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flying-elliska · 5 years

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You said it feels cool to have a specific identity but isn't that exactly why we are seen as the special snowflake generation? Not to mention wasn't the whole point to be free from stereotypes and dress however we want, love whoever we want etc? And yet there's now so many identities, labels, flags which create an implicit pressure to define yourself so you'll be included. Idk I think your french friends are right,it still feels like we're pushing people into boxes; they're just woke boxes now.

Hey anon ! Thank you for this very interesting question. I hope you’re ok with getting a mini-essay as a response (that’s kind of my brand now lmao)

So first of all, if you don’t feel like you personally need labels, you are totally valid. And so are my friends. I think you have to find out what you’re most comfortable with. It’s true that labels can be used to exclude, esp in the LGBTQ+ communities. I think we focus our activism a little bit too much on words and online stuff and media representation nowadays, as opposed to practical political action, and that’s an issue. And we focus too much on people not having the correct, latest approved terminology and labels as a way to show you’re a good person, as opposed to what people are actually doing and their lived experiences, and who is authorized to use what label and those debates often just exasperate me to the highest point. It’s like, don’t you have anything better to do ? It becomes very clique-ish, school courtyard drama at times. There should always be a place for questioning, fluidity, no labels, a place for discovery and uncertainty, shifting identifications, multiple labels at once, words changing, and questioning what place they take in our lives.

But, on the whole, I still like my labels, and I’m going to try and explain why.

Labels are words right ? They have the benefits and drawbacks of words. A rose under any other name would still smell as sweet, of course. But we are a fundamentally social species, and words are a way to create bridges between people, between our experiences. It signals that you are not alone ; it’s a way to make visible things that are usually invalidated, ostracized or just plain erased by the mainstream and the status quo. The development of a vocabulary for the queer community was what made their political struggle and pride possible ; before it was “the love that dare not speak it name”, all euphemisms and shame. It honors, too, the struggle of those who came before us ; it places us in the continuity of a history ; it says we have been here before, it gives us memory and context. Of course words are going to betray us, because they can never retranscribe the fullness, complexity and confusion of lived experience. But they’re a conversation starter ; they bring people together ; they create spaces of freedom.

I’m going to give you a personal example : a few years ago I fell in love with a girl for the first time ; after that I seriously started thinking of myself as bisexual. There had always been a thing there but because I had been mostly attracted to boys before, I’d swept it under the rug. But finding the ‘bisexual’ label made me realize - no this is a thing, this is valid, and it made me look back at all those instances in the past of having weirdly intense feelings for some of my girl friends, of being obsessed with certain actresses, etc…that back then I didn’t understand, I just thought I was weird…and I always thought that bisexuality was something that something Hollywood starlets did for attention. But finding a community behind that word that was seeking to reclaim it from the stereotypes and being proud about what it meant, it was so healing.

After that I immersed myself more in my local LGBTQ+ community ; and in particular I volunteered for the European Bisexual Convention - that one in particular was incredible because it felt so…liberating. In the general LGBTQ community, people expect you to be gay until you say otherwise. In the student association I was in, it was cool, but it was also…very normative in a way. Lots of stereotypes about how we were expected to be, what we were expected to like, behave like. So for Eurobicon, to have all of that lifted, it was amazing. And it was also so much more inclusive - of disabled, neuroatypical, transgender ppl, different body types and ethnicities, like you could feel that they had made an effort. I also met several nonbinary ppl for the first time of my life and I was like…oh wow there’s something here that feels very important and real. We shared experiences that we did not have a space before, that were specifically bisexual and that tend to go unheard in general queer spaces because they’re not part of the dominant narrative : the daily hesitations, the lack of visibility, the much higher rates of staying closeted, feeling like you are not really part of the community, but also the really cool aspects too - there was this incredible energy of fluidity too of thinking, here is a space where everyone can potentially be into everyone, there aren’t as many barriers as we usually have to think about. And there was this one party and we were all dancing and flirting in a very sweet kind of way, people of different ages and body types, gender presentations and configurations I hadn’t thought about before, a girl in a wheelchair swirling around and being treated like a queen, guys in corsets and cool butches and just some beautiful people - and there was this euphoria in the room, of recognition and kinship, and it felt so…normal, not freakish like I had been led to believe it would be. Nobody was putting on airs or trying hard or whatever, they were just being themselves. And I was like, wow, this is something I need more of in my life. And this freedom was made possible by people coming together under a certain label, recognizing that certain people have specific needs and experiences. Especially after growing up in environments that never tell you that those things are possible, finding the right label can be like coming home.

I have other labels for myself I am less public about because I don’t want to deal with the social aspect of it, or I’m like this is none of anybody’s business, or I want to give myself the time to figure it out on my own. But they’re tools for self-knowledge, they allow me to think about things, to conceptualize, to research (and lol I’m a nerd so…). And to be less hard on myself sometimes, and to stand up for myself in a ‘I know who I am and it’s okay’ kind of way. Because society tends to pathologize, ostracize or demonize the things it doesn’t understand, and labels can protect you against that.

In an ideal society maybe we wouldn’t need labels - to have a right to exist or survive, and that’s definitely a goal, but I think we would still make some, because that’s who we are as a species, we need to classify certain things in order to think about them. The problem is when those boxes become cages instead of like, beautiful pots to grow seeds in, like art or poetry. And of course deconstructing the boxes we don’t want remain important. But I don’t think we can ever be box-less, it just to me doesn’t compute.

I just wanna come back to the ‘special snowflake generation’ thing. If you don’t want labels, like I said, that’s fine. But I hate hate hate that term, and I don’t want to define myself in reaction to it. To me it’s used by a) bigots who just hate the fact that natural human diversity is becoming more recognized and discussed, and want to put us back in the artificial, stifling boxes that dynamics of power, patriarchy and imperialism have made us believe were normal when they really weren’t. And b) older people who are uncomfortable with increased levels of emotional intelligence and lability among younger generations. It’s a thing I’ve noticed over and over again ; people used to talk so much less. When they had feelings in general, or experiences out of the norm, they were taught that stuffing them down and sitting on them and repressing the shit out of them, was the noble/normal/grown up thing to do. So they did and they suffered in silence. And maybe some of them now feel bitter, or at least bewildered, by younger generations refusing to do so and inventing and or reclaiming all those new ways of talking about their experiences out in the open. And so they’re like ‘it’s too much ! you’re spoiled !’ because they want to believe that their sacrifices had a point. They don’t want to realize they could have done things differently all along. It’s very sad. But I don’t think it should be a barrier to us using them like…just as we shouldn’t refrain from using washing machines because our grandmothers suffered to wash everything in a bucket…There’s nothing entitled about wanting a better life than previous generations… And to me, having more words and more space to express myself will never be a bad thing.

#pride #labels #bisexuality #bi pride #lgbt

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