Using Social Media As a Tool to Include Queer and Trans Identities Alongside Academic Discourses Concerning Radical Gender Politics

Yoana Pehlyova
260774277
POLI 364: Radical Political Thought
Dr. William Roberts
Word Count: 2014

Over the past five years, there has been an upwards trend towards more trans and queer political content through social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. While internet politics (like the majority of western political space) is heavily polarized between extremists on both sides, there has been a notable algorithmic shift towards the inclusion of trans and queers voices, and in particular, surrounding queer and trans education. These voices, which are peppered across all social media platforms, are oftentimes from individuals who have been involved with (or are still currently involved with) academia. As such, it is interesting to see how these platformed trans and queer academics have been able to merge academic discourse on radical gender politics with contemporary queer and trans theory and online sensibilities. Not only that, academic content creators make their work accessible, inclusive, and interactive — allowing for open dialogue on radical gender politics, in a way that wasn’t possible within their academic studies, at least not at the scope social media is able to reach. In fact, these LGBTQ+ academic and educational content creators are leveraging social media as a tool to include queer and trans identities into existing discourses around radical gender politics.

This is important because while analyzing the texts read throughout the course on radical gender politics, (namely that of Angela Davis and Catharine Mackinnon), a prominent limit spans both their work. Firstly, Catherine Mackinnon discusses the oppression of animals in relation to humans as comparable to the oppression that women face in relation to men. She expresses, “Women are the animals of the human kingdom, the mice of men’s world. Both women and animals are identified with nature rather than culture by virtue of biology. Both are imagined in male ideology to be thereby fundamentally inferior to men and humans. Women in male-dominant society are identified as nature, animalistic, and thereby denigrated maneuver that also defines animals’ relatively lower rank in human society. Both Are seen to lack properties that elevate men, those qualities by which women value themselves and define their status as human by distinction,” (Mackinnon, pg. 256).

Through this, Mackinnon highlights how the relationship of ownership, inferiority, and objectification of men towards women is problematic and comparable to the oppression that humans enact over animals. Similarly, Angela Davis discusses the economic oppression of black women during slavery. She states, “Expediency governed the slaveholders’ posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles,” (Davis, pg. 9). Through this, Davis highlights the lines of black womanhood could be redrawn based on the axes of profit and punishment. While both Davis and Mackinnon’s accounts are crucial perspectives in understanding radical gender theory, they are essentialist insofar as they fail to deconstruct heteronormativity and the gender binary. Mackinnon’s work is deeply heteronormative, while Davis does not account for the lived realities of black queer people.

Both Davis’ and Mackinnon’s accounts fail to acknowledge the very systems that contribute to women’s oppression, and instead continue to utilize these systems in theorizing women’s and black women’s oppression. The systems in question are: the gender binary (ie. one is either a man or a woman), heteronormativity (ie. a man and woman belong together), and cisgenderism (ie. a man is a man is not a woman). As such, it is easy to overlook these systems or fail to understand how they contribute to women’s oppression. However, at the beginning of this course, we learned that the essence of “radical political thought” means getting to the “root” of a political issue. This implies that our study of radical gender politics, as explored through the works of Angela Davis and Catharine Mackinnon are insufficient, even in understanding women’s oppression. This is because using the gender binary to affirm and theorize the oppression of women obscures the fact that the construction of gender itself is a tool used to oppress women. In this way, both authors fail to explore how heteronormativity and cisgenderism permeate women’s oppression, as well as that of trans and queer people. Thus, our class study of radical gender politics is incomplete without the exploration of trans and queer politics, and how both LGBTQ+ and feminists movements have been inextricably under the same systems of oppression: the gender binary, heteronormativity, and cisgenderism. The system of domination of men over women, and of white men over black women is the after (after-after) effect of these aforementioned systems.

A solution to this at the university level is to centre more texts with genderqueer identities at their core. This will help to understand the ways in which the oppression and liberation (of women and genderqueer people) are interconnected through cisheteropatriarchcy. Some academically rigorous texts by queer, trans, and femme authors include: The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards by Catherine Palczewski (2005); Inversion and the Third Sex: Gender Variance and Queer Expression in Anti-Suffrage Rhetoric by Anthony Pankuch (2018); Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Dr. Clare Sears; The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schulle; From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America by Dr. Kimberly Hamlin; and Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity by Dr. Afsaneh Najmabadi, to name a few.

However, the issue still remains that these academic texts, while they are more intersectional and inclusive of genderqueer identities, are still mostly inaccessible to many individual who are not involved in academic spaces. This inaccessibility contributes precisely to the limiting of theory because it narrows the scope of understanding the root of the issue, and thus works to misrepresent the nuances of the lived experiences of many individuals today. That is, while analyzing woman’s oppression through a genderqueer lens at an acaemic level, it nonetheless leaves out the political developments of trans and queer people today, which is anti-radical in nature. Therefore, in order to to more deeply understand the roots of women’s oppression, it must be analyzed alongside trans and queer oppression that is happening today. Luckily, online education platforms consist of some of the most up to date, accessible, and interactive discussions on gender and sexuality politics. As such, this essay will explore the benefits of creating a space in academia that merges traditional gender discourse with genderqueer educational platforms online, in highlighting oppressive systems which bind both women, as well as queer and trans people. Specifically, it will explore how the merits of feminist scholars, Angela Davis and Catharine Mackinnon, can be extending by studying it alongside genderqueer online content from creators such as Contrapoints, Alok Menon, and PhilosophyTube.

THE MERITS OF ACADEMIA VIS-A-VIS THE LIMITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
First off, Angela Davis and Catharine Mackinnon do an excellent job at providing background context and depth for gender politics. Davis does this by specifying the historicity of black women’s oppression in a depth that social media cannot. For example, Davis fleshed out the matriarchy of the black enslaved family, and critiques that many “sociological examinations of the Black family during slavery assumed that the masters’ refusal to acknowledge fatherhood among their slaves [must be] directly related to a matriarchal family arrangement, where the women dominated their men,” (pg. 13). Whereas in actuality, “black women were not debased by their domestic functions in the same way that white women came to be because unlike their white counterparts, they could never be treated as mere “housewives”,” (pg. 14). This is an important distinction because I think a lot of academic scholarship will try to understand something through the lens of traditional white roles, relationships, and society. While black enslaved families are related in some ways to the white contexts they were subordinated to, the black family structure must be understood in its own unique and specific ways. For this reason, academia is useful in understanding the historical relationship between gender and race. Similarly, Mackinnon highlights the connection between the relationship of men to women, and humans to animals, underlying the top-down paternalism that exists between both (for example, the perception that both need to be subdued and controlled, and how both are used for labor, breeding, pleasure, and ease. Through this, Mackinnon did a thorough job of highlighting these similarities, and showing that they are not all that exaggerated. This contains the same depth and novelty that may not be found on social media discourses concerning feminist gender theory.

A NEW SPACE: USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO EXTEND EXISTING ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
Social media and academic discourses can be used in tangent to fill the gaps in radical gender theory in the texts studied in class. Each day on social media, dynamic academic conversations transpire, and as such, these platforms can add to the discussion on the oppression of women by highlighting how the gender binary and cisheteropatriarchy oppress women as well as queer and trans people. YouTube, for example, is a great source of academic videos on gender politics from young scholars and recent graduates who identify as trans and genderqueer. Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube are both trans women who earned philosophy degrees, and now make their living off of highly produced educational YouTube videos about gender, politics, and class. The two offer their own takes and critiques on certain theories and this makes it interesting because both YouTubers have highly interactive fan bases who frequently get in on the discussion through Twitter and their live Twitch streams. Another YouTuber that deconstructs gender, race, and class is Toronto native Khadija Mbowe. Mbowe weaves together academic theory with modern pop culture and her own personal life experiences to showcase how all three are inter connected. The last creator is Alok Menon, who is an author, performer and public speaker focusing on liberating people from the gender binary. They create visually appealing and accessible weekly book reports on Instagram, on texts that deconstruct the gender binary. Each week, Menon goes live through the Instagram Story feature and responds to questions (and sometimes hate) from their audience in a productive way. To this end, academic social media platforms that focus on the liberation of women, queer, and trans people have a dimension of interactivity, inclusion, and modernity that is missing from the experience of current academic discourses. This issue can be solved by working more mixed media into syllabuses, such as YouTube and Instagram, and by giving greater platforms to the ongoing work of Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube, Khadija Mbowe, and Alok Menon. It could also be interesting to try and apply our class knowledge with ongoing online discussions about queer and trans liberation as it relates to women’s liberation.

CLOSING REMARKS
In summation, trans and queer online academic media can be leveraged alongside university academic discourses to extend the conversation surrounding women’s oppression and liberation. The LGBTQ+ community as well as cisgender women are similarly oppressed through the construction of the gender binary and the cisheteropatriarchy. Including trans online media can be a solution to this because it provides a more modern, up to date, accessible, inclusive, and interactive platform with which ideas can be debated and discussed, and different identities can be platformed and elevated. I am interested in the future of political theory education at the university level, which will increasingly merge social media learning with traditional academic texts. This will induce fascinating new ways to solve problems such as the (de)construction of the gender binary and cisheteropatriarchy, and will also make learning more accessible and soaked in what’s currently going on in our world today. This future is exciting and it is also nearby, if not already happening at the university level.

_____________________________________________Works Cited

Catharine MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men” (2004).

Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (1981).