A Stoplight Between Blood-Curdling Fantasy and a Compulsory Reality

Aolun Zhan

ENL 186 - Paper Topic 1

11/01/10

A Stoplight Between Blood-curdling Fantasy and a Compulsory Reality

In today's society people are constantly crossing a street dictated by a stoplight that governs the passage between their imaginary desires for acceptance and a compulsory reality full of systemic social inequality. Society is becoming increasingly diverse and this dramatically widens the arena for the battle between the mythical norm of a standardized white heterosexual world and those whom diverge from this standard sexually, ethnically, mentally, or physically. On one side of the street people, such as homosexuals or ethnically bicultural, come to a stoplight that signals red because on the other side of that street is an ideal reality that violently revolts against the immediate one they are limited by. On the other side of the street stands those who are beautifully shaped by their privilege of being a majority dominant group, whether heterosexual, upper-middle class, or with hardly acute corners to conflict with the parameters of their reality. The light always turns green and they need not wait to cross nor risk j-walking in the red; they need not worry about the risk of getting run over by the vehicles of oppression and discrimination for what their desires define them to be. Because what they desire is exactly what the mythically normal society programs them to desire, rising up to claim the American Dream while neglecting to see those invisible and outcast in its shadow. In both Halberstam's article Imagined Violence and in David Wojnarowicz's Memoirs of Disintegration, there exists an intersection where the themes of combatting reality with a rebellious mindset cross paths and the signal turns green for both sides but there is an almost Black Panther assertiveness to their manner of revolt that encourages people to cross when its yellow or flashing.

The way for people to get the light to turn green is through becoming sharply aware of the exigencies of this heterotopian world and while not strictly intoxicating their mindset with a morbid sense of disintergration, they can assume a confident stance of deconstructing what is wrong with the world and putting back together what is real. Heterosexuality is a hegemonic wide-spread domain that capitalizes on the evolutionary welfare of people who safely dance to the beat of nature's waltzing gender roles. But this leaves out and infuriates many who do don't dance the same dance, whose sexuality and gender identities groove to a different beat, and cultivates what Halberstam calls many, many "places of rage". This rage is born and brewed under the crucible of a highly contradicting social structure where labels and generalizations which run short only illuminate just how badly the state of things are. In these places of rage, film and media exploit the convention-defying personas that oppressed members take, such as women who are usually subordinate in society. Consider Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise where Halberstam mentions both an invitation to the stereotypical view of lesbians while also engaging women with a set of empathies for what they can do to empower themselves against oppressive situations such as rape.

Halberstam consistently opens up a dialogue with Wojnarowicz's Memoirs of Distintegration particularly to his concept of the mythically normal America characterized as a "one tribe nation" which deliberately pokes at the irony that it is anything but one tribe - it is many. He sympathizes with the sentiment Wojnarowicz seems to elaborate on here, that people are too different to be unified. True, unification under an enforced false consensus does depreciate the idea of unity itself, and that different people with different strokes can't be forced into accepting they are all the same. But what Halberstam and the One Tribe Nation concept eludes from their argument is that unity can indeed exist among the different. Unisex bathrooms provide a necessary sanctuary for transexuals who are violently attacked when they try to go to a public bathroom but a unisex mindset, a tolerance, cultivated by less negative and more understanding media portrayals of transexual identites like Transamerica can fight this social dysfunction and intolerance. It is highly difficult but the nation has overcome and accepted one group of outcasts over the other through the pattern of initial hostility and scapegoating and while assimilation is an inevitable side effect, disintegration isn't. People can coexist together if they don't wrestle for a sovereign sense of identity and learn to embrace individuality.

In Wojnarowicz's writing there is a lonely detachment to all emotional continuity for a narrative outside of the central character that occupies and pilots the reader's mind through the world of his memoirs. The fact that he uses first person and hardly ever gives the names of the characters he witnesses, most of whom are male like himself, creates a strange sense that he may be all at once a repertoire of the same echo of his protagonist because of how easy it is to confuse the antonyms. In Being Queer in America its almost as if this was done deliberately, as if he wanted the reader to confuse the narrator with the characters he witnesses. The boy getting beaten up for being a queer in the middle of street escapes and runs for a while until the reader is suddenly made aware that this diverged from reality, giving a characteristic unreliability to Wojnarowicz's voice which narrates the memoir. This characteristic is exactly what Halberstam discusses in his article about the way fantasy is diverging one from a numbed sense of reality. Wojnarowicz was standing on the other side of the street with the stoplight signaling red. When it turned green, the boy who was attacked