am missing the true liberatory potential available to me in this culture. I like to think that how we do our monogamy is profoundly different to how it was done in my heterosexual marriage. That we do not feel we own each other's bodies or allegiances, that our monofidelity is freely chosen on a daily basis, not imposed on us by fear or duty, and always retains the potential to be renegotiated or reinterpreted.

I think that what the twenty-first century is teaching us is that society will not disintegrate if we embrace difference, that it is not social diversity that threatens social cohesion, but rather the struggles for power and domination that characterise the effort to impose a normative subjectivity on any social group. True social cohesion can only come when each individual's rights to self determination are respected and protected. Social cohesion is more like the fluid bonds between water molucules than some kind of rigid crystal structure. Queer theory does at least allow for the flow of identity - solution, absorption, transformation.