Theory alert: you have been warned.
According to Foucault (1980), power--in the social or communal sense--is acquired or maintained by various means. These are often built-in to the structures of society, particularly in the realm of knowledge production: where information and knowledge are transacted through various means. In 1700, this meant universities, books and newspapers. In 2003, the realm of knowledge production is much broader and deeper--and in some respects more democratic. More folks can read and write; new technologies like personal computing, the 'Net and photocopying make making knowledge product much more accessible than even 40 years ago.
Still, some forms of production have a greater impact. The sum total of all blogs is formidable; the impact of any one blog (yes, even
RuPaul's blog) I would posit as inconsequential. Mass media--print news, magazines, TV and the web sites of these sorts of knowledge industries still dominate knowledge dissemination. Their power and authority--what Foucault called “regimes of thought” ( p.81--seek to transgress all institutional and organizational bounds in their denunciation (or silencing) of other views. They represent a sort of discursive hegemony: alternate voices are marginal. Or silenced, if recent trends in communications deregulation are any indicator--as be the decline of public broadcasting. And the regime of thought never seems to find someone who is ostensibly of a marginal or stigmatized community to speak through their means, though rarely in any sort of substantive challenge to the discursive hegemony of the day. Can anyone say Andrew Sullivan? I knew you could...
But there is resistance, and counter-discourse--and there always has been. Local knowledge has been around as long as people have whispered behind the back of the master. These local knowledges, though they often have been considered as important and valuable as the regime of thought's take on things, are too often “subjugated knowledges, (which represent) a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their tasks or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy” (p. 83). Queer knowledge most definitely qualifies as subjugated knowledge. I would argue that bear knowledge, trans knowledge, and all other sub-sets of queer knowledge are subsequently more marginal in the mainstream.
Which isn't all bad: by remaining local we get to set our own terms, work based on what's important
right here, right now. Except that we're not left alone for long. And sometimes we get yanked into the hegemonic discourses we seek to avoid. And it can very quickly become sink or swim.
If we decide to try and make our local knowledge meaningful and valued by society at-large. Something I don't think is altogether necessary--and can often cause dissonance and strife among our own. Hence recent (and not recent) diatribes and pontifications on what is a bear, who is a bear, what is the purpose of bear-ness, and why being not-a-bear is a discursively superior position. The result? Division, confusion, rancour and hurt.
And who wins? Not us my friends, not us...
Who's the real enemy? Whom should we be fighting?Foucault, M. (1980b). Two Lectures. In P. Rabinow (Ed.),
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (pp. 78-108). Toronto: Random House Canada.
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querrelle. gotta have him included!
