Last week a friend told me the story of a Surrey-based businessman named T.J. Johal, who donated outfits to the Indian Olympic team when he heard they would not be wearing official uniforms for the Games’ opening ceremonies. He was crestfallen when he saw the team wearing regular street clothes and tracksuits, rather than the clothes he had given them. Commenting on how the team looked as they marched into BC Place Johal said, "I don’t think it was up to par." Talking to the CBC, R.K. Gupta, the Indian team’s Chef De Mission said the team did not wear the donated outfits because the team is not a charity. For me this story is a tale of a person with means who tried to input his ideas on how things should be upon a group of people he thought he could speak for, for whom he thought he was doing right by.
Hearing this story I thought of how Mr. Johal can be seen as a metaphor for LGBT advocates and organizations who like him use resources they have access to, that others don't, to work, and push others towards embracing sameness and maintaining the status quo in the name of equality (or being "up to par").
Pushing against the notion of equality as a brand rather than for it, activists and writers Yasmin Nair and Ryan Conrad have collaborated with others to begin Against Equality (AE), an online archival, publishing and arts collective focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. The cornerstone of their work is their website (www.againstequality.org) which is, as Nair puts it, "An archive for radical potential."
The impetus of the group, which also informed the name, is born out of Nair and Conrad's desire to point out the empty rhetoric and potential injustice stemming from groups like Human Rights Committee's (HRC) use of "equality." "On the face of it who could be against equality? Equality seems so self-evident as a 'movement' and it does appear that what the gay movement is asking for is simply inclusion and equal rights. However, equality in this framework is a way to increase the inequality in society."
An example of how equality can work as inequality, says Nair, is the LGBT pro-same-sex marriage argument that suggests marriage is a way for many LGBT people to get health care coverage in the U.S., where it is not universal. Critics of this argument like AE as well as groups like the U.S.-based Sylvia Rivera Law Project reject this line of thinking, and instead ask why the act of marriage should privilege someone to get what should be available to all.
"I think it is really important to break the spectacle of silent consent around all this equality garbage. There is literally no time or space to have conversations about whether blindly marching in the direction of some vague notion of equality is actually progress. Is inclusion in the military or the institution of marriage progress? Or should we be imagining a queer world that dismantles militarism and honors all people's rights to freedom of movement, access health care, defining their own family, et cetera" explains Conrad.
While focusing on challenging LGBT mainstream beliefs on current hot button issues in the U.S. like same sex marriage and the possible repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" within the U.S. military, AE also focuses attention on the total injustice of prison systems. The AE website provides links to organizations like the Canadian-based Prisoner Correspondence Project, which coordinates a direct-correspondence program for gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, gender variant, two-spirit, intersex, bisexual and queer inmates.
Against Equality have launched a postcard project, have a Facebook group and are working on creating a book. By providing information in various forms Nair and Conrad hope to put the onus on the queer community to engage in conversation and action around, as Conrad hopes, "Imagining and even attempting to realize more fantastic queer futures."
As AE reminds us, we have a choice to blindly accept the notion of equality as it is sold to us and for us in our name, or like the Indian Olympic team declined the outfits, we can meet in the world in our street clothes and work towards real progress.
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