Queer/Trans K’s

Orientalism

Orientalist discourses feed into conceptions of sexuality today – they are inextricably tied together – we have to look at how the aff has constructed China as the “Other” using the same discourse of subordination that has fed war for centuries

Owens, 10

(November 19, Patricia , Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Senior Researcher at Oxford-Leverhulme Program on Changing the Character of War, author of “Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt” , “Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism” https://www.academia.edu/10243784/_Torture_sex_and_military_orientalism_Third_World_Quarterly -KSA)

Orientalist discourses have much in common with discourses about gender and sexuality. Like the Orient in the Western imaginary, gender and sexualityare historical constructs; the reality of their distinctions is not uncovered through scientific inquiry or confession of one’s true nature but is produced through discourse. The binary opposition of Orient/Occident is not asymmetrical relation; neither is that of male/female or homo/hetero. Thefeminised/homo/Orient is subordinated to the masculinised/hetero/Occident.The celebrated side of the binary only acquires its meaning through subordination and exclusion of the Other—the sexually deviant Orient.And yet the homo–hetero binary ultimately contradicts and undermines itself. Efforts to construct stable sexual subjectivities must fail, belied by the ultimate instability of actual practice; there is no sexual being behind thedoing. If, as Edward W Said rightly argued, ‘without examining Orientalism ... one cannot possibly understand ... [how] European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically’, then one cannot understand Orientalism without examining how modern Western culture is fundamentally structured by theeffort to establish a clear binary distinction between homo- and hetero-sexual populations. In Eve Sedgwick’s words, ‘an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition’. This binarydistinction, which emerged—not coincidentally—alongside the rise of formalEuropean empire, is central to all Western identity and social organisation,including military socialisation and associated forms of cultural and gender-based subordination.

“Women”/ “Men”

Every time they use the term “women” to denote a common identity they have turned the case. “Women” is not a stable signifier-their reading of “women’s material bodies” slaps an identity onto bodies and overdetermines the experience of individual bodies with labels, eliminating subjective experience.

Butler ’90 (Gender Trouble, pg. 3)

Apart from the foundationalist fictions that support the notion of the subject, however, there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I That Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple significations. If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.

Their treatment of males as equivalent to men, the oppressor, is an act of division that forecloses all other options besides dialectical reversal. This is a “with us or against us” approach to biological sex that eviscerates those whose identity is caught somewhere in between.

Azaldua in ’99 [Borderlands/La Frontera, pg 80]

Lumping the males who deviate from the general norm with man, the oppressor, is a gross injustice. Asombra pensar que nos hemos quedado en ese pozo oscuro donde el mundo encierra a las lesbianas {it’s amazing to think that we have been stuck in this dark well where the world encloses lesbians}. Asombra pensar que hemos, como feministas y lesbianas, cerrado nuestros corazones a los hombres, a nuestros hermanos los jotos, desheredados y marginales como nosotros. {It’s amazing to think that we, as feminists and lesbians, have closed our hearts to men, to our brothers the gays, disinherited and marginalizes like us}Being the extreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino [Latin@] and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other- the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another. Colored homosexuals have more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at the forefront (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation struggles in this country; have suffered more injustices and have survived them despite all odds. Chicanos need to acknowledge the political and artistic contributions of their queer. People, listen to what your joteria is saying. The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls.

The idea that women/other groups are more vulnerable than others is incorrect and rooted in the strict gendered binary that exists in current climate change science

Alaimo 09 (Stacy Alaimo is a Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor at the University of Texas at Arlington, “Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of Gender,” KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 3-4 2009, Date Accessed: 7/12/16, https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/44306/84085, sabz)

Although the hypermasculine consumerism that has dominated the U. S. in recent decades may seem a far cry from transcendent scientific perspectives, they both detach themselves from vulnerability – precisely the sort of vulnerability that emerges from a serious consideration of how we are all immersed within, rather than floating above, this world. Moreover, the globalizing visions of some of the discourse on climate change impose a rather troubling binary between universal (masculine) scientific knowledge and the marked vulnerability of impoverished women. ‘Vulnerability’, has, in fact, become a key term in the risk assessments of climate change, where it enables researchers to identify the risk differentials of various groups and regions. Even as it has been important for scholars and women’s organizations to assess the ways in which women may be more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, this emphasis on female vulnerability brings at least three problems: 1) it results in a gendered ontology of feminine vulnerability as opposed to the scientific (or masculinist) imperviousness discussed above; 2) it may provoke a model of agency that poses nature as mere resource; and 3) it reinforces, even essentializes gender dualisms in a way that undermines gender and sexual diversity. Even as it is crucial to consider the specifically gendered forms of vulnerability that global climate change may exacerbate, a feminist and an LGBT-affirmative5a politics must avoid reinstalling rigid gender differences and heteronormativity. Moreover, it seems commonsensical to ask that climate change advocacy be environmentally-oriented, in the sense that it should promote the inestimable value, significance and force of ecosystems and natural creatures – not as mere ‘resources’ for human use, but as truly valuable in and of themselves.