I really enjoyed this week's reading by Beth Berila, Toxic Bodies? for many varying reasons. She starts off talking about the tainting of the "purity" of this country through "marginalized" communities, a concept I cannot seem to comprehend, simply because of its outlandishness. She outlined a few examples, mostly through the organization ACT UP of how there seems to be an uncomfortable coherence between heteronormativity and nation. She even mentioned a study done by ACT UP in regards to dressing up for Wall Street and Burroughs Welcome, and how people were mortified and uncomfortable that they were "fooled" and couldn't "read" them, letting them "pass" as being "normal," all of which directly show that interpretations of homosexuality are politically connected to our heteronormative society.
One of the main points I thought was most interesting was how to help solve this problem, not just because it exists in the LGBTQ community, but also with women, people of color, poverty, and even fatness, in my opinion. She described how important it is to "unsettle" the ability to decipher between citizens and "aliens," thus directly confronting the issue of the insider/outsider opposition.
This idea can EASILY be applied to ALL of the other categories of social struggle we've talked about thus far in class, including the ones listed above.
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I like the point you mentioned about the whole dichotomy between the "insider" and "outsider." I also agreed with Berila's argument that this issue must be approached in order to address the idea that there has to be an "outsider" that has to be eradicated in order to protect the health of the nation. This dichotomy is very universal and does pertain to all the articles we have read. It is extremely important to show that this sort of divisiveness cannot be truly ascertained, and shouldn't be the issue anyway.
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