Beyond “Tolerance” and Empire
In recent articles, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler rightly and harshly criticizes the confusion of sexual politics with the politics of empire and argues for a kind of sexual politics that resists Islamophobia, racism and imperialism and that tries to find convergence points of antiracism and LBGT struggles. Unfortunately, Butler doesn’t elaborate much.

It is the task, it seems to me, of critical, anti-racist, queer movements to think about and develop on forms of sexual politics beyond tolerance, against tolerance. The heteronormative society radical queers are fighting is the very society that excludes and discriminates against immigrants. Convergence points exist, for instance in the field of education where there is every reason to fight against both implicit heterosexuality as well as against the structural disadvantaging of girls and immigrant kids.

Anti-racists and LGBT activists may also find each other in solidarity with LGBTs from minority communities and in solidarity with homosexual refugees and their rights.

The reader may perhaps ask herself whether the author of the present article has gone mad. Isn’t the Netherlands in fact one of the “best” countries to live in for lesbians or gay men, because they have in fact gained rights and a certain amount of acceptance and demanded their place in the public domain?

Of course this is true, and the gains of LGBTs in the Netherlands must be defended and the public kiss-ins and similar actions organized by queers in response to homophobia must be supported and participated in. But we need a movement that is more than just responsive, but tries to constantly reinvent itself to fight the exclusion of deviant sexualities as effectively as possible, while doing everything to resist the exploitation of our struggles in the “war against terror” and the ongoing onslaught against the Muslim community.

I do not argue for intolerance, but for re-imagining political struggles in such a way that the structural causes of exclusion, discrimination and violence assume center stage again, for a queer movement that takes up the struggle against heterosexual normativity.

Tolerance is ideology. We do not fight to become tolerated but to change the world. Tolerance is an ideological construct that disarms the LGBT movement and positions us against as opposed to alongside “other” oppressed minorities.