Unite? and Fight!

I wasn't comfortable, necessarily.

Poster by Jenine Bressner

Not the way I usually am in these sorts of things: all fired up, all action-planning, all here-we-are-and-aint-it-cool-that-we-have-the-answers. I found my breath often held, slightly, partially engaged and partially waiting to see what would happen next. 

Last Thursday the Rhode Island Anti-Sexism League and Queer Lil Rhody hosted Unite & Fight! A Forum on Queer Liberation and Feminism at Libertalia Autonomous Space. This panel was a part of Queer Lil Rhody's month of radical queer events, a massively awesome fest of queerness that has rocked Providence's lil June socks off. There's been a youth-organized dance party, a political poster-making workshop, 8 films, a farm day, and so much more that I've given up listing each thing. Basically the queer community in Providence is popping and it's extremely delicious.

So back to that circle of folks sitting together and talking about how, why, when, and what is up with the union of queer liberation and feminism. So many important concepts were brought to light, but I want to focus on that slight discomfort that crept in to this seemingly obvious discussion. Turns out, uniting is more complicated than a hand shake and an agreement that gender oppression sucks. The discomfort I am speaking of came from the very raw realization that many people in the room did not in fact share the same politics, or the same priorities, or the same reasons for being there. This is true for any group of people hanging out, but often in activist circles we cling to our categories of oppression and hope that broad titles; "feminism," "queer liberation," etc; will keep us all convinced that we are in the same boat. 

How do we organize people whose priorities often fail to coincide, in fact sometimes contradict? One participant, who was queer-identified and male-bodied*, shared his first-time activism story: his mother was an anti-choice activist and he too became involved. He said that many of his beliefs had not changed since then, but he still wanted to stand in solidarity with women. He said this to a room scattered with some of the fiercest pro-choice activists I know. Did I cringe? Of course. But instead of jumping down his throat, the response was one of gratefulness. Grateful, because he went out on a limb to share his beliefs to a room full of those who fight that very belief. Grateful, because he broke the ice in a conversation that for a large part assumed we all already agreed. Grateful, because now we could get real about the challenges we face in movement-building in the real world. This might be one of the biggest ideological chasms I've seen accepted, openly, in a room brimming with political passion.

I have been reading the classic collection of essays, This Bridge Called My Back. These essays were written by radical women of color in the late '70s, and the collection addresses head-on the issue of assumed unity in a movement that in fact contains many differences. White, middle-class women's priorities are not all women's priorities. Experiences get excluded and oppression reiterated when we refuse to acknowledge these differences. It is essential that we stand alongside each other in struggle, but to claim unity numbs us to the complexity of our struggles. This assumed unity damned the women's movement of the 60's and 70's to a limited, elitist and fundamentally racist shell of what it could have been. 

This book helped me freak out with happy when tensions arose in the room last Thursday. There we were, feeling in real-time what it means to hold differences side by side without shying away. The discomfort of a situation that ain't so simple is the exact sort of discomfort that must be embraced if we are to build tolerance and respect and, ultimately, change. We will never all agree on every bullet point, but we can create tools for respecting each others' struggles and fighting together. This does not just apply to queer liberationists and feminists, but to every gradation of identity and struggle. The discussion was a meditation in listening that was sorely missed from most Occupy spaces I participated in, where the desperate rush to solidarity swept differences under the table.

This is exciting. If we can, within our own activist communities, finally start sitting with discomfort so that we can push through to understanding; if we can swallow our pride and our fears and allow people to actually be different from ourselves without pushing them away; if we can cut the politically correct bullishit and start speaking frankly about what keeps us from fully loving each other, then I am convinced liberation is unstoppable. 

The brilliant panelists and moderators blowing everyone's minds

Also, this is unrelated to the meta-conversation tone of the rest of this post, but I can't talk about the Unite & Fight panel without sharing panelist Malcolm Shank's response to a debate about the merits of radicalism versus reform: "I come from a more social services perspective... Helping people survive is the most radical sort of reform you can do."

* Male-Bodied: A term used to recognize a person who was assigned a male sex at birth, or who identifies themselves as having had/has a male body.