A Dyke A Broad #33
The Bogus Idea of Progress, Selling Out the Avengers, and More, Much More
Hello from Paris!
The city’s cafe terraces and movie theaters have finally opened up again. Which is great if you’re safely vaccinated and marinated, and don’t mind sipping your beer under an umbrella wearing a wooly sweater.
For me, it’s a tepid meh until I’m completely marinated in Pfizer, and there’s sunshine for more than a 15-minute stretch between showers. Still, on the first day of the opening, people were practically weeping over their morning lattes. At night, in places with better weather, the crowds were rambunctious, drunk and out of control, burning a car instead of going home at the 9 p.m. curfew. If that’s how it’s gonna go, we’ll see how long the downturn in infections lasts.
More and more I believe there’s no such thing as progress, only whatever comes next. Which may or may not be better.
On the Delusion of Progress
A couple years ago I found this teeny tiny book in a Paris bookstore reprinting Karl Marx’s essay on the Civil War in France, but the thing that impressed me, besides the discovery that in it Marx sounded more like a blogger than the turgid, unreadable (for me) theoretician of Das Kapital, was that a quick bio search online revealed the unexpected information that there had been a temporarily successful movement for Jewish civil rights in the Austro-Hungarian empire when it looked like Anti-Semitism was finally on its way out.
Before that I’d had the vague, very vague, ahistorical impression that after their expulsion from Spain and the Inquisition in 1492, the fate of the Jewish people had continued in an uninterrupted downward trajectory until the Holocaust during World War II.
That was the point I actually started to think that history wasn’t like an arc towards progress and justice after all, but a zigzaggy mountain range of a heartbeat monitor going up and up and down and up and down and down and down until the patient expires.
Right now, we’re only at the apex of what looks like an LGBT movement, but is really just a roiling soup of corporate interests. Ordinary homos and trans folk left horribly behind.
An example from just last week—I was shocked to learn the Gap had come out with a Lesbian Avenger tee-shirt sporting the bomb logo on the front, and a brief history on the back.
That wasn’t the worst. The worst was when I learned that two former Avengers—who, if I recall, were EXTREMELY vocal back in the day criticizing all the LGBT institutions for getting fat and corrupted by corporate money—were the ones who actually signed a contract with the Gap licensing the logo.
Their logic? It will share the history of the Lesbian Avengers. And send a few thousand to the Lesbian Herstory Archive. (Which also used to not accept corporate money.)
The two had no reservations at all about what it might mean for a baby dyke to learn about the Lesbian Avengers on the back of a giant, for-profit corporation’s tee-shirt using us to burnish their faux “progressive” credentials. Especially when there are few—if any— legit projects in the U.S. taking action for dykes and only dykes, and where good ole lezzies are in charge of how their needs and identities are defined and presented. Most organizations have gotten side-tracked—often in service of funders’ desires for laundry list projects that somehow always leave dykes behind. And many have been totally hijacked by corporate interests that see LGBT folk as merchandise or pinkwashers supreme. Fuck everyone.
What’s the purpose of history anyway? I started the project documenting the Avengers and sharing activist resources because I hated how easily lesbians were erased, but mostly because I hoped young dykes would benefit from having role models, and by seeing that dyke activism was possible, would start their own projects.
(I guess this is as good a time as any to announce the re-release of the Lesbian Avenger Handbook. Pre-order yours today. )
And some days I feel it’s been worth it. That dykes have benefited from my work. Other times I’m sure I’m a delusional idiot who’s wasted her life just providing more fodder for master’s theses on Nineties activists or dyke activists or whatever. Which will lead to what? A dissertation? A post-doctorate shoved into an archive somewhere?
Nineties activists—ha!
Speaking of the devil, last week, too, I got asked whether or not my Nineties dyke perspective and a generational divide had anything to do with my critiques of The Kids These Days and gender issues.
At first, I was taken aback. But after turning down Kurt Cobain on my cassette player, and running my hand through my buzzed Sinead O’Connoresque, doo, I decided it was an interesting question, as long as we accept from the beginning that new or different doesn’t necessarily mean better—as I said before. While elders are not automatically wise, young people are not automatically forward-thinking.
And it is true that age and experience can make us seem foreign to each other, and we may have different lenses to view the world, different frameworks, different tools. Or not. Other things we share. We’re all affected, for instance, by how technology is changing at a rapid pace.
There’s so much to think about. So much really that as I began to write about a few of the differences that seem to characterize and shape the last few generations, what I’d imagined as a quick newsletter turned into notes for an enormous essay that you’ll have the pleasure (or misfortune) to read bit by bit in the coming weeks.
In short, this is just a teaser. Like the tweet below. Which immediately appeared—because Twitter and Google can read your mind, especially now that I’ve had my first dose of vaccine, and we all know they use it to implant tracking devices. Don’t worry. I’m kidding. Or am I?
At any rate, I found it awfully funny. But is it true?
I have thoughts. Many thoughts about labels. That you will read soon. Maybe even before next week.
Until then,
Very disgruntledly and soggily yours,