Two questions of interest on a general level come to my mind, related to the debate concerning Avital Ronell – a case I do not really have any direct opinion about, due to lack of information.
My first thought would be about our limited skills (or desire?) to discuss the matters of difference in the context of sexual harassment cases. As I see it, we simply lack a vocabulary for that kind of debate. Sexual harassment legislations are formulated to hinder power abuse; but do we here, in the AR case, discuss power abuses only of the patriarchal type, or also in divergent queer contexts? The specific forms that power abuse takes in these two major scenes (patriarchy vs. queer) do not need, out of some necessity, to differ significantly. However, as a person who has experienced both contexts I think that we really need to ask that question; and start to imagine a lexicon for it.
What can then be meant by the specifically queer context? This is brought to the fore, for example, by Antu Sorainen, who shows in her research that care relations in sexually marginalized groups often, if not as a rule, significantly differ from what is taken as a norm in the inheritance legislation – much more diverse and complex care relation networks than the nuclear family type are common in these groups. Further, such sexual difference thinkers as Luce Irigaray and Adriana Cavarero have pointed out how our thinking is structured in a way that includes, implicitly, value hierarchies. Therefore, we lack vocabularies for thinking difference as irreducible. This is also related to the question of why we lack good practices for taking differences into account in different institutional settings.
In this, I would also highlight the fact that we would not have any out-and-about lesbian professors, in the first place, would not the pioneering representatives for the “Rainbow & Pride” folks been willing to take risks and go through the pain that is always the price to be paid where a transformation towards a society where diversity is valued is the inspirational incentive.
Please remember, for example, the 1980s gay men who carried in the funerals their friends who died in AIDS, and did all that without getting proper support from the normative kinship nor from the authorities to fight the disease.
Or, think about those “masculine women” who have been, in order to better conform to society, often putatively, prescribed feminine hormones by doctors – not to mention the lost contacts with families or discrimination in workplaces because of “erring” sexuality and “weird” gender. The transformation towards more diversity, liberal laws and less violent social practices needed such risk-takers and transgressors of the familiar, the usual and the non-shameful.
This urge for “the necessary for the socially productive gain but personally high risking” leads to the second question I want to bring forth, in the context of the Ronell debate. Theoretical and intellectual high-risk/high-gain work requires that we spend lots of time in solitude, off the stage of any “normal” relationality. The forms that some of our social relations then take in these situations might sometimes seem rather weird from the point of view of the norm society – these relations might go, for example, much deeper than an everyday friendship is expected to go without necessarily resonating with traditional love relations, either. For many of us, such relations are the best things in life.
However, when such a relation is not mutually rewarding for those who are involved in it, it should be ended at once. This could be difficult since it is hard to negotiate about such issues that we lack words for. How could we then always exactly know who should end what, and when? And maybe something wonderful – perhaps even something revelational that would benefit us all – is waiting at the next level, even if we now feel uncomfortable? How could we know this, without exploring and experimenting with what we have? Even if we’ll risk to lose it all?
Thus, what we lack in discourse is always a bit weird: to discuss such questions that transcend our common discourse easily sounds insane from the point of the norm society. Still, we need to confront these questions in order to create new frameworks for interpretation, to take thinking further, and to make new innovations. And that is exactly what is expected from scientists.
At the same time, I totally agree that power abuse in hierarchical dependency relations, such as those between a supervisor and a supervisee, should be prohibited. But I think that we need a much more nuanced debate about the questions of sexual harassment and difference. However, these questions are, in my view, best discussed on a general level, not in relation to specific cases, and especially not based on inadequate information about what has “really” happened.
Finally, I also think that the fact that Western democracies have a long history of pathologization and criminalization of non-normative sexuality is an extremely relevant question in this context. We need to remember this, in order to avoid the history repeating itself. And we need experimenting, testing and creation of new norms for showing interest, desire and being romantically together in a world that has, for a such a long time, been dominated by the male gaze and regime.
* Maria Svanström (b. 1980) is a grant researcher in political science at the university of Helsinki. She is specializing in questions of ontology, language and diversity in the context of political thought and sexual difference thinking.
Queer Pain 