The category resisting subjugation is constructed from the themes acting/doing with others, acts of parrhesia, subjugated voices, openness to new ideas, struggle and perseverance, resisting hegemonic ideas and acting on the world. The subject is as an active force that resists oppression and discrimination. It is seen as strong and agential, engaged in a continual struggle to overcome any limitations placed on it through society’s expectations and values.
The subject is ‘not bound by convention’. Its role is positioned within a context of ‘ignoring values, to react against the norm’. The subject is an active force continually engaged in struggling against its subjugation. In instances when the subject is under threat from oppressive ideas, it recognises ‘I would have been giving in. I decided the next day to continue the fight’. In confronting a world that is full of injustice and inequity, the subject constructs a role for himself that doesn’t accept dominant ways of thinking. The subject questions morality, ‘what the fuck is that?’. The role of the subject is ‘to rebel, to react against the norm, to argue, to be different’. In the comment ‘no one asks people why or how they became heterosexual, so why ask the same of men and women who are homosexual’. the subject reacts against hegemonic ideas and resists standardised conventions of how it should be and what is considered normal. The subject also questions the dominance of certain ideas within gay subculture, involved in a process of continually questioning what can be known and what it is expected to be. Able to understand the way that culture and societal ideas can constrain its assembly, the subject is able to resist such constructions. The ability to do this is accessed through the way it questions and decentres expectations and norms of both wider society and the subcultures that it circulates within.
Hegemonic ideas construct ‘false accusations and media lies’ that create injustices that need to be changed. In the comment, ‘If you are not young and beautiful it’s almost as though you don’t count. The person does not count, only the body counts’, the subject acknowledges the way that gay subculture and patriarchal values of youth and beauty limit the potential for valorising difference within the gay community.
In the statement, ‘Every person has both feminine and masculine characteristics; however, society coerces people into identifying with only one, that one that correlates with biology’, the subject, whilst being complicit in maintaining the hegemonic idea that a person’s personality is constituted by biologically essential determinants, is also constructed as being able to acknowledge that there are other ways of thinking. The subject acknowledges that some people in society benefit, and others lose from certain dominant ways of thinking. Subjugated knowledge is foregrounded and given a potential space for the subject to position itself within. The process of the subject becoming attuned to how it both is constrained by and resists hegemonic discourse is constructed by this theme as an important part of the process of transformation.
This category constructs the subject as continually striving for change. Its trajectory is one that is about striving to ‘reach my goal’. Even when those goals still have ‘along way to go’, there is a motivation and perseverance to continue to seek change and resist subjugation by oppressive ideas and/or systems and institutions. The subject locates itself within a mantra of ‘it is now within my reach’ and ‘you have come along way’. Taking pride in the way it resists oppression and injustice, the subject applauds its ability to change from ‘not being able to stand in front of a mirror and say that you were gay, to standing in front of the mirror and whispering that you were gay’. The subject is constructed as rejoicing in the liberation that the process of coming out as gay instills. There is power in not conforming. There is power in being different.
The subject resists the subjugation of a moral discourse that precludes the body experiencing pleasure. In the excerpt from the coming out journal, ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it … Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about … When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy (Wilde 1949, pp.42, 105-106), the subject is able to challenge heteronormative ideas of pleasure and love. Pleasure, friendship, commitment, and relationship exist outside heterosexist ideas of long-term monogamy.
In the phrases, ‘Why is there no sanctuary in our society for people to legitimately take time out’ and ‘why don’t people have a right to say I can’t cope’, the subject resists the stigmatisation of people who are mentally ill as pathologised and sick individuals. People with a mental illness are constructed as people with ‘courage and strength’ in being able to resist the expectations of wider society. The subject and mental illness are contextualised within the institutional and systemic parameters that impinge upon their positioning. ‘Those in control and power’ label and position people who have a mental illness in a particular way that is tied up with certain economic, political, social and cultural discourses and power. The subject of mental illness possesses an alternative ‘knowledge’ that challenges dominant ideas of health, illness and rationality.