Should we stop thinking we are free?

We have left behind repressive security in favour of precarious freedom. But we aren't as free as we think. On the parallels between regime and sexuality.

“Don’t cry, Róger. You have to remember, they lived in a different time from us. We don’t have more chances to build a better life. We don’t have to live like that anymore.” So concludes one of the dozens of illuminating vignettes in anthropologist Roger Lancaster’s new book on class, gay identity, modernity and development – all told through the lens of his ethnography in Mexico.

In The Struggle to Be Gay – in Mexico, for Example, Roger recounts watching Brokeback Mountain at a viewing party with several other gay people. Shedding a tear at the end of the film, the (much older) Roger is comforted by “Diego”, one of his informants, a young gay man.

There is so much contained in Diego’s consoling words. Roger unpacked it for us on Bungacast as follows: “Diego’s words communicate that ‘we inhabit the same time, we inhabit an open field of possibilities’; ‘they – the cowboys in the film (and also ‘they’, the people in the indigenous village from where Diego had come from and left behind) – live in a different time’. All this sums up how Diego images in the present, the modern moment, and his vision of freedom, time, and possibility.”

What happens to young Diego afterwards is both representative of the wider picture Roger paints, as well as exceptional. Diego had rejected his indigenous identity in favour of a gay one. But struggling with a lack of opportunities, he faced rough times, was homeless, and had to return to his village. To Roger’s surprise, Diego managed to save up some money, move back to the city, take computer programming classes, and eventually get a professional job. This was one of the few informants Roger developed that managed “some semblance of a middle class ending”. This is all the more crucial because to be gay – to fully incorporate the modern, global gay identity to which many of Roger’s informants aspired – meant having access to middle-class, affluent consumption patterns: clothes, bars, nightclubs, travel, etc.

Most didn’t achieve that. Roger recounts a hackneyed joke about a son coming out to his father that exemplifies this phenomenon. The father responds by asking the son if he shops in fancy boutiques in the Zona Rosa, has money to go to nightclubs, etc. When the son says no, the father replies: well son, I love you very much but you’re confused. You’re not gay, eres solo un pinche puto (you’re just a fucking fag).

As it happens, “Diego” managed to achieve the means to have a modern gay lifestyle. But he ends up working 12h days, not going out much, and being afraid of having his possessions stolen if he invites sexual partners back to his place. The irony is that the sense of possibility Diego had spoken about years before can now be realised, materially, but something had changed and the youthful spark had diminished.

Roger’s book is full of these twists and ironies, complex interactions between class and sexuality in a Mexico that, over the past four decades, transformed from a corporatist centre-left dictatorship with some measure of welfare state, to a neoliberal state and consumerist society overseen mostly by centre and centre-right governments (some but not all with some democratic legitimacy).

One of the recurring themes suggested by the book is a tension best captured in Roger’s repeated reference to “ground beneath my feet”. Kids wanting to come out and retain familial love and support but also have the freedom to be who they felt they were while also having a degree of material comfort and financial independence. Squaring that circle proves very difficult for many.

For the individual, it often comes down to a choice between repressive security at home (a conservative family denying the son’s gay identity; or the son repressing his desires so as not to incur familial disdain or disownment) and a precarious freedom out in the world. If the young gay man leaves the conservative ambience of the family behind, he may lack basic material, as well as emotional/psychic support.

The opposition is reflected in Mexico’s historical transition under the weight of the debt crises of the 1980s: from the repressive security proffered by the PRI (Partido Revolucionário Institucional) dictatorship to the precarious freedom of the neoliberal years – in which the working class was squeezed harder and harder, but greater sexual freedom was on offer, along with other types of consumer freedom (it’s there if you can afford it). Indeed, according to Roger Lancaster, under the centre-right government of Vicente Fox of the early 2000s, Mexico was an early pioneer of what Nancy Fraser called “progressive neoliberalism.”

Mexico’s transition to neoliberalism is, of course, not unique. But in the global North, the corporatist period saw a more extensive welfare state, while social inclusion through formal work was almost universal – this was something the national-developmental regimes in Latin America never really achieved. In the most advanced states, liberal-democratic regimes obtained. So the “repressive” aspect was more pronounced in somewhere like Mexico – even if racism was still a central component of rule in the US, UK, France, etc. But the loss of developmental regimes was more tragic for less developed societies than the turn away from social democracy was for the core. In any case, none of this was simply a matter of political option: the crisis of profitability through the 1970s/80s was real and imposed serious constraints – continuing the old way of managing capitalism was not a possibility. There was no alternative – other than revolutionary transformation.

But back to Roger – and to Diego. Their interaction, at a micro-social level, ends up being exceptionally telling about society and history at large. Roger muses on where Diego went wrong, and the traps he found himself in: whether he expected too much, whether it was wrong to assume that following one’s desires was correct, whether he was wrong to long for old-fashioned intimacy despite being gay and whether – this is crucial – he erred in “his belief that the present is a time of freedom”.

The present is a time of freedom. Those words stuck with me. Some of Roger’s young, gay, Mexican informants clearly worked on that presupposition, in contrast to the world depicted in Brokeback Mountain. But do I think now is a time of freedom? Do my peers? Does the public in general think this? Broadly speaking, I suspect so. See the way that a lot of politics – from social demands to policy initiatives – operate on the premise that we are too free. Things have gone too far; they – or we – need reigning in.

And despite the way civil liberties are eroding at an ever faster rate (the notion of privacy is gone entirely, the security state and its corporate partners extend their tentacles inch-by-inch, day-by-day, etc.) we still jealously guard certain freedoms. This is honoured in their absence. When someone’s freedom is denied – when there are expressions of racism or sexism or homophobia, for instance – we are outraged.

It occurs to me that the widespread presumption that the present is a time of freedom generates a particular kind of politics: social justice. If we think we are granted freedom but feel it denied in certain instances, that is understood as a break of the social contract. Justice politics is always about claims that the rules of the game have been broken. And not about the rules of the game themselves. (A theoretical critique of justice politics was usefully advanced by Ross Wolfe here, and on Bungacast – though I think Ross’s case goes too far in trying to cleave off justice from freedom; it’s not so clear cut in practice).

What if instead of thinking that the present is a time of freedom, we started thinking about our lives in society, at this point in history, as being characterised by unfreedom? Yes, we have our consumer citizenship in which we can adopt whatever identity we like; and the old socio-cultural strictures of duty, guilt, shame have died along with the old bourgeoisie – the new elite has no need for these things. But maybe we aren’t actually very free at all. We are only free if we conceive of freedom as the absence of intervention in our lives, or the absence of responsibility. But we are not free to truly determine our lives, as individuals or collectively. Maybe if we didn’t think of ourselves as free, we would clamour for freedom, fight for it, rather than merely shout “injustice!” in the face of its breaches?

In another passage in Roger’s excellent, surprising book, he recounts how he gave Le Petit Prince to one informant to read. The latter’s take? “I didn't really like that book. It seems to say that if you don't do exactly what you want to do, you're wasting your life. But who can do exactly what they want to do? Only rich people can do that.”