Читать книгу Freedom to Differ - Diane Helene Miller - Страница 17

Public voice and political visibility are seen as key goals in the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights. Attention to voice often parallels concerns of visibility; lesbians, for example, are both silenced and invisible as lesbians. Indeed, invisibility implies a degree of silence, and lack of voice implies hiddenness. Yet, while these are not mutually exclusive processes, neither are they completely identical. For example, many women have historically been denied a public voice, forbidden to speak publicly or to claim political influence or representation. Nevertheless, they have been far from invisible, either historically or currently. For centuries, women have been looked upon and treated as objects or possessions. Through portrayals in art, literature, law, and even scientific treatises (see Keller 1985), some groups of women have been denigrated as sex objects, while others have been idealized and put on pedestals. In both cases, they have been granted visibility yet denied an empowering voice. Certain classes of women, like children, have long been admonished to be seen and not heard. This directive communicates clearly the possibility that visibility and lack of voice can and should coexist and may even be prescribed. This juxtaposition of visibility with silence has long characterized the oppression of such women, as ubiquitous images portray them as objects to be admired and possessed rather than as human beings to be respected and valued.¹³

Conversely, women have long worked behind the scenes to contribute to important, ostensibly male accomplishments. In this way, women’s influential voices permeate our entire history, even where women themselves remain invisible. Many of women’s assigned domestic tasks, like many functions carried out by poor and working class men, are relegated to the background in a manner that obscures recognition of who has done them. Such concealment not only masks the identity or the existence of the worker; it often prevents even the awareness that work has been done.¹⁴ Women may have a voice in household decisions. They may influence or actively participate in their husband’s or boss’s career. They may participate in numerous other endeavors where they make key contributions to a variety of fields. However, their work and influence have remained largely unseen, virtually invisible. Such contributions, like the everyday work of raising children or running a household, show how women’s influence may be abundantly present while women themselves remain concealed. History abounds with examples of extraordinary women whose intellectual and artistic contributions have been and continue to be widely misidentified as the work of men. This pattern of voice without visibility signifies participation without recognition or acknowledgment, reaffirming women’s second-class status by denying their claim to their own accomplishments. In this way, voice without visibility, like visibility without voice, can be more oppressive than liberating.

This same hiddenness characterizes gay and lesbian achievements. The influence of lesbians and gay men has always been pervasive throughout our culture. Yet such participation has come at the price of our visibility. To have our voices heard, we have been forced to remain closeted as gays and lesbians. When we do achieve public visibility, we are often subjected to misrepresentations that deny our humanity, distort our words and images, and denigrate our lives and love. Both configurations—voice without visibility and visibility without voice are characteristic forms of oppression. They are familiar attributes of prejudice based on class, race, and gender as well as on sexual orientation. When we contribute our ideas and skills while being denied recognition or credit, or when we achieve visibility only to be exploited as objects, we confront the double bind that is oppression’s most telltale sign (Frye 1983).

In emphasizing voice or visibility as a key strategy for our movement, we necessarily adopt the clusters of meaning, both literal and metaphorical, associated with each choice. Visibility directs our attention to what can and what cannot be seen. The centering of vision necessarily raises the question of what is inaccessible to vision, returning us to questions of secrecy and taboo, of what must not be seen: sexual secrets. This metaphor directs our attention to bodies, to physicality, and to sexuality. A concern with visibility draws attention to questions of behavior or conduct—from political activism to “appropriately” gendered activity or dress to sexual practice itself. Emphasizing physical presence can be a strategy of resistance when large numbers of people visibly support an oppositional cause. Groups can influence the political process by demonstrating a voting bloc or by challenging oppressive institutions or practices, in ways ranging from peaceful demonstration to outright violence. Nevertheless, focusing on physical presence can also be a technique of the oppressor. Dominant groups may exaggerate the numbers of or the threat posed by a marginalized group, in order to provoke fear and hatred of its members. An emphasis on the body may be used to debase a group, by reducing it to its physical being. Oppressors thereby portray minority group members as animals, subject to physical drives unchecked by morality or reason. This strategy has been effective in many campaigns of hatred, most notably in the discourses of Nazi Germany and U.S. slavery.

Whereas visibility directs our attention to the corporeal, to bodies and actions, metaphors of voice emphasize ideology and identity, the power of ideas and stories. Our voices are instruments through which we challenge dominant beliefs when we speak of our lives in ways that contradict dominant representations. Historically, many groups of women, along with groups of minority men, have been denied the right to speak publicly. Women who are multiply marginalized are likewise multiply silenced. Even the power of self-naming has been withheld, as the dominant culture imposes gender, racial, and sexual identities without regard to the self-identification of individuals. Because of this disregard for subjective identity and the sweeping imposition of silence, voice serves as a powerful metaphor for resisting oppression. This is true not only in the field of speech communication, where an emphasis on voice would seem inevitable, but also in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies across the disciplines. The importance of finding one’s own voice and making that voice heard is widely acknowledged as a means of personal and collective empowerment among many minority groups.

Nevertheless, the value of voice remains equivocal because of its reliance on language, a tool that most often operates in the service of the dominant ideology. The categories of language are generated and given meaning within a system of patriarchal belief, and even a rebellious application of language represents an engagement with and reliance on a sexist and heterosexist conceptual framework.¹⁵ While voice is often viewed unproblematically as a liberatory concept, we must remember the ways in which our use of language may be complicit with dominant interests. Using language as a mode of resistance is a double-edged sword, because it means adopting categories and terminology that are often inherently at odds with our own experiences or beliefs. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard cautioned that “being in opposition is one of the modes of participation within a system” (Phelan 1993, 776). Indeed, to rebel against a stigmatized identity, groups are often forced to organize around that identity, defining themselves through the linguistic categories imposed by the very ideology they wish to undermine (Epstein 1987).

In identifying either voice or visibility as our key concern, we prioritize one of two senses, hearing or seeing, and we select a particular framework within which to perceive the project of liberation. Feminists as well as lesbian and gay rights advocates employ both concepts to some extent. For example, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has used the phrase “Equality through Visibility in the Media.” The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), one of the most radical groups of AIDS activists, employs the slogan “Silence = Death,” which draws on Audre Lorde’s admonition that “your silence will not protect you” (Segrest 1995).

Opponents of lesbian and gay rights often fail to distinguish between these concepts at all. The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, for example, stubbornly equates voice with visibility. It seeks to uphold its ban on gays and lesbians and to maintain the appearance of uniform heterosexuality by imposing a smothering silence that maintains invisibility. This prevents the military from having to acknowledge the many gays and lesbians who have served and currently serve in its ranks, and who include some of its most decorated soldiers. The military’s effort to equate voice, visibility, and identity—what we cannot see and do not say does not exist—illustrates the power of language to create or suppress what we come to think of simply as “reality.” It testifies, as well, to the influence of public representations on the ability of minority group members to name and define themselves. As Adrienne Rich has written, “Invisibility is not just a matter of being told to keep your private life private; it’s the attempt to fragment you, to prevent you from integrating love and work and feelings and ideas, with the empowerment that that can bring” (1986, 199—200). Such effects are only intensified for those whose history has been largely hidden not only from outsiders but even from themselves.