Creative Deviance!

Reading this article posted by Frances Madeson got me thinking about creative deviance. There's a tendency for Marxists to see all forms of deviance as products of class alienation, thus curable--end capitalism, and viola, we'll be good self-governing workers. Like Xians who want to cure homosexuality. Artists, not all artists, but certainly the one's I most indentify with, are deviants. In the words of Sarah Dowling, "Poetry…” I would expand that to include all the arts “… is the language of weird people." I see at the core of my activism, making the world safe for weird people... who don't need to be cured!

Even in some imagined Marxist workers paradise, creative deviance would be the difference between collective tyranny and repression, and an open, evolving culture. In art, like what Howard Zinn demonstrates in A People's History--it's the outsiders who create the possibility of change, and it’s about more than what we marginalize as ‘art.’ I’m thinking of divisions within LGBT peoples... where non-conformity to sexual norms ceases to be in any meaningful sense, deviance. A room full of gay retirees discussing their checking accounts. Yikes. Those who embrace their Queer are, in their bodies and their being, the creative edge--pushing and creating change, by more than making sexual diversity acceptable, but by pressing to new understandings and definitions of human relationships on the most basic level--that of our sexuality. Creative Deviance--something totally missing in this piece as in any brain-in-a-bottle WordThink that assumes ideas change action, when it’s always the other way around.