Feminism and Abolition, public lecture by Professor Angela Y. Davis on Friday, May 3 @The University of Chicago
last week I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Angela Davis one of the movements’ master teachers. She touched on so many great topics doing a great job of connecting the FBI’s recent attacks on Assata Shakur to the current struggle against police brutality, increasing incarceration and violence in POC communities. With all that she said it was her queer studies informed reflections on feminism and the prison industrial complex that stirred up so much within me. Her words brought me back to the moment when I first fell in love with the phrase Africana Womanism.
It was amazing to hear this former political prisoner and black panther assert that it was the feminist movement’s challenging of patriarchy, sexism, and oppressive gender roles which opened the door for trans, gender variant and pansexual identities to be as as visible as they are today. I almost fell out my pew when she said at the vanguard of the prison abolition movement is a critique of the prison system through the eyes of transgender women. Not only are their struggles from within the PIC inherently feminist but they are also effective strategies for social justice.
Her lecture was refreshingly current, relating the same themes she engaged as a young black panther to the struggles of youth today. One of the reasons she has so profoundly been able to make these connections is her ongoing relationship with youth today. It was affirming to hear her passionately speak about the need for elders and adults to listen to youth and be open to learning as much as they think they can teach. Moreover to witness someone of her generation and continued activism connect the trans community to the social justice movement and oppression in general gave me life. Her words reframed my urgency within the struggle for social justice and encouraged me to bring all of me to the front lines in the war on poor people of color. As I struggled to write my reflections in essay form the last few days the piece below bubbled up…
Definitions, Apologies, and the Status Quo
right now they’re calling us transgender
but in another 20 or 40 a 100 years
they will have another name
and hopefully a better appreciation
for who we are and what we bring to the human experience
We are another stroke on the canvass of humanity
walking art
a beautiful body of politic
millions upon millions of differently the same blends of masculine feminine
that many are just not quite ready for
though we’ve always been here
My varied expression of masculinity
they seek to label deviant
because my reality challenges their truth
it refuses to fit in any either or box
my reality
my variance they take as a challenge
to everything they’ve been taught about what makes them ok
and what makes them better and
deserving of whatever they have told themselves they deserve
because they are not like me
them or any other other you choose,
this is the the slippery slope
of defining yourself in opposition to
in order to control
they take me being me
as an assault on the pedestal they’ve built to maintain their privilege
our varied definitions of She, He, Ze…
our constant redefining of we
defies their definition of self
pierces patriarchy threatening sexism with a fatal blow
defiling the status quo
my queerness is mine to be defined or not
my trans ness is translucent and undefinable
the personal is political
and though I didn’t choose my identity or experience
I do fiercely and with all political intentionality
choose to be true to whatever direction it takes me in
and to never again apologize for not fitting in
Dirty Art Boi 