Excluded
Reviewed by: Anonymous
Bibliographic Information: Serano, Julia. Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2013. 336 pages. $17.00. ISBN: 9781580055048.
In her book, Excluded, Julia Serano makes the argument that feminist and queer communities are often more exclusive than inclusive and that the solution to this problem is to take a holistic approach to advocacy work. Serano spends the first half of the book explaining her experiences and basic terms/practices in queer communities. She frames different aspects of exclusionary practices from different perspectives, walking readers through being a woman, being trans, being bisexual, and some of her more influential experiences as they relate to those aspects of her identity. Serano writes from a place of personal experience, using her own stories to explain concepts at a very approachable level. For example, the first chapter is her explaining her terms and how she intends to use them in the book. Then, in her chapter on being bisexual, she introduces more terms, helping readers understand both arguments for and against the term bisexual. In the second half of Excluded, Serano makes the case for taking a holistic rather than fixed approach. She explains the benefits of a holistic approach through teaching the reader about double standards and how feminist and queer communities have used their own oppression to ignore or even perpetuate other types of oppression because of their fixed, inflexible, and singular understandings of oppression, gender, and sexuality. She then advocates for a holistic, flexible way to eliminate oppression rather than simply flipping the current scripts that exist to exclude people.
Serano spends considerable time throughout her book explaining different aspects of queer issues and culture to her readers. She always defines her terms and, as a reader, I always felt that I fully understood what she was intending to communicate. However, the primary source for her argument always seems to be her own experience. She often structures chapters by explaining some general terms and issues, telling personal stories, and then explaining how the community could do better in general terms. While the stories she shared were often compelling, and personal stories need to be shared, this book often made generalizations that were not backed by evidence in the text. While her generalizations may be true, Serano often left me wondering if this was a book for her story, in which case she needed to stop making generalizations, or about the queer community at large, in which case she needed more evidence for the trends she was describing.
The overarching structure of the book, presenting stories and evidence in part one, and presenting a new way of advocating in part two seems to be a logical way to set up the argument, but Serano found it difficult to stick to this structure. After presenting evidence in chapters throughout the book, she often “soft” presented solutions and alternative approaches to difficult subjects. This can leave readers a bit confused, as the problems and solutions were each present in both parts of the book. Perhaps because of this lack of distinction between the two parts of her book, Serano never completely explains what her understanding of a holistic approach is. Many chapters, in their discussions of a particular issue, would include an aside about a holistic approach, but there was never a complete explanation or vision of what a holistic approach might look like for the queer community, feminist movement, or even an individual person. One of Serano’s most repetitive points is that language matters, and she chooses positive terms throughout the book. Talking about cissexism rather than transphobia because of the more positive representation of the oppressed (trans) people, for example. Therefore, it is peculiar that she does not spend more time fully explaining her approach.
As a cisgender woman, this book was incredibly helpful to me. I really appreciate the candidness of Serano, the care she took to explain who she is and where she is writing from, and that she put in the time and effort to share her perspectives. I hugely benefited from learning about trans women and some of the oppression they face from within the queer community. Serano’s premise is that people like her, people who are not cisgender or only attracted to one gender, are often made to carry a lot of the blame for gender binaries, and this is because the way we understand sexism is fundamentally flawed. To this point, Serano did not completely convince me. It is not that I do not believe that this is probably true, but Serano repeatedly used only her experience to support her argument, which was almost always generalized. I agree with her on many points she makes, especially that a key way forward is that people work within themselves to expect heterogeneity (everyone to be different in many ways), we need to stop policing other people’s genders and sexualities, and that we need a gender ethic that is not based in forcing your own beliefs and ethics on others. I do believe these three components would lead to the holistic approach Serano desires. However, I wish she had spent more time elaborating on how they can be achieved, helping the reader understand the changes they need to make and how the queer community needs to expand itself.
Personally, I have not experienced exclusion within the queer community, though this is likely because I have not spent much time in queer spaces, and because I am cisgendered and white. Because of my lack of experience in queer spaces, I really appreciated the story pieces of this book; getting to read about Serano’s experiences was emotional and impactful for me. I would recommend this book to those within the queer and feminist communities that wish to better understand how their community can continue to grow and be more accepting. Where this book lacks is in clarity on where we go from here, so a word of caution to future readers is that they may want to read this book with a group, and slowly, so that they can dream along with Serano as to what a more inclusive future can be within the spaces she is rightfully calling out.