Gender and Sexuality 10

Searching, I discovered something I didn’t expect. Something decades of determined assimilation could not blind me to. In this great gay mecca, I was an invisible man. I had no shadow, no substance, no place, no history, no reflection. I was an alien unseen, and seen unwanted. Here as in Hephzibah, I was a n***, still.

Quoted from Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied in: José Esteban Muñoz (1999): Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9.

Marlon Riggs (1957-1994) was a US-American filmmaker, poet, and gay rights activist.

In this quote, Riggs was talking about how different structures such as racism and sexuality influence each other. This is referred to as intersectionality. Thinking about discrimination in an intersectional way does justice to a complex reality in which everyone always feels that they belong or are assigned by society to various categories (age, gender, sexual identity, disability, legal status, educational qualifications, and many more). For example, Audre Lorde wrote that she was Black within the lesbian community and lesbian within the Black community. Lorde wrote that there was no hierarchy of oppressions, for which reason one must always recognise and consider oppression in its diverse forms.

*Marlon Riggs (1994): Black is ... Black ain‘t. Dokumentarfilm. 87 min. *Marlon Riggs (1989): Tongues untied. Dokumentarfilm. 55 min. *Audre Lorde (2009): I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

1989