Too Much Real World Application

I cannot help but take this class and see this theory inside my own life and my own identities. As a queer woman, I understand how so much of the conversation about our lives and their infringement on the lives of others is our fault. Today I am talking with friends about heading to Arizona to get ourselves arrested if Jan Brewer extends her record of supporting fascist legislation (like the “Papers, Please Initiative) by signing into law legislation that would make it legal for businesses and workers to deny me service because I am a gay person. I mean, JESUS F-ING CHRIST, can I just buy a bottle of water over here? No, because we don’t serve your kind. But then I started thinking about plane tickets - can I be denied access to other places, be kept in my place, kept out of places, because of my queerness. Well Jeez Wally, they can already do that because of my fat body. Just see how my refusal to pay for two tickets to get to one place, one time keeps me grounded. What about access to parks, swimming pools, hiking trails. Can the Arizona legislature allow businesses to be so upset by gayness that they don’t let us walk, picnic, bike, swim? Well - institutionally that has already happened in my life because of my inability to buy clothing that would allow me access to those activities. I am only allowed spectator status in relationship to sport. I guess there is just not enough fabric.

I have found the most interesting and upsetting thread of this legislation and the national debate around it, the words of people who call themselves my ally - “You know if I owned a business in Arizona, you would be welcome. I would probably paint my walls in rainbows. BUT, people have to be free to their religious beliefs. Sorry, not sorry.” The minoritization of the argument about my right to buy toilet paper whether or not you believe the earth is 2400 years old is structured so that I must realize that my being alive is impinging on other people’s rights to believe that I am not something their god would make. And that my allies, my "friends", are buying this argument, that I  - not the institution, needs to make room for civil rights. That the business, religious, and political institutions need be left alone and that I need to make room for people’s right to deny me a toothbrush. 

But again, using the example of Southwest Airlines and their competitors engaging in price discrimination against me and my fat body, they must engage a minoritizing argument because a universalizing argument will cost Daddy Yourbucks way too much money. It isn’t the ridiculous - and shrinking - size of the plane seats that are the problem, it is your fat neighbor. It isn’t the absurd idea that we are all one size and one seat should fit all that is the fallacy, it is my silly assumption that I should be given a seat that fits...and a bathroom that I can turn around in. (You can see this demonstrated well by way of classroom desks. I pay the same tuition yet I am given two choices when it comes to class seating - sit and suffer or sit in shame.) And it isn't the business owner's hate and hateful heterosexism that is the problem. It isn't their hijacked understanding of faith and salvation. It is my stubborn insistence to require the right to buy groceries as a gay lady.