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Bi Lines
In Defense of Anger
This column appeared in Siren: irresistibly tempting for queer women, Rage issue, vol. 7 issue 2 (June/July 2002), page 14.
One of my first theology courses was called Death. Cheery, n'est pas? The thing that stood out for me the most was Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's "stages of grief." It's not the only model of grieving, but it's one I find politically useful. As I remember, the stages were denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'd like to say a bit about the first two. I'll leave bargaining, depression and acceptance for another time.
1) Denial. Most people spend much of their life in denial. And not just about death. As a younger woman, despite considering myself to be a feminist, I was convinced that I had never experienced sexism (Hahahahaha! laughs older, wiser me). I've met many people who are in denial about the reality of heterosexual privilege, or the power and violence of heterosexism. Denial protects us from having to face unpleasant or overwhelming truths, but it doesn't let us grow as people or achieve any real change.
2) Anger. Lesbian feminist Beverly Wildung Harrison defines anger as a "feeling-signal" that something is wrong in our relations with others. That's for sure. When I finally had my conscience tuned into the sexism that permeated my daily life I became really angry. My mom's generation would have called it conscientization. At one point I wondered if the anger would ever go away. Was I going to be an angry person for the rest of my life, or did I just need to burn the previous twenty years of stored anger, after which I could settle into a lower level of general annoyance?
As it happens I was to stumble on the discovery, made by many queer feminists long before me, that anger is powerful. Society discourages anger in women, racial and sexual minorities for just this reason. The stereotype of the angry dyke or the angry black militant are used to prevent people from claiming their rightful anger power. Personal protection trainer Sanford Strong writes that anger helps us break out of the "paralyzing fear" that blocks our concentration when faced with violence. Many survivors of violence have found that tapping into their anger provided them with the needed stamina, strength and power to remain alive. I found this to be true for myself, both in instances of violence, and in the face of the systemic violence queer women and other groups face every day. I threw myself into activism, fueled by my anger at sexism, heterosexism, biphobia, and racism as I found it (suddenly, it seemed to me) in my world and in myself.
I'm not saying that anger is without its dangers. Beverly Harrison warns that "[t]he deepest danger to our cause is that our anger will turn inward." Unfortunately, I see a lot of that in our queer community. It's often easier to direct our anger at lesser targets than at the real cause of our fury. As a bisexual woman, I am often the target of lesbian anger at men. This is unfortunate, because bisexual women should be natural allies with lesbians against our shared experience of oppression as women and as queers. Yet I know that I am also guilty of this same side-tracking, lashing out at potential allies instead of fighting the real source of my anger.
Beverly Harrison wrote that "Anger denied subverts community." This resonates with my own experience. My anger at unchallenged biphobia sat like a barrier between me and the women who could have been my allies, friends or lovers. I worried that if I revealed my anger, and challenged those who were its cause, I would lose their approval, affection, or respect. Yet I believe that Harrison is right when she argues that the opposite of anger is not love or peace, but indifference. Anger requires that we take the cause of our anger seriously, whether that cause is a social system, a political movement, or an individual. I take my commitment to the queer community seriously enough to use my anger to work for positive change for bisexuals. I take my commitments to particular queer women seriously enough to say when they have angered me, and to try to accept the power of their anger when I have hurt them. It sure ain't easy.
One of the reasons I find the stages of grief applicable to community activism is that in many ways I feel a sense of loss. I feel grief over our individual and communal loss of equality, dignity, work, families, security, and the all-too-often loss of life suffered by our fellow queers. I have found myself in the bargaining stage, thinking I'd be accepted if only I was the right sort of queer-the good queer. I have thrown myself into the depression stage, and thought it would never end. My biggest problem with Dr. Ross's stages of grief is that her model ends with acceptance. As a theologian, I'm not sure that we ought to accept death. As a bisexual activist, I'm positive we shouldn't accept oppression. If these were my stages, the last one would be Action.
The books and authors I mentioned are:
- Beverly Wildung Harrison, "The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,"in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, Ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) 3-21.
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan Press, 1969).
- Sanford Strong, Strong on Defense: Survival Rules to Protect You and Your Family From Crime (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).
