Decompiling Oppression #64
Sam McVeety
A reflection: what does pride mean to me?
This month finds me thinking about seeing and being seen. We've just started reading Heartstopper at home, and our well-worn Samwell t-shirts (hockey and rowing, thank you) are seeing plenty of use.
Backing up: Samwell College is a fictional school in the universe of Ngozi Ukazu's brilliant webcomic Check, Please!, a love letter to hockey, pies, and well, love (in its many forms). Required reading, at least for this particular Canadian/American couple. It's something that, when I read it, I see myself; I feel seen. I recognize myself in the nuances and contradictions of what it's like to have a supportive team around you, and still feel precarity, still drive yourself to prove yourself beyond all measure of doubt. It offers hope, showing a version of the answer to the question: "what is it like, to simply be?"
There's something special about Samwell, too, in the Sciamma-esque absence of trauma (unlike Portrait, however, there are somewhat more men). There's not none, but it’s blurred, out of focus, hidden offscreen. And this in itself is a radical choice. Particularly when seen through the eyes of others, queer stories are usually stories of trauma and loss. Of impossible love, violence, and disease. Ngozi is telling a different story here, one where hate and violence aren’t given a leading role.
And still, pride also has me thinking about its antithesis, shame. What does writing about shame for me look like? Is it easier or harder than pride? Both carry the reluctance of self-aware privilege. Travel is back, and with it, those moments of hesitation in a new place. "Yes, that's right, a king bed is fine, not two doubles." (I hope this interaction doesn't inconvenience you. I don't want it to be a big deal, really.) "And will your wife be co-signing on that?" "Husband." "Yes, so will your wife be co-signing?" I catch myself making myself smaller; I don't want to make myself smaller... and still, it's exhausting.
Perhaps nothing in recent memory captured the enduring power of shame as well as this passage from Violet Allen's dystopian simulation in The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves (via A People's Future of the United States). Our protagonist, Dante, thinks he's part of a futuristic conversion therapy operation, running virtual reality simulations to help others find their way to cis/heterosexual bliss. (Stay with me here.) Except... his test subjects keep rejecting his simulations, again and again. Amid his growing frustration with his subjects' inability to change, and finding himself (re)discovering his own desires, he realizes that his own mind has been tampered with, and that he is the one in a simulation:
We’re giving you a very important gift, Dante. You should treasure it. Sweet, simple shame. You used to suffer from a pitiful lack of shame before you came here. Sassy and smug and out and proud and so forth. Other people aren’t like me, Dante. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t like it being rubbed in their face. They don’t like being forced to accept you. Don’t worry. You’ll still be yourself after this. Most of our graduates are. We’ve never been able to really fix you all. But at least you’ll know how to keep it to yourself. Maybe you’ll settle down, find a nice girl, have some kids, satisfy your urges in secret. Or at the very least, you can be the bachelor uncle or the lonely oddball neighbor. Like in one of your movies. All you need is beautiful, wonderful shame. We love you, Dante. I promise.
San Junipero it ain't. To me, what's brilliant about this is how it constructs a society (an eerily familiar one) that aspires to a negative peace, where we might enjoy some basic protections, and still be prisoners of our own minds. A society that says, "we can't kill you, but we can still make you hate yourselves." A society that undermines pride not from outside, but from within.
And so, I find myself sitting at this tension of pride and shame, and wondering what it means. What does pride look like, divorced from a reactive need to counterbalance shame? Is there a gift within the thorns of shame, one that allows me to see myself in the precarity of others, and replace distance with empathy?
But I do wonder... what it would be like, to simply be.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Where do you feel tension between pride and shame in your life?
Communal: What do collective conversations about shame look like? How could they create space for healing?
Solidarity: Support Queer The Land, a collaborative project grounded in the self-determination of queer, trans, and two spirit Black/indigenous/people of color and the vision of collectively owning our land and labor.
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