Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)
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Politicising Queer Issues and Activism: Disciplinarity, Biopolitics and the Means by which Activist Issues Enter the Public Sphere / Dr Rob CoverAbstract:
This paper explores ways of understanding how an activist 'issue' is politicised by examining and analysing lesbian/gay and queer community politics. The paper focuses on the contrast between (1) the wyas in which queer political activism has taken up and politicised the issue of same-sex marriage rights as one of seeking equality and foregrounded as the queer issue of the 2000s; and (2) the issue of queer youth suicide and self-harm which is arguably one of the most under-represented yet ethically most urgent issues within GLBT discourse carrying greater risk and impact on the most marginal and least visible of groups that might ordinarily fall under the banner of queer representation. Why some issues and not others are offered by activist organisations for public sphere consideration, legislative change, executive intervention, and research and community funding is examined through two framework: (1) the shifts and developments in the hsitory of queer political activism over the past forty years; and (2) by working these concerns through an understanding of community activist organisations as disciplinary institutions that work variously alongside or in contrast to broader state, social and national governance systems that deploy biopolitical regulation. For the latter, the argument draws on the recent interest emerging from the release of Foucault's lectures on biopolitics as a mechanism of power and develops these to explore how 'local' disciplinary technologies of power work within, against or alongside 'global' biopolitical frameworks, and the ways in which this relationship frames decisions around what issues are 'important' for a community.
Keywords: queer politics, activism, discipline, biopolitics, youth suicide.
<1> If activism is to be considered a set of activities, ways of organising and formations that seek political, legislative, social, cultural or everyday change through an engagement in the public sphere, then it is important for any analysis on the politics of community activism to understand how its framework allows an "issue" or "topic" to be evaluated, selected and chosen for active publicity. That is, we must ask what are the technologies, processes, institutional arrangements and conditions of possibility that make an issue intelligible for political action.
<2> I would like to explore this question through what can loosely be described as queer activism. This has a long history and, like any community politics and activism, is multifaceted and located historically in broader political formations, usually national but certainly also transnational. Lesbian/gay politics arose out of Gay Liberationist revolutionary rhetoric based on the Freudian-Marxian stance of Herbert Marcuse and was expected to lead to an “end of the homosexual” via social transformation to a new society “based on a ‘new human’ who is able to accept the multifaceted and varied nature of his or her sexual identity” (Altman 1971:241). In his later analysis of lesbian/gay politics Altman bemoaned the fact that “[t]he expectation that the growth of gay self-assertion would lead to a much greater degree of androgyny and blurring of sex roles seems, at least for the moment, to have been an illusion” (Altman 1982:14). The gay civil rights lobby politics—operating on the ‘default model’ of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States (Sinfield 1996:271)—has been the dominant cultural mode of lesbian/gay politics since the early 1980s, reliant on essentialist notions of both sexuality and gender and the citation of the hetero/homo binary in combination with the unsteady trope of ‘equality’. It is a politics not of change or resignification of power-relations themselves, but has been described as a bourgeois politics of gaining a ‘piece of the pie’ (Epstein 1990:290). However, while gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) politics is represented in the public sphere under the civil rights or ethnic community model, it is not the only model or approach to activism as I will discuss further below.
<3> To understand how various frameworks of activism make an issue 'political' while others are sidelined, I would like to explore this by contrasting (1) the ways in which queer political activism has taken up and politicised the issue of same-sex marriage rights as one of seeking equality and foregrounded as the queer issue of the 2000s; and (2) the issue of queer youth suicide and self-harm which is arguably one of the most under-represented issues within GLBT discourse (Cover 2005), yet carries greater risk and impacts on the most marginal and least visible of groups that might ordinarily fall under the banner of queer representation. The rate and causal factors of queer youth suicide are relatively unknown, although there has been a surge of research interest around determining both of these. Statistics are debatable, although the standard citation comes from work done in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting that gay youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual youth (Gibson 1989: 110). The statistic is based on the idea of discrete sexual personages, and has been disputed for this reasons and because of the ways in which the data has been gathered and tested. However, there is enough evidence, as Christine Saulnier points out, to warrant further research, intervention, policies and—perhaps most importantly—a raising of the standard of public discussion on the topic (Saulnier 1998: 52).Yet the one issue that has been taken up within queer activism across western countries since the mid-1990s and come to dominate GLBT community politics is the struggle for same-sex marriage and partnership rights. Again, the reasons this has become important in to queer political activism in western countries are manifold, but what is at stake is how the limited resource of activism itself is deployed on behalf of one issue and not another.
<4> For an 'issue' to become politicised, enter the public sphere, be the subject of persistent media coverage, gain attention from broader communities, governments and institutions, be seen as a topic worthy of funded research and funded intervention, and the momentum necessary to bring about change, a matrix of activities among dominant community or sub-cultural institutions, political organisations, unofficial organisations and community media are required. So what are the conditions of possibility throughout that matrix that allow one issue to be represented on the political agenda of a subculture or community and not another? Ultimately, I am interested here in developing ways of understanding why an issue of arguable importance such as queer youth suicide tends to be marginalised as a political concern within lesbian/gay political activism(s) and how 'issues' or 'topics' become politicised and/or are included within—or excluded from—what colloquially is referred to as a 'political agenda'. It is not fruitful in the context of this paper to be distracted by undertaking a lengthy analysis of the ethics that would allow us to assert that queer youth suicide is rightly 'more important' an issue than the call for same-sex marriage for lesbian and gay couples. Social contestation around issues related to sex and sexuality have an historical tendency to be limited by narrow definitions of relevance (Meyer 1996: 108).
<5> Certainly, the issue remains significant, with the more recent research indicating rates of suicide intent or attempt anywhere between eight and thirty percent of younger persons who currently or later go on to express a non-heteronormative sexual identity (Rutter & Soucar 2002), whereby there is a very clear link between non-normative sexuality and suicide ideation or self-harm. What makes it 'worthy' (for myself, at least) is the fact that sexuality-related suicide is a topic which (a) impacts younger persons who are not necessarily represented by broader political and activist organisation; (b) is a matter of life, by which we might also include the notion of lives (and deaths) that require recognition to be 'liveable' (Butler 2004: 43-44), (c) not an issue that is necessarily resolved by anti-homophobic and anti-heterosexist policy at the level of government and corporate organisation in western countries, and (d) one which requires further understanding and action at the levels of research, community and political activism in order that both research and intervention are supported, funded and maintained.
<6> I would like to tackle this concern in three steps. Firstly, by discussing some of the broader reasons why queer youth suicide is a topic considered unpalatable for queer political activism. I then want to show how a neo-conservative political perspective has come to dominate the more significant queer political organisations in the west, and why such a perspective both actively and, in the culture of organisational politics, promotes the call for same-sex marriage rights as the issue for queer politics. Finally, I want to critique the place of queer activism within the broader political and cultural framework in which we see the operation of lobby politics as a brand of activism and the dominant one today in queer politicisation operates. One way in which we can understand how (1) a matrix of community political, lobbying and activist formations chooses and presents an issue that gains broader political and social support within (2) national and transnational governance systems is by looking at the interplay and disjuncture between (1) community institutions as disciplinary, and (2) the broader social and political framework as the site of deployment of biopolitical technologies of regulation. The recent interest in biopolitics sparked by the release of Foucault's lectures on the topic (Foucault 2004; 2007) prompts a reading of the place of queer political activism within broader politics that is grounded in understanding the ways in which the two contemporary technologies of power operate both together and separately.
Politicising Suicide
<7> Research and policy development in the area of queer youth suicide continues to be under-funded, marginal and without broad public interest or support—it remains an issue that requires political activation from within queer communities and politics. One of the reasons suicide has been kept off the minority sexuality ‘agenda’ by different constituent organisations within a liberal-humanist political matrix that incorporates an identifiable lesbian/gay politics. The older stereotype that non-heterosexual persons are unhappy on the basis of abnormality, difference or intolerance continues to exert its influence: not today in film and televisual depictions of non-heterosexuality but in a lack of state policy address, particularly where that policy is related to research funding and cultural, as opposed to personal, intervention. What needs to be questioned are the range of ways in which an issue worthy of broader ‘political’ attention, locates itself in a nexus between the popular cultural, the community-organised forms of activism and active politics, the institutions which authorise responsible roles of policy-making and research fund distribution and the broader and more complex sets of knowledges on the issue as they emerge outside of these specific channels.
<8> Why queer youth suicide tends to be marginalised as a political issue within lesbian/gay politics is due to a complex set of relationships. Partly, it results from the fact that suicide remains a relatively ‘taboo’ topic in many cultural formations even today (Battin 1995: 19-20). Where suicide is deemed to be not only a sin, an illness, a crime but also a failure, absenting it from public discourse results from lesbian/gay political imperatives to present a figure of the homosexual that is stable, sane, law-abiding and successful. Michael Warner makes the point that this has been common in much recent gay politics, most recently witnessed in the challenges against military rules banning homosexuals or discrimination within the Boy scouts movements: great pains are taken to find test cases in which the victim is a “model victim because he or she has never done anything wrong” (Warner 1999: 29). Warner’s point here can be expanded to suggest that it is not just sexually active citizens who are banned from portrayal as model test-cases, but young suicidal citizens whose suicidality can inadvertently be read to suggest that homosexuals are less-than-stable individuals, are mentally-ill or are in some other way defective—precisely as old stereotypes of the ‘sad young man’ (Dyer 1993: 22, 42, 73-92) or the unstable, monstrous lesbian (Creed 1995:87) indicated.
<9> While the liberal mainstream print press have sometimes portrayed a suicide-attempter as a young gay citizen wearing a badge of honour and as an authentication of homophobia effects arguments (Passey 1997: 38), there is much less willingness within lesbian/gay political and cultural production to take risks in representing a social problem as complex as queer youth suicide. Certainly it is the case that adversaries of lesbian/gay rights and those who advocate compulsory heterosexuality have been willing to use queer youth suicide anecdotes, evidence and statistics to support their arguments that non-heterosexual persons either are sick or immoral (Muehrer 1995). Absenting the issue from public perception can be understood, then, as a non-conscious action to protect a positive image of non-heterosexual persons as stable, sane, happy and moral. That is, any identifiable social problem among a minority group is seized by those opposed to that group’s rights agenda, often recirculating negative stereotypes (Cover 2004). Heavy recreational drug use among gay men (Lewis & Ross 1995: 98), for example, has often been utilised in damning attacks by Christian conservatives on gay culture. Submerging issues such as the high rate of youth suicide, the high levels of same-sex domestic violence (Island & Lettelier 1991) or the degree of economic disparity among lesbians and gay men (Pharr 1997: 54-55) has been an important political tactic. However, while these arrangements and choices certainly contribute to the silence from lesbian/gay political activists on the topic, and while they stem from both lesbian/gay organisations and community media’s roles in political ‘agenda setting’ (Goddard 1996), the mechanisms by which lesbian/gay political organisations operate do not foreclose on the possibility to introduce topics, goals and plans for lobbying and other political activities within areas that might be unpopular or controversial.
<10> Understanding how and why a broad, globalising lesbian/gay culture itself has not taken the ‘necessary risk’ of more openly incorporating youth suicide into its array of cultural and political concerns involves the important reason that lesbian/gay lobby politics internationally is dominated by a liberal ‘civil rights’ approach that seeks legislative change and anti-discriminatory protections on the understanding that such reforms will invoke a trickle-down effect and alter the state of cultural marginalisation of lesbian/gay youth. It is more difficult to intervene directly in areas of discursive change that do not have at least a gestural structure for dialogue or intervention, as does the political lobbying arena. Such lobby politics has focussed more recently on issues of same-sex marriage rights or civil union bills, and this has been the result of particular ideological perspectives that have dominated lesbian/gay politics since the mid-1980s (Cover 2004). Such liberal-democratic perspectives are arguably ‘middle class’, and ‘middle aged’, and rarely take into account factors that affect sexually diverse youth such as suicide, homelessness, a sense of cultural isolation or access to the necessary resources through which to forge identity. The funding and time of any broad-based rights movement is always finite, and some fields of intervention are inevitably ignored.
The Neo-Conservative Position—Legitimating the Couple
<11> A loosely-defined liberal or ‘neo-conservative’ set of political positions drives the dominant forms of lesbian/gay politics, particularly in Australasia, the United Kingdom and the United States. These are represented by various organisation which operate on a liberal-humanist model of reform, lobbying, networking, and sometimes parliamentary representation (Cover 2002). By no means is this strand of GLBT politics representative of just one, unified ideological position, but it is safe to say that conjoining its differences is a faith in the liberal-humanist and liberal-capitalist projects. This approach has been particularly fruitful for articulating minority group expressions of a desire to ‘sit at the table’ (rather than to ‘turn the tables’), although this has also sometimes been a foil for opening up new niche consumer markets (Field 1995; Clark 1995). While a reformist ‘ethnic-rights’ approach to lesbian/gay politics has been strongly advocated—not without ongoing criticism—by lesbian/gay political leaders, organisations and communities, it is also in part a response to the perceived opportunities opened by a multiculturalist paradigm. We can describe the rights-and-reform approach as a policy which has come, as Tony Bennett puts it, from ‘government’ shaping ‘community’; from ‘above’ defining the ‘below’ (Bennett 1998: 202). As Dennis Altman tells us in describing this paradigm in early 1980s gay politics in North America,
groups are allowed to maintain their identity within American society only to the extent that they are prepared to subscribe to the dominant values of the society; to go outside these values is to be denounced as un-American (Altman 1982: ix).
Steven Epstein, similarly, refers to the criticisms of this sort of liberal pluralist politics in which the goal is simply to obtain a ‘piece of the pie’ by appeal to a hegemonic order, and the corollary lack of potential or desire to challenge the structural roots of inequality (Epstein 1990). He strikes the key to understanding the current reformist, liberal pluralist politics when he suggests that the difference between the 1950s accommodationist approach and the lesbian/gay politics of today is the rhetorical difference between cries of ‘we’re just the same’ to ‘we’re different but no less human’. This discourse of lobby-politics has been described as the ‘default model’ for all minority political claims, following the precedent of the Black Civil Rights movement (Sinfield 1996: 271).
<12> Much like the liberal-feminist approach that characterised women’s politics in the 1980s and 1990s, a lesbian/gay politics operating in such an environment bases its motivation on a search for equality, an end to workplace (and other) discrimination, legislated protections against specific gay-related crimes, and consideration of various specificities of lesbian/gay lives in the work of legislation and policy. To give one Australasian example, the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (NSW) informs the local lesbian/gay community of Sydney through its website (www.glrl.org.au/takeaction/index.htm) that the ways in which an individual can make a difference centre on addressing “policy makers” through letter-writing, phoning local elected representatives, making submissions to parliamentary inquiries and entering the public sphere through letters to newspaper editors. Rather tellingly, the website gives quite a good summary of the legislative process in the Westminster parliamentary system. The limitations of a lobby politics have not been lost on commentators and on alternative forms of queer activism such as North America’s Queer Nation in the 1990s and Gay Shame in the new century, who have argued that processes adopted by reformist organisations have stymied the ways in which issues such as queer youth suicide can be addressed (Sycamore 2004: 131).
<13> The way in which queer youth suicide is given recognition within this political format is less often articulated as a complex problem emerging through cultural factors, but presented as an example of the effect of delays in achieving the reformist agenda. North American lesbian/gay rights political commentator Urvashi Vaid addressed youth suicide as an “especially pernicious form of discrimination” (Vaid 1995: 16), seeing it as an effect of cultural homophobia and its internalisation (Fenaughty & Harré 2003: 4). Former Australian Democrats Senator Brian Greig referred to queer youth suicide in his maiden parliamentary speech in 1999, suggesting that a homophobic conspiracy of silence in institutions is the prime causal factor for the large rate of suicide among younger lesbian and gay people (Australian Senate Hansard, 1 September 1999, p. 8104). He referred to a “conspiracy of silence” that sees
gay and lesbian youth living in an environment of denial and rejection, with no support, counselling, validation or role models. And then we wonder why it is that up to one-third of all young people who attempt suicide do so because of the anguish or uncertainty over their sexuality (Australian Senate Hansard 1 September 1999, p. 8104).
Indeed, the former leader of Greig’s party—the minor Australian Democrats—made use of youth suicide as a political ‘trump card’ more overtly. According to a report in Melbourne’s The Age (Schubert 2004: 4), Andrew Bartlett choked back tears as he addressed a new (conservative) government-introduced bill banning gay marriage: “Overcome as he tried to read speech notes contemplating how he would have felt if he had been banned from marrying his wife, Julie, the Democrats leader spoke instead of how the new laws might hurt gay teenagers contemplating suicide” (Schubert 2004: 4). Such examples by lesbian/gay reformist politicians indicate a tendency to ignore queer youth suicide in favour of other projects such as same-sex marriage rights, superannuation privileges and so on, while invoking youth suicide unrelatedly and only within a loosely-discernible implication that legislative and financial protections for same-sex couples will lessen the likelihood of suicide as an outcome of sexual non-normativity.
<14> The appeal for legislative protection and opportunities for public registration of same-sex couples has taken the United States, United Kingdom and Australasian lesbian/gay political agenda by storm, with lobbying of legislatures in virtually every state or political region, and the secure placement of the issue of gay marriage in the public political sphere, forcing all legislators, governors and would-be presidents to articulate a stance on it. For example, The Human Rights Campaign, as the national body in the United States seeking GLBT legislative reform through lobbying politics, lists on its public website (www.hrc.org) six issues of priority concern: advocating equal marriage rights, job discrimination, hate violence, HIV/AIDS and lesbian health, and ensuring a fair-minded judiciary. While all useful and important political goals, issues specific to non-heteronormative youth are not canvassed and the question of youth suicide is not directly applicable to any one of these. This is part of a wider and ongoing conservative shift in the dominant forms of lesbian/gay politics, moving the political potency of 1970s liberationist ideals from both the destabilisation of heteronormativity and the introduction of a range of sexual and familial arrangements to claims for the protection of same-sex relationships that are modelled on heterosexual marriage. Rather than seeking broad cultural change that might open new possibilities for youth sexual identity development or critiquing the very notion of normativity that is central to youth suicide ideation—both of which were goals of 1970s Gay Liberation political organising, the contemporary political approach can be said to be one which serves a particular class of lesbian/gay adults in ways which do not foster an environment of protection for younger non-heterosexual persons.
<15> Certainly, part of this shift in attitude to lesbian/gay relationships and the growing dominance of the issue in lesbian/gay political circles is the result of several decades of HIV/AIDS, in which a number of the discourses arguing for prevention “made clear the value of monogamous relationships.” (Baird & Rosenbaum 1997: 13). In addition, it could be argued that HIV/AIDS has provided the politics of gay marriage with a ‘moral’ and epidemiological legitimation. As Warner has indicated, conservative lesbian/gay politics obsessively focuses on “the matrix of state regulations of sexuality of which marriage is the linchpin” (Warner 1999: 108). It is presumed, then, that an environment of protection for youth follows the outcome of same-sex marriage appeal: access to gay marriage will produce self-esteem through state legitimacy. This is part of what is referred to as “trickle-down acceptance” (Warner 1999: 66). Such trickle-down motifs do, however, require a prior hierarchicalisation of issues (and often also of people) such that some issues, concerns or ideas have been prioritised through different political ideological perspectives or political processes—many of which in the case of a lobbying movement are neither transparent nor representative. Queer youth and the question of queer youth suicide have been de-prioritised in this form of lesbian/gay politics on the understanding that once certain bourgeois rights and protections are in place—such as marriage—these protections will manifest the resilience to bear existence as a queer youth, and produce an environment in which queer youth suicide is not a likely response to social conditions (Remafedi et al. 1994: 125; Schneider et al. 1994: 108).
<16> Importantly, the effect of the strong concentration on marriage, partnership, superannuation, and the subsequent discursive production of a ‘gay couple’ that relies on the notion of family-unit as the basis for public and private social and sexual practice works to marginalise an issue which is, arguably, more requisite of political, social and funded intervention, or at least of public sphere discussion around the possibilities, contingencies, opportunities and values of intervention. What needs to be understood here is that for any organisation, activism or institution—and particularly for those representing various formulations of minority movement politics—time, labour and funding are finite resources, restricting the number of ‘issues’ which can be politicised; that is, brought into the public sphere for debate, consideration, concern, discussion and dialogue.
<17> Particularly important here is the suggestion not that concerns around suicide are sidelined in a wholesale way, but that they are politicised alongside a considerably narrow reformist, legislative and lobbying agenda. And there may well be some value in such a project, noting that among the most significant risk factors for sexuality-related suicide involve concerns around self esteem (Remafedi et al 1994: 125; Schneider et al 1994: 108). What underpins such a linkage is, of course, the notion that legislative protections of lesbian/gay couples will have a longer-term result of providing a more tolerant cultural environment in which self esteem is more easily built, or is protected from the presumed ravages of legislative or public exclusion. However, the significant argument remains that while legislative protections of GLBT couples, workplace relations, superannuation rights and health insurance rights may work to improve the self-esteem of a significant proportion of GLBT persons, it does little for those we categorise as youth. These protections serve specific ‘adult’ concerns and are achieved by a programme that considers adults primary. This point best explains the shift in suicide of gay men (in general) as a popular cultural motif to the question of youth suicide as a residual group of GLBT persons not adequately covered by the concerns and subsequent effects of such a reformist agenda.
<18> Perhaps the strongest criticism of the ways in which the reformist/lobbying approach in lesbian/gay politics has sidelined the question of youth suicide is through coupling a notion of urgency with political resources. As Warner suggests in his critique of the politics of gay marriage “millions of dollars of scarce resources are poured into fights that most of us would never have chosen” (Warner 1999: 144). Time and temporality are the crucial terms in developing an ethical stance that critiques the pouring of limited activist and political resources—both economic and human—into same-sex marriage lobbying as opposed to youth suicide research and preventative measures. When same-sex marriage is put up against queer youth suicide issues, one is striven to ask which of the two more urgently requires attention from policy makers, interventionists, preventative solution development, funding for research and, ultimately, social change? While the trickle-down effect and flow-on arguments of same-sex marriage are used as a solution to this ethical dilemma, it does remain that once temporality comes into the picture, the ideological decisions behind the distribution of scarce resources does have to be rethought.
<19> With this in mind, it does remain that queer youth suicide has been marginalised within the operations of today’s dominant form of lesbian/gay politics, lobbying and activism, and that this form of marginalisation—while clearly neither conscious nor selfish in reasoning—is under strong criticism from ethical perspectives that would consider queer youth suicide to be on the one hand an issue worthy of lesbian/gay activism and on the other an issue of such temporal urgency that it outweighs concerns around same-sex marriage. While I do not want to suggest that the dominant neo-conservative liberal-humanist or reformist method of lesbian/gay political organising is a fashion of politicisation of no value—there are layers of politics and battles that must be fought on a dozen different fronts with a dozen different weapons—but that under a more clearly-articulated ethical position on its ideological agenda-setting, it remains that the struggle for same-sex marriage is not only less urgent than addressing queer youth suicide, but is something which can expand from it rather than by hierarchically primary to it.
Disciplining Queer Activism
<20> Another way of approaching the question as to how an issue is politicised is to look at the relationship between the formations of the sorts of community political/activist organisations I have described above and the broader social frameworks that constitute the public sphere and governance and their deployment of techniques of regulation. To make such an approach, it is useful to turn to Foucault's concepts of disciplinarity and biopolitics, particularly in terms of the release of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France (2004, 2007) which expand the understanding of biopolitics as a neo-liberal technology of power that normalises differently from discipline and presents a framework for discourse that takes as its object not individualisation but the regulation of broad populations. The argument here is that the conditions of possibility for the entry of a topic or issue into the public sphere for consideration socially, culturally or within broad governance regimes depends on the relationship between (1) the disciplinarity of organisations and institutions within the realm of activism and community politics, and (2) the political public sphere which is focused on regulation through various inclusions and exclusions of personages, types, categories, categorisations and the related issues.
<21> It would, of course, be both unhelpful and reductive to view activist organisations and their deployment of disciplinarity as a 'micro' politics within biopolitical governance of populations, regulatory exclusion and the political space for public debate on topical worthiness as the site of the 'macro' (Collier 2009: 83), for the relationship between the two is fundamentally more complex and interwoven, resulting from the emergence of these two technologies of power at different historical stages: discipline in the late seventeenth century, focusing on the body, its productivity, docility (Foucault 2004: 241-242), and biopolitics in the second half of the eighteenth century, regulating and normalising populations and races, a strategic coordination of power relations focusing on the political and economic issues related to populations (Foucault 2004: 243) and the preservation of the 'nation' (Foucault 2004: 223), which of course requires a boundary and a set of determinants as to which lives will be included and excluded from participation in that sociality. However, as a context for analysing what makes a political activism successful and what conditions are necessary for a political issue to be put into circulation from a sub-cultural community to a wider social group, it is useful to consider how a political or activist organisation operating at one level can be deemed 'acceptable' to the broader social and governance systems of regulation and inclusion if its disciplinary tactics are in the service of the biopolitical regime.
<22> I will start with disciplinarity and queer activist/political lobbying. One can argue that the dominant queer activist and political organisations—those that utilise lobbying and the 'piece of the pie' neo-conservative approach to goal-setting and activity—deploy the four goals of disciplinary power: "selection, normalization, hierarchicalization, and centralization" (Foucault 2004: 181), the individualisation, regimentation and normalisation with constitutes the fixed, coherent and recognisable subject. As nodes of representation (in the spotlight through lobbying both legislature and executive, as having the organisational processes to maintain themselves and a public profile, to be the 'go-to' groups commentary and opinion for broad mainstream and community media) the neo-conservative queer lobbying organisations are more than just sub-cultural community institutions, but play a significant disciplinary role in the generation of the normative and disciplined lesbian and gay subject: Firstly, because they provide the normative codes by which lesbian/gay performativity is authorised and articulable. And secondly, because the legitimated journalistic rhetoric permits the circulation of symbols which, in Ben Anderson’s formulation, allows ‘community’ to establish and police its borders (Anderson 1983). Through the dissemination of symbols and norms (Cohen 1985: 76), they imagine a queer activism into being, but one which is restricted and, to appear coherent, represents particular subjects, subjectivities, identities, issues, processes, and goals. Discipline is thus a technology of power in the service of broader neo-liberal sociality that, as Butler has very neatly phrased, underpins "the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy” (Butler 1993: 8).
<23> I want to give just one example as to how disciplinary regimentation occurs at the level of the political lobbying form of queer community activism, drawing again on the Australian example of the New South Wales Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (http://glrl.org.au/). GLRL has been active since 1988, in New South Wales, and has been one of the more visible queer political organisations in Australia, "leading the fight" as the organisation states in its history summary (http://glrl.org.au/index.php/About-Us/About-Us/History-Of-The-Lobby). The work that has been undertaken is, of course, of enormous value to a lesbian/gay community in Australia, albeit one which dominates queer community politics and thereby excludes alternative forms of activism that do not necessarily mesh so well with, for example, state government and legislative goals—which are not necessarily the same goals we might argue will protect queer youth from the causes of suicide intent and self harm. As of February 2010, there are two notices on the front page of the lobby's website which are worthy of a brief analysis in terms of disciplinary and discourse. One is an invitation to participate in "Uncloseting Youth": a workshop on "youth activism" that " is designed to engage young gay and lesbian individuals with the GLRL and our campaigns on civil marriage, adoption, surrogacy and federal anti-discrimination provisions" (http://glrl.org.au/). While a valuable contribution to queer culture and an opportunity to engage with the demographic the lobby group claims to represent, the important element is that "young people" here is explicitly defined as "aged 18-25" (http://glrl.org.au/). As with all disciplinary institutions, there are inclusions and exclusions, and the age statement polices the borders as to who contributes to the forum, what voices are heard and what issues are brought into discourse. The 'queer citizen', then, can be understood to be an adult citizen.
<24> The other item on the lobby group's main page is a call for adoption equality, providing some important information on this area of legislated discrimination and giving some highly valid reasons why change Is important. The method adopted for making this change is a form letter to the New South Wales state premier, deputy premier and the minister for Community Services. It is an online letter, which by filling out one's name, address and adding a short statement. The description of what makes an appropriate statement is couched very clearly in the language of discipline:
Tell the Premier and Minister your personal story of discrimination or why you support adoption equality for same-sex couples and their children. Keep it positive and to the point. As the letter automatically formats for you, there is no need to write "Dear..." or sign off. (http://glrl.org.au/index.php/component/ option,com_rsform/Itemid,99999/formId,11/)
Much as the letter automatically formats on behalf of the writer, the organisation—which refers to its activities as activism (http://glrl.org.au/), automatically formats the community it is representing. By not, for example, taking to task the adoption system, the concept of family, the notion that parents are single or coupled (but not anything outside of this dichotomy) or the parent/child relationship, it represents a queer community 'as if' normative and, indeed, as if heteronormative—but without the heterosexuality. In other words, its representation of a particular 'brand' of lesbian/gay personage acts in disciplinary fashion to constitute that personage, to bring it into being, and to exclude that which—in other discursive arrangements—is queer, but queer otherwise.
<25> As Mauritzio Lazzarato puts it in his Marxian take on Foucault's disciplinarity, "one must conduct oneself and have a lifestyle which is in harmony with the market" (Lazzarato 2009: 127). Michael Warner indicated, as discussed above, that the neo-conservative approach in queer politics has relied on the notion of putting forward public 'test cases' of the queer model citizen who is coupled, not overly promiscuous, practices sexual safety and conforms to broad economic, citizenship and participatory norms (Warner 1999: 29). The model citizen, then, that is put forward by dominant queer political activism does not denigrate or question the structure of the contemporary nuclear family or capitalist-labour relations or the role of the military but, through same-sex marriage claims, calls for adoption rights, sound employment and consumption practices, calls for the right to be openly lesbian or gay in state military organisations, (etc.) demonstrates a willingness to participate in contemporary social and institutional norms of family, work and war. But we might ask what, in the disciplinary regime of political lobbying is excluded? Effectively, this is not about representing a narrow group or a narrow perspective, but producing, circulating and reinforcing a particular brand of behaviour, thinking, political inclination and modelling that is a stereotype—a node of language which links an identity category or label to a set of behaviours that, in this case, becomes the intelligible, coherent and recognisable face of queer personage (Cover 2004).
<26> But why, then, is such a set of tactics taken? Why should the most important and influential queer activist organisation in New South Wales adopt (a) a neo-conservative view of 'what queers want'; (b) the deployment of stereotypes as a technique that disciplines the community the lobby group represents; (c) the exclusion of a broad range of perspective, behaviours, attitudes and sub-groups, including in this case youth; (d) the representation of a set of political goals and issues as if these represent the most significant, most desired, most relevant and most ethical goals and issues among queer persons. These four elements are governed not so much by an underlying ideological perspective, nor necessarily the discursivity of the organisation that emerges through its history, but by its methodology of activism. As indicated above, the methodology of lobby group activisms is to appeal to broader social formations, governance systems and spheres of discourse that make political change possible or at least make public the call for such political change. And to appeal, to make this method work, to make at least something work on behalf of queer communities, means falling in line with the biopolitical regulation that connects state, capital, sociality, and community.
<27> Biopolitics, as a strategic co-ordination of power relations, is a technology of power addressing and regularising the populace as a race or set of races, through the rationalisation of births, deaths, reproduction, fertility and "a whole series of related economic and political problems" as its objects of knowledge (Foucault 2004: 243). Biopolitics is unlike the disciplinary mechanism of power as it is a biopower (Foucault 2007: 1) applied not to the individualisation and normalisation of bodies through surveillance, training and punishment (Foucault 2004: 242-243) but to the greater multiplicity. As Foucault points out, biopolitics does not exclude the disciplinary; rather it "does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques" only it "exists at a different level, on a different scale…has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments" (Foucault 2004: 242). Like disciplinary power, it constitutes subjectivity through forms of surveillance, regularisation and normalisation (Venn & Terranova 2009: 4), albeit for Foucault differently and separately (Foucault 2007: 56; Collier 2009: 87). Where discipline is normalisation and docility and biopolitics makes populations and subgroups its object (Clough 2008: 18), both forms deal with the regimentation of conduct through the norm at two different levels (Fassin 2009: 46).
<28> Following Foucault, Lazzarato points out that the discursive formations and practices governed by the regulatory power technology of biopolitics operate as an ensemble of dispositifs available for making particular statements, including the political. As he puts it:
They function and produce statements in different ways—for example, legislative bodies such as parliament draft laws, employment agencies specify the norms, other agencies establish regulations, universities produce academic classifications and reports, media construct opinions, and experts make informed judgements (Lazzarato 2009: 112).
As significant is that such discursive practices stemming from the biopolitical also construct and "determine 'the 'problems of a society at a particular time" and "prevent statements appearing that do not conform to the dominant regime of statements" (Lazzarato 2009: 112). This is the regime in which political activism attempts to have statements, issues and topics heard, and it is a regime which prevents particular issues—those considered to be unnecessary for the workings of the neo-liberalist biopolitical regulation—from coming to light. Importantly, then, it is the regime with which particular formations of queer political activism attempts to align itself, while other sources of statement, issue or critique remain under-circulated due to their expressions in opposition to the deployment of biopolitical processes.
<29> That is, the operation together of discipline and biopolitics is, in contemporary society, determined by the neo-liberal knowledge framework (Lazzarato 2009: 119), and this is significant in understanding why lobbying activism and the politics of GLBT neo-conservatism is so much more successful than more complex, radical or problematic political representations—that is, in our case, the politics of the un-intelligibility of youth suicide. For broader biopolitical regimes to consider queer issues, a simple, well-disciplined categorised representation of lesbian/gay personage needs to be at the fore-front. This, then, excludes the problematic queer youth, the troubled youth, the one who self-harms, the queer youth that is neither recognisable as a model queer citizen nor coherent as a subject because suicide and self-harm are beyond intelligibility. But, importantly, this is not merely because suicide and self-harm are outside of the disciplined, disciplinary representation of queer politics, but because changing or resolving the issue of queer youth suicide is not of value within the neo-liberal framework that both discipline and biopolitics supports.
<30> Foucault was adamant that there is no dichotomy between the two technologies; although biopolitics emerged as a form of governance slightly later in the eighteenth century it does not "exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques" (Foucault 2004: 242). The mutuality between the two technologies of power, then, is for the most effective neo-liberal governance, a form of "government that targets society in its entirety" (Lazzarato 2009: 115). That is, for effective neo-liberal governance, discipline and biopolitics must have mutual goals, must operate as semblance and however much the older of the two mechanisms of power (discipline) may be disrupted by the ethical distaste in the action, orders must be obeyed. It is within both forms of power that the discursive framework constitutes and makes intelligible and feasible a particular topic for political consideration.
<31> We witness the mutual operation of disciplinarity (at the level of the queer representative activist organisations) and the biopolitical in the history of lobbying successes. In describing Australian 'queer' activism that represents anti-establishment, anti-homonormative critique as opposed to neo-conservative 'piece of the pie' calls, direct-action as opposed to lobby politics, and diversity or fluidity of sexuality as opposed to fixity of lesbian/gay identities, Graham Willett points out the distinction in relation to the actions, which we might read as the activities of bodies in relation to space, each other and discourse. Willett describes the modus operandi of organisations at the fringe of queer community political activism as
indicating an adherence to militancy, defiance and confrontation, reflecting its US origins. In Melbourne, Queer Nation (1991), Buggers and Dykes (1992) and Queer Action (1996) came into being. In Sydney, One in Seven (1991) and, in Perth, Poofters and Dykes United in Anger (1991) and then Queer Radical (1996), all occupied similar space on the political spectrum. They emphasised action as an expression of anger. Rallies in favour of anti-discrimination laws and against anti-gay violence, graffiti runs, fundraising dance parties … marked intense but shortlived bursts of activity … The problem was the fact there simply wasn't the basis for sustained anger. Too much progress was being made on too many fronts for the politics of frustration and rage to capture the imagination of many, and none of the groups lasted very long (Willett 200: 263-264).
For alternative queer organisations, disciplinary processes are not necessarily those of hierarchicalisation but consensus, difference and anti-regimentation, and these are typically grounded in the anti-liberal, anti-institutional ideology of postmodern anarchism. In what Willett describes as the failure of these organisations is not necessarily that too much progress was being made by neo-conservative queer platforms but, rather, that the method of operation of these groups as Willett describes them was a method that impelled a discord between the two contemporary techniques of power of disciplinarity and biopolitics. Foucault indicated very clearly that disciplinarity and biopolitics work mutually as techniques of power: while discipline is a technology of drilling for the docility, productivity and normalisation of the body, biopolitics is a technology that aims for an "overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers…a technology of security…a reassuring or regulatory technology," but both clearly technologies of the body at different levels (Foucault 2004: 249).
Conclusion
<32> One of the important elements in Foucault's analysis of power relations that sheds light on the contemporary situation of activism, queer youth suicide and the mechanisms of power, governance and regulation is the shift from sovereignty which is the centralisation of power that proclaims the right to kill and let live to the modern biopolitical regimes that, through selective epidemiology, data gathering and population control, "make live and reject into death". As Didier Fassin puts it, "To 'make live' actually supposes implicit or sometimes explicit choices over who shall live what sort of life and for how long" (Fassin 2009: 52). The concern, then, is that under the 'allowable' and 'successful' activist framework that operates when neo-conservative queer lobbying is aligned with neo-liberal biopolitical regulation, certain choices over who shall be rejected into death remain tacit. This is no longer a national politics of heterosexism in which the lives, inclusion, safety and social participation by non-heterosexuals was not socially supported. Rather, as biopolitical regulation support neo-liberal systems has become more entrenched, western nations become societies that prompt the multiplication of individual freedoms that increase the number of citizen-subjects on the condition that they are responsible for their self-management and economic interests (McNay 2009: 61). As Lois McNay has put it:
neoliberal regimes acquire an apparent flexibility, in that they can seemingly tolerate a wide array of practices and values as long as they are compatible with a consumerized notion of self responsibility . . . Discipline and freedom are not opposites, therefore, but intrinsically connected in that biopower indirectly organizes individuals in such a way that their apparent autonomy is not violated (McNay 2009: 63).
<33> The multiplication of various types of freedoms, therefore, allows for a range of individuals to be social subjects whose concerns—such as the call for same-sex marriage or coupled partnership economic rights and recognitions—can be presented as long as they presented coherently by political organisations which are aligned with that framework. That is, by organisations which participate in the disciplining and within the neo-liberal : the concerns of the 'proper' queer citizen who is consumes, manages his or her own economic interests, and maintains proper self-governance,
<34> In other words, the former 'abnormal' can be included (or at least not excluded) if (a) the fight for the issue of inclusion occurs within the neoliberal framework; (b) the representatives, the community, the activist institutions are those which utilise disciplinary techniques to decide the normal/abnormal and the related issues for representation. What this framework of discipline, biopolitics, activism and lobbying does, however, is exclude youth at risk of suicide ideation and self-harm who (a) may be consumers but not responsible for the economics of that consumption, (b) are not intelligible, recognisable queer subjects within the narrow homonormative, happy, stable, coupled representation. They thus are "rejected into death" not because queer politics fails, but because the topic or issue of queer youth suicide cannot be put into public circulation as it cannot be represented by the disciplinary activist regimes that align themselves with the broader biopolitical and neo-liberal framework.
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