I Remember Audre: a meditation on a Black queer-male relationship with Black women, Black feminism, and the feminine
A central tenant of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that “all women are oppressed.” This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women. Sexism as a system of domination is institutionalized, but it has never determined in an absolute way the fate of all women in this society. Being oppressed means the absence of choices. It is the primary point of contact between the oppressed and the oppressor. Many women in this society do have choices (as inadequate as they are), therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describes the lot of women collectively in the United States.
- bell hooks, “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory”
Derogatory terms do not mean; they assault. Their intention is not to communicate but to harm. Thus they are not discursive signs or linguistic statements but modes of aggression. They express a structure of power and domination, a hierarchy that contextualizes them and gives them their force.
- Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”
I have long contemplated my relationship with Black feminism. My understanding of it, my hostility toward the way it reorients things, my reliance on its strong explanatory power, my exploitation of its unique ability to ground arguments in radical shifts toward acknowledgement of the anti-Black world, and my tenuous inabilities to actually capture, sit-in, or experience the Black feminist perspective. Which is to say, or perhaps attempt to address, a certain tension between theorizing and progressing Revolution and being situated at or embodying the locus of complete abjection. Where ontology meets a particular lived experience, and the two dance a two-step of death, only to be broken by a kick-ball-change of rape, violence, and silence. I choose my words carefully, for at this moment, it is only these words I have to get my point across, to reach my reader (if only myself) and we meditate on an understanding of our condition. Too often I’ve been at odds with people surrounding choices in language, trying to understand exactly what is meant when things are said to or at me, as well as defending my own positions because of lazy attempts at humor or colloquialism or at my best moments: unflinching stances against racist heteropatriarchy. But what I always fall back on is an interrogation of conversations (and I do not escape my own investigations), trying to capture or document the intricacies of power—where the discursive reveals, conjures, and rest upon my own or others relations to power. This has been made possible through the opening sentence of this statement: I have long contemplated my relationship with Black feminism.
At this point, I don’t recall whether it was by happenstance or if someone pointed me in the direction, but when I was beginning a development of consciousness surrounding sexual identity and sexual politics, Audre was there. I remember long days spent with the Sister Outsider collection and thinking through notions of “difference” and theorizing and acting from the margins. Trying to understand and deal with my own position in activist spaces, classrooms, work environments, and personal relationships. I look back on that time as a great moment in my political development, personal growth, and academic grounding, but also as a dark time of misreadings, abuses, and bad-faith advancements of self (and a particular position) founded upon a specific relationship to power left unexamined. Held as one of the founding documents of radical Black feminism, the “Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977) purports Black feminism emerging in response to the failures of racist white feminism and sexist Black Nationalism. The Statement demands an intersectional analysis that accounts for the ways in which race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in the lives of Black women. In its view Black feminism was the logical conclusion for those who sought a framework that was inclusive of all women. And many critics have pointed to the “problems” of the Statement; taking issue at points in the document that imply only Black women could be Black feminist. And in that tension I situated myself at odds with its purpose and in need of its analysis. At that particular point in my consciousness raising, there was no voice quite as pronounced as that of radical Black feminist scholar-activists. They resonated with me as I had grown up with the teachings and love of my mother, grandmother, aunties, cousins, and a few family friends I claimed as my sister. And my experience of growing up as a feminine queer boy put myself at odds a lot with my father, grandfather, uncles, cousins, and a few family friends I claimed as brothers. Which is not to say I found my place with women and not men. Rather, my relationship to maleness was complex and upon reading Lorde and her company of Black feminist it became easy to conflate their relationship to patriarchal power with my relationship to the feminine and sexual identity. And their plight against racist White feminism and sexist Black Nationalism was misread as a universalizing battle for the Black sexual deviant. Putting stock in the critique of the Combahee River Collective Statement, but also understanding the valiance of a vertical understanding of oppression, I made Coltrane-styled ‘giant steps’ toward applying myself as a “Black feminist” and acting in manner as if I suffer just like them, all the while quoting Black feminist for their unique perspective from the bottom of the hierarchy. Which was a struggle on a political level, how does one organize a bottom-up strategy without knowing what it means to be on the bottom?
I remember Audre. She spoke unapolegtically Black, feminist, and queer. And perhaps gave me a glimpse of the location I should be organizing from, but somewhere along that consciousness raising, experiences became intertwined in such a way that I lost her, and I lost myself as well. I have chosen not to reproduce any Audre Lorde quotes here because of the way I see her overly used, often taken out of context, and the weight of her words often ignored toward a preservation of the one who wields her words. All mistakes I made myself: when I needed to point attention to race inside of queer spaces I spoke Lorde; when I needed to make a queer point in Black spaces, I spoke Lorde. Largely ignoring the unique specificity she was speaking to and from as that of the Black queer female position, thereby casting myself at the locus of racist, sexual oppression: an authority I assumed through speaking from my own experience which was validated on the back of Black feminism. Of course this (I hope) unforgiving meditation on my relationship with Black feminism is an attempt at an apology, but not a call to put down the tenants of Black feminism(s), particularly radical Black feminism if one is not centrally located in that two-step of death, only to be broken by a kick ball change of rape, violence, and silence. Instead, I hope this becomes a moment to (continue to) reflect on the radical potential within Black feminist analysis and reevaluate the ways in which certain discursive moves fleet away from Black women, while claiming the tenants of Black feminism.
Toward a radical queer critique, spoken by Black males, that doesn’t displace Black women.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Cj1DsLmv0&feature=share < check out the video!
A good friend sent me the video link I post here now on negrosunshine. I watched it the other night and was excited to see the three men featured in the short documentary were here in the Chicago area at DePaul University AND talking a good game around issues of gender and sexuality (if anyone knows these guys, hit me up! I would love to sit down with them and talk more). And overall I thought the video was an interesting look at the word “faggot” and the gay-male relationship with the feminine. And while I will take the risk of sounding overly critical, I want to point to a few discursive strategies in the production and the responses of the participants that inspired me to write.
The first instance that revealed contradictions in the intent of the film and the way it was laboring came at 1:14. Zach explains that he is often the target of hate due to his sexuality and the camera pans down to his shoes. The quick glimpse of his boots can be misunderstood as displaying “girl shoes,” which links the hate Zach receives to his performance of femaleness, or a transgression against gender norms. An interesting shot, which I thought/hoped would open the discussion into the complex relationship between gender and queer identity. However, the conversation is cut to Kylon who announces he does not experience the same treatment as Zach, despite wearing his “lady Uggs” around campus. The three men discuss fashion, and the screen goes black with a title shot reading “5 minutes later,” implicating the three gay men with accepted stereotypes of women and fashion, women and shopping, women and shoes. Which one could read as a now accepted gay male stereotype, but we must keep in mind the ways in which gay male stereotypes are often used to effeminize gay males, thereby linking them with something innately female (inferior)—the inner workings of heteropatriarchy. While the film’s overall intent was giving voice to gay males, it rested on a power tied to patriarchy that largely went uninterrogated.
The title of the film is “The Power of Faggot,” which in and of itself leaves the reader/viewer (pre-screening) largely open to interpretation. A ‘reclamation versus abandonment’ argument immediately comes to mind, and one is left to ponder, what is the power of “faggot?” I tend to leave these conversations alone because I myself can’t even commit to one side of the debate and speaking on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality I am guilty of using nigger, bitch, and faggot…often. However, what always shakes me to my core and causes me to reflect on my uses of language is the second epigraph of this post. Sexton and Martinot aptly point us to the power inscribed inside of language, specifically derogatory terms. When the terms enter conversation, whether or not they have insulted someone, they always assault certain positions, because they reveal, conjure, and rest upon ‘a structure of power and domination.’ And while this film attempts to dance with this argument, it falls secondary to its labor of linking sexual identity with gender-bending, and a conflation of the feminine with gay male transgression. In a nine minute video about the word “faggot” a discussion of the word does not commence until two minutes in, on the foundation of “lady Uggs” and “switching of the hips.”
The second major issue I found was the respondents’ use of certain language that signaled a homogenization of sexual deviants despite the intent of their message of intersectionality. Kylon and Zach’s use of the term “sisters” and John’s use of the word “oppression” revealed an understanding of Black feminism while also displacing a reference point that could adequately speak to/from a site of oppression. And this critique is by no means made to disregard the intent of their message, but rather made in a ‘spirit of solidarity’ as an analysis of the discursive toward an articulation of a radical queer position. How do queers, particularly Black queer men, think through relationships to the feminine in the face of Black female subjectivity? What reveals itself in our notions of gender and sexuality when solidarity rest upon uses of “sisterly” bonds? Perhaps our difficulty in answering further reveals itself in our thoughts on the word “oppression.” In the leading epigraph of this post, bell hooks points us to the uses of language, much like Sexton and Martinot, but explicitly takes a bold step in highlighting certain positions that are conjured when we rely on generally accepted terms. The ‘absence of choices’ hooks speaks of is quite the position to be in, and my experiences in activist spaces, the classroom, and personal relationships reveal I may not know what it means to be without choices. But conversations on oppression, at their best, point to differences in experiences, “your oppression is not like mine,” but rarely take that radical leap toward, “you are my oppressor.” And if we accept hooks logic, can there be a position void of choices, yet wrapped with the ability to oppress? Perhaps here I open myself up to the same critique made of the Combahee River Collective Statement: “only Black women can be Black feminist?” An answer to that question I do not possess, and maybe it’s not even my place to attempt a solution. Rather I want to point to the ways in which discursive strategies work to do harm, and how we desperately need a language of Revolution.
As I said earlier, I hope this article sparks a moment of reflection and further conversation, because holes in our tactics won’t bring about the liberation many of us are searching for. And I’m not the first to make this call. I remember Audre (and many before and after her). To harken: what is the theory behind racist liberalism? Or essentializing queerness? Or perhaps more aptly, what is the benefit of radical thought with blind-spots in its analysis of power?
With the Spirit of Desla,
ashe.
