Parody
and subversion: notes on roles
Roles are the repetitive
performance of a particular set of power relations. The incentive for playing a role is a shred of power; even when
one plays a submissive role there must be some sort of incentive even if this
is only a negative incentive, the avoidance of a worse fate. To say that roles are performances doesn’t
make them unreal, roles are real acts, acts that are repeated until they harden
into habit. Roles do not appear from
nowhere, they are perpetuated by institutions such as the family, the
workplace, businesses, bureaucracies, schools, and roles in turn perpetuate the
power structures of these institutions.
There are objective social structures and institutions that perpetuate
roles, this does not mean that they are set in stone. There are subjective desires to subvert and destroy these roles,
this doesn’t mean that this is easy or that subversion will succeed. In the tension between the structures of
power and the desire to rebel, the game of subversion is played.
Ethnicity, gender and class
existed before capitalism but in very different forms. Ethnicity has been changed drastically by
the rise of the nation state, gender roles have been changed by the
proletarianization of women, and it is quite obvious that the rise of
capitalism changed class structure.
Nevertheless roles based on gender, ethnicity and class were used to
perpetuate power relations by the structures of power both before the rise of
capitalism and after. Nationality is
something that people often don’t historicize, people simply don’t realize how
young the nation state is and that this has effected the very idea of cultural
identity. Our present concept of ethnicity (this word comes from the Greek word
for nation) is shaped by the nation state.
Some imagine that nationality existed in its present form long before
the rise of the nation-state and others imagine that patriarchy existed in a
stronger form in the past, that it is now slowly fading away into nothingness.
Patriarchy is one of the more obvious examples of a process that perpetuated
roles of domination and submission long before capitalism. I would argue that some forms of patriarchy
have indeed lessened but that overall patriarchy is not fading away, it has
been merely reconfigured by capital into a different form, those aspects that
limited the flow of capital and the proletarianization of women were
changed. Patriarchy is not one global
monolithic structure; it is cultural, and has varied forms. It starts in the family, spreads to other
institutions and is thus reproduced throughout society. Capitalism reproduces new mutated forms of
patriarchy, it uses gender difference just as it does class and ethnic/racial
differences, to exploit the labor force to the greatest degree possible.
How do we use categories of
identity to understand the society we live in without perpetuating the very
roles that we wish to move beyond? This
is tricky, if we simply throw away the categories that describe gender, race,
and ethnicity we lose important tools that we need to understand how this
society functions, how these categories effect and structure our
relations. On the other hand, it is
easy to fall into perpetuating the very roles that we wish to transcend. This
is a problem that often surfaces within identity politics, which start with an
identity category as a point of departure.
Since such politics are based in identity categories which are
fundamentally tied to roles, unless there’s a conscious attempt to subvert
roles, one instead reinforces them.
Recently the article “Stick it to the Manarchy” referred to women and
people of color in the same lists of categories as the elderly and children as
if being female or not white made a person less capable of dealing with
demonstrations and riots. The argument
is that people of color are prosecuted more harshly, this is true, yet I have
never noticed this being a deterrent. In fact, in my experience it is those who
come from more privileged backgrounds that are more scared in such situations. What their reason is for including women on
this list I can’t figure out. In any
case they fall into a patronizing tone in spite of any intentions to the
contrary. There is a danger that
discussion about gender can fall into patronizing tones that reinforce the role
of the woman as victim. On the other
hand, this doesn’t mean that we should avoid discussion about sexism which is
very real, or that women shouldn’t complain about getting fucked over because
they want to avoid perpetuating an image of the woman as victim. We can only throw away the categories of
gender, race, class and so on when we are dancing on the ruins of this society
and have learned to relate to each other without these roles in a classless
stateless society. Until then we can’t
just pretend that we are all treated equally, simply proclaiming the death of
these social divisions by refusing to refer to them does nothing except forfeit
a means to confront the problems that they create.
Race (or at least racism),
unlike ethnicity, is based on a person’s appearance and not necessarily their
culture. I do not mean to imply that
race is biological, it is a social construction, but that for example a black
person raised by white people, who is culturally indistinguishable from whites,
still experiences racism. Gender is
generally structured around biological sex (a person has to drastically change
their appearance to be treated as a different gender); the traits that are
described by these categories are partially biological (or based on the
assumption of the presence of a certain biology) and thus it is impossible to
completely break with these categories as long as the present society remains
since they will effect how people treat you no matter how you act. That is, race and gender consist of more
than just roles.
Roles are social because
they are relations, they are performances in which there is always an
interaction with the audience. They
cannot simply be broken with on an individual level; by changing or breaking with
a role one is necessarily changing a relation.
However, this does not mean that they can only be broken with
collectively, or only by society as a whole. To change roles is to change
relations, such change can occur on many scales, it is not only a question of
collective change. There are
innumerable intermediate scales to social change that lay between the
individual and the collective or the individual and the societal. Therefore we do not need to wait until some
“collective break” seems imminent to move beyond the roles that shape our
relations. It is precisely by not
waiting and starting to subvert these relations now at whatever scale possible
that a break might eventually spread throughout society as a whole. I am not referring to a collective break in
the sense of a homogenous simultaneous break with roles but a multifarious
rupture that spreads throughout society; the concept of roleless relations
necessarily implies multiplicity for to act without a role is to act without
the very power relations that create homogeneity. Of course it is not that easy, it is not just a question of
everybody trying to make change in their daily lives and this change adding up
to a sum total of revolution. A
large-scale break with roles implies a large scale break with the power
relations that roles perpetuate, in other words capital and the state must be
destroyed in all of their manifestations, the multiple micro ways in which they
filter into our relations, and their macro institutional forms.
To break with a role is not
something that can be achieved immediately or easily, often one must first go
through a process of subverting and bending roles, playing with them, making
the unnaturalness of roles obvious through parody. How do we expose the unnaturalness of gender, race or
nationality? Parody can expose a role
as unnatural. When someone
misappropriates a gender role, when a man badly copies female behavior or vice
versa we may be forced to think about whether there is a “genuine” female and
male behavior. Is the transvestite
copying true femaleness or maleness or is s/he copying a copy? Suddenly everything gets confusing. Is she a real woman? Is there such a thing?
How do we organize ourselves
in a qualitatively different manner without the constraints of roles? How would we organize ourselves if the most
powerful and repressive structures which reproduce our present social roles
were absent? It is important to be able
to imagine such a situation and attempt to organize ourselves differently,
without the roles that constrain us and perpetuate the state-capital machine,
to the degree possible, here and now.