Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity

Tim R. Johnston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137594082
• eBook ISBN: 9781137593047
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Johnston argues that affirmation is not only encouragement or support, but also the primary mechanism we use to form our identities and create safe spaces. Using the work of feminist care ethics and the thinking of French philosopher Henri Bergson to examine responses to school bullying and abuses faced by LGBT older adults, he provides the theoretical analysis and practical tools LGBT people and their allies need to make all spaces, public and private, spaces in which we can live openly as members of the LGBT community.

With its combination of philosophical theory and on-the-ground activist experience, this text will be useful to anyone interested in philosophy, women's and gender studies, psychology, aging, geriatrics, and LGBT activism. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Tim R. JohnstonAffirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity10.1057/978-1-137-59304-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Need for Affirming Spaces

Tim R. Johnston¹

(1)

SAGE, New York, USA

Abstract

The introduction begins by asking why lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people experience places like schools, dormitories, hospitals, senior centers, parks, shopping malls, public transportation, and government offices as either safe or threatening. It then describes my methodology of philosophical analysis grounded in my experience as an activist and LGBT cultural competency trainer, and outlines why I use the work of feminist care ethics and French philosopher Henri Bergson to elaborate my notion of affirmation. The introduction ends with my definition of affirmation as an indispensable interpersonal and political process through which we create the identities and spaces that allow for human flourishing.

Keywords

LGBTFeminismCare ethicsActivismCultural competencyHenri BergsonPhilosophyAffirmation

End Abstract

AMY GOODMAN: What advice do you give—I mean, these figures you give around suicide are just horrifying—for young people? What advice do you give to them?

LAVERNE COX: I mean, well, the statistic, 41 percent of trans folks have attempted suicide. I’m one of those trans people. I think we need to begin to create loving spaces where we affirm people’s gender identity and expression, so that people can be—live in a space of gender self-determination without stigma and without shame, and know that people—for people to know that they’re loved no matter who they are and how they identify.

Democracy Now! interview with Laverne Cox, CeCe McDonald, and Alisa Williams 2/19/2014

Over the past several years, people identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) have made great advances in securing certain legal rights and protections.¹ Marriage equality, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, local antibullying initiatives, and antidiscrimination legislation have all been heralded as successes for the LGBT movement. Yet, LGBT people are still routinely psychologically and physically assaulted—with recent media attention drawn to the connection between school bullying, cyber bullying, and LGBT teen suicide—and LGBT older adults often receive substandard care and face systemic abuse in long-term care facilities. These facts underline the importance of Laverne Cox’s call “to create loving spaces where we affirm people’s gender identity” and, I would add, sexual orientation. The LGBT community has created many subcultural spaces where we affirm one another, but we still are not affirmed, and often not welcome at all, in the shared spaces of public life. If we want to improve LGBT people’s quality of life we need to ask whether and why LGBT people experience places like schools, dormitories, hospitals, senior centers, parks, shopping malls, public transportation, and government offices as comfortable or threatening. Are these places where we can be open and move fluidly, or do these places demand hiding LGBT identities? Shifting these important public and shared spaces from being hostile to being affirming can be a daunting task. What makes this shift possible? What can activists and allies do to create affirming spaces?

This book provides a theoretical analysis and the practical tools LGBT people and their allies need to work toward making all spaces, public and private, spaces in which we can live and move freely. Using a combination of philosophical analysis, ethical argument, and real-world examples, I show that affirmation is a form of care that both stabilizes our identities and constitutes our embodied relationship to physical spaces. When we think of affirmation we might think of a pat on the back, a pleasant bit of feedback, or a warm and heartfelt “You can do it!” While these are certainly forms of affirmation, my use of affirmation is not limited to interpersonal encouragement. I understand an affirmation as anything that reflects part of my identity back to me. It can be verbal (a loved one affirms my sexual orientation), physical (a family photograph affirms my membership in a family), or cultural (a character in a television show reflects and affirms an aspect of my identity). Affirmations can be positive or negative, intentional or unintentional, and performed by conscious agents or fulfilled by inanimate objects. In the chapters that follow I demonstrate that affirmation is more than a psychological phenomenon or act of dispensing encouragement or a compliment; it is how we come to have a sense of self, how that self or identity changes across time, and how it relates to different physical environments. Legal protections and rights are important, but if we want to have a tangible and immediate positive impact on the LGBT community we have to also focus on creating spaces where LGBT people feel affirmed and at home.

Affirmation impacts everyone at every stage of life. Given the concept’s wide-ranging applicability, I have chosen to focus on two case studies that bear on several different public spaces and different moments in the life span: bullying among young adults and abuse faced by LGBT older adults. The first case study articulates the importance of affirmation in the development of a stable and healthy identity in the school system and other spaces important to adolescent development, while the second allows me to describe the role of affirmation at the end of life and in aging network services, such as senior centers and long-term care and assisted-living facilities.

My decision to write about LGBT bullying is grounded in my own experience of being bullied. I was one of several students routinely bullied for several years of elementary school. I have vivid memories of daily verbal harassment and physical injury. Despite the fact that I loved my teachers and enjoyed learning, I quickly became withdrawn, began lashing out at my younger sister, experienced regular stomach pain and nausea, and started exhibiting signs of obsessive–compulsive behavior. I can still feel the dread of entering my classroom, the anxiety of leaving my home, and the fear of seeing the bullies. The classroom environment became so toxic that several families removed their children from the school, and I was one of a handful of students whose parents decided to try home schooling.

I quickly became a happy and healthy kid once I was removed from this school and placed in an environment filled with positive affirmations of my identity and worth. I have thought a lot about this shift from a toxic to safe environment, and I noticed the same pattern many years later when I came out as a gay man. Coming out was a long process of pruning away the relationships and affirmations that denied or devalued my gayness and cultivating relationships and environments that affirmed my sexual orientation. This is a long and often difficult process; I was out for years before I could fully claim my gay identity.

These issues are not unique to LGBT people. We have all experienced being seen or ignored, affirmed as worthy of love or as worthless. What has always stuck with me is the impact that these experiences have not only on our psyche, but also on our embodiment. When I was bullied I stooped and felt nauseous all the time. When I was closeted, my sexual desires, and by extension my body, constantly threatened to reveal my secret. I policed my mannerisms and denied my own athletic ability for fear that a tiny slipup, a single limp wrist or jump of excitement, would out me to my peers. By contrast, when I feel loved and affirmed as valuable, that feeling I think of as being “at home,” my embodiment is easy, fluid, and comfortable. Because so much of affirmation extends beyond the strictly psychological into our somatic experience, my touchstone for whether or not something is positively or negatively affirming is if it makes our embodied movement in a given space more fluid or more stilted. If a space is affirming of my identity, I will experience that place as one in which I can be myself and move fluidly. By contrast, if a place is not affirming or negatively affirming, I will be vigilant, stilted, and fearful.²

A powerful example of the connection between affirmation, identity, and fluidity comes from the 2011 documentary Gen Silent. The film looks at the lives of several LGBT older adults as they confront the realities of aging and caregiving. Midway through the film there is a touching example of how affirmation forms and sustains our identities and determines our relationships to spaces at any age. Two of the main characters are Lawrence and Alexandre. Alexandre is living in a nursing home and experiencing both cognitive and physical decline. Lawrence is Alexandre’s long-term partner and primary caregiver. He visits Alexandre in the nursing home every day. After having a negative experience in another nursing home, they are lucky enough to have found a home for Alexandre where they can both be openly gay without fear of discrimination or abuse.

In one scene the interviewer asks Lawrence and Alexandre about the differences between the previous nursing home where they did not feel comfortable being openly gay, and the current facility where they are able to interact as partners and do not feel pressure to pretend to be friends or former roommates. To illustrate the difference Lawrence describes the intimate daily ritual of putting lotion on Alexandre’s hands:

Lawrence: I put lotion on his hands and that is such an intimate moment of just smoothing lotion on to hands and touching his skin. And as I touch his skin saying, “I love you.”

Interviewer: Would you have had that at the other place? [the previous nursing home]

Lawrence: No, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. And maybe you should just go ahead and do it. Maybe I would have … I probably would have gone ahead and … I would put lotion on his hands but I would do it in a almost clinical sort of way where you’re just sort of, “okay, let’s get this lotion on your hands and let’s get this cleaned up you know, boom, boom, boom.” But you know it wouldn’t be the—just massaging it in and taking your time and just feeling, feeling his skin, feeling his hand and you know, being able to sense my touch.

Interviewer: Is it nice to be able to hold Lawrence’s hand?

Alexandre: Oh, yeah. When he walks into a room. I’m there.

When Alexandre says, “When he walks into a room. I’m there,” we are not hearing a stutter or breakdown in grammar. I think Alexandre is being quite literal when he says that he is not present until Lawrence enters the room. It is Lawrence’s attention that allows Alexandre to be in that space as a beloved partner. When the two of them can be affectionate with one another it reaffirms Alexandre’s history, sense of self, and emotional identity. This affirmation also helps to create a space in which Lawrence and Alexandre feel at home. Fluid mobility here is both the freedom to have loving contact and the feeling of safety and comfort that comes with being at ease. The previous facility was not one in which they could be open, but in this new space they can engage in the kind of simple rituals, like applying lotion, that help to create a safe and stable environment.

This example is particularly poignant because Alexandre is nearing the end of his life. Memory loss is unraveling his sense of self, and his physical vulnerability makes the safety of his facility doubly important. That being said, this kind of affirmation is not only important when we are physically and psychologically vulnerable. As I will show, it is the process through which our identities and relationships to different spaces are constituted throughout our lives. Affirmation is at work during periods of health and illness, happiness and despair, community and loneliness.

It is stories like that of Lawrence and Alexandre that are the motivation behind this book, as well as my own activism. What follows is an account of affirmation that is meant to help us create spaces in which LGBT people feel they are able to live open lives free from threat, aggression, or the need to be closeted. I put my theory into practice every day as an LGBT cultural competency trainer for Services & Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Elders (SAGE) and SAGE’s National Resource Center on LGBT Aging. I lead a team of advocates and certified cultural competency trainers who work with different facilities to help create spaces where LGBT people feel safe and affirmed. My theoretical engagement with affirmation both informs my work and is informed by my day-to-day interactions with people on the front lines of the struggle to create safe spaces for LGBT people and relationships. On the one hand, I use affirmation as the lens through which I evaluate a given environment. I look for what messages are being sent by décor, pictures, policies, intake forms, and interactions with staff in order to assess what is being affirmed to constituents. On the other hand, I use affirmation and fluid mobility as guiding norms for my recommendations and suggestions for changing a climate from being hostile to affirming. It can be difficult to know how to create a safer and welcoming culture, or the best way to intervene in a conflict between two people, but I have found that affirmation provides a reliable lens through which to evaluate a situation, and also a goal toward which we can orient our responses to it.

Methodology and Chapter Outline

My day-to-day work is informed by a variety of different disciplines, all of which could serve as the methodological foundation for this analysis. I am interested in providing an account of how affirmation works and the impact it has on our identity and embodied fluidity. This text sits at the intersection of Continental philosophy, analytic feminist ethics of care, and LGBT or queer political critique. Affirmation raises questions at the heart of all three disciplines. What is the nature of identity if it is both created and undone by affirmations? What is the relationship between identity and temporality? How do we determine what to affirm and how to do so? Do I have a moral responsibility to affirm other people? What is the relationship between LGBT activism and broader political struggles for rights and self-determination? No identity remains perfectly static from childhood to the end of life, so what are the ways that the LGBT community reconceives of identity and community, and how have we created different affirming subcultural spaces that allow LGBT identities to flourish in the face of tremendous resistance, discrimination, and bigotry?

While I draw on work in the social sciences and several other disciplines, the methodological heart of the text is philosophical. Philosophy provides the best tools to analyze metaphysical or abstract concepts such as being, time, space, causality, and knowledge. It provides a compelling and rigorous language to discuss how we relate to and understand the world, ourselves, and politics. Philosophy’s weakness is that it has a tendency to become so abstract it loses touch with lived experience, which is why I have decided to focus on two different philosophical traditions: the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson and feminist care ethics. Bergson saw this tendency toward abstraction as the root cause of many philosophical problems, and his metaphysics of time is a sustained effort to integrate temporality into the work of philosophical analysis, bringing that analysis back down to the movement of life. Similarly, feminist care ethicists argue that canonical ethical theories are too divorced from lived experience. Care ethics is an effort to ground ethical thinking in the particular experiences of real people. I focus on their work to strike the balance between philosophy’s strength of discussing foundational principles and keeping my discussion grounded in the lives of real people. My discussion of affirmation thus uses Bergson’s analysis of memory and time in tandem with the relational model of identity found in the work of two major thinkers in contemporary feminist ethics of care: Sara Ruddick and Hilde Lindemann. This novel combination allows me to describe how the affirmations we receive over our lifetimes are determinate of our identities and consequently whether we feel comfortable or threatened in a given space.

It may seem strange to take Bergson into realms he never entered in his own work, specifically questions of feminism, gender, and LGBT identities. There is certainly a genealogical story to tell. Scholars are only now starting to discuss Bergson’s wide-ranging influence on phenomenology, poststructuralism, and other movements in Continental philosophical thought that are foundational to the work of many feminists. That being said, I am less interested in tracing historical lineage than I am in seeing how his work resonates with contemporary concerns in feminist and LGBT studies. Bergson’s body of work taken as a whole provides a compelling and coherent account of the manner in which identity, the body, memory, and specific spaces are interrelated. In what follows I will trace what Bergson’s insights into the nature of time can tell us about feminism, sexuality, and the formation of identity.

This is the first sustained attempt to show Bergson’s relevance for care ethics. Bergson’s work describes the difference between knowledge that is timeless and abstract, and knowledge that is specific to a certain temporal moment or duration and is therefore particular, contextual, and situated. Care ethics is similarly concerned with providing ethical and moral theories that are sensitive to the knowledge that arises from particular relationships—specifically, relationships of care and vulnerability. I focus on the work of Ruddick and Lindemann for two reasons. First, they are explicitly concerned with describing the care involved in identity formation. According to these thinkers, our identities are not static attributes we possess, but rather interpersonal accomplishments that require nurturing and attention. I show that this view is very much in line with Bergson’s account of identity formation as a temporal process that is open to change across the life span. Second, both thinkers develop their theories through a combination of description and argument, drawing from lived experience to make theoretical points. This method helps the reader to see the applicability of the philosophical analysis to her own life. Bergson is similarly concerned that his readers apply his ideas directly to their own experience, and it is my hope that you, reader, will do the same by considering the role of affirmation in your life. I am not attempting a thorough review of all of care ethics, nor am I arguing that Bergson underpins the work of care ethicists as a whole. Rather, I see strong affinities between these three thinkers, and their work allows me to describe affirmation and affirmative feedback loops in the development of stable, healthy, and authentic identities.

The chapters in this book tell a linear story and form a coherent whole, but each chapter is also a self-contained argument a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Need for Affirming Spaces
• 2. Affirmation and Care Ethics
• 3. Embodied Memory and Fluid Mobility
• 4. Affirmation and Adolescent Bullying
• 5. LGBT Aging and Elder Abuse
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter