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In a skewering 2015 essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege,” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent policing … there are also spaces … where a generalized ideology of anti-normativity holds sway, queerness is a badge of honor, a marker of specialness, and a source of critical and moral authority: in short, a form of privilege.” FuckTheory’s contention with what he calls queer privilege is that such attitudes, and the deep irony of their basis in a misunderstanding of Foucault, are “grounded in the idea of a link between the normativity of an act and its ethical valence.”
He puts it better than I ever could: “It’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing?” The counterargument to queer privilege is not to retreat to the reactionary normativities that queerness, even privileged queerness, attempts to disrupt. No, the radical thing is not actually to be a straight couple and get married and make babies and reproduce oneself as the world produced you. It’s not actually more radical to be monogamous just because everyone and their panamorous triad is meeting in an expensive bar in Williamsburg and reveling in their radical performance. Such a counterreaction would merely repeat the problem of inherently linking the normativity or abundance of a given act with its ethical weight.
“The California Ideology”—the dream (dreamt by a handful of rich, white men in the early 1990s) that the internet would be a democratizing force of decentralized power and knowledge—was always a myth born of myopic thinking, one which failed to take into account that the internet was born within, not beyond, the strictures of capitalist relationality and brutal social hierarchy. Public access to information expanded on a vast scale, but at the same time, consolidation of power over the information network was stunning. As writer and neuro-scientist Aaron Bornstein has pointed out,
Each year more data is being produced—and, with cheap storage and a culture of collection, preserved—than existed in all of human history before the internet. It is thus literally true that more of humanity’s records are held by fewer people than ever before, each of whom can be—and, we now know, are—compelled to deliver those records to the state.