A Trip to the Morg

lettersforourcommunity:

Matt Smith here. Not friends with any of the performers, organizers, or facilitators. Didn’t even know there was a drag controversy until this week.

Disclaimer: I mention some of the examples others have shared about what may be problematic in a performance. I’m not crusading against the performers. Even if I think you did something problematic, I don’t hate you.

I’ve been thinking about what makes a performance offensive, oppressive, whatever.

It’s not whether or not it pokes fun at some oppressed culture. We can all think of funny comedy like that.

I also don’t think it’s just when someone pokes fun at some oppressed culture without being a member of it… or that being a member of it automatically makes it all okay. Minstrel shows weren’t okay.

I think it’s about whether the performance humanizes oppressed people or dehumanizes them. Under the status quo, oppressed groups are dehumanized – reduced to a set of stereotypes. That’s why so many women seeing a black guy will clutch their purses, or why my father-out-law came to meet me for the first time fearing the worst. (The worst for him was promiscuity, and he was relieved to find we didn’t have a harem of half-naked men at the apartment. We made them all go home until he was gone.)

And that dehumanization is beneath all kinds of discrimination. We’ve all internalized oppressive bullshit. We all act on that internalized bullshit in varied ways, often without being conscious of it. That’s lot of the racism in today’s world. (If you don’t already know all this, tell me and I can show you where to find tons of evidence.) We either help break that down, or we’re complicit in perpetuating the status quo.

When white frat boys throw a blackface party, they’re treating race and racism as nothing but a source of entertainment. Nothing more serious than that. A minstrel show does the same – letting people feel okay about the stereotypes they’ve internalized and the reality of an oppressed community. The message is there’s no big deal, nothing serious to see here, just good for a laugh.

If someone says that a performance portraying her own community made her feel suddenly alienated, alone, and betrayed by the people laughing around her, that’s a good sign the performance was dehumanizing the oppressed group. If a bunch of ignorant guys in the audience point and laugh at the “crack whore,” that’s another clear sign of dehumanization.

And not to say that was the performer’s intent. Maybe even it was intended as a humanizing performance, and somebody completely misunderstood the message as “haha, a crazy crack whore.”

Similarly, when the imagery used for publicity is a chola behind bars, maybe that image was created by somebody who grew up in that culture and makes fun of their people with love. But the image on its own still pushes the same stereotypes that dehumanize latinos/as. And if the art doesn’t convey the love and humanize even as it pokes fun, that’s where things start to feel offensive, unsafe, racist, oppressive.

For these reasons, I find it less problematic when someone makes fun of their own culture. It’s more likely to be done and conveyed with love, in a way that’s palpable to everyone. But that’s not automatic. It could just as easily become a minstrel show.

The audience matters too: If someone’s performing for their own community, I’m less worried about dehumanization. But if you’re performing for the general public, where people don’t have that shared experience of the culture, the risk of dehumanization is far higher. And there are some people/crowds a humanizing performance would be lost on, just because they’re not in a place to get it.

So for me, there are two questions. One, is the performance coming from a place of love and common humanity, or just making fun of someone’s culture or plight? And two, will the audience have an experience that breaks down the oppressive BS we’re all spoon-fed in this society; or will they experience the art as license to (continue) not see(ing) us as people, and relating to us as some “other”?

wait wait wait wait wait. So they ask for transparency, and you give it to them. They ask who is organizing it and what the purpose is and all of that, you tell them. And they still aren’t satisfied????? So done with this fuckery. Meanwhile, Queerbomb is never asked to release a list of organizers. Meanwhile, we are held to much more rigorous standard than anyone else. Why? Because we are speaking truth to power and they hate that. They will do everything in their power to undermine and invalidate our position. 

nueva-bordena:

queeraztlan:

biyuti:

because part of what radfems (and even white trans women) want us to think

is that the ideas radfems have

somehow exist in a vacuum

or that their claims on transmisogyny and trans women can be isolated and removed

leaving behind a reformed radical feminism

^^^Like really. What’s with all of that “radfems/transphobic feminists aren’t real feminists” shit. Ask any trans woman who experienced the consensus “real feminism” just like ten years ago. Are we to believe that magically TWoC are at the top of their agenda, and the last 40 years doesnt matter, and feminists are now the answer to transmisogyny?

Just cuz they’re disowning Cathy Brennan now and think about us once a year? Meanwhile, ”(white) vagina supremacy! All (cis white) bodies are beautiful! (Vaginal) sex positivity!” Like that’s also in a vacuum separate from TWoC?

I can kick it with a lot of feminists. Feminism gives me a good framework to understand my oppression. But its been 40 years since TWoC started your pinche queer revolution, and we’re still waiting for your real feminism to save us. Get your shit together and remember who died, and are still dying, for you. Remember whose deaths your ideologies and communities are founded on.

And that one day is basically just them tallying how many of us have died.  It’s not a day devoted to building up the TWOC community, or celebrating our accomplishments, it’s this condescending ritual that is so rote its insulting.
I didn’t want anything to do with feminism when I was younger because of all the stuff I read on Trans message boards online.  There were tons of messages about white transwomen (because that was who dominated those spaces) no being allowed in certain spaces or facing discrimination because of ideas feminism put forward.  What changed my mind, at least for a while, was reading Borderlands/La Frontera my freshman year of college.  So now I have complicated relationship with feminism where the majority of my friends are feminists, and I often say I’m a feminist as a kind of shorthand, but the transmisogyny and racism that pervade feminism basically lead to me avoiding feminist spaces.

Also, you’re totally right on how ridiculous they get around bodies.  I remember this one white feminist recommended I read “Cunt” because it was a good book and it was basically a hundred pages of white transmisogyny.

We need to stop waiting for feminism to do anything for us.  I think the only people who are actually capable of helping #girlslikeus are other #girlslikeus, and we need to get all of our resources together and focus on helping ourselves.  We get consumed by other communities and by helping communities we share part of our identity with (I don’t think I phrased that well, but like, as a personal example, me doing tons of work in cis Chicano/a places or helping cis Queer people at the expense of helping TWOC), and if we don’t organize for ourselves no one will.  Even though that’s going to be incredibly difficult. :/

I also think its important to make the distinction between feminism and womanism/mujerista. Like, feminism for me is white folks looking at Native ways of being and stealing that shit and slapping on white supremacy and transmisogyny.

Mujerismo, for me, is about women of color taking back our Native ways of being. Its intersectional and made by women of color, for women of color. 

biyuti:

queeraztlan:

biyuti:

because part of what radfems (and even white trans women) want us to think

is that the ideas radfems have

somehow exist in a vacuum

or that their claims on transmisogyny and trans women can be isolated and removed

leaving behind a reformed radical feminism

^^^Like really. What’s with all of that “radfems/transphobic feminists aren’t real feminists” shit. Ask any trans woman who experienced the consensus “real feminism” just like ten years ago. Are we to believe that magically TWoC are at the top of their agenda, and the last 40 years doesnt matter, and feminists are now the answer to transmisogyny?

Just cuz they’re disowning C**y B***n now and think about us once a year? Meanwhile, ”(white) vagina supremacy! All (cis white) bodies are beautiful! (Vaginal) sex positivity!” Like that’s also in a vacuum separate from TWoC?

I can kick it with a lot of feminists. Feminism gives me a good framework to understand my oppression. But its been 40 years since TWoC started your pinche queer revolution, and we’re still waiting for your real feminism to save us. Get your shit together and remember who died, and are still dying, for you. Remember whose deaths your ideologies and communities are founded on.

omg. YES

Honestly? it has all the stench of an accountability dodge

because if they call them ‘not real feminists’ then they have no responsibility to deal with them

Yeah, whenever folks are like “OMG thats not real feminism” I’m just like, but uhh… It is. Transmisogyny is at the very heart of feminism. And you can’t be one without the other, in my opinion. 

(via nepantlastrategies)

trannypowah:

As many of you know,  Boston has a LGBT Film Festival. Held over many days and in many different theaters, the festival screens films that celebrate and shed light on the queer experience. And while most of the films are centered around white queers, there were a number of films that featured QPOC only cast. I saw one of those films. It’s called Leave It On the Floor. The program billed it as a black gay musical inspired by the groundbreaking documentary Paris is Burning. There were gorgeous boys and sickening queens, voguing and lots of singing. And, for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was the perfect mix of campy realness and torrid love affair drama.

About half way into the movie, however, one of the characters dies. I’m sure you can guess what her identities were. She was a poor, black, trans woman. And this really, really bothered me. And while she wasn’t murdered, she died in a car crash, it still frustrated me. She was also the only character in the movie to die. Why is it that many, if not most, portrayals of black and brown trans women in the media have them dead? Without fail, when a trans woman of color is introduced into a film or TV show they are dead before the end of the movie. Even in the news, we never hear about the victories or successes of trans women of color. We only hear about their murders, if we hear of them at all.

On top of that, the protagonist of the movie was kicked out of his home for being gay by his mother. Her character was completely one dimensional. She was callous, completely unremorseful that she was sending her kid to the streets.  She verbally assaulted and insulted the protagonist for being gay. She was written in such a way that her only defining characteristic was her hatred for her son. She was the perfect caricature of the homophobic Black mother. 

The reason for this is because that is the narrative that society has given to us. The script, if you will, that is given to all trans women of color. We come out, we get kicked out of our homes and we are killed. Since PoC, apparently, have the patent on homophobia and transphobia, there is no other result to our coming out. Communities of color are the most intolerant of queerness and gender diversity. (Let alone the fact that people of color are more likely to be queer) 

What is particularly egregious about this instance is that the writer and director of the film were both gay white men. These two men were not only operating from two of the worst of QPoC narratives but they were also doing so with complete lack of analysis as to why they are problematic. It is an extremely sneaky form of racism because for all the audience knows, this film was a production by black queer and trans* folk for black queer and trans* folk. The cast was entirely black. And this makes it easy for the audience to miss the implicit racist stereotypes.

We need to be rewriting this narrative. We need to take our stories into our own hands and rewrite it to reflect our own lives. We need to be telling our own stories for ourselves, for others like us. We need to stop blindly accepting the messages that white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and capitalism would have us consume. We need to start telling stories that demonstrate our lived lives. We need to write poems, short stories, plays, screen plays that celebrate our identities, that reflect our experience has survivors. We need to make art and space that is meaningful for us. That accurately represents us. I’m not saying that we should erase the hardship that surrounds our lives because that would be just as bad. What I am saying is that we need to be talking about our victories, our loves, our hopes, our accomplishments.

What I am saying is that we need to rewrite the narrative so that we become human and not just corpses.

My story used to end with my early death at the hands of transmisogyny . I had no doubt that it was a question of when, not if. And that is because I accepted the narrative given to me. I won’t lie to you; I still often worry about that and I know it is a very real possibility. But it’s different today. I know that I am given that narrative so that I give up before the fight has even started. And I know my  story might still end up that way, but I am determined to make sure that it isn’t a certainty. I am determined to rewrite the ending so that women that come after me can have hope.

I am determined to rewrite my narrative for myself.

-Morgan