MYSTI on "significant sameness" in Schöneberg

For those who haven’t read Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, it is her invitation to acknowledge the generative nature of “significant otherness” by abandoning our projections of absolute love and loyalty onto dogs, instead observing them as beings capable of interspecies love but also lesser desired qualities of protest, impatience, grief and likewise. She refuses feeling entitled to love, calling unconditional love a “rarely excusable neurotic fantasy”. For Haraway, loving a dog is a mess, tending to mess, which is not removable from the project of love within the question of otherness.

Perhaps we should imagine a “significant sameness“ so as to illuminate Haraway’s exploration of relations between species and how the affect of peace might be lived better in prevailing difference? I observe significant sameness daily in Schöneberg. Gay lovers so in love they look like twinsies. Online is even more uniform, there is little value for difference, always same for same, Masc 4 Masc, and often claiming racial prejudice benign, merely having a type.

I see these profiles as bodies in the streets wearing sportswear or boots, and always beards! I understand how many feel more comfortable looking like everyone else. I get consumer identity and feeling somehow natural in relation to those who consume the same. But how does the mythology of love, love that changes you, fulfill this promise when looking down a hallway of mirrors for connection? What does love look like between two individuals (or in a larger community) blindly becoming the same thing? Where’s the mess?

Alongside these lover-look-alikes, there’s a parade of purebred dogs. Pugs, Cavaliers and French Bulldogs tasked with representing the feminine, cuddly and sweet desires that the owners deny via their cagey masculinity. Bros with boutique bags filled with gear, hyper-branded fetishes and genetically pure dogs don’t cruise the streets looking for something different. Instead they look and judge, with queeny sneers, those of us who wear purple, flaunt our feminine or simply fail in the most mundane ways to gain membership in this clone cult. Is the product of suffering a rather recent and still limited liberation that we must police each other for the appropriate representation of our kind? Have we merely liberated heterosexuals from the burden of norm enforcement?

Consumption is a tricky connection. Likeness is rife with forgery in our army of shoppers. As rainbow flags – supposedly a symbol of diversity encouraging persons to be who they are and celebrating significant otherness for making a community dynamic – dissolve into less colorful flags of exclusionary leather or bear/ds-only desire politics, I find myself looking to the dogs these fags live and love alongside, believing it a pleasant disruption to their mantra of masculinity. Haraway says her dog colonizes her on a cellular level with “darting tongue kisses”, that their love is a “nasty developmental infection”, so I hope the strut and delicate candor of these pooches might also inspire us all to walk a little lighter in our loafers.

MYSTI is known as host of Gegen, Panty Splatters and Südblock's Pubquiz. Aside from Fag Philosophy, more writing can be found at her website, Hold my Hair Back