The real problem with cancel culture
April 6, 2023
Cancel culture is not a popular actor losing employment opportunities due to misconduct; rather, it is Colorado Springs Pulse Nightclub and Matthew Shepard. This is the logic of cancellation – out of sight, out of mind. Right-wing extremist groups are propagating this in a concerted campaign to ‘cancel’ queers; choosing, as their battlegrounds, public and civic spaces where queerness is being celebrated. They are often hurling charges such as “groomer” and “pedophile” at attendees of such events. These attempts to undermine the strength of public, civic, queer-friendly spaces are the Right’s first step in reasserting Christo-fascist puritanism and patriarchy into public structures; by making it impossible for ‘others’ to exist, they thus experience validity in the public eye.
Heterosexuality, as a hegemonic norm, is threatened as a legitimate institution by those who deviate from it. As Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant put it, “Queer social practices like sex and theory try to unsettle the garbled but powerful norms supporting that privilege…” Practices that unsettle these norms elicit feelings of disgust from cis-het people.
Consider the common pejorative refrain, “It really does not matter to me that some people are gay, until they shove it in my face.” There is an inherent demand for queer people’s invisibility in this bigoted line of thought – a discomfort felt due to the “unsettling” of norms by the queer subject. Proud Boys and other Christo-fascist groups exist as enforcers of this hegemony.
Huffington Post reporter and author Andy Campbell compiled an ongoing thread documenting the Proud Boys’ violence at civic events. The first event to appear on this thread is from Frisco, Texas. Proud Boys showed up to a community event recognizing Pride Month for the first time in city history. They – predictably – called attendees ‘pedophiles’.
To date, the thread documents seven instances of Proud Boys terrorizing drag and LGBTQ-themed events – most of them “storytimes” at public civic spaces. In Arlington, Texas, Proud Boys mobilized against a “Disney drag brunch”; in Indiana, six Proud Boys walked into a public library demanding an LGBTQ storytime be shut down; the list goes on.
Assemblies by Proud Boys in public spaces are explicit invitations for violence and intimidation. What makes their campaigns of terror in civic spaces so notable, however, is the Proud Boy’s positionality as replacements for LGBTQ persons and ‘defenders’ of children’s liberty. By physically entering the civic space that queer people are positioned in as leaders (via inhabiting the role of “teacher” in storytimes and “entertainment” in drag brunches), and demanding their excision from said roles, Proud Boys are then poised to become the next authority figure. This authority propagates heteronormativity – one can only imagine what books the Proud Boys would read during storytimes: “The Normal Fish” or “The Little Proud Boy,” perhaps.
The cultural panic about queer pedophiles and groomers is working as intended. A Tallahassee school board recently mandated that schools “notify parents – by form – if a student who is ‘open about their gender identity’ is in a physical education class or on an overnight field trip.” “Students open about their gender identity” does not refer to students who fit comfortably into the hegemony; this rule will be used to single out queer children and punish them – lest they groom their classmates into becoming queer as well.
We must recognize that the actions of those propagating Christo-fascist ideals pose an existential threat to queer livelihood. By utilizing the logic of progressive cancel culture, one is posing some sort of existential threat to progress. Proud Boys are well on their way to forcing LGBTQ+ people back into the shadows.
Gern • May 31, 2023 at 5:51 am
This opinion piece is a confused Marxist-feminist word salad pretending to be serious political thought.
Please define “Christo-fascist puritanism”.
Explain how queerness can be “celebrated”,
Please defend the practice of “drag brunches” as entertainment (or education) for elementary school children.
Please provide any evidence of your assertion that the Tallahassee school board mandate you reference is intended to “”punish” any child.
Kenny G • Sep 29, 2023 at 10:28 am
Rebecca is another in the seemingly endless horde of post-Tumblr brainrot critical theories zombies churned out by our indoctrination factories. I’d bet she’s lived a fairly sheltered life and never ventured out intellectually beyond her ideological echo chamber. She’s young. She’s kissed a couple girls (or at least thought about it). Maybe read a little Judith Butler or some blog posts about her. She’s filled with hormonal, righteous anger. I get it. I’ve been there too.
Getting to the point, no decent American condones violence against LGBT communities. Most people just want to maintain freedom of thought, speech and movement, and parents want to retain the right to raise their children with their values, instead of the newly popularized chaos-inducing radical values that Becca would like to see imposed by the state.
Yes, there are obviously the hate-filled Trumper types that would like nothing more than to carry out the worst of what our little Foucaulta lays forth in her histrionic rant. These types should obviously be denounced, shunned, and, where appropriate, arrested and removed from polite society. To conflate these types with the liberal-to-centrist normies who don’t think DQSH deserves a place in our kindergarten classrooms is incredibly disingenuous.
We should encourage kids to “be free to be you and me” at a young age and ground them in tolerant attitudes as early as elementary school, but there is absolutely no need for discussions of sexuality or gender ideology in public grade schools. Kids should be given a chance to have at least a small period of actual innocence for the first 10 years of life. I’d argue that there’s really no place for these types of theories in any of our secondary education either, since they do nothing to prepare our kids for the real world, but if you must, at least save it for their teen years when they’ve begun to develop some critical thinking faculties.
I say all of this as the father of a gay son, a lifelong liberal, and as a man who has never voted for a Republican in his life.
Dodo • Sep 30, 2023 at 12:47 pm
Sure Kenny G— “lifelong liberal and the father of a gay son”. Round of applause. Glad to know that you believe that your son, who is gay, should have spent the first ten years of his life in a period of “actual innocence”; AKA a period during which he’d be exposed to countless instances of “innocent” heterosexuality, such as kissing, marriage, etc, and would learn, through a lack of exposure to queerness, that heterosexuality is the norm. That way, when your son hit puberty, he’d have been perfectly primed for confusion and self loathing. Glad to know that if your son had a child, you would prefer that your grandchild enter a public school filled with other kids who may not have seen a two dad household before in their lives, and have no idea what it is or means to be queer. I’m glad that your faith in the inherent kindness and sympathy of elementary school children is great enough that you would bet the emotional and physical safety of your potential grandchild on it. No one is saying that kids below ten need extensive sex ed. They are trying to protect children like your son and your potential grandchild, so they don’t have to live in world where they are hated by themselves or their peers. Queer love is not inherently sexual, which I would hope you should know as the father of a gay child. Reading this post has me seriously questioning your parenting abilities, and I do feel that saying so is fair game considering the amount of time you spent speculating on author’s personal life, upbringing, and sexual experience, you creep.
Maybe if either of you could understand or respond to any of the points made in the article, this would be less degrading. However, the first poster’s obvious frustration at their inability to understand the big words used by the college undergrad, in combination with your straw-manning, personal attacks, and appeals to a neoliberal authority produces a truly skin crawling instance of second-hand embarrassment. Maybe give what you write a read before posting it? Or like think about your opinions for two seconds before spewing junk? Bye!