Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy, and the editor of three nonfiction anthologies: That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation; Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving; and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients. She is at it again with her latest anthology, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.
I caught up with Mattilda over email. Here's Mattilda...
You discuss in the introduction of Nobody Passes your struggles with exploring issues of social and economic justice within an academic setting. You state: “I saw that the more radical in context a course became, the more intellectually elitist.� Can you talk more about this and how did you work towards making Nobody Passes not intellectually elite?
I grew up in an upper-middle class, assimilated Jewish family where I was sexually abused by my parents, and this violence was camouflaged by their “success.� At an early age, I realized that I didn't respect my parents on any level, but I still internalized their model that prioritized higher education over all else—since I was an overachiever child, it was always assumed that I would go right from high school, to a prestigious college, to grad school, etc., and I did in fact spent some time at one of those posh East Coast liberal arts breeding grounds for the intelligentsia, only to find—surprise, surprise!—that even “activist� classes were more or less about shuffling around abstractions in a battle for the ownership of ideas. I spent most of my time doing activism for racial and economic justice against the administration, and then I realized well, guess what? I could learn direct action organizing skills outside of the academy, I mean that's where I was going to learn what I needed to keep me alive, so I left college and fled to San Francisco, where I found radical outsider queers dedicated to politicizing every aspect of identity, analyzing and processing and challenging every choice—hookers and incest survivors and vegans and anarchists and sluts and even self-identified vegan incest survivor activist whores—oh, wait—that was me!
But the point is that where I’ve learned the most about radical challenges to the status quo has really come from an active role in cultures of resistance, and while we've certainly fucked up our share just like everyone else, I still think the possibilities for instigation and troublemaking and tearing apart established systems and ideas, those possibilities—for me, at least—come mostly from outside the academy. Someone asked me in an interview recently: “Tell me some of the scholars you’ve worked with.� And I was like, “Huh?� I mean the “scholars� I've worked with are the people I've done direct action activism with—ACT UP in the early ‘90s, Fed Up Queers in the late ‘90s, Gay Shame from then until now, and so many other groups that have appeared and disappeared, as well as from people who may never be entered into official histories—just the queers and freaks and outsider vagrants who have given me a sense of maybe a little bit of hope in a world of loss.
But wait—am I getting distracted? My point is that with Nobody Passes, I wanted to incorporate as many different perspectives on the times when we pass, and fail to pass, and when we realize we weren’t actually passing at all even though we thought we were, or when we were passing as something entirely different, or when we refuse to pass—all of those messy intersections in everyone's lives. Of course, I am attracted to scathing analysis over abstract jargony alienation, although one person’s scathing analysis could always be another's jargony alienation, so I'm open to critique.
For readers who haven’t read Nobody Passes yet, what is the assimilation process that is referred to throughout the anthology and what are its dangers? Is anyone free from assimilation? Do you consider yourself an assimilation fighter? Are there positive aspects to assimilation?
A lot of my work over the years has centered around challenging the violence of gay assimilation, the process through which the dominant signs of straight conformity—marriage, military service, adoption, ordination into the priesthood, gentrification, etc.—have become the ultimate signs of gay “success,� while issues like housing, health care, fighting police brutality and U.S. imperialism, those are all swept under the rainbow doormat. In thinking about assimilation, not just the tyranny of sweatshop-produced nylon rainbow flags and participatory patriarchy, but assimilation in all of its many layers and forms and means and methods of cultural erasure, I conceived of Nobody Passes as a way to examine passing as a means through which assimilation sometimes takes place, and is often allowed to remain invisible. So, I'm talking about passing into dominant cultures, and also standards of inclusion for subcultures and cultures of resistance. There are essays in Nobody Passes that address an incredible range of experiences, from passing as the right kind of victim in the domestic violence prevention movement, to passing as the right kind of genderqueer or transgendered person, to passing as disabled, to passing as the right kind of incest survivor or femme or religious person or cruiser or rapper or immigrant or hooker or activist or prisoner—all of these stories examined side-by-side, sometimes in the same essay in complicated, critical, messy and dangerous ways—that’s what I was looking for.
Are there positive aspects to assimilation? Yes, in the way that there are positive aspects to any kind of monstrous ideology or politic or identity or existence. Of course, there are positive aspects to living in the dominant colonial power in the world, but am I going to extol the virtues of the “The Star-Spangled Banner�? Not today. What I’m saying is that of course we are all assimilated in various ways, and this is often a survival mechanism— I’m not saying that we shouldn’t survive, simply that we shouldn’t grasp on to any sign of acceptance as progress. To bring it back to Nobody Passes, we all pass in various ways in different scenarios, the question of the book is how do we make sure that when we are passing, we are not simultaneously enacting violence, making sure that someone else fails—or, if no one were required to pass at all, then what possibilities for defiance and celebration and transformation might emerge?
How did you go about choosing the contributors to Nobody Passes? The contributions reflect a variety of “passings.� Can you talk more about this?
Absolutely. The whole point for me in doing this book was to examine passing from the widest possible range of perspectives. I got in a little bit of trouble with Seal Press on that one. They wanted to narrow the range to pieces centering around gender. While all the pieces in the book do examine gender in one way or another, they also examine all of the other messy and dangerous and illuminating intersections in all of our lives. I mean, how is it possible to examine gender without also talking about race and class and sexuality and ability and age, etc.? It was really important to me to include essays about some of the most dramatic passing crises in the news today—immigration, racial profiling, appropriation, anti-Arab hysteria—and to position these essays side-by-side with pieces about cruising for sex and gender transgression and even a reading group.
Community often appears as a double-edged sword throughout the anthology. On one hand, the sense of belonging and shared experience helps many of us survive on a daily basis. But at the same time any differences that stray from the community groups we belong or want to belong to can affect our membership making many of us minorities within minority groups. How can this reality change? Can activism around identity be empowering without oppressing?
I think that identity is a really incredible starting point. I don’t know where I would be without certain identity categories, like queer or faggot or queen or freak or outsider. The problem with identity politics is when identity becomes an endpoint. That’s where we see how “community� becomes a screen behind which people with power hide behind in order to oppress everyone else and get away with it by saying “we� need to gentrify these neighborhoods in order to make them safer for “our community,� whoever that may be.
But I truly believe that the only way we can possibly come to any agreement, both inside and across, within and without identity categories, is to articulate, experience and explore our differences. I think that’s where we can find commonalities. Not from silencing or muting our complexities in order to reach some sort of tragic compromise.
How did you arrive to the activist you are today? And what do you consider to be the foundation of your activism?
Looking back, there are a few things that were very formative to my politics. First of all, growing up in an upper-middle class, supposedly “liberal� family of origin where misogynist violence played itself out in appalling ways, and where I was completely powerless as a child, a broken toy for my parents to shred—that experience has made me very suspicious of the “liberal,� upper-middle-class worldview and the conventional definitions of marriage and family. When the first Gulf War erupted while I was graduating high school, that really showed to me the systemic violence of U.S. imperialism. Then the Rodney King verdict soon after that really showed me the way U.S.-colonial violence plays itself out here in the U.S. in such horrifying, racist ways.
Getting involved with ACT UP San Francisco when I was 19—this was a chapter of ACT UP that, at the time, focused on universal health care, needle exchange, women with HIV/AIDS and prisoners with HIV/AIDS. That’s where I learned an intersectional politic, because at ACT UP the belief was that you couldn’t fight AIDS without also fighting racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. It also was a chapter of ACT UP that operated by consensus, and that was really formative for me as well. The ways people still enacted horrifying power dynamics, well that was illuminated for me as well because it made me think about what would it mean if people actually worked out their personal issues and didn’t operate on the permanent burnout model. Well, that’s something I'm still trying to figure out.
But I also want to mention that my activism comes from creating radical queer alternatives to families of origin, institutional education, institutions as a whole, status-based ways of looking at the world, monogamy, consumerism—or at least trying, and failing, and trying again—that’s where so much of my politics come from.
I know you’ve been on the road with Nobody Passes for some time now. What kinds of feedback have you received from Nobody Passes? And where can readers find you next?
I went on a crazy 2 1/2 month cross-country tour and it was absolutely amazing. What was so incredible was to see how people were engaging with radical queer politics and politics around passing and just engaging with the world in so many delicious and dangerous ways, all over the place. One of the things that was fascinating was how excited people were that I center my analysis around feminism. I mean, I wouldn’t be anywhere without the feminism of radical queers and whores and runaways—you know, the feminism of challenging power, not accessing power. I mean, feminism is such a given to me, but I realize that since I was given the label “male� at birth, I’ve been denied feminist authenticity of the surface variety. But this may also be a blessing because it has allowed me to create my political vision on my own terms.
I felt so inspired while I was on tour, existing in this constant space of rigor and analysis and engagement. Unfortunately, I’m a fragile girl. I’m dealing with fibromyalgia, which basically means chronic pain all over my body plus an inability to get restful sleep and then the two wrap around one another until I can hardly function. So, I think I’ll be resting in San Francisco for a while. But I certainly welcome ideas for travel and activism and deviance and other forms of troublemaking
Is there anything you would like to add?
I love feedback and correspondence. It’s one of the things that makes me feel like I’m actually doing something or having some impact. So, please feel free to say hello to me on my blog, nobodypasses.blogspot.com, or write to me via my homepage, www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com. I’m also working on a new anthology, tentatively titled, Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification and the Desire to Conform. The call for submissions is on my blog. Send any ideas my way, and stay in touch!
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"my activism comes from creating radical queer alternatives to families of origin, institutional education, institutions as a whole, status-based ways of looking at the world, monogamy, consumerism—or at least trying, and failing, and trying again—that’s where so much of my politics come from."
AND SO MUCH OF MY ENCOURAGEMENT AND DETERMINATION COMES FROM YOU AND YOUR WORK!
the world would be so much less feminist without mattilda.
"my activism comes from creating radical queer alternatives to families of origin, institutional education, institutions as a whole, status-based ways of looking at the world, monogamy, consumerism—or at least trying, and failing, and trying again—that’s where so much of my politics come from."
AND SO MUCH OF MY ENCOURAGEMENT AND DETERMINATION COMES FROM YOU AND YOUR WORK!
the world would be so much less feminist without mattilda.
Ok I know it's Saturday but for me shameless self-promotion never really ends. Just wanted to highlight a story in the UK that may not have made it out here. Banaz Mahmod, the british woman brutally raped, tortured and agonisingly murdered by her own father and uncle for dating a guy they didn't approve of. Sickening stuff.
Lovely to see Mattilda on Feministing this morning!
As always, I love her commitment to "trying, and failing, and trying again" to find, to make, something better.
Cruella – Interestingly, her father got a life sentence for ordering the killing.
The father of did not.
/off topic
"Even 'activist' classes were more or less about shuffling around abstractions in a battle for the ownership of ideas."
What a great a line. And as someone doing graduate work in "culture studies" at one of those "posh East Coast liberal arts breeding grounds for the intelligentsia," I make no assumptions in saying: SO TRUE.
Nice work, and good interview.