….
“But Valerie Solanas — a feminist loner mainly remembered for shooting Andy Warhol — was not an ordinary library patron. “
This sentence might be insulting but I blushed at the feminist loner part.
"Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."
— arundhati roy from the guardian (via counterworlds)
(via mikkipedia)
Self-Defense and the Criminalization of Survival
It was just announced that CeCe McDonald, who was being charged with two counts of second-degree murder in an incident of self-defense, has just taken a plea-deal—second degree manslaughter with a recommended 41 month sentence. CeCe McDonald’s sentencing hearing will be in a month.
But Ms. McDonald isn’t the first young Black trans woman to be thrown in jail and aggressively prosecuted for surviving a violent attack on her life. Unfortunately, without real systematic change, she isn’t likely to be the last either.
It should be no secret that young trans women of color (TWOC) are being murdered at alarming rates. This is a social problem largely ignored by most people, including the media, the service/nonprofit sector and government. But this is something people in the affected communities can’t afford to ignore.
But attacks on the lives of TWOC don’t go without resistance, and when TWOC resist sometimes their attackers end up dead. This was the case with Ms. McDonald, but it was also the case last year with Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman currently serving a four-year sentence for “manslaughter” for stabbing her boyfriend in self-defense when he beat her with a baseball bat.
Jackson, a Detroit native, moved to the California Bay Area where she became an advocate for young TWOC. She was a Program Specialist from TLISH (Transgender Ladies Initiating Sisterhood), a transgender youth program where she spent her time counseling young women about housing, government assistance, and employment.
If Ms. McDonald and Ms. Jackson weren’t Black trans women it is likely that their cases might not have ended up differently. By being criminalized for their survival, these two women share something in common with many other women of color, including the New Jersey 4, a group of Black lesbian women who were attacked in the New York City’s West Village and later aggressively prosecuted for defending themselves. The attacker fully recovered, but the women were forced to serve time.
It’s a sad irony that we promote self-defense classes as a way of combating violence against women, yet many of the women of color, trans and cis alike, are currently imprisoned precisely because they fought back against violence in their homes and in the streets.
Too often trans and queer women of color survive violence in their homes and on the streets only to have the police, courts and prison-industrial complex come after them for having the audacity to survive in a world where, as Audre Lorde said in her poem “A Litany For Survival,” they “were never meant to survive.”
Marie Howe’s “After the Movie”
Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a surprising little volume from our Everyman’s Pocket Poets library. It contains everything from anonymous “murder ballads” and verse by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning to more contemporary entries by Frank Bidart, Carol Ann Duffy, and Kimiko Hahn. The below, by Marie Howe, is one of those rare poems that actually captures a conversation as it takes shape, in this case a particularly Manhattan, walking-in-the-West-Village sort of conversation.
***
After the Movie
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing
about the movie.
He says that be believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone,
then come to a daywhen you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.I say, Maybe we mean different things by the
same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then
what is it?We’re walking along West 16th Street - a clear
unclouded night - and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is
action, I used to say to him.Simone Weil says that when you really love you are
able to look at someone you want to eat and not
eat them.Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart
now baby.Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love any
image we are doomed to live in purgatory.Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue
saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just
bought -again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and
suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made.What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict.
You are a nun.”Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him
to think these things of me even if he’s not
thinking them?Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns
clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to
lengthen,we both know the winter has only begun.
***
Poem © 2008 from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, used by gracious permission of W.W. Norton. Excerpt from KILLER VERSE © 2011 by Everyman’s Library. Excerpted by permission of Everyman’s Library, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
"This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.” Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310). In Foucault’s radical formulation, queer friendships, queer networks, and the existence of these relations in space and in relation to the use of time mark out the particularity and indeed the perceived menace of homosexual life. In this book, the queer “way of life” will encompass subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being."
—
Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” « caring labor: an archive
SHE RULES/QUEER THEORY RULES/WRITING ABOUT QUEER TEMPORALITY, DELEUZE, AND SADOMASOCHISM FOR THIS PAPER AND THE RESEARCH IS JUST SO REFRESHING AND FUN
(via rhizombie)
j.habs/l.dugs/j.munoz(s?) and their work have been toootally important in shaping how i conceive of value/affect/space/bodies/everything. i am reblobbin this to remind myself but also specifically with my brother in mind. DAN ARE YOU READING THIS, IT’S IMPORTANT
(via pussy-strut)
this book is the best/halberstam spoke at the university of manitoba a couple years ago and it was the best/this book provides useful examples of what I mean when I talk about friendship/you’re not supposed to expect too much of your friends or be too invested but the opposite is true when you queer friendship, expect too much and fail but try to fail together/so should I be super mad at shitty ex-boyfriends (is their failure patriarchy or is their failure queer?)/isn’t it so weird that halberstam spoke at the university of manitoba/yes it is
(via hysteriarama)
Why does theorizing how my friendships are conflicted, desire-ridden 19th century throwbacks and the inherent queerness of such a fact not make them easier to have?
What Heather Love says:
“In the collective effort to undermine a strict division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, queer scholars have looked to models of sexual and gender behavior that exceed the normative bounds of ‘modern gay identity.’ The history of friendship is a particularly attractive archive for the exploration of same-sex relations, partly because of the relative absence of stigma, and partly because of the relatively unstructured nature of friendship as a mode of intimacy.” Feeling Backward, pg. 77.
But ALSO there’s an important part right after in this chapter when Love quotes Foucault again on friendship, noting: ‘It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people.’ Feeling Backward, pg. 78.
On why my romantic friendships are so troubled/troubling I imagine “desire-in-uneasiness” is probably why, which I prefer to “because I make them that way.”
(via hysteriarama)
NYPD spying on NYC & NOLA activists, including Critical Resistance.
not that i am surprised given the long & on going history of COINTELPRO but part of the NYPD “intelligence” spying was happening to me & my old co-workers (i was one of only 2 staff at CR-NYC) in the Bronx Critical Resistance office during 2008. i just found out about it on Saturday night.
NYPD marked cars regularly circled our office & pointed in at us all the time. but its startling to actually see the memo! and if this is what all intelligence briefings look like at the NYPD i feel somewhat safer because they don’t understand that our organizations work collectively (an amazing list of orgs are all listed at one!), aren’t lead by a single person and mostly don’t make mention of the truly subversive & revolutionary things we were doing like stopping a new jail from being built, long weekly conference calls & mid day office dance breaks.
to read the full AP report click hereDear Friends,
As you may have heard, Critical Resistance and a number of our long-time allies have been named in documents leaked from the New York Police Department outlining NYPD surveillance and infiltration of demonstrations, meetings, and public events during April 2008. The documents, released by the Associated Press, illustrate the persistent and continuous surveillance, intimidation, and repression of organizations working to resist US imperialism domestically and internationally. The leak also offers one more opportunity for our organizations and movements to exercise increased solidarity and unity in the face of that repression.
Groups in New York will be holding a press conference on Wednesday, March 28th to draw attention to this document and to the NYPD’s surveillance program. CR stands strongly in solidarity with these groups. We know that rather than this being an exceptional moment of policing scandal, it is, instead, a demonstration of what policing is and the political roles it plays. The practice of policing has at its core controlling and targeting poor people and people of color, even as it disrupts our movements and suppresses dissent. Whether through recent efforts to highlight these policing practices in Muslim communities or through the defense efforts in support of Carlos Montes and the 23 other activists facing charges related to their anti-war and international solidarity efforts, time and again we find that the more tightly we draw together, the better able we are to resist their attacks.
We urge organizations to stand in solidarity with us. If you are in New York turn out to the press conference on Wednesday. If you are not, please endorse the press conference and spread the word. This is not a moment for shrinking away, but for boldly embodying our politics, and pushing our movements forward.
This email was sent to pooja@srlp.org by isaac@criticalresistance.org |Critical Resistance | 1904 Franklin St #504 | Oakland | CA | 94612
Where is her movement?
“A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten in her California home with a note left next to her saying “go back to your country” has died.
The director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Shaima Al Awadi was taken off life support on Saturday afternoon.”
Reading about Trayvon Martin’s killing and am beyond saddened, sickened, and outraged at the continuation of state-sanctioned killing of black and brown youth. I wonder, however, if there another way to push for justice for Trayvon, without appealing to the…
