Privilege: What is it and How do you Keep it in Check?

Check your Privilege:

What does it mean when someone remarks on your ‘privilege’ or asks you to ‘check your privilege’? Privilege in this instance refers to the multiple ways that institutions and society automatically favor you as a result of your race, class, gender, sexuality and other classifications based on systems of oppression. It is not about you personally but about the advantages you may have over others because of a history of institutional power and subjugation of certain communities or groups of people.

This doesn’t mean that you haven’t suffered or experienced disadvantages or particular forms of systematic violence in life. It just means that in specific instances, we all are more privileged than some depending on the topic at hand and it is important to accept this, just listen to, and understand those that have experience and lived a form of systematic violence that we have not. 

Buzzfeed has provided a simplified test to understand where you fall on the spectrum and why:

How Privileged Are You?

Homonationalism and the Creation of “Executive LGBT”

Homonationalism

Jasbir Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times introduces readers to the notion of homonationalism which is a coupling of Lisa Duggan’s Homonormativity. Homonationalism however differs in that it is poststructural critique of nationalism and develops a conceptual framework to analyze and understand how “acceptance” and “tolerance” of lesbians and gay men becomes the litmus test for neoliberal economic and racial practices in the West and a way of rereading national sovereignty, sexual rights, and democracy in the 21st century.

Further Reading:

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007). See also her collected writings at http://www.jasbirpuar.com/.

No Homonationalism – A Collection of Active Writings and Resources for Organic Intellectuals

Gay Rights as Human Rights: Pinkwashing Homonationalism

Problematic Proximities, Or why Critiques of “Gay Imperialism” Matter

Homonormativity

Homonormativity

Homonormativity was first coined by Lisa Duggan in her work The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism where she describes “the new homonormativity – it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions [such as gay marriage or the right to serve openly in the military] – but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatised, depoliticized culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan).

Further Reading:

Duggan, Lisa – The New Homonormativity: the Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism

Mapping US Homonormatives

Homonormativity, Homonationalism and the ‘Other’

Gender Trouble: Performativity and Creating Your Gender

Gender Performativity

Post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler first used the term gender performativity in her work Gender Trouble (1990). Butler states that gender, which is a socially constructed idea, is a continuous performance of the mythical notions of what constitutes male and female gender identities. Butler points out that “the body is only known through its gendered appearance”, and therefore gender performativity is the incessant reenactment of the gendered appearance, experience, and personal identification of it (406).

Further Reading:

Your Behaviour Creates Your Gender

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Writing on the Body. Ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 401-417. Print.

Biopower & Biopolitics

Biopower and Biopolitics

The French philosopher, social theorist and historian Michel Foucault, is concerned with how modern society is controlled, subjugated and regulated through “biopower”. Biopower is a complex social theory that examines the strategies and mechanisms by which society is organized and managed through an authoritative regime of power, knowledge, and systems of subjugation. Power is not only something that an elite few exercise over the rest of society. Power is rather decentralized, invisible and diffused through all layers of society so that our very sense of self, our relationships and actions are a product of its force.

Foucault famously juxtapositioned what we know to be “sovereign power” against the notion of biopolitics. Biopolitics, as he defined it, is understood as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”

Further Reading:

BioPolitics: An Overview

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Keeping Russia Closeted

Intersectionality: How’s it all Connected?

What is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a concept coined by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It is commonly used in critical theory to illustrate how different forms of discriminationatory and oppressive institutions (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism, ableism, xenophobia, etc..) are interconnected and and cannot be analyzed and examined in vacuum of each other. It is a methodology of critical thought that examines “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations” (McCall 2005).

Further Reading:

Mapping the Margins, Kimberlé Crenshaw

Intersectionality: A Tool for Gender and Economic Justice

Gender and Humanitarian Issues

On ‘gay conditionality’, imperial power and queer liberation: Rahul Rao