The Queer Politics of Spanglish.

CRITICAL CRITICAL MOMENTMOMENTFREE ISSUE #9 MARCH-APRIL FREE ISSUE #9 MARCH-APRIL

defining our own

sexual liberation

2 Critical Moment • January-February 2005

The content of Critical Moment consists primarily of works submitted by local writers, artists, and activists. Submissions are not limited to our Critical Moment consists primarily of works submitted by local writers, artists, and activists. Submissions are not limited to our Critical Momenttheme. We welcome news, analysis, commentary, art, short stories, poetry, music, book, and movie reviews, and other forms of expression that fall outside of the suggested theme yet are still refl ective of the political nature of Critical Moment.

Suggested length for submissions is 800-1,500 words. Please email text submissions, questions, suggestions for future issue themes, and/or letters to the editorial collective at [email protected]. Art and image submissions should be sent to [email protected]

CRITICAL MOMENTIssue #9, March-April 2005Editorial CollectiveAndy Clarno • Joel Devonshire Andrea Dewees • Tarek R. Dika Yoni Goldstein • Michelle J. Kinnucan • James Leef • Kate McCabe • Mike Medow • Erick Michael • Jennifer Obidike • Max Sussman • Bashar Tarabieh • Anna Vitale

In working towards social justice we must not only challenge institutions and systems of power at the macro level—such work must also challenge and impact the way we conduct our personal lives.

Our personal lives do not exist in a vacuum. The personal is infl uenced by dominant systems of power that exist around us. The systems of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism all impact the way we live our personal lives and develop intimate relationships with our lovers and our friends.

The interrelationship of the personal and the po-litical is explored in the articles featured in this sex-themed issue of Critical Moment. The articles in this issue, some playful, many serious, reveal that the work of fi ghting oppressive systems and of fi ghting for the people’s right to self-determination is deeply connected to the process of building a world where our personal lives and our intimate relationships can be more liberating, more fun and more beautiful.

In this issue of CM, you will fi nd articles on repro-ductive justice, HIV/AIDS, sex work, sexual assault, body image and strategies for achieving real sexual liberation. We hope that you fi nd some of what’s in here interesting, inspiring, or otherwise useful. Read these articles with your lovers and your friends. Fig-ure our what you can do to make you intimate rela-tionships more rewarding and more revolutionary.

Sincerely,

Critical Moment

Upcoming Issues - Calls for SubmissionsUpcoming Issues - Calls for Submissions

FEATURES3 What I didn’t learn in Women’s Studies Class

by Elizabeth Sy

5 The Queer Politics of Spanglishby Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

6 Defi ning Our Own Sexual Liberationby YK Hong and Ingrid Ravera

10 HIV/AIDS: The Neo-Liberal Pandemicby Claire Decoteau

12 Fight or Walk: The Chicago Transit Fare Strikeby Midwest Unrest

14 Strong Hearts and Poisoned Watersby Puck

16 A Working Mother’s Feminismby Floyd Peterson

18 Activist Scenes Are No Safe Space for Womenby Tamara K. Nopper

20 A New Fat-Positive Feminismby Emi Koyama

22 Israeli Anarchisman interview with Yossi by Aaron Lakoff

FICTION8 Torpedo Through the Tulips

by Rachel Shukert

POETRY26 “Elation...”

by CD Wright

REVIEW24 Black Women’s Adventures in Sex and Reading

Ayesha Ki’Shani Hardison reviews Zane’s Addicted

SHORT THINGS8 MichiganIMC Newswire

10 “Just Shut Up”

19 Questions on Consent

Critical Moment is an Ann Arbor-based journal working to provide a forum for education, debate and dialogue around the political issues eff ecting our communities • an independent media project that aims to support movements for social change by giving voice to those excluded from and misrepresented by the dominant media • a free journal available at community spaces and shops throughout the Southeast Michi-gan area.

Cover art by

Critical Moment acknowledges the gener-ous contributions of former Agenda pub-lisher Eric Lormand.

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Th e ideas and opinions expressed in Criti-cal Moment are not necessarily those of the Critical Moment editorial collective or its individual members.

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FAIR USE NOTICE Critical Moment contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifi cally authorized by the copyright owner. We are mak-ing such material available in an eff ort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democratic, scientifi c, and social justice issues, etc.

We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the copyrighted material in Critical Moment is published for nonprofi t ed-ucational purposes.

From the editors Contents

www.criticalmoment.org

May/June: EnvironmentDeadline: March 30, 2005

Consumption comes at the expense of our natural world; from species loss to suburban sprawl to global climate change, somewhere the price must be paid. Low-income com-munities of color are disproportionately aff ected by environmental hazards - the “hidden” side-eff ects of the economic growth paradigm under which we live. Our technological advances often cost us thehealth of our children, our communities and sometimes entire cultures. Environmental issues are, therefore, not limited to the protection of wilderness areas, but extend to include a broader range of social, economic, and geographical issues that aff ect life everywhere, from farmers in developing countries to residents of urban public housing.` How does the intersection of race, class, and political power aff ect how envi-ronmental decisions are made? What eff ects do those decisions have on our ability to build healthy, sustainable relationships with one another and the land? Critical Moment seeks contributions from local writers, activists, artists, and academics that both address and challenge the forces that combine to create environmental injustice, and attempt to provide insight into the future of environmental justice for all communities.

May/June: Religion & SpiritualityDeadline: May 30, 2005

Religion and spirituality are powerful and infl uential factors in human affairs throughout the world. They intersect with poli-tics in many areas, including race, gender, and class. How does religion and/or spirituality inform your own political perspective? In what ways are you and your community treated differently be-cause of your religious/spiritual beliefs? Do you reject religion? Why? How has religion and spirituality played a role in political movements in the U.S. and around the world? Critical Moment encourages our readership to explore the theme of Religion and Spirituality from a wide range of per-spectives, including but not limited to fundamentalism, liberation theology, religion and political organizing, religious persecution/prejudice, religion and sexuality, church and state in the US, the Christian right, Armageddon, spirituality and the left, religiousviolence, and more.

3

When I was eight years old, I wanted to be the next When I was eight years old, I wanted to be the next WBobby Fischer. I was a chess champion, a spelling bee fanatic, and a classically trained violinist; I was Wbee fanatic, and a classically trained violinist; I was W

the all Asian American role model student. I never thought that I’d end up where I am today, a former sex worker and a sex workers rights activist.

Sex. Sex Work. Sex Worker. Titillating words that illicit strong reactions. From the completely disgusted to the all-knowing, these words never fail to arouse curiosity matched with endless questions.

I remember my fi rst discussion about sex work and sex worker politics. I was eighteen and in a women’s studies class listening to some fellow classmates express how the support of sex workers seemed fundamentally wrong in regards to the rest of the feminist movement—that if women wanted to exist out of the patriarchal paradigm, they shouldn’t be selling their body image or themselves for male pleasure. A few women had dissenting views and brought up that the feminist movement should be supporting all women and that if the feminist movement wanted to move forward, it would have to include everyone, including women who chose to do sex work.

Th e fi rst time I went to a strip club: the fl ashing lights, gaudy Mardi-Gras-like decorations, and nude undulating female bodies. It is still fresh in my mind. My roommate and I had gone because we decided that we were going to be strippers and that we were going to make a shit load of money doing it. Fuck what everyone had said about sex workers and

fuck what we had been taught about them growing up; we were on a mission--we wanted to see what stripping was like and why so many women did it. After the initial shock of seeing a sex venue wore off , I decided to buy a lap dance. After all, I was a paying patron, why should I feel intimidated as a female client in a strip club? I was entitled to the same things the other male clients were entitled to.

By the time I left the club, I was off ered a job and was in awe of how glamorous every woman had seemed. My former image of the coked up sex worker was quickly replaced with

the sex goddess, the femme fatale, and the innocent school girl. Th e pendulum had swung—from the misconceived negative values that a sexually repressed culture had socially ingrained into me, to a new naïve and equally misconceived positive outlook on sex work.

Within the fi rst few weeks of working as a stripper at Lil’ Darlins, I quickly realized that sex work wasn’t a glamorous job. I’d walk in at 5 pm to cake on layers upon layers of cosmetic products, stuff up several tampons into myself and tuck in strings when I was bleeding. I’d let other working women spray feminine hygiene products on me and then get horrible yeast infections, painstakingly walking around in nine-inch stilettos for hours at a time. I’d make up stories about where I was from, slink up to patrons to seductively off er lap dances, tell patrons to keep their hands off of me and always, always demand more money. I would go home at 3 am, baggy raccoon eyes and tell inquisitive housemates that I was returning from my waitressing job in the city.

Wha t I didn’t learnin women’s studies cla ss

lettersI recently started reading your paper and was

pleasantly surprised by its range of opinion and by the overall format as well as the quality of the content provided by the writers.

However, I was shocked and extremely dismayed by Matt Erikson’s piece on the current state of what he calls “confi nement” within Americas school systems [Teacher or Prison Guard?, Critical Moment #8]. Not only is the article devoid of any real substance concerning actual data or research into the nature of classroom discipline, it makes several sweeping generalizations about an entire school system based upon Matt’s experiences a substitute and as a student teacher. What the hell was he thinking? I could have understood if he was examining the current state of sub teaching and the ways in which it is inadequate, but this kind of slanderous and misinformed ranting is not what I would have expected from you guys. Really.

Maybe the reason that Matt feels ineff ective as a teacher has less to do with the systems focus on conferment and more to do with his own limitations as a teacher. In the future, please take more time to quality control articles like this that diminish your reputation as source of information and exploration for our community.

Aaron Jackson

CRITICAL MOMENT welcomes letters and comments from our readers. Please submit letters to [email protected]

CRITICAL MOMENT welcomes letters and comments from our readers. Please submit letters to [email protected]

BY ELIZABETH SY

SEX WORKER RIGHTS ADVOCATES GET TOGETHER TO ORGANIZE AND PLAY A GAME OF CHESS.

continued on next page


Most of the women I worked with were single mothers, many of them had been working there for over fi ve years. Our favorite topic to discuss was what we were going to do once we stopped working at Lil’ Darlins. We all were “temporary” workers, talking about the day that we’d be able to quit and start working “real” jobs. Panther was training to be a masseuse, Jasmine was planning on going back to school to become a veterinarian, and Tony was going to become a professional ballet dancer. I had long given up my dreams of becoming the next Bobby Fischer but I was putting myself through college.

In my women’s studies class, we had moved far from contemplating why women did sex work. We decided that it was more important to discuss the politics of sex work. We had a discussion about unionizing sex workers, what it meant and if it was important.

San Francisco’s clubs are practically monopolized by a chain called Déjà Vu. Déjà Vu owns strip clubs all over the United States. In San Francisco’s infamous North Beach district, there are two blocks chock full of strip clubs. Déjà Vu owns the vast majority of these clubs and is closely associated with the other clubs with the exception of the Lusty Lady. Th ere have been several eff orts to unionize the Déjà vu strip clubs in San Francisco; none of them have been successful. Aside from the reluctance that many have for labeling themselves as sex workers because of social stigmas and discrimination, the main reason women haven’t successfully unionized within the Déjà vu chain is because the vast majority of them have signed on as independent contractors after being pressured by managers to do so.

At Lil’ Darlins, I was charged “tickets” as an independent contractor, which I found out to be illegal years later when I got involved in a class action lawsuit against Deja Vu. I rented out the stage for all of my stage shows as well as the private booths for all the lap dances that I did. I also had to pay extra tickets if I came into work “late.” Basically, if I walked into work at 8 pm, I automatically owed the club $80 and if I gave 13 lap dances and did 20 stage shows then I owed another $260, a total of $340. Th e money I took home depended solely on tips and I usually brought home anywhere from $0 to $1000.

As an independent contractor, I was given no health benefi ts or sick pay, I had no rights to complain about working conditions and knew that on any given night I could be fi red and blackballed from any of the Déjà vu clubs.

According to the women I worked with, the Lusty Lady was a peep show that paid women by the hour. I found out that in 1996, workers at the Lusty Lady joined the Exotic Dancer’s Union in the Service Employees International Union Local 790. Workers demanded and then received, among other things, health benefi ts. Years after unionizing, management decided to shut down and sell the Lusty Lady. Th e workers of the Lusty Lady organized themselves and decided to purchase the Lusty Lady themselves and turn it into the fi rst worker-owned cooperative peep show in the U.S.

Th e unionizing eff orts of the Lusty Lady workers proved that sex workers could organize themselves to demand rights. Beyond that, it challenged society to recognize sex work as valid work.

I started to seriously question myself. Did I think sex work was valid work? Did I identify as a sex worker? Did I feel entitled to having basic rights as a service industry worker? Despite the fact that I knew I wouldn’t be a stripper for the rest of my life, despite my reluctance to let friends and family know that I was stripping, despite my non-existent voice that wanted to tell my manager’s to fuck off and stop charging me all those illegal stage fees, I knew the answer to all those questions was yes.

For the fi rst year that I was involved in sex work, I hardly shared any of my experiences. All of my friends were worried about my decision to strip and many of them had told me that they could not be supportive of me. Desperately wanting to prove why sex work was something worthwhile to me, the only experiences I shared were positive ones like reclaiming my sexuality or making quick money. I never talked about incidences of work related assault (being ripped off fi nancially by my employers, sexual harassment from my managers, sexual assault by a client) or my heightened body image issues. I have no doubt now that had I had the support that I needed or lived in a culture where sex, sexuality and sex work weren’t taboo and sensationalized topics that I would have been able to eff ectively communicate more of my experiences, and perhaps sought out professional help, legal and psychological, and utilized more community resources such as the various sex worker support groups within the city.

After fi nally coming to terms with identifying as a sex worker, I started to critically think about other issues that doing sex work brought up. For instance, I recognized that as a sex worker, my defi nition of sexual harassment had become completely skewed. I no longer considered my manager slapping my ass or coming onto me as sexual harassment. I questioned how my quasi-illegal work (the private lap dancing booths in San Francisco are an illegal set up that is currently being disputed in public hearings by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission and city offi cials) would aff ect my ability to access legal services. For example, if I were being stalked by a client, even assaulted or raped, could I report the incident to the police or a social worker without being outted as a sex worker and consequently arrested for doing sex work?

Beyond my own personal issues with sex work, I recognized that my experiences as a privileged college student choosing to do sex work (as opposed to the many men, women and children who’s experience with sex work is a survival strategy) was drastically diff erent from the other women I worked with. It was then that I realized in order to truly understand all the political and social implications of sex work and sex workers, there must absolutely be a place where sex workers can freely express their thoughts and advocate for themselves and their experiences without fear of prosecution and/or discrimination. Until then, society’s view of sex work would still swing wildly from one end of the pendulum to the next.

Since my day at Lil’ Darlins, I’ve worked at the Lusty Lady, as a dominatrix, helped SWOP put a measure on the Berkeley ballot to decriminalize prostitution, done outreach to traffi cked sex workers and have started a youth program that works with Oakland’s minors involved in prostitution. Th e more I get involved with the sex worker culture, the more I realize how much more there is to learn about all the diff erent sub-cultures and issues within the sex worker world. I’m convinced that taking top-bottom approaches will never fully address all the issues that these populations face.

Maybe I’ll return to my aspirations of becoming the next Bobby Fischer and start my own community of supportive and sexy sex workers who play chess. Anyone down for a game?

Elizabeth Sy has worked as both an exotic dancer and professional dominatrix. Sy has also facilitated female sexuality classes and volunteered for sex worker and sex culture focused non-profi ts such as Sex Workers Outreach Project. She is currently involved in starting Banteay Srei, a non-profi t dedicated to social justice for sexually exploited young southeast asian women, and lushorchid, an economic development project that works with Cambodian sex workers.

continued from previous page

5

The Queer politics of Spanglishpolitics of Spanglishpolitics of BY LAWRENCE LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES

“Queer,” a somewhat untranslatable term with no exact equivalent in Spanish, is used in Anglo-America and its linguistic contact zones as a resignifi ed marker of sexual difference: that which is askew or off-center, as in the case of lesbian and gay; a position beyond identity politics and more closely associated to the postmodern decentering of the subject. Like saying “lo raro,” in other words, “extraño, singular, muy diferente de lo corriente, de lo que se espera o de lo que es razonable y justo,” following María Moliner, referring not to the term that concerns us but to one that helps us approximate its meaning. But who decides what is “very different from what is reasonable and just,” as the Spanish linguist and lexicographer would have it?

Nations, constituencies, and groups defi ne themselves and consolidate their identities through the imposition of norms, limits, and parameters. The control of language, just as that of many other socio-cultural traits such as clothing, food, music, and dance, can (and often does) serve toward these purposes. The formation of linguistic communities does not necessarily imply homogenizing, exclusivist stances; multilingualism is accepted in many locations around the globe. Yet monolingualism, closely associated to some imperialist projects and to modern processes of nation formation, is exacerbated in contemporary ultranationalist movements, ruled and defi ned as they are by racist and xenophobic ideologies. Present debates in the US regarding “English Only” are an example of nativist positions that seek to literally and symbolically silence immigrants as well as indigenous populations, including both Native Americans or Indians and Hispanics / Latinos who trace their roots to pre-1848 Mexican territories or to later conquests, such as that of Puerto Rico in 1898.

What does “queerness” (understood as a sign of sexual difference) have in common with non-monolingual linguistic practices such as bilingualism and code-switching? One answer would be the way both relate to notions of purity and impurity: of that which is civilized or nominally acceptable, as opposed to that which is considered to be taboo, savage, or degraded. There is nothing intrinsically pure or impure about sexuality or language, except how they are constituted and defi ned in different socio-cultural and historic moments. Yet the two, as well as another key pairing—language and gender—are often inextricably intertwined.

Mestizo Languages

Nowhere is the link of Latino/a multilingualism and queerness more clearly articulated than in Gloria Anzaldúa’s fundamental text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), more specifi cally in the chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Here we see how the body’s organ becomes by synecdoche a symbol of a rebellious, non-conforming state, something that brings Anzaldúa close to another transgressor, Malintzín, also known as La Malinche, the indigenous translator and lover of Hernán Cortés who was also referred to as “lengua” (tongue) and criticized for her linguistic and sexual identity. Anzaldúa’s revolt occurs in the context of a dominant view of Spanglish (the code-switching

between Spanish and English) as an “impure language,” opposed to pureza de la lengua, only a stone’s throw away from pureza de sangre o de raza [purity of blood de raza [purity of blood de razaor of race]—ideologies intrinsically opposed to the fundamental reality of Latin American mestizaje. Politics in both English and Spanish-language

communities, which attempt to promote “la defensa de la lengua” [the defense of language], deny the heterogeneity and mixture that characterize the New World. Anzaldúa’s affi rmation of her lesbianism, feminism, and multi-voiced and multilingual identity challenges traditional concepts of submissive, quiet womanhood, of subservient victims and obedient spouses. Anzaldúa lists the languages of her own and of Chicano/a experience: standard English, working class and slang English, standard Spanish, standard Mexican Spanish, North Mexican Spanish dialect, Chicano/a Spanish (with its regional variations), Tex-Mex, and Pachuco or caló(55). Half and half—mitá y mitá—in the sexual and linguistic mitá y mitá—in the sexual and linguistic mitá y mitásense.

Yet queerness is not an exclusive province of any one sexual orientation, be it straight or gay. “Me siento muy. . . excited!” says Selena (as portrayed by the Puerto Rican actress Jennifer López) in the 1997 fi lm of that name, drowning by the sheer strength of her charisma the xenophobic anti-multilingual instincts of her possible detractors. Selena draws on her own self-crafted politics of affect, by which linguistic “insuffi ciencies” are masked, transposed, or embroiled in complex negotiations of charm, physical touch, and rapport. Selena’s body and emotion become her tongue, la lengua, much as her singing in English and Spanish served to reaffi rm ties of common ancestry and culture across the Mexican-US border. The queer circumstances of her death (murdered by a woman accused of being a lesbian) and her beatifi cation by scores of admiring fans add to the complexity of her legacy.

Puerto Rican Linguistic Queerness

When the conceptual/linguistic divide of sex/gender/nation and language is not a geographic expanse but rather an immensity interrupted by the Atlantic Ocean, as in the case between Puerto Rico and the United States, the expressions of queerness and language are bound to be different. “But how does one invent a language? Jerigonza would do!” Jerigonza would do!” Jerigonzaexclaims the lesbian Puerto Rican poet Luz María Umpierre in “The Mar/Garita Poem” (1987), to later affi rm in code: “yo in “The Mar/Garita Poem” (1987), to later affi rm in code: “yo in “The Mar/Garita Poem” (1987), to later affi rm in code: “tú nos/ necesi/tamos lenguas; si las lenguas/ no se unen/ no habrá/ la unión salvadora/ del mundo y de la guerra” [I/you/we need tongues; if the tongues do not unite/ we will not have/ the redeeming union/ of the world and of war] (34). This fi nal poem of the Margarita series attempts to bring resolution to a lesbian process of love and loss as well as to a situation of estrangement and transformation: the cultural threat posed by appropriating gestures camoufl aged as friendly exchange, commented on in “Only the Hand that Stirs Knows What Is in the Pot”: “No handing out my set of ingredients,/ they sauté in my head,/ inside a Corning food dish” (25).sauté in my head,/ inside a Corning food dish” (25).sauté

Umpierre’s highly successful integration of bilingualism and code-switching contrasts greatly with the experience of another fi rst-generation gay Puerto Rican migrant, Manuel Ramos Otero, who never truly integrated the English language into his work, at least not in a successful manner. While the lack of linguistic diversity of early stories such as “Hollywood Memorabilia” (1971) is addressed in later narratives such as “El cuento de la Mujer del Mar” (1979), which actually engages El cuento de la Mujer del Mar” (1979), which actually engages El cuento de la Mujer del Mar

in trilingual Spanish/ Italian/ English exchange (that of the Woman from the Sea or la Donna del Mare), or through the fi gure of Sam Fat, the Afro-Chinese/ Puerto Rican/ Loisaida detective in “Página en blanco y staccato” (1987), it is always with a certain daintiness and detachment that betray a true lack of comfort. But this is not something that the gay writer ever hid, as is evidenced in his interview with Marithelma Costa, in which he candidly discloses his unease with the English language.

Frances Negrón Muntaner’s fi lm Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994) presents, from its very title, a different position regarding bilingualism. This fi lm, part documentary and part fi ction, presents a history of Puerto Rican migration to the US with a particular focus on gay and lesbian experience; the documentary segments are framed in the context of a semi-autobiographical story of a character called Claudia Marín, an exiled lesbian Puerto Rican photographer living in Philadelphia. The fi lm freely switches back and forth between languages and disparate themes such as race, history, discrimination, and the dynamics of personal relationships between island and mainland-born lesbians. In

fact, by focusing on the relationship between Claudia and her Nuyorican girlfriend Ana Hernández, the fi lm enacts a scene of queer national romance in which the encounter between the island and its diasporic population is enacted through language and sex. This occurs quite noticeably by criticizing intolerance, as in the case of Claudia’s condemnation of her girlfriend’s cousins in Puerto Rico, who laughed at Ana (and stunted her Spanish learning) for incorrectly translating “grocery store” as “grosería“grocery store” as “grosería“grocery store” as “ ” (which means coarseness or rudeness); but grosería is precisely what the threat of grosería is precisely what the threat of groseríalesbianism (and of migration) is constantly portrayed as in Puerto Rico: familiar, as the ubiquitous bodega on every barrio street corner in the US diasporic atlas; shocking; and queer.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is an Assistant Professor of Latino/a Studies and Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he teaches courses on the queer Caribbean and on theater and performance. He was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His book of short stories Blue Fingernails/Uñas pintadas de azul is forthcoming from Bilingual Press (Arizona). He can be reached at [email protected].

“CHUPAROSA,” ALMA LOPEZ, 2002“CHUPAROSA,” ALMA LOPEZ, 2002


Ingrid’s story

I began my non-monogamous sexual self-exploration after breaking up with a woman I spent fi ve years with. Th e last year of our relationship, we mutually decided to “open it up”. Our years together had been very fulfi lling but after several years together, came to the conclusion that our love for one another did not diminish the lust, attrac-tion and need for other queer people in our lives. We embarked on a journey that most of our friends had only whispered about. It was a process that seemed natural to us but a process all too unfamiliar. We struggled and I believe our break-up had much to do with the lack of information and community around this lifestyle.

After our foiled attempt at an alterna-tive relationship I was not deterred. I knew it would be diffi cult due to societal views but I felt monogamy was a societal construct I did not want to be controlled by. Control-ling mechanisms ranged from being viewed and named a “whore”, my motherhood being put into question because I was not setting a good example for my daughter, being told I would get a sexually transmitted disease and eventually live a lonely existence due to my selfi shness. Regardless of those roadblocks I continued to explore. I ventured into other open relationships, being “single” and dating several people and experimenting with pri-mary partners and swinging. Th is journey is a continual one that I cherish because I am creating my own view and ideas about what intimate relationships, love and sex mean to me.

YK’s story

My relationships have always been un-conventional in some ways, whether because of my queerness, my gender identity or my color. Th is is one of the reasons I began a

self-evaluation process to fi nd out what felt right to me outside of the limitations of what I was told to feel, think and do.

My personal exploration of non-mo-nogamy came about as I began to recognize that my attractions for many people were not validated when I was in relationships with one person. I felt strongly that it was healthy to name, express and pursue desire when I felt it. Th is desire was never limited to one single person, yet I was told by society and laws to limit myself to desire only one. I was also told that everyone else was supposed to fi nd one person. I had many diff erent types of relationships that I cherish, felt happiness in, and learned lessons from. Yet throughout all of this, I felt that society’s constructs were limiting me by controlling my body, mind, sex and sexuality.

As a person who strives for personal liberation in all aspects of my life, as a per-son who constantly struggles to grow and change, I have been fi nding that I am able to fi nd my own path, create my own relation-ships and defi ne my own ideas of sex, sexual-ity, love and relationships. I look forward to my future growth and embrace my personal journey of purging, unlearning, creating and naming.

Finding Community

When we met, we had been traversing through our separate paths along an unwrit-ten script of non-monogamy. Th ere is no guidebook for how to live your life, if you live it outside of social convention. As with any situation that is exploratory, or without a script, we had each been learning through trial and error and self-exploration.

We met through our political organiz-ing work and found that we had many things in common, including being political non-monogamous queer people of color.

Non-monogamy is political to us be-

cause it strives to break from social construc-tions of what it means to be in any kind of relationship with another person or persons. It also aims to break from the mentality of “I own you,” which we believe comes from a

capitalist idea of ownership and property.What is polyamory?How many friends do you have? Do you

have just one? Most people would say, they have many diff erent kinds of friends. Friends

Defining Our Own

BY YK HONG & INGRID RIVERA

We believe it makes sense to live a life that allows us a right to enter into multiple intimate relationships. We believe the notion of fi nding everything you’ve ever wanted in one person, whether a friend or lover, is a huge expectation for any one person to ask for or fulfi ll.

Sexual LiberationThis is our story of how we met, found community, and are building a vision together.

7

that are supportive, friends that you hang out to have fun with, friends that off er commu-nity, and friends that give you love.

We have many friends because we have many sides to each of us. Friends touch upon and access diff erent aspects of our personal-ity, background and experiences.

Th is is how we feel when we talk about intimate relationships.

Even when you think you fi nd someone that fulfi lls many or even most of your wants and needs, we cannot assume that person will never change, and we cannot assume that you will never change. Growth is a natural process of life, we learn this as we fi nd and lose friends and have lovers come and go. We hope that there is never a moment in our lives that we do not grow, learn or change.

Our belief is in a philosophy that opens our minds up to thinking dynamically about ways we can interact and grow. In this con-text, we are people who have diff erent identi-ties: being queer, being people of color. We explore diff erent ways to fi nd this with and through our interactions with people around us.

We call this philosophy polyamory. Polyamory goes beyond non-monoga-

my. It is negotiated, ethical non-monogamy. Polyamory is the non-possessive, honest, re-sponsible and ethical philosophy and prac-tice of interacting intimately with multiple people simultaneously. It gives one the op-tion of having relationships outside of social norms. Polyamory is from the root words Poly (meaning “many”) and Amour (mean-ing “love/lovers”); hence “many loves” or Polyamory.

Polyamory is an umbrella term, it can mean many things, such as being in a triad (when there are three people who are inti-mate with each other), having a primary partner, being single but having multiple lovers or relationships. To us, revolutionary polyamory means purging the seeds of op-pression that try to corner us into ownership, control of our bodies, and illusions of secu-rity through something outside of yourself.

Examining and coming into this phi-losophy is not an easy task.

Similar to coming out as a queer or transgender person of color in a homopho-bic/transphobic, racist society, we have need-ed to learn the process of shedding the ways in which society at large has taught us how to live, love and navigate through this world. Th is means unlearning and challenging most of the information we are given on a daily basis. Th is means questioning the ways we are told the world is supposed to work. Even with polyamory, we knew that many models of intimate relationships were largely based in the dominant culture, i.e. white culture.

As people of color, we work to fi nd cre-ative ways to expand our culture, language and relationships outside of the box that we are pushed into by dominant culture.

Th e boxes we are often pushed into are “family values”, religion, and “ethics”. We are initially taught that a family is a man and a woman married with children. Even now, family values are being challenged as be-ing queer people with children, but perhaps we need to think about breaking from the framework of conventional structures alto-gether. We are taught that there are ways to conduct ourselves in relationships even when we are dating, that there is one religion with its values that takes precedence over other beliefs, that society dictates what is wrong and what is right.

Being polyamorous is not anti-love or anti-relationship, but simply thinking diff er-ently about relationships that were created for us. Th e government and state have always tried to enforce how we are supposed to use our bodies as queer people, poor people and people of color. Poor women of color going through forced sterilization, past sodomy laws, sex work, abstinence until marriage policies and Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initia-tive are examples of our bodies being con-trolled by others, not by ourselves.

Polyamory fi ts into our life, because of our politics, our practice and our beliefs. Even when we are considered outsiders and

not understood because of these beliefs, we continue to pursue our desires and ideas with passion. We don’t claim to be perfect or bet-ter than anyone else, but we do understand that we live in a country that oppresses our actions, thoughts and desires. Th ese are the things that we are trying to break out of.

A Revolutionstar Experience

Revolutionstar Experience is the eff ort we, as two queer political polyamorous people of color, put together to bring to our larger communities. It is our philosophy of detoxi-fying our people of color bodies, minds and spirits from oppression within and outside of ourselves. As we walk through our lives we are bombarded with dominant culture and systemic oppression. Purging and un-learning these is key to fi nding personal and collective liberation. We emphasize constant self-evaluation and self-criticism as part of our personal work and growth. Only after we have gone through individual growth and are fully conscious with ourselves can we begin building with our larger community.

We started Revolutionstar Experience to bring our personal experiences of purging, and still continuously purging, ourselves of the seeds of poison that we as people of color, especially queer, genderqueer and trans folks of color, experience, and how these seeds al-ter our existence and intimate interactions.

Revolution can mean many things, in this case, to us, it means upsetting the setup. Polyamory is revolutionary to us because it is a way to deconstruct and dismantle the systems and setup that attempt to oppress us through sexism, racism, homophobia, trans-phobia and other oppressions.

We do many things to try to help our queer, genderqueer and trans communities reach this radical vision, such as workshops, a retreat called Purge to explore our bodies, sex and sexuality, an eff ort called OP3 (Op-pressed People’s Protection Plan) to talk about violence within our own communities due to systemic control, and also organize

play parties, events where we off er space for queer, genderqueer and transgender people of color to express themselves without inhi-bition.

We aim to make our play parties spaces for people to think about and exercise sexual liberation without guilt, shame, judgment or single-mindedness. We think about these as opportunities for queer, genderqueer and transgender people of color to reach a radical vision collectively.

Th ese projects are liberating in that they allow us to question, act, and feel freer with-in our own bodies and minds outside of the ideology that bombards us. Our workshops have focused on the important intersections between politics and “alternative” ways queer, poor people and people of color can begin to consciously use our own bodies that the state has historically tried to police. We not only emphasize the importance of sexual libera-tion but also how our sexual oppression has been tied to policies, politics, the state and laws. We try to address how sexual libera-tion is not just about the sex we have but it is also hindered by the systemic control of our thoughts.

Our collective and individual growth continues through our work with Revolu-tionstar Experience. We look forward to this lifelong journey.

[email protected]

Ingrid Rivera is a queer, Black Boricua, highly seasoned and experienced community organizer and consultant. She is also a poet /performance artist and self proclaimed sex educator.

YK Hong is a trainer, organizer, writer, leturer, artist and revolutionary dedicated to talking about accountability, anti-oppression, grasrootsorganizing and sexual liberation, particularly for people of color, queer and trans folks and poor communities.

-with special guests Laura Whitehorn, Climbing Po-etree, Njeri Earth, Miz Ko-rona, and Psalm One.-Panel discussion on in-carcerated women’s lib-eration through.-workshops on: poetry, turning media into art, breakdancing, screen printing, linoleum cuts


Lynne Stewart Guilty; Faces Up to 45 Years in Jail

In a blow to the abil-ity of lawyers to de-

fend clients suspected of terrorism, a jury in Manhattan today found radical lawyer Lynne Stewart guilty of aiding terrorists. She was found guilty

on every charge as were co-defendants.Many of the harshest charges against

Stewart were originally dismissed, but in a surprise move, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft fi led new charges against the law-yer.

from the AP: “A veteran civil rights law-yer was convicted Thursday of crossing the line by smuggling messages of violence from one of her jailed clients -- a radical Egyp-tian sheik -- to his terrorist disciples on the outside.”

In a development on Feb. 8 that may provide grounds for an appeal of the verdict, members of the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO), a right-wing terrorist organization, posted fl iers on the Manhattan courthouse door calling for Stewart’s death.

Citizens to Bush: ‘Hands off Social Security’

DETROIT – Protesters organized by the National Campaign for America’s Future

chanted “Privatization, no way; Social Secu-rity is here to stay” outside Cobo Hall Feb. 8. Inside, Pres. George W. Bush addressed the Detroit Economic Club about his plans to privatize the social security system by allowing workers to put their contributions into private investment schemes.

“The current system is working fi ne, and has been for 70 years,” Byron Frazier of Michigan Citizen Action said. “We’re scared to death of what this man is proposing.” Linda Teeter added, “One out of three people in most cities like Detroit depend on Social Security. The only people who would benefi t from Bush’s scheme are Wall Street and the president’s large contributors.”

newswireARTICLES FROM THE MICHIGAN INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTER

When I was living in Amsterdam, When I was living in Amsterdam, Wa friend who worked in PR and knew about such things

suggested to me that I might have some sort of future in writing for men’s magazines—the “cool girl” feature so popular in Maxim, FHM, Details, etc—if I could manage to be a little more pornographic and slightly less intellectual in my work.

“You think I’m an intellectual?” I asked, taken somewhat aback. “I mean, I have yet to read any Chomsky where he writes about getting his period all over his bicycle seat.”

He surveyed a recent story I had written, looking for evidence of my brain. “Well, there are some awfully long sentences in here.”

At the time, faced with the impending prospect of returning to New York with no foreseeable career opportunities, I fi gured that writing some narrative prostitution about how much chicks LOVE anal sex was worth a shot. I’d be like a brainy phone-sex operator—like the brothel of intellectual harlots in the Woody Allen story “Th e Whore of Mensa.” I’d have to spice up my sex life a little; let my hair down, but that was okay. I was already kind of slutty in the name of bohemianism—downing large quantities of “art juice” every night and sleeping with tattooed Scandinavians. Now I’d research, record, get paid. “I am a camera,” said Christopher Isherwood. Well, I’d be a camera too—just without the Nazis.

It was with this goal in mind that I headed to the red-light district to buy a vibrator.

I have slowly come to the conclusion that I have become, despite all my eff orts to the contrary, that most predictable of creatures; a single woman in her mid-twenties. It’s time to make some kind of investment in the future. A girl my age who is the newest associate at a law fi rm, say, or works in P.R. or marketing, might put a down payment on an apartment, start an I.R.A., buy a car or a grown-up purse. My means are considerably more limited, and I was in Amsterdam, where you must traverse the seven levels of the Dildo

Forest, raft across the mighty Lube River, and answer the riddle of the beautiful Ball Gag Fairy in order to get to work in the morning.

I munched Gummi sweets from a striped paper sack, browsing the human wares of the ancient streets admiringly, until I came to a shop called PRIVATE—SHHH! It was large and clean and the salespeople wore shirts with their names embroidered on the breast pocket like gas station attendants. I situated myself in front of a large selection of vibrators against the back wall, fascinated by the paroxysms of pleasure their packaging promised. A trio of Muslim teenagers in headscarves and fl owing tunics giggling girlishly over a rubber maid’s uniform.

An enormous man approached me, a man who would not look out of place sternly shielding Britney Spears from prurient photographers. (By the way—according to a British magazine I read here, a reporter recently asked La Britney—la Bretagne? —what the last thing she had in her mouth was and she replied coyly, “A vibrator.” Somebody needs to explain a few things to that girl.) Th e giant spoke to me in the elfi n singsong of the Dutch language, and gauging my terror, switched to English.

“Are you fi nding everything? Can I help you?” His bald pate gleamed ivory in the soft light.

I’d had a similar experience once before in junior high school, cutting across the park on my way home from the bus. As I made my way through a small, wooded area, I heard an unmistakable gasping coming from behind a tree. Gingerly, I approached, to see a man who appeared to be in his late thirties, rubbing his bare ass against the bark like a cat and furiously grappling with the one-eyed warrior. Disturbing, yes, but mortifying was the fact that whole way home, I had been thinking feverishly of a certain boy who sat in front of me in Social Studies—oh, let’s call him Matthew Patrick Calloway—and all the things I would let him do to me should we ever fi nd ourselves locked in the band closet during homeroom. I felt as if this frightening, sweaty man, staring

at my thirteen year old haunches with a look that would peel paint, could read my mind. He knew what I wanted. He knew. Probably everyone that looked at me knew. Including Matthew Patrick Calloway.

Th e point of this charming little digression is that when an obvious pervert somehow intrudes upon your erotic reverie, be you pre-pubescent or fully pubed, it throws you for a loop.

I searched for words to answer the giant pervert. Blankly I stared at his vast shirt, where his name, Jeroen, was embroidered in bright yellow—coward’s yellow, I thought, crazily. Oh. He wasn’t a pervert. He worked there. A fl icker of something—amusement? condescension? love? --traversed the laugh lines around his eyes—the cool, placid blue that so many of his countrymen are blessed with, like a space shuttle photograph of Planet Earth, so peaceful, so right.

From a distance the world looks blue and green/And the snow capped mountains white/Th ere are no guns, no wars and no disease/No hungry mouths to feed.

Clearly, I was going mad. “Um, I’m okay. Yep. Just fi ne.”“Why don’t you come over here, ja? I

have some samples with batteries—I make a little demonstration and you can decide which one is for you.”

How could I refuse?I think of myself as a fairly

sophisticated person. I’ve read Camille Paglia and um, Candace Bushnell. I see the post-modern signifi cance of porn. I have worked through most of my sexual inhibitions, aided by a therapy and a circle of friends that would curl the hair of Freud. Still, watching a man with fi ngers the size of hot-dogs operating a lavender dildo shaped like a bunny was somehow beyond my comfort zone.

Th ey had vibrators that revolved. Vibrators that gyrated. Vibrators that held you and asked about your feelings.

My apartment in Amsterdam had a large framed portrait of Richard Wagner hanging in the living room. For some reason, his aquiline profi le popped into my head and refused to budge. “Great,” I thought. “For the rest of my life, I will be

Torpedo BY RACHEL SHUKERT

through the tulipsTorpedo

through the tulipsTorpedo

fi ction

9

‘Bus cuts will ruin Detroit’

If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick

goes ahead with his plan to cut 24-hour bus services, he will breed more trouble for the city than he ever imagines, bus drivers

and riders told the Detroit City Council Feb. 21.At a public hearing in the Coleman A. Young

Municipal Building, bus drivers and residents told the council that the trouble could mean an increase in crime, homelessness and many other societal ills.

source: Michigan Citizen

Reclaim Your Health! A Com-munity Conference on Do-It-

Yourself Health

March 18th-20th at the Cass Community Neigh-borhood Development Corporation, 3535 Cass

Ave and the Cass Community Food co-op, 4566 Charlotte in Detroit, MI.

The Detroit Health Collective is sponsoring a Do-It-Yourself health fair. This will be a weekend of workshops, discussions, networking, and train-ings with a place for activists, health providers, and interested community members to network and learn.

The kickoff of this event will be Friday night with keynote speaker Maureen Taylor, president of the Welfare Rights Origination. She will talk about the diffi culty of accessing the current healthcare system. After her speech there will be a coffee and social as well as a dance. Saturday and Sunday will be fi lled with discussions, workshops and hands on trainings.

The Michigan Independent Media Center web-site features an open publishing newswire where you can publish your story in your voice.

Visit http://michiganimc.org/publish to get started!

newswire

ARTICLES FROM THE MICHIGAN INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTER

(continued)

unable to orgasm without thinking of Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner wrote the melody of “Here Comes the

Bride.”Oh dear.I kept it reasonably together until he brought out a

monstrous fuchsia penis with curved attachments on each side, looking for all the world like a veiny, pornographic cactus. “Th is one is for your clitoris, and this is for your anus,” said Jeroen, with medical clarity, manipulating the dolphin shaped pellets gracefully. “And this,” he caressed the shaft lovingly “then goes in between.”

I lost my shit. Lost it. L-O-S-T it. My howls of laughter distracted even the Muslim girls, now perusing a display of leather restraints at a nearby counter.

Jeroen glared at me as if I were a sixth grader who cackled every time someone said “hard.”

“Well, of course we have the technology for it to be possible, so why would you not do it?” So practical. So matter-of-fact. So Dutch.

In the end, I chose a fairly simple model made of heat-sensitive rubber in teal. Cute, I thought. It’ll match my iMac. Th e cashier wrapped my purchase up in pert polka-dotted paper, free of charge, and I made my way to the next stop of the day, the Uitmarkt, the giant outdoor festival that is the offi cial opening of the Dutch cultural season. Hundreds of dance companies, theater companies, concert halls, and cabarets set up booths on the Museumplein, just a few feet from the Vermeers and the Rembrandts at the Rijksmuseum, to give their spiel and hand out their pamphlets and candy and complimentary ball-point pens. I perused the off erings. Th e Abridged Works of William Shakespeare in Dutch! A Streetcar Named Desire in Dutch! Various modern dance troupes full of concave stomachs and blank expressions that make you think of scary ballet teachers and how much you hate your body. In Dutch!

I tried to be a good, international artist, a young up-and-comer who deserved to be taken seriously.

“Hi, I’m an actress and a writer from New York City. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” and all I could think was I’VE GOT A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE!!! I’VE GOT A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE!!!

“How do you get your funding here in the Netherlands? Because in the States it’s very diffi cult for young companies…” I’VE GOT A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE!!!! I’VE GOT A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE!!!

With the possible exception of the New York Times Sunday Crossword, sex is undoubtedly the number-one obsession in my life.

I am no better than the man behind the tree.Desperate, I bought a beer. VIBRATOR! VIBRATOR!

NO! FOCUS, RACHEL! FOCUS! I bought a sandwich.I turned the corner. And caught my breath. It couldn’t

be! No, it couldn’t be! But it was! It was!Lounging on a marble bench, his long legs

tossed carelessly over the side, his fi ery hair glistening in the golden sun of Vincent Van Gogh, was Paul Bettany.

Paul Bettany. Hot, English, hallucination of Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. Shirtless English poet Geoff rey Chaucer in “A Knight’s Tale” with Heath Ledger. Confl icted, English, tennis player in the upcoming “Wimbledon” with Kirsten Dunst. I realize that the readers of this particular publication might not read Us Weekly with the same voracity as I do, but Paul Weekly with the same voracity as I do, but Paul WeeklyBettany. Paul Bettany. Paul Bettany. In a second he was going to turn his leonine head, our eyes would meet, and he’d take me back to his hotel room and say all the naughty things British men say in bed because they’re uncomfortable around women—things like “Get that gorgeous ass of yours over here, you nasty little tart.” And we’d shag and shag and shag, even though he’s married to Jennifer Connelly, and I’d never tell the tabloids, no matter how much money they off ered me, because I’m noble and I knew we had shared something very special.

AND I HAD A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE!

Lost in a world of my own, I tripped over the high curb and went fl ying, my bag of promotional materials with me, scattering over the deep emerald grass. Paul Bettany turned slightly. Was it my imagination, or did one divinely formed cheekbone twitch in a semblance of a smile?

I had a brand new vibrator. I needed to go home right away.

Rachel Shukert is a playwright/author/performer based in New York City. Her work has been featured at Nerve.com, Culturebot.org, and e74. She is alsothe co-founder of the performance group the Bushwick Hotel. Th anks, Dan Nester!

“I HAVE A VIBRATOR IN MY PURSE.” YONI GOLDSTEIN, 2005.


NINE THOUSAND PEOPLEthroughout the world die ev-ery day from AIDS. 24,000

people die of poverty each day.people die of poverty each day.In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s,

the world was struck by two simultane-ous calamities – HIV/AIDS and neo-liberal economics. But in addition to sharing chronology, these developments have grown together, fed off one anoth-er, and exacerbated each of their horrifi c eff ects. Unfortunately, our movements are not making links between the two – or at least, not in the sustained and vociferous way they should be. His-torically, groups like ACT UP (AIDS torically, groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and ME-DECINS SANS FRONTIERES (Doctors without Borders) and more recently the People’s Health Forum, the Th ird World Network and Health GAP (Global Access Project) have em-

phasized the connections between HIV infection and the social oppression and marginalization caused by neo-liberal capitalism and neo-colonization. Such movements should provide us with both inspiration and blueprints for mass struggle. Instead of learning from these social movements, which have taken a political economy approach to fi ghting HIV/AIDS infection and stig-ma, most leftists are still ignoring the relationship between HIV/AIDS and neo-liberalism. In fact, within many leftist groups, the issue of HIV/AIDS leftist groups, the issue of HIV/AIDS is not addressed at all. Th is silence can too easily be interpreted as indiff er-ence.

If we combine the statistics, 33,000 people are dying everyday worldwide from disease and hunger – that’s 11 times more victims than 9/11 every day, that’s “the equivalent of one tsunami a week” (Lula da Silva, “An Indivis-ible Destiny”), that’s a Holocaust ev-ery year. Th is is global genocide, and it should be commanding every ounce it should be commanding every ounce

of our energy to resist and revolt. If we don’t start revitalizing, broadening and globalizing our eff orts to conquer these joint executioners of the world’s these joint executioners of the world’s marginalized populations, they will be annihilated. Neo-liberalism will have succeeded in ridding the world of the people they defi ne as both unproduc-tive and undesirable.

In my opinion, the left’s over-whelming silence and absence in HIV/AIDS activism is largely due to the fact that struggles surrounding HIV/AIDS are not commonly understood as anti-capitalist in nature. However, it is ex-ceedingly important that global justice ceedingly important that global justice activists begin recognizing that poverty and inequality are causal factors for infection, not simply eff ects; the neo-liberal macro-economic structures and corporate logic that have insidiously infected international and domestic

policies for the past three decades are primarily to blame for the unequal dis-tribution of HIV infection between the North and South. HIV/AIDS unveils, with horrifying vividness, of-ten obscured fault lines of economic and cultural inequality. On an inter-national scale, this is illustrated by the vast schism between former colonies and industrialized nations; the rates of infection hover around .1 percent in industrialized countries while in most Sub-Saharan African countries, HIV/AIDS infects on average 25% of the AIDS infects on average 25% of the population. Within most nations, HIV infection parallels inequalities of class, race, gender, sexuality, health, and dis-ability.

Th ere are three primary reasons why the HIV/AIDS crisis is not com-monly analyzed in socio-economic terms and is thus excluded from anti-capitalist/anti-neoliberal struggles. First, the way in which HIV/AIDS policy is imbued with neo-liberal agen-das is often complicated and obscured das is often complicated and obscured

– on both an international and national level. Neo-liberal policy and coloniza-tion are largely to blame for the endemic poverty that plagues the ‘Th ird World,’ which has resulted in high rates of HIV infection, as well as an inability to care for those infected. For example, World Bank and IMF policies force states to cut funding on social services (for health care, education, the provision of basic services, etc.) and impose policy restructuring at a national level, which encourages the corporatization of state governance and privatization of basic services. As a result, health (along with water, air, electricity, etc.) is commodi-fi ed, and only those who can aff ord to pay have the luxury of healthiness. “Th e current economic policies would rather view health as a private good that is ac-cessed by the medium of the market” (World Social Forum People’s Health

conference). In addition, the WTO’s TRIPS

(Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) agreement globalizes US pat-ent laws – enforced by trade sanctions authorized by the WTO Dispute Set-tlement panel. Often, the US forces countries around the world to pass national laws that support restrictive trade policies and benefi t US pharma-ceutical corporations. Th ese imposi-tions on national sovereignty are hid-den in bilateral negotiations over trade and investment strategies. Although the TRIPS agreement allows for the parallel importing of generic drugs, which should be applicable to countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, South America and India, pharmaceu-tical multinational corporations ada-mantly disallow the implementation of this particular TRIPS clause and unre-servedly punish those countries who at-tempt to bypass IP’s on anti-retrovirals (this occurred in both South Africa and Brazil). Even though the pandemic is

HIV/AIDS:The Neo-Liberal PandemicHIV/AIDS:The Neo-Liberal PandemicHIV/AIDS:

BY CLAIRE DECOTEAU

“JUST SHUT UP”BY DAVID SALYER

Every year, people all over the world say stridently stupid, misinformed or absurd things about HIV and AIDS. Here’s a list of some folks who make you wonder what, if anything, they were thinking before they opened their mouths. Their comments are best met with three little words: Just shut up.

Jose BatistaDown in Bexar County, Texas, the Alternative Housing Down in Bexar County, Texas, the Alternative Housing Corporation (AHC) secured federal funds to develop an eight-unit transitional housing complex for single moth-ers with HIV/AIDS. AHC conducted more than a dozen meetings with local neighborhood associations and met meetings with local neighborhood associations and met no opposition to the structure. Vacant land was chosen on a bus line across the street from Stephen F. Austin El-ementary School in the Five Points neighborhood of San Antonio. At a town hall meeting near completion of the Antonio. At a town hall meeting near completion of the transitional housing, Bexar County offi cials fi nally heard from the opposition, led by Jose Batista. His fear? Chil-dren could be infected with HIV if a child carrying the virus bit them. Batista felt no better when Bexar County virus bit them. Batista felt no better when Bexar County Housing and Human Services representatives explained that there has never been a documented case of child-to-child HIV transmission by biting. “Th ere’s no cure,” to-child HIV transmission by biting. “Th ere’s no cure,” Batista brayed. “Th e causes [given by health offi cials] are always changing. As adults, we get scared when we don’t always changing. As adults, we get scared when we don’t know what’s going on. But kids don’t even know [what to be afraid of ].” Th e transitional housing plan is about get-ting homeless HIV-positive single moms back to work ting homeless HIV-positive single moms back to work and back into the community -- a compassionate en-deavor. Batista promotes the nonsense that these women have birthed a bunch of rabid little vampires poised to gnaw away at the unsuspecting population of the local elementary school.

William Donald SchaeferWilliam Donald Schaefer, Mary-land’s Democratic (yes, Democratic) Comptroller, has been a lifelong Comptroller, has been a lifelong public servant. Now 82, the former public servant. Now 82, the former mayor of Baltimore and former gov-ernor of Maryland remains an un-fl agging source for bad ideas and re-pugnant quotes. At a Board of Public

Works meeting last October, Schaefer got in the state Works meeting last October, Schaefer got in the state AIDS administrator’s face, demanding to know why she AIDS administrator’s face, demanding to know why she does not establish a public registry listing HIV-positive Maryland residents. Looks like he’s not going to let this one go -- Schaefer called for such a registry three times in the 1990s and it was defeated each time by the state legislature. Interviewed later, Schaefer declared, “As far legislature. Interviewed later, Schaefer declared, “As far as I’m concerned, people who have AIDS are a danger. as I’m concerned, people who have AIDS are a danger. People should be able to know who has AIDS.” Not People should be able to know who has AIDS.” Not knowing when to stop, he also reminded everyone that knowing when to stop, he also reminded everyone that people with AIDS “brought it on themselves.”

continued on next page

It is exceedingly important that global jus-tice activists begin recognizing that poverty and inequality are causal factors for infec-tion—not simply effects.tion—not simply effects.

11

AIDS ACTIVIST CONFRONTS THE SFPD ON CASTRO STREET. SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 6, 1989

Phillippia FaustGot a lame, one-dimensional abstinence-only message for Got a lame, one-dimensional abstinence-only message for America’s adolescents, ages 12 through 18? Get a grant! America’s adolescents, ages 12 through 18? Get a grant! Th at’s what Phillippia Faust, a nurse at Georgia’s Rockdale Th at’s what Phillippia Faust, a nurse at Georgia’s Rockdale County Medical Center, did last year. Faust was awarded a federal grant of $177,809 a year for three years (that’s $533,427, or half a million dollars) to create an abstinence-only program. Now, Faust can aff ord a staff , supplies and a real curriculum. “We do discuss teen pregnancy and STDs,” real curriculum. “We do discuss teen pregnancy and STDs,” says Faust. “But abstinence is all about strengthening the family. Abstinence upholds the family as the basic unit of family. Abstinence upholds the family as the basic unit of society and recognizes marriage as the framework for the family, which equates childbearing within the context of family, which equates childbearing within the context of family. Abstinence identifi es marriage as the only accept-able and legitimate place for the sexual experience and that able and legitimate place for the sexual experience and that avoidance from premarital sexual activity, including but not avoidance from premarital sexual activity, including but not limited to sexual intercourse, is the expectant standard for limited to sexual intercourse, is the expectant standard for the unmarried.” It’s entirely possible that Phillippia Faust the unmarried.” It’s entirely possible that Phillippia Faust is a really nice person, but she sure does sound like an in-suff erable, proselytizing control freak with an astonishingly suff erable, proselytizing control freak with an astonishingly narrow and oppressive view of human sexuality. How does she stop teens from engaging in premarital sexual activity? By staging mock weddings -- complete with props, scenery, By staging mock weddings -- complete with props, scenery, bridal attire and graphic slide show presentations of the ghastly things sexually transmitted diseases can do to your ghastly things sexually transmitted diseases can do to your body. After two mock weddings last May, Faust told Th e Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I just wanted kids to have Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I just wanted kids to have a grand visual of what their day-to-day decisions can lead to for their families, with an image of two beds -- the bed of poor choices and the bed of ‘we made good choices by of poor choices and the bed of ‘we made good choices by waiting.’” Th ose are your tax dollars at work ... and a half a waiting.’” Th ose are your tax dollars at work ... and a half a million bucks can buy a lot of mock weddings.

Abott LaboratoriesAround World AIDS Day 2003, pharmaceutical giant Ab-Around World AIDS Day 2003, pharmaceutical giant Ab-bott Laboratories increased the U.S. wholesale price of its HIV drug Norvir by 400%. Marketed since 1996, protease inhibitor Norvir exists primarily due to a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Never U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Never

in the history of antiretroviral therapy has a company announced such a price increase on an existing drug. Abbott did not bring a “new and improved” version of Norvir to the market, nor did it raise the price of its other market, nor did it raise the price of its other

protease inhibitor, Kaletra, which happens to contain Nor-vir. Shocked AIDS activists, consumer groups and HIV vir. Shocked AIDS activists, consumer groups and HIV physicians responded with sharp criticism. Slammed from all sides, Abbott representatives and spokespersons spent all sides, Abbott representatives and spokespersons spent 2004 justifying the price hike. Th e spokespersons roboti-cally repeated the same worn-out public relations prattle and transparent lies as always. “Th is new price is necessary and transparent lies as always. “Th is new price is necessary to support our ability to continue research to bring a next to support our ability to continue research to bring a next generation of HIV medications to market. Th is pricing ac-tion supports our ability to continue research and develop-ment.” Year in and year out, pharmaceutical companies like Abbott are the wealthiest and most profi table corporations Abbott are the wealthiest and most profi table corporations in the world. Number of new HIV drugs Abbott had in research, development or clinical trails in 2004: ZERO. research, development or clinical trails in 2004: ZERO. Number of the Seven Deadly Sins Abbott gleefully em-braced in 2004: ONE. Greed.

Read the full version of this article at www.criti-calmoment.org

claiming 9,000 lives a day and the rates of infection are ris-ing, pharmaceutical corporations are not prepared to lose profi t in order to save lives. “Th e combined sales of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies exceed the South African Gross National Product” (Oxfam, “Priced Out of Reach: How WTO Patent Policies will Reduce Access to Medicines in the Developing World”). And yet, we are re-liant on these multinational pharmaceutical companies to provide the world with treatment. We should be attempt-ing to build the generic drug market to bypass this system of neo-liberal colonialism.

Th e second reason HIV/AIDS has not become a pri-mary focus of global justice movements is representation. Th e images HIV/AIDS activism invokes are those of “care and support” – hospitals, nurses, social workers, NGOs – not militant anarchists storming fences, blocking roads, and occupying buildings (though ironically, this adequately de-scribes many of the activities of ACT UP New York, Phila-delphia and San Francisco during the 1980’s). Th is problem of symbolic representation is dangerous for many reasons.

First of all, it encourages and sustains the feminiza-tion of the disease. Th roughout the world, HIV/AIDS is a ‘gendered epidemic’ (Roth and Hogan 1998) in primarily

two ways. Womyn are often portrayed and blamed as the primary vectors of the virus, and they also bear the brunt of care-giving for those infected. Womyn are more likely to be infected (and in fact have a higher rate of infection than men in most parts of the world) both because of the physical mechanics of transmission and because men too often wield control over womyn’s bodies. In addition, womyn are blamed for the high levels of infection (because of prostitution, the weakening of traditional morals and in-stitutions - like the family, shifts in ideologies of sexuality, etc.) and as such, they carry the added burden of stigma. Th is cloaks their plight in silence. In addition, due to the global gendered division of labor, womyn are also taking on the tremendous responsibility of caring for the victims of this epidemic – both the living and the dead. However, womyn are also the ones fi ghting back. Th e growing ranks of AIDS activists worldwide, combating both state and in-ternational inaction, the pharmaceutical companies’ exploi-tation, and their own communities’ discrimination, are pre-dominantly fi lled by womyn. However, the feminization of HIV/AIDS only rarely celebrates womyn as leaders of the struggles against HIV/AIDS and instead invokes and reinforces anachronistic and discriminatory gender norms. Second, the ‘image’ problem of HIV/AIDS activism allows NGOs to be the primary delegates of HIV/AIDS preven-tion and treatment. With the increasing corporatization of NGOs around the world, and their largely patronizingly

Eurocentric (and often racist, classist and sexist) approach to management and the provision of care, this is a truly dan-gerous tendency to encourage. Th irdly and fi nally, repre-senting HIV/AIDS as a “soft” issue obscures the reality of radical political movements that have been fi ghting against the discrimination and inequality intrinsic to HIV/AIDS politics for the past three decades.

Th e third reason HIV/AIDS has failed to capture the attention of mass leftist movements is perhaps the most important because it also explains the global indiff erence shown to the 61 million people currently infected world-wide: HIV transmission is portrayed as the result of individ-ual behavior. It is absolutely essential that we fi ght against this individualization of the disease because it obscures the socio-politico-economic causal factors of the epidemic and excuses those responsible for carrying out this ongoing global genocide. By insisting that there are international forces and actors responsible for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I am not off ering another ‘conspiracy theory’ about AIDS being constructed in some laboratory in order to rid the world of the undesirables (as much as I understand the rea-son these theories hold so much sway with disenfranchised populations around the world). I am simply saying that while people need to practice safe sex, use clean needles,

etc., we need to take a broader perspec-tive. Th ere are structural reasons why certain populations are more vulnerable to infection (womyn, people of color, the poor) which have more to do with the relationship between health and deplorable living conditions, patterns of inequality, and exploitative inter-personal relations than with individual behavior. “Blaming the victim is part of the neoliberal approach to health. It nicely avoids any discussion of struc-tural violence, which would be deeply threatening to the status quo of current international economic arrangements” (Interview with Alison Katz, Clamor Magazine, Jan/Feb 2005, page 55).

HIV/AIDS not only unveils schisms of diff erence between the

North and South, and between the haves and have-nots in each society, it also allows for the coales-cence of various social movement struggles, including: resis-tance to World Bank and IMF debt, WTO trade policies, and privatization; demands for the rights of womyn, chil-dren, people of color, LGBT communities, and the disabled; the accessibility of basic services like water, electricity, hous-ing, education and health care; and the promotion of com-munity self-sustainability. HIV/AIDS activism must be waged at global, national and local levels. Living in South Africa has shown me the power of community-based activ-ism and networks of care, but we must work to ensure the sustainability of autonomous community movements and their capacity to undermine, challenge and transform state-sponsored structures. Such community-based struggles must proliferate, expand in scope, and unite across borders to ensure the growth of the ability of grassroots movements to undermine and subvert neo-liberal capitalist structures throughout the world. It is also essential that HIV/AIDS becomes a major component of the growing international global justice movement – and not simply as a sidelined, secondary issue, but at the forefront of any and all anti-capitalism campaigns.

Claire Decoteau is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the UM. She is currently living in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she is engaged in research and activism focusing on the connections between HIV/AIDS and neoliberal capitalism.

continued from previous page


The Campaign Begins

In July 2004, we heard in the news that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) was going to raise fares $0.25 at the start of the 2005. We thought that this was a lot to ask of transit riders whose fares had already gone up from $1.50 to $1.75 at the start of 2004. Th e CTA claimed they were facing a budget crisis but we could not see justifi cation, in a city as stinking rich as Chicago, for them to pass their crisis onto the poorest section of the population.

Th e idea of a fare strike made sense to us. As an anarchist collective we had no illusions about lobbying politicians. We wanted to win our demands through direct action. If drivers stopped collecting fares and riders stopped paying them, then we could pressure the transit agency without disrupting the lives of those who depend on transit service. It was also a very easy way to involve all the riders who would be aff ected by the fare increase.

We started passing out one fl yer for riders and one for drivers suggesting a fare strike as a tactic. Th is got a decent response. Th en in September the CTA announced that they weren’t simply going to raise fares but instead had an entire “Doomsday” budget to be passed unless they received $87 million from the state legislators. Th is did not fool community groups who had had prior

experience with the CTA. Th e CTA had made similar cuts before in 1997 and did not use extra money received from the state to restore them. Th e “Doomsday” budget threatened a 20% cut to service and the loss of over 1000 jobs. Whether or not money was received, they also had plans to increase Para-transit fares for disabled riders by a full 100%.

While the obvious connection of not paying fares in resistance to a fare increase was lost, we decided to use the tactic of a fare strike against the Doomsday budget anyway. Th e elimination of several bus routes and a lot of night and weekend service would be even more devastating and angering for people. Th e attack on bus drivers’ jobs also would make the necessary alliance between riders and drivers a lot easier. We continued to pass out fl yers, this time sure to have “No fare increases, no service cuts and no labor cuts” as our demands.

Hearings and Lobbying

In October, the CTA held four public hearings throughout the city. Th ey were a joke. Th e CTA bureaucrats sat there with bored looks on their faces, drinking bottled water and occasionally giggling to each other, while people talked about how they will lose their jobs without their bus lines, will starve if they have to spend $150 of their monthly

disability checks on a transit pass or just yelled at the offi cials for being idiots and told them to watch their backs (and of course some leftist wing-nuts lectured on why only a revolutionary party could solve the problem). Th ey were more like public tribunals against the CTA offi cials than public hearings. Midwest Unrest used the opportunity to begin publicizing the idea of a possible fare strike, passing out fl yers and getting contact info from people.

Th e fi nal hearing was the CTA’s annual budget hearing at the Palmer House (a fancy-ass hotel). Hundreds of people attended: various transit groups, community organizations, CTA workers, disabled CTA riders and other angry transit riders. Many people gave angry speeches about how the service cuts would aff ect them and the audience continually heckle the board members. While one Midwest Unrest member gave a crowd-rousing speech, another member got on the stage and ripped up the poster board with the Doomsday budget on it. Both people were detained and kicked out of the building while members from the crowd yelled at the security guards to let them go.

Th e public hearings had no impact on the CTA’s decisions to cut service, of course. Th ey were used as a way for the CTA to have angry riders vent off their anger (sometimes against impolite, stressed-out bus drivers)

and to promote the idea that only the state legislature could fi x the problem.

Th e trip to lobby the state legislature on November 9 left people feeling like they’d wasted their time. Th e CTA’s request for funding was not even on the legislators’ agenda and a couple days later it was announced that no extra money hade been allocated. Th is shattered the illusions of those who’d previously been convinced that the state would supply the money.

Meetings and more Meetings

Around this time, we started to fl yer the bus garages in town and talk to workers more about a fare strike. Often workers were in the middle of a conversation about the cuts when we approached them so they were usually happy to talk to other interested people. Th e drivers were all pretty pissed and stressed out—at the CTA and at their union (ATU Local 241). When we brought up the idea of a fare strike, the response was usually quite positive. Only a few drivers ever told us it was a bad idea and most said they would support it.

We had a hard time pushing the campaign to a more coordinated level. Originally we had planned to call a meeting with all the contacts we had collected at the hearings, through email and from phone messages, but we decided to call an initial

BY MIDWEST UNREST

In this article, we discuss the strengths and weakness-es of our fare strike campaign in Chicago, as well as to help groups in other cities who want to organize around transit issues. When we fi rst decided to do this cam-paign, there wasn’t much to read on how other people had organized fare strikes. Hopefully this can be useful to other groups who want to use similar tactics.

the Chicago Transit Fare StrikeFight or

Walkthe Chicago Transit Fare Strike

Walkthe Chicago Transit Fare Strike

13

meeting solely with drivers before proposing a fare strike to riders, hoping to have a more solid plan of action.

We returned to the garages with over a thousand fl yers inviting CTA workers to a meeting about a fare strike. We realized it was pretty sketchy leaving fl yers for workers around where management could see them but we didn’t feel like there were any other options.

A lot of drivers told us they would try to make it but when the evening came, only two employees actually showed up. Th e meeting was still useful though. Th ey were interested in the idea of a fare strike, but worried about management cracking down on employees who participated—especially if fare boxes were sabotaged. On the other hand, they said that they doubted that any drivers would call the cops on people for evading fares. Th is pointed in the direction of a rider-lead fare strike.

Th e next week we had our open meeting. About 35 people showed up, all riders. Th ey were of all ages and from diff erent groups such as the Little Village Environmental organization (a group based in a working class Latino neighborhood, that has been fi ghting for restoration of transit service to their neighborhood cut in 1997), a high school group, the Campaign for Better Transit and many other folks. We proposed callinga fare strike starting December 15th, just over two weeks before the Doomsday budget was to go into eff ect.

We felt it was key to have the fare strike before the cuts went into eff ect so that the drivers being fi red would still be working, be pissed off and not have much to lose. Also the idea of starting the strike the day the cuts went into eff ect would be undermined if the CTA delayed or was unclear about when this would happen. We wanted it to be more than just a single day strike. We wanted it to continue until our demands were met (and even then we wouldn’t issue a call for people to start paying fares). Th e proposal was passed.

Getting the Word out

We had then about 3 weeks to promote the strike. Unfortunately, our lack of resources were a constant problem. We had an entire city to cover with over a million people riding the CTA everyday. We had English and Spanish versions of posters and fl yers and a fl ood of people calling us wanting to pass them out. While there was tons of work to do we probably spent 80% of our time fi nding ways to get free copies printed. Due to limited copies and the fact that we had fl yered the bus garages so often already with fare strike propaganda, we decided to simply poster the December 15th date around the garages and save our fl yers for riders. Th e most disheartening thing about not having enough resources was that the response was so good to the limited fl yers that we did have; we knew that having more could have made a much greater impact.

We sent a press release out the week before the strike but even before that we started getting a lot of calls from smaller media outlets. On December 14th, a bogus press release was sent out in the name of Frank Kreusi, claiming to apologize for the service cuts by declaring a “fare holiday” on the 15th. Although the CTA publicly blamed Midwest Unrest, we were not the ones responsible. We did appreciate the autonomous action though. Th e fare strike was suddenly getting coverage from almost all the major media. Th e CTA denounced us and said that they would have extra cops on the CTA that day. Th e ATU encouraged its employees to follow all CTA rules—that is, not allow people to ride for free. On the down side though, it was often covered by making it seem that since the press release was a hoax, the “fare strike” people might have heard about was as well.

December 15

On December 15, the day the strike was to begin, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that a deal had been struck with state legislators and that all the cuts and any decision on them would be delayed 6 months. Th e CTA refused to comment on the matter. Th is announcement actually served to weaken the fare strike as many people thought the issue had been resolved.

Still, many bus drivers and station booth attendants did let people ride for free that day. In one instance, a bus driver let a rider sit at the front of a bus, handing out fl yers for the entire route, letting about 200 people on for free. Due to the decentralized nature of the fare strike, we’ll never know how many people, either workers or riders, took part. From stories we’ve heard though we would estimate at least a 50% success rate when riders tried to get on for free.

Th e CTA reported 4 arrests for fare evasion that day, which seems about average for a weekday, and none of the arrestees ever got in touch with us. We were not encouraging anyone to get themselves arrested by participating in the fare strike. We were counting on the groundwork done with bus drivers to make it likely that people could get on the bus for free, without incident.

Cuts Delayed

After months of stalling tactics and leaving the decision on the Doomsday budget until the last minute, it was fi nally on the agenda at the December 16th CTA board meeting. Th e CTA had this “public” meeting so fi lled with their own people that very few of the 200 riders who showed up, on a weekday afternoon, could even get in. Th e public comment process is very strict, allowing 3 minutes each to only 5 speakers, who must book their space a week in advance. After giving Frank Kruesi a lump of coal for Christmas, high school students from Students for Transit Justice walked out and started chanting in the lobby downstairs, loud enough

to disrupt the meeting upstairs. Th e students led others in chanting that continued for a good 2 hours.

Th e meeting eventually restarted however. Th e decision in the end was in fact, like the Sun-Times had hinted the previous day, to delay any service cuts or decisions on them 6 months. Furthermore, the decision to double Para-transit fares in January, which had already been passed, was reversed.

A Partial Victory

Midwest Unrest put out a statement declaring partial victory and stopped organizing fare evasion. We estimate the number of people who fare evaded on the 15th and 16th in

the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands needed to put real economic pressure on the CTA. Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that the cuts were delayed when the pressure was being put on the CTA itself. In a context where there is widespread anger against the CTA and the beginnings of radical direct actions, it could quite easily snowball and

cause a major disruption of management of the transit system. In this situation, it is not unreasonable to assume that the bureaucrats in the CTA, the city government and even the state legislature wanted a cooling off period in order to keep this from happening.

Of course the fi ght is not over. We are encouraged by our successes so far and will continue to organize against the CTA.

Midwest Unrest is a class struggle anarchist collective based in Chicago. We are dedicated to direct action organization around issues which eff ect our lives and the lives of those around us. Formed in the summer of 2003 to protest at the FTAA Ministerial in Miami, we have since shifted our focus to provide a radical voice in more local struggles.


Strong Hearts and Poisoned Waters:The Exclusion of Women of Color

BY PUCKand the Reproductive Rights Movement in the U.S.

Abortion is not and has never been only a “white issue.” Although few people today re-alize it, women of color have been involved from the very beginning. Women of color have played and continue to play a crucial part organizing for and shaping the struggle for reproductive freedom in the US.

Who Receives Abortions?

Currently, Latinas are two times as likely as white women to have an abortion; Black women are three times as likely. Black women obtain 24 percent of abortions in the US. Indeed, polls show that over 80 percent of African Americans support family planning, yet few are members of the prominent reproductive rights organizations.

Why? A look into our recent past shows that people of color have valid reasons to suspect the motives of predominantly white groups advocating for the single issue of abortion rights.

During the last century, the pro-choice movement, or the family planning movement, often dismissed or ignored concerns of women of color when they weren’t problems for white women as well. Devastatingly, the reproductive rights movement of the past at times allied with eugenicists and other white supremacists in opportunistic political coalitions meant to further the abortion rights movement.

Understanding the Past

Being pro-choice or a feminist today

means having to acknowledge and transcend the racist legacy of collaborations between white feminists, conservatives and eugenicists who shared common ground on parts of the abortion issue. How we fi ght for reproductive freedom today must be informed by the reality that for many women of color, abortion is just one fi ght in a larger struggle of class and racial oppression. Unlike for some white or middle class women, the lack of access to reproductive freedom that many women of color face has more to do with the limitations placed upon them by their ethnic and class background than by the actual legal status of abortion or geographic availability of abortion clinics.

Early on, the Black community saw reproductive control as being an essential key to liberation, and they have fought for it since the times of slavery. Black women have been underground providers of safe and aff ordable abortions. Later, African American women organized with other women of color and brought tens of thousands to participate in rallies demanding an end to forced sterilizations.

Th en and now, many feminists of color challenged white feminists who framed abortion rights as a woman’s issue that was unconnected to other social injustices.

As Black feminist and activist, Loretta J. Ross explains: “Many Black women still do not see abortion rights as a stepping stone to freedom because abortion rights do not automatically end the oppression of Black women.”

Sadly, the vital participation and intellect brought to the reproductive rights movement by women of color are noticeably absent from many white feminist accounts of history.

The Privilege of “Choice”

Until recently, mainstream and preeminent pro-choice organizations have promoted a narrow view of reproductive liberty that focuses on the “right to choose” abortion. Such language can come off as consumeristic. Even so, the language of abortion rights politics can be culturally insensitive and alienating to recent immigrants and to women who come from religious backgrounds- even those who support and get abortions.

Women of color have also been subjected to controlling and coercive reproductive policies and, as a result, many continue to distrust public health services and are more

apt to view family planning programs with apprehension.

As Brenda Romney, an African American activist, explained: “When our children were [white men’s] property, we were encouraged to have children. When our children are ours, we are not worthy parents. Th ose are the messages, the background and the context of health care in general.”

Th is is some of what Black women bring with them when they seek health care information or abortion services.

Th erefore, many women of color feel that it is more central to their needs to demand economic justice and healthcare- including reproductive rights- instead of focusing on the aspects of “choice” and availability regarding abortion and birth control.

An Issue of Survival: Birth Control as Social Control

Eugenicists promote the idea that essentialist traits such as intelligence and criminality are biologically determined, and can thus be eliminated or emphasized through the selective breeding or elimination of “pure” races.

Th e ideology of eugenics became applied

15

to public health policy in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s. Industrial tycoons like the Rockefeller family funded it; prestigious universities studied it, and governors introduced legislation proposing the compulsory sterilization of Native American, Black and poor women in order to “fi ght the war on poverty.” In truth, these policies were aimed at decreasing the explosive political potential of minority populations and pacifying white fears of social unrest during a time of increasing militancy in the struggle for civil rights.

During the 1960s, family planning services became accessible for large numbers of poor women of color through federally subsidized programs like Medicaid. Although this was seen by most feminists as a victory, on the fl ip side, the government also began coercing Native American and Black women on public assistance into getting State-sponsored hysterectomies by threatening to revoke their welfare benefi ts if they refused.

During the 1970s, it is estimated that up to 60,000 Native American women and even some men were sterilized. Indian Health Services had a “captive clientele,” since Native women often lacked access to services other than paternalistic public ones located on reservations. In 1975, for every seven babies born, one woman was being sterilized. Shockingly, the IHS sterilization campaign was paid for entirely with federal funding.

Puerto Rican women were also sterilized at astronomical rates by U.S. tax dollars. During the same time, several Mexican American women were sterilized at a County hospital without much explanation or information. A national fertility study conducted by Princeton University found that 20 percent of all married African-American women had been sterilized by 1970.

Given that experience, it is no surprise that in the communities of color targeted

by government-controlled depopulation programs, birth control and abortion were equated with genocide for years to come. Many poor women of color felt that they had been “tracked” toward sterilization and were outraged at having been denied the opportunity to have children in numbers of their choosing.

“While birth control was demanded as a right and an option for privileged women, it became an obligation for the poor,” Ross recalled.

When women of color organized successfully for laws requiring the “informed consent” of patients undergoing hysterectomies, in an eff ort to cut down on forced sterilizations, they had to do so often without support from mainstream white abortion rights groups. Th ese groups were then too obsessed with their own narrow self-interest to see the broader feminist struggle at hand.

No Substitute for Social Justice

Access to abortion and birth control do not exist free of social values. White people of all political motivations have supported abortion when it suited their interests and set the stage for years of racial tension and mistrust in the arena of reproductive rights policy. Today, eugenicist ideas like “overpopulation” and biological determinism continue to infl uence public health and social policies that blame poverty, crime and pollution on the rising population growth of Brown and Black people. Th ese ideas ignore the root causes of social ills: unequal distribution of resources in a society deeply segregated by white supremacy.

A recent example of this phenomenon was the Norplant controversy during the 1990s. Norplant is unusual because it is a contraceptive that is 99 percent eff ective

and can last up to 5 years after its initial administration. However, it requires the insertion of six matchstick-sized capsules under the skin of a woman’s forearm. Although Norplant is expensive and can cause negative side eff ects including depression and irregular, heavy bleeding, public subsidies covered the costs for many poor women of color. Politicians framed the initial cost as an expenditure that could save millions of dollars nationally in the welfare costs it would take to raise the children of “irresponsible women.”

Several states wanted to require mothers on welfare to use it as a condition of receiving their benefi ts. Debates ensued in the national media: “Can Norplant Reduce the Underclass?”

Commonly, women who suff ered negative side eff ects and asked for their Norplant’s to be removed were denied and had to endure paternalistic, bureaucratic and controlling service providers.

Hope Prevails

During the 1980s, feminists of color clamored louder than ever to be heard. Women of color gained in numbers as well as prominence within mainstream pro-choice organizations, and some assumed leadership positions. Reproductive rights groups put more energy into reaching out to people of color. Health activists of color broke through the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding abortion in their communities, framing reproductive rights as a human rights and healthcare issue. Th e fi rst “March for Women’s Lives” was organized in 1986. Ross, who worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW), was employed to fi nd organizations of women of color to endorse this fi rst national march dedicated to abortion rights. She refl ects on

the changes in the years since: In 1986 Black women were skeptical

about joining a march for abortion rights sponsored by what was perceived as a white woman’s organization. Although all the leaders of the Black women’s organizations I contacted privately supported abortion rights, many perceived the issue as marginal, too controversial, or to ‘white.’

By 1987 NOW was responding more clearly to the voices of women of color.

By 1986, the annual march was endorsed by 107 organizations of women of color, and by 1989, “more than 2,000 women came together to form the largest delegation ever [at the time] of women of color to support abortion rights.

Women of color were responsible for expanding the focus of the abortion rights movement. Th eir infl uence can be found in the shifting language used by mainstream groups -- from one centered on abortion to one emphasizing reproductive rights. Th e work women of color had been doing all along in their communities to support reproductive freedom slowly began to be recognized and at times supported by mainstream feminist groups. Most importantly though, women healthcare activists of color continued to push for more and more justice- for more social justice in the pro-choice movement and more feminism in their communities.

We should refl ect on the mistakes of the past and the injustices of the present. We still have a long way to go. Let us constantly strive to bring about more instances for increasing numbers of people to experience self-determination, true democracy and justice in their lives. We must not let our vision of liberation be obscured by political compromises that promise only a few of us legitimacy and victory. We must all be free simultaneously, or none of us can truly be free.

Puck works with San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist People of Color and Critical Resistance, a prison abolitionist organization.

that in the communities of color targeted


A Working Mother’s

FeminismDear Momma: You are the

Reason I Keep FightingMy mother is at once degraded,

exploited, abused, tired, addicted, and self-defeating, while managing to be optimistic, caring, content, wise, and legendary. She has fought off all of my worst enemies: bosses, abusive partners, and general patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. She existed for her and I alone - that was it.

But she was also missing in my childhood. She was missing because she was in battle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with these fi ends of oppression. I did not know her, because she spent her waking hours making sure I had at least two meals a day, and shelter over my head. I hated her for most of my childhood, because she wasn’t physically present. She was either at work, fi nding new work, or dealing with the cultural expectations of patriarchal relationships. Men wanted her labor, her rent, her bills, her sex, and her nurturing. She was forced to comply, and she didn’t ask for any thanks, she did it to survive.

She couldn’t defend me from abusive babysitters, abusive peers, and abusive live-in boyfriends. Working as a bartender, she spent anywhere between 50 - 80 hours a week waiting tables and pouring shots, listening to sad stories and broken hearts for measly blue-collar tips. She was single and alone, and drunk men took advantage of this. She drank and smoked away most of the money she made after the bills were paid for. I often lived with babysitters, and would see my mom only a couple nights a week.

Besides the small wages and tips, her unpaid work included raising and feeding me, preparing her make-up for a half hour, and hours of guidance counselor work in bars. My mom gave excellent, practical advice. Th e blue-collar workers in the late night pubs loved her endless smile, her slim waistline, and her friendly ear. While I’m on the subject of unpaid work, let’s breakdown what work is for a second, because I want to make it clear what kind of work women

like my mom do every fucking day in order to please men, without the slightest bit of fucking appreciation.

Back to Basics: Sexuality as Service and Production

When a man visits a massage parlor or a strip club, he expects to be entertained, and his exchange for the entertainment is monetary. Th is is acceptable by law, as long as either the workplace that sex work takes place in follows regulations, or if it doesn’t, the enforcer of regulations is bought off to

shut up about it. A sex worker usually makes a profi t for the owner of the property from whom (s)he is renting space from in order to provide the service. Th is production is exploited by the property owner, and is protected by property-loving capitalist system. In other words - sex work is criminal, unless a property owner is sanctioning it, and exploiting its labor. Why? Because most of the exploiters are men, and the exploited are usually women or trans. In a profi t-driven society that off ers limited opportunities for women to enter the workforce, sex work is historically a common option for women. Imagine if women controlled their own sex controlled their own sex controlledwork!? Th ere would be a massive disruption in the infrastructure of class society if women were able to control their own bodies - in the form of healthcare, reproductive rights, and the social value of sexuality and childrearing.

Patriarchal capitalism has historically depended on a massive disenfranchisement of women from being in control of their own bodies, because their reproductive choice, their preparing of children for the workforce, and their sexuality are all powerful forces in powerful forces in powerfulsociety.

My mother spent all of her time working in order to reproduce another worker - me. She only got paid a wage for a fraction of her actual labor and production though. Every man she met and fl irted with was another exchange of labor. She didn’t love any of them at all. She lied to herself in order to ease the suff ering of more alienation from

her body. She fucked men, so they felt an ownership and management over what she was responsible for - her shelter, her payment, her child, her sex. Every hour she put on makeup for work, every conversation with a customer, every diet plan she took on, every drink to ease the pain, they were all a process of application for more work - sex work. Her dependence on this patriarchy forced her into an endless string of labor. Live-in boyfriends were “business deals.” Th e way she walked around the bar was tailored to the wandering eyes of lonely construction workers—men socialized to pursue more property. And when men can’t seem to meet the expectations of property ownership in a society that rests every foundation on the celebration of property, men will fi nd ways to take ownership of women’s property.

My mother wasn’t interested in the

feminism of the 60s and 70s. Not wearing makeup, not shaving her legs and not wearing bras are nothing but bourgeois choices that off ered her no liberation. Her feminism was her literal survival and the courage to come home with the ability to see me survive.

My Mother’s Resistance

Th ere were times when her hard work, and relentless networking presented windows of opportunity for her to shed burdens and dependencies. When she could kick patriarchy in the butt, she did it fi ercely.

Th ere were times when I saw my mother cry through drunken hazy stares, golden opportunities to peer into her struggle. I usually only saw this after something goodhappened to us - like when she fi nally got a raise, or when some rich tourist dropped her a $100 tip, or when she won the limited version of the lottery. Having an extra $100 was a world of options for a single mom in the mid eighties, believe me. We’re talking a few extra days off from work, a couple of nice chicken dinners for the weekend, and maybe, a trip to the shore for a day. Th is precarious bit of economic independence off ered mom a bit of bargaining power in her sexual labor exchange, and she utilized this power at every opportunity. Suddenly dude was sleeping on the couch, he would come home with roses, he would take her out on her fi rst date in months, suddenly he turned into a romantic,

My mother wasn’t interested in the feminism of the 60s and 70s. Not wearing makeup, not shaving her legs and not wearing bras are nothing but bourgeois choices that offered her no liberation. Her feminism was her literal survival and the courage to come home with the ability to see me survive.

BY FLOYD PETERSON

17

caring, thoughtful sweetheart, instead of the usual dickhead around the house attitude.

Th is kind of property-driven relationship reveals the complex ways in which capitalism enforces abusive social interactions between fellow workers. Th e sexual politics of working class men and women are defi ned and socialized to fi t in with the demands of the class system. Th is weakens our common power against bosses and landlords, and creates hostile environments for workers to reside in and coexist. Th ere are variations on the theme of course, including queer relationships, unorthodox/poly family structures, but in the end, many of the relationships that workers enter into are intertwined into property relationships, sexual exploitation, and further alienation from our labor beyond what is classically considered the “workplace.” Within these experiences, single, blue-collar mothers, especially mothers of color face a virtual labyrinth of labor exchanges and patriarchal subordinations in order to survive. Why are working class men interested in continuing to exploit women this way?

This Hurts the Boys Too

I believe that the class system is based on power structures that are rooted in the continual and state-sanctioned drive for profi t and exploitation of working people. We are taught endlessly in capitalist schools, media, and cultural traditions, what they are expected to live up to as workers. Our purpose is to continue selling our labor in exchange for resources that supposedly enable us to further our struggle to reach our goal. I believe this goal is a spectacle of freedom, power and independence for men, and (for conservatives) the women’s goal is to support these men in their drive toward their goal, (for liberals) the women’s goal is to vie for a piece of this freedom, power, and independence. Th ese goals revolve around the core of what we hold to be the most important pillar of capitalist society - property. If you have it, you are socialized to exploit the power that comes with its ownership, and if you don’t you are socialized to get it. When I say property, I don’t just mean money, a house, land, or a DVD player, I mean these things, as well as people’s labor, their bodies, their individual and collective identities, their communities, their resources, their abilities to bargain for pieces of other’s properties, etc.

Within this struggle, working class men face many obstacles to reaching what our bosses have. If we don’t attain these properties, we are shamed, considered failures, and are not rewarded with social status. Th is struggle that men go through is very real, and is at the core of what drives our sexual choices, our disregard for other’s safety, our abusive relationships with our partners, and our unbridled attraction to objectifying everything as potential property, including

women. In our minimal states of reaction we blame other

workers for our failures, like immigrants stealing our jobs, other racial/ethic/national groups of workers for selling their labor for cheaper wages, when heterosexual men can’t meet the sexual expectations that we are fed, we scapegoat queers, the breakdown of traditional family relations, etc. We literally become failures to ourselves, we can’t break out of it, and we are willing to rape, kill, and steal in our most desperate of times in order to fulfi ll what is expected of us.

Why?

Because we are told that we are supposed to. Meanwhile, we are destroying ourselves, our lovers, our families, our friends, and our class. We are weak and powerless, and when we can’t get what we are expected to, even after busting our asses for many years, we become so destroyed inside, that the most vile and dark reactions we hide from ourselves come out in rageful and vengeful manners.

We are faced with a myriad of social compromises in order to reach our goal - property. We attempt to manage our lover’s lives, control their labor, and guarantee a relationship that forces our other halves to rely on our labor as well, so that

we can attain a piece of their property in return. I understand that this paints a bleak picture of the working class concept of people loving and sharing their time with one another, but I must say that even when we feel, share and communicate in mutually reaffi rming and supportive ways with our partners, there still exists a social phenomenon that springs from our drive to gain more property. Even if we have nothing left, and we are not willing to terrorize other workers and steal property, we terrorize ourselves with mental illness, loss of self-worth, and in some cases suicide.

Th is is the force that drives the actions my mother’s boyfriends took. Often, she was forced to concede some of her property, and when she had a chance to withhold her labor and ownership, she went on a personal general strike.

Toward a New Strategy for Working Sons

Th ere are many meaningful ways that we can off er support and real solidarity for working mothers, ways that aren’t patronizing or vanguardist. Start with your mom. Try and understand what kind of obstacles she has faced to make sure you are where you are today. If she was negligent or abusive, attempt to look at the sources that led her to react in such ways. Spend time with her, and off er your own labor to ease the time she spends doing your dishes, laundry, and making your bed. your dishes, laundry, and making your bed. yourOur working class mothers have put their time in, and they are often battered and beaten on the inside, even when they don’t show it, or admit it.

Finally, when moms work together to build organizations or show solidarity with one another, we need to do whatever it takes to off er our labor to support them. Th ey deserve the world for what they have gone through for fucking thousands of years of breaking their backs for us, taking abuse for us, breastfeeding us, harvesting, cooking, cleaning, and hunting for us, nurturing us, spreading their legs for us (in many cases unwillingly) and fi nding the compassion to forgive us for not valuing and supporting their labor and eff orts.

We owe it to them. It is in our interest as men, as workers, and as humans. If we intend to build a powerful working class movement that is liberating and equal for all of its adherents, we must do our best to make a very safe and supportive space for our mothers.

Floyd Peterson is a blue collar thug, raised in small Jersey towns by a single mom. He’s a proud interracial queer and former homeless drug addict, with a history of making bosses VERY angry, and a tendency towards building working class power. Floyd has worked over 26 seperate jobs in 26 years of living, spanning a dozen industries, including but not limited to, sex work, cooking, telemarketing vaccuum-cleaner salesperson, bodyguard, audio engineering, drug-dealing, ditch digging, and dishwashing.


As a woman who has experienced physical and emotional abuse from men, it is diffi cult to learn from other activist women that they are being abused by activist men.

Th e interrelated issues of sexism, misogyny and homophobia in activist circles is rampant, so it is unsurprising that women are abused physically and emotionally by activist men with whom they work on various projects.

I am not speaking abstractedly here. Indeed, I know of various relationships between activist men and women in which the latter is being abused. For example, a long time ago a friend of mine showed me bruises on her arm that she told me were from another male activist. What was additionally heartbreaking to see is how the woman was shunned by activist circles when she tried to have her abuse addressed. Some told her to get over it, or to focus on “real” male assholes such as prominent political fi gures. Others told her to not let her “personal problems” get in the way of “doing the work.”

I struggled with my friend’s recovery too. As a survivor of abuse, it was diffi cult to meet a woman who in some ways was a ghost of me. I would run into this woman, and she would randomly tell me about another fi ght that she and her boyfriend had gotten into. I would fi nd myself avoiding this woman because it was hard to look at a woman who reminded me of who I was not too long ago. I too had gone through the desperation of trying to get out of an abusive relationship and needing to tell people what was happening to me. And similar to how this woman was treated, most people, even those I called friends, shied away from listening to me because they did not want to be bothered or were dealing with their own emotional struggles.

Th e embarrassment associated with telling people that you have been abused, and like myself, stayed in an abusive relationship, is made worse by people’s responses. Many times I was told by people that they were “surprised” to fi nd out that I had “put up with that shit” because unlike “weak women,” I was a “strong” and “political” woman. Th is response is downright misogynist because it denies how dominant patriarchy is, and instead tries to place the blame on women. We are to ignore that men abuse women and to instead emphasize women’s character as the defi nitive reason for why some are abused and others don’t “put up

with that shit.”

Regardless of one’s politics, women can be and do get abused. Anyone who refuses to believe this either just doesn’t listen to women or think about what women go through on the regular. And this is because they are just hostile to recognizing how pervasive and normalized patriarchy and misogyny are—both outside of and within activist circles.

A lot of us want to believe that activist men really are diff erent from our fathers, brothers, old boyfriends, and male strangers we confront in our daily routines. We want to have some faith that the guy who writes a position paper on sexism and posts it on his website is not writing it just to make himself look good, get pussy, or cover up some of his dangerous practices towards women. We want to believe that women are being respected for their skills, energy and political commitment and are not being asked to do work because they are viewed as “exploitable” and “abuse-able” by activist men. We want to believe that if an activist male made an unwarranted advance or physically/sexually assaulted an activist woman that it would promptly and thoughtfully be dealt with by organizations and political communities—and with the input of the victim. We want to think that activist groups are not so easily enticed by the skills or “name-power” that an activist male brings to a project that they are willing to let a woman be abused or have her recovery go unaddressed in exchange. And we would like to think that “security culture” in activist circles does not only focus on issues of listserv protocol or using fake names at rallies but actually includes thinking proactively about how to deal with misogyny, patriarchy and heterosexism both outside of and within the activist scenes.

But all of these wishes tend to go unaddressed. Instead, I know of activist men who troll political spaces looking for women that they can politically manipulate or fuck without accountability. Some of these men move from city to city looking to recreate themselves and fi nd fresh meat among those who are unfamiliar with their reputation. And I have seen activist women give their labor and skills to activist men (who often take the credit) in hopes that the abusive activist man will fi nally get his act right or appreciate her as a human being.

While romance between activists is fi ne, I think it is disgusting how activist men use romance to control women politically and keep women emotionally committed to

helping the man out even when his politics are problematic.

I know activist men who were abusing and manipulating female activists and at the same time, writing position papers on sexism. Sometimes the activist male will pen the position paper with his activist girlfriend in order to gain more legitimacy. I know of activist men who quote bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, or other feminist writers one minute and are harassing or spreading lies about their activist girlfriend the next.

What is heartbreaking is the level of support abusive activist men fi nd from other activists, male and female but most usually other men. Activist communities may talk a good game but in the end could give a shit about the victims’ emotional and physical safety. For example, when I was sharing with an activist male my concerns about how an activist female was being treated by an activist male who held a prominent position in a political group, the man “listening” to my story said in a snide, accusatory voice, “Oh, she’s probably just mad ‘cause he started dating someone else” and went on to make fun of her. He continued to tell me that while he “acknowledges” the man is wrong, the woman needs to stand up to the man if she wants the treatment to stop. His comments revealed an attitude that assumes that if activist women take issue with activist men, they are “crying abuse” to cover up hidden sexual desires and anger over being rejected by men who “won’t fuck them.”

While activist men will pay some lip service to how they need to keep their mouths shut when women are talking or how women only spaces are necessary, all too often “critical” and “political” people do not want to confront the fact that women are being abused by male activists in our circles. When the issue is “addressed,” more often than not attention will be given to “struggling with” the man. I have even seen some situations where abusive men become adopted, so to speak, by other activists, who see rehabilitating the man as part of their project and think little about what this means for the women who are trying to recover. In some cases, the male activist abuser was adopted while the woman was shunned as “unstable,” “crazy” or “too emotional.” Basically, these groups would rather help a cold, calculating guy who can “keep it together” while he abuses women rather than deal with the reality that abuse can contribute to emotional and social diffi culties among victims as they work to become survivors.

In some cases, activist women will avoid going to the

are No Safe Space for Women:

On Abuse of Activist Women by Activist Men

Activist Scenes

BY TAMARA K. NOPPER

19

How do you defi ne consent?Have you ever talked about consent

with your partner(s) or friends?with your partner(s) or friends?Do you know people, or have been

with people who defi ne consent diff erently with people who defi ne consent diff erently than you do?

Have you ever been unsure about whether or not the person you were being whether or not the person you were being sexual with wanted to be doing what you were doing? Did you continue what you were doing? Did you continue what you were doing because it was pleasurable to were doing because it was pleasurable to you and you didn’t want to deal with what you and you didn’t want to deal with what the other person was experiencing? Did you continue because you thought it was you continue because you thought it was your duty? How do you feel about the your duty? How do you feel about the choices you made?

Do you think it is the other person’s responsibility to say something if they aren’t into what you’re doing?

How might someone express that what is happening is not ok? Do you look what is happening is not ok? Do you look only for verbal signs or are there other signs?

Do you think it is possible to misinterpret silence for consent?

Have you ever asked someone what kinds of signs you should look for if they have a hard time verbalizing when something feels wrong?

Do you only ask about these kinds of things if you are in a serious relationship or do you feel comfortable talking in casual situations too?

Do you think talking ruins the mood?

Do you think consent can be erotic?Do you think about people’s abuse

histories?Do you check in as things progress or

do you assume the original consent means everything is ok?

If you achieve consent once, do you assume it’s always ok after that?

If someone consents to one thing, do you assume everything else is ok or do you you assume everything else is ok or do you ask before touching in diff erent ways of taking things to more intense levels?

Are you resentful of people who want to or need to talk about being abused? Why?Why?

Have you ever tried to talk someone into doing something they showed hesitancy about?

Do you think hesitancy is usually a form of fl irting? Are you aware that in some instances it’s not?

Have you ever thought someone’s actions were fl irtatious when that wasn’t actually the message they wanted to get across?

Do you think that if someone is promiscuous that makes it ok to objectify them or talk about them in ways you normally wouldn’t?

If someone is promiscuous, do you think it’s less important to get consent?

If someone dresses a certain way, do

you think it means that they want your you think it means that they want your sexual attention or approval?

If someone is dressed in drag, do you take it as an invitation to make sexual comments?

Do you ever try to get yourself into situations that give you an excuse for situations that give you an excuse for touching someone you think would say no if you asked? (i.e. Dancing, getting really if you asked? (i.e. Dancing, getting really drunk around them, falling asleep next to them)

Do you make people feel “unfun” Do you make people feel “unfun” or “unliberated” if they don’t want to try or “unliberated” if they don’t want to try certain sexual things?

Have you ever used jealousy as a means of control? Do you use jealousy to make your partner feel obligated to have sex with you?

Do you feel like being in a relationship with someone means that they have an obligation to have sex with you? What if obligation to have sex with you? What if they want to abstain from sex for a week? A month? A year?

Do you whine or threaten if you’re not having the amount of sex or kind of not having the amount of sex or kind of sex that you want?

Do you think it’s ok to initiate something sexual with someone who’s sleeping?

Do you behave diff erently when you’ve been drinking? Do you seek you’ve been drinking? Do you seek consent the same way when you are drunk consent the same way when you are drunk as when you’re sober?

Do you ever talk about sex and consent when you’re not in bed?

Have you ever raped or sexually Have you ever raped or sexually abused someone? Are you able to think abused someone? Are you able to think about your behavior? Have you made changes? What kinds of changes?

Do you avoid talking about consent Do you avoid talking about consent or abuse because you aren’t ready or don’t or abuse because you aren’t ready or don’t want to talk about your own sexual abuse

What if months or days or years later, What if months or days or years later, someone tells you they were uncomfortable with what you did, do you grill them?

Do you initiate conversations about Do you initiate conversations about safe sex and birth control?

Do you take your partners concerns about safe sex and birth control seriously?

Do you think that if one person wants to have safe sex and the other person doesn’t really care, it the responsibility of doesn’t really care, it the responsibility of the person who has concerns to provide safe sex supplies?

Do you think if a person has a body Do you think if a person has a body that can get pregnant, it’s up to them to provide birth control?

Do you complain or refuse safe sex or the type of birth control your partner or the type of birth control your partner wants to use because it reduces your wants to use because it reduces your pleasure?

Do you think there is ongoing work Do you think there is ongoing work that we can do to end sexual violence in our communities?

A longer version of these questions A longer version of these questions originally appeared in Slug & Lettuce.

police because she is critical of the prison industrial complex but also because other activist men will tell her she is “contributing to the problem” by “bringing the state in.” Meanwhile, the activist male is not chastised for the problems he has created. Th us, women are stuck having to fi gure out how to insure her safety without being labeled a “sell-out” by her activist peers.

While I am a strong believer that we need to try to work towards healing rather than punishment per se, I am painfully aware that we often put more emphasis on helping men stay in activist circles than supporting women through their recoveries, which might involve the need to have the man purged from the political group. Basically, the group will usually determine that the activist abuser must be allowed to heal without asking the woman what she needs from the group to heal and be supported in her process.

When groups are unwilling to address abuse, some women will still remain involved in because they believe in the organization’s work and frankly, there are few spaces to go, if any, where she is not at risk of being abused by another activist or have her abuse unaddressed. Others will simply leave the organization. I have seen how these women get treated as “sell-outs” for letting the personal get in way of “the work.”

Or, if activist women who have been abused are “supported,” it is usually because she does “good work” or that not addressing the abuse will be “bad for the group.” In this sense, the physical, emotional and spiritual health of women is still sacrifi ced. Instead, the woman’s abuse must be addressed because if it is not, she might not continue doing “good work” for the organization or there might be too much tension in the group for it to run effi ciently. Either way, women’s safety is not viewed as worthy of concern in and of itself.

Overall, activist scenes are no safe space for women because misogynists and abusive men exist within them. More, many of these abusers use the language, tools of activism and support by other activists as means to abuse women and conceal their behavior. Perhaps it is time we begin proactively addressing this as an integral part of the “work” that activists must do.

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer and activist living in Philadelphia.

Th is article was edited by Critical Moment with permission of the author.

Questions on ConsentBY CINDY

Questions on ConsentBY CINDY

Questions on Consent


A while back, I went through my entire ‘zine library to decide which ‘zines and chapbooks I want to keep and which ones I should give away or recycle, since the sheer volume of other people’s DIY writings I’ve accumulated over the years began to overwhelm me.

My goal was to consolidate three medium-size card-board boxes full of ‘zines into one big box that would only contain those select ‘zines that I am actually likely to read again. In the process, I’ve come across quite a few ‘zines ad-dressing the topic of fat oppression and women’s self-esteem written by other girls who are, like me, fat, proud, and fi erce.

Even though I’ve never been deeply involved in the “fat-positive” feminist movements, I’ve been around them long enough to know how much it has impacted fat girls like me, and how zine-making is the perfect medium to confront and contradict the anti-fat, pro-diet biases in the mainstream media and the anti-fat industries that fi nance them. None-theless, after skimming through several of these ‘zines, I felt empty and ended up tossing many of them in the “give away or recycle” pile.

And I know that this is the same empty feeling I get after attending just about every “fat positive” workshops and events (and I’ve attended many) including even the other-wise fabulous “FatGirl Speaks!” event in which I performed a spoken-word piece last year. Th is essay is an attempt to verbalize the shallowness or emptiness that I frequently feel within the fat-positive feminist movement, and how we can reinvent it.

Th e greatest turn-off for me with fat-positive work-shops--and it somehow manages to take place in just about every such workshop--is hearing the comment that “fat op-pression is the last remaining socially acceptable oppression” or that “if this was done to Blacks (and it’s always Blacks, or else other people of color), there’d be an outrage.”

Sometimes, this is the premise that workshop present-ers (almost always white) speak from, and other times these comments are made by regular participants (again, almost always white). And it is extremely rare that someone would point out how wrong it is to rank severity of various oppres-sions, or to assume that the mainstream society is no lon-ger tolerant of racism (or classism, or heterosexism, or any other oppressions, for that matter) before I do. Or sometimes don’t.

Th e view that the fat oppression is the only socially tol-erated oppression negates the experiences of not just Blacks, but all people who are marginalized by various intersecting and overlapping systems of oppressions, while at the same time erasing the presence of fat people who are dealing with multiple oppressions. Together, these factors function to lim-it the appeal and the membership of the fat-positive feminist movement almost exclusively to the fat women who are rela-

tively privileged otherwise.Th is brings us to the second problem with the “fat-posi-

tive” feminist movement: the inability of fat-positive work-shops and ‘zines to address multiple layers of meanings the society attributes to fatness. Contrary to the idea that the fat oppression functions in some sort of socially accepted vacu-um, the anti-fat attitudes and systems have everything to do with racial and class politics, not just the gender politics.

For example, the debate over the “welfare reform” has been intrinsically shaped by the fi scal conservatives’ manipu-lation of the public perception of inner-city welfare recipi-ents as fat, Black, lazy single mothers. Exploiting such per-ception, they managed to convince voters that the solution to the problem of poverty is to send the poor mothers back

to work, nevermind the fact that few jobs today actually pay “family” wage. In order to counter such propaganda, it is not enough to criticize the use of fatness or fat stereotype as the symbol of laziness or unworthiness; we must take apart its anti-fat, sexist, racist, and classist overtones piece by piece until lies and bigotry are exposed as such.

Th ird, the fat-positive feminism must pay attention to many other ways in which human bodies are socially regu-lated. For example, there appears to be natural opportuni-ties for the disability movement and fat-positive movement to work together as both movements challenge the society’s defi nition of normal and acceptable bodies. However, this potential alliance is hindered by the fat-positive movement’s oft-repeated insistence that fat people are healthy and pro-ductive.

Th ese notions of health and productivity both assume a certain type of body to be “normal” based on its ability to participate in the capitalist labor market as it exist today, and denies the basic human dignity to those bodies deemed too “crippled” to participate in the workforce. However, it is not our physical diff erences that limit the ability of people with “crippled” bodies to fully participate in the society; it is the lack of accessibility and accommodation based on the lim-ited view of humanity that does.

Also problematic is the fat-positive movement’s disdain of people with “eating disorders,” especially toward members of the so-called “pro-ana” movement (i.e. women who cel-

ebrate extreme dieting and purging as personally gratifying and empowering). Dieting and purging are often form of self-help, two of many creative ways women cope with life and reclaim the sense of control in a society that robs from us genuine control over circumstances of our lives. If so, we could recognize that both fat-positive feminism and pro-ana movement are basically made up of women who are refusing the society’s labeling of their bodily diff erences and coping methods as “unhealthy” or “maladaptive.”

In fact, similarities between the two movements are many. Both groups are primarily made up of women who are considered sick and in need of “help” to alter who they are. Women from both groups report strong sense of alien-

A New Fat-Positive

Feminism

BY EMI KOYAMA

Why Fat-Positive Feminism (Often) Sucks and How to Reinvent It

The view that the fat oppression is the only socially tolerated oppression negates the experiences of all people who are marginal-ized by systems of oppressions.

21

buttonspatchesdisc golfbooksbeltsstickers

ation and isolation prior to fi nding others with similar experiences. A common statement made toward someone who is anorexic is that “most men aren’t attracted to fat women, but neither are they attracted to extremely thin women,” as if that is all that matters in a woman’s life.

Sure, dieting and purging could be, if not careful, harmful to one’s health; but so is be-ing fat: why do we need to judge or fi ght each other? Some fat-positive activists refer to those who diet and purge as “brainwashed” or as vic-tims in need of our rescue, but how is that dif-ferent from the society telling the fat women that we should lose weight for our own good? As we criticize the anti-fat element within the pro-ana movement, we must also confront the paternalistic and pathologizing gaze our move-ment sometimes imposes on other women.

Lastly, if I may entertain a little snobbism in me, I fi nd a large portion of fat-positive personal essays and performance art boring. Too often, they provide such a simplistic and linear narra-tive of complete victimhood to complete pride that it is laughable. I fi nd them devoid of human complexity and contradiction that make essays and art meaningful. Th e concept of fat pride is revolutionary when you hear it for the fi rst time, but after third or fourth time I begin to yearn for something more real, something that I can relate to.

And most women in America simply do not relate to feeling completely proud and un-ashamed about their bodies, whether they are fat or not. It’s just not realistic. Most women in America, myself included, struggle with our bodies. Or rather, we struggle with voices in our heads and outside telling us how dirty and ugly our bodies are, no matter how we look, and sometimes we end up agreeing with it. I’m not saying that this is right or wrong, but that is how it is.

Th rough the writings and performances like those I described above, the fat-positive feminism fosters a political climate that idolizes complete pride and shamelessness as an ideal. By doing so, however, we are in eff ect setting up yet another unattainable set of ideals that women are somehow expected to live up to, just like the “beauty myth” itself.

In such climate, women who feel ashamed of their bodies--that is, most American women at some point in their lives--are made to feel ashamed of their shame, and are thus doubly silenced, because an admission of body-shame or desire to be thinner is interpreted by those in the movement as the proof of their ideological impurity, or as the evidence that she is still un-der the patriarchal brainwashing and needs to be liberated further. We need art that imitate and enrich life, not those that dictate or condemn perfectly reasonable life experiences of women living in an unjust society.

I envision a new fat-positive feminism that does more than just confronting fatphobia. We need to pay attention to many ways in which fat oppression is embedded not only in sexism, but also in racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and other oppressions. Instead of merely argu-ing that fat is normal and healthy, we need to challenge the concepts of normalcy and health altogether, and question who is arbitrating these

categories and who benefi ts.In addition to the army of “fat and proud”

women and activists we already have, a new fat-positive feminism needs to attract, not repel or patronize, weight watchers, pro-anorexics, wom-en struggling with eating disorders (i.e. those who are not pro-ana), and ordinary women in America who are concerned about their weight either somewhat or great deal. And by that I am not talking about “liberating” them from their body image “pathologies” and converting them to be just like us; I am talking about starting from the assumption that other women’s ways of coping with this woman-hating, body-hating society may be just as valid as our own.

Instead of belittling or condemning the vast majority of women, a new fat-positive feminism focuses on dissecting political and cultural values imposed on our diverse bodies. It will promote pro-women and pro-body attitudes by validat-ing creative ways in which women cope with struggles of daily life and breaking the silence and isolation that separate us. Th e fat-positive feminist movement must take over the main-stream, rather than settling with the consolation of being the righteous fringe--and we can do so without compromising any of the key progres-sive values.

Along with the rampant violence against women, fat oppression is one of the oppressions targeting especially women that is so ubiquitous that it can be readily identifi ed once one begins to notice it. Th is fact suggests that fat-positive feminism could be an entry point for millions of women to embrace a full range of progres-sive politics that seek to create a more just and equitable society.

So far, the fat-positive feminism has been able to enlist only a relatively small number of women--and from a relatively thin socioeco-nomic layer of the society--partly due to the problems discussed above. If we were to change how the society ranks and regulates our bodily diff erences, instead of secluding ourselves in the homogeneous enclaves of affi nity groups who think and act just like us, we must seize this pre-viously untouched opportunity and rally for it.

By combining the dedication of pro-an-orexics, persistence of weight watchers, and, yes, our fi erceness and pride, we will be able to bring in millions of women and men (and people of other genders) into progressive social change movements. And then, the fat-positive femi-nism will become a new common sense in the American mainstream.

Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social justice activist and occasional manifesto writer who cur-rently works for Intersex Initiative (www.inter-sexinitiative.org). Emi has been putting the emi back in feminism through eminism.org.


Can you tell me about the anarchist movement in Israel?

Well, anarchism in Israel, or may we say in Palestine, was never a big movement or a popular movement. It’s because Zionism was a nationalist movement, and most of the refugees who came here held beliefs of nationalism and zionism, and supported the idea of a Jewish state. And they chose to come here and not to other places. Th ey chose to come into Palestine and build the Jewish state. So anarchism was very strange to them - it was not in their agenda. Th ere were a lot of socialists coming here, but they were socialist and nationalist at the same time. Th ey were not trying to overcome the nationalist visions of socialism. So for historical reasons, anarchism was very small here.

In the 60s there were a few more because of the student movement in Europe, and people were infl uenced by all the revolutions outside of Palestine and Israel. You can see only at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s more and more anarchist groups coming together, but mostly from the same milieus. In the 80s the movement grew bigger because of punk. Punk fans came into the anarchist movement. Th e animal rights movement was really big here and still is big and it was very anarchist in the beginning. All of this was happening in the 80s and 90s. Th ere were beginning to be more and more books and pamphlets about anarchism in the 90s. At the end of the 90s more people became anarchists because of the wave of anti-globalization that was sweeping the world, and this came to Israel as well. Up until the beginning of the Intifada, there were many groups who were anarchist, anarchist-affi liated, or non-hierarchal.

You mentioned diff erent issues that anarchists in Israel have been involved with over the decades, and then you

mentioned the Intifada. Th en recently there has been the Anarchists Against the Wall. Can you talk a bit about this group and what you do?

When the Intifada came, there were two processes going on at the same time. Th ere was the mainstream left-what we call the Zionist left-in Israel, which became much more right wing. Th ey began to show their real racist face again. Th e radical left became more and more radicalized at the same time. You can say that both the mainstream and radical left were becoming polarized. Th is process brought more actions into the radical left.

During the Oslo-era, the radical left was much more quiet. Today, since the beginning of the second Intifada, there is a demo almost every day. So many new movements came to life, working really hard against the situation. All of this energy, and people seeing what was happening in the occupied territories, made people more alienated against the state. People could see that the state is the enemy when the state is shooting at you. It ceases to be theoretical, and becomes very much alive to see the true face of the state. When the apartheid wall was beginning to be built in 2002 and 2003, many people – very young Tel Avivian people, punks, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals – came to a village in Palestine. It was a very conservative village, but they were invited by the village to come there and to build a peace tent against the wall. Th is was in Mas’ha. Th at was for 5 months, and it was to make Israelis and internationals realize what was happening with the fence, what it was, where it was going to be built, etc. All throughout those 5 months, a new thing came about in the radical left.

It was the fi rst time we were meeting Palestinians daily and living with them. It was a new thing for Palestinians as well. Th is was really

a place of dialogue. Out of this came a very close relationship between anarchist Jews and Palestinians. Of course anarchists were always against the occupation and the oppression of the Zionist state, but I believe that this camp brought these issues into our daily lives. I think that this was the fi rst step of Anarchists Against the Wall.

We began doing actions in the last days of the camp. We did direct actions against the wall in other villages. We tried to stop the building of the wall in Mas’ha, and the camp was destroyed by the army. Th ey ordered us to never return there. Th is was the beginning of a direct action group that was anarchist-organized, non-hierarchical, and directly democratic. We began doing more actions in villages all over Palestine and all along the route of the wall. Th en there was one action again in Mas’ha when one of the anarchists against the wall was shot in the legs, seriously hurt, and almost died on the way to the hospital. Th is was in late December, 2003. Before that day, the group always changed its name. We were Jews Against Ghettos in one action, the Mas’ha Group on one day – we never stuck with one name. But on that day, we used the name Anarchists Against Fences. We got a lot of media on this day, much more than we had gotten before.

Th e media was really interested in us. People actually began asking what anarchism was. It was not very known in Israel – people knew the word, but they didn’t know what it meant. After that action, we became much more active in the fi ght against the wall or against the occupation because a lot of Palestinian villages began to recognize that there is an Israeli group which is coming and doing stuff in Palestine. Palestinians started to rebel against the wall as well as it came closer to their homes, and there were many villages, especially Budrus – one of the symbols

Anarachism being young, queer, and radical in the ‘Promised Land’

Israeli

Yossi is a young resident of Jerusalem and a member of the International Solidarity Movement. He is part of many social movements in Israel and Palestine, including Anarchists Against the Wall and Black Laundry, a radical queer group. Yossi is currently working at the Alternative Information Center. Here he speaks about anarchism in Israel, it’s relationship to the Palestinian struggle, and radical anarchist and queer culture.

INTERVIEW BY AARON LAKOFF

http://michiganimc.orgpublish your news. become the media.

23

of non violent opposition to the wall – when we were there for almost a year to stop the construction as much as possible.

We were really going to Budrus almost every week for a long time. Every day people got shot. Some days people were killed. Until now, there were 6 or 7 Palestinians shot dead by the Israeli army in non-violent demonstrations against the fence. Th ese Palestinians were shot dead at demonstrations when Israelis were not there at the time, because the army does not like to use live ammunition when there are Israelis in the area. So we were acting as well a bit as human shields. Th is is not why we were there, but the fact that we were there made the army a bit less violent. Th e army thinks we have better blood.

Th ere are many groups in Israel who are working in the peace movement to put an end to the occupation; Gush Shalom, Ta Ayush, and Peace Now are just a few. How do the anarchists diff er from these groups in their actions?

First of all, there are many groups in the peace movement who are very close to us. Black Laundry, for example, is a queer group against the occupation who are working a lot with the Anarchists Against the Wall and vice versa. Ta Ayush is quite active, and we work with them. We are not organized the same way, we don’t work in the same methods, but we do work together.

In terms of our ideology, we don’t have a list of our demands. Of course, most of us would like a ‘no state solution’. We are against any kind of separation, and we are against the wall no matter where it is going to be built. We are against the Palestinian Authority as well. We see the PA as another tool of oppression. We will work with them sometimes, but we still don’t support the PA like Gush Shalom does. We don’t agree on a lot of things as well. We act diff erently to the police than most groups. We would never inform the police on an action. But in the end we all support each other and work together. Th ere are arguments, but we maintain a dialogue. Th ere was a coalition against the fence of many groups in the radical left, and there were no big problems in this. If there are problems that are so crucial, all those endless debates about anarcho-communism or anarcho-syndicalism become insignifi cant.

You mentioned that anarchism doesn’t have a tradition in Palestinian culture. How do you feel that anarchism relates to the Palestinian struggle?

Of course, we’re always in demonstrations with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, nationalists, racist people, and we fi ght alongside them for the same goals. But there’s always a problem; how do we uphold anarchism, animal right, women’s rights, and queer rights while working with people who are against them? It’s hard. We work with Palestinians all the time and we still say we don’t want a Palestinian state. I’m not fi ghting for a Palestinian state, I’m fi ghting for the end of the occupation and that’s the main goal. And we’re not alone in fi ghting for this. Th ere are many Palestinians who are not anarchist, but who are on the left – communists, socialists. Th ere are so many that are fi ghting for the same goal; a one-state solution, and this is very close to our goal. I still believe that you need to fi ght alongside national-liberationists sometimes, because the main thing within that is to liberate themselves from the oppression of the other. Before you liberate yourself from the oppression of your own society, you need to liberate yourself from the oppression of the other society, which is usually much more cruel. Th is is evident in Palestine. First, we need to end the occupation and give the Palestinians their rights. After that, we can speak about how we want to live here. If the Palestinians chose to have a one-state solution, we will be with them. If they chose to have their own state, we will

be with them. We have nothing to say about it. Th ere are Palestinians who are working with us for the same kind of solution.

Can you explain the group Black Laundry and its relationship with the Palestinian struggle and the anarchist movement?

Black Laundry was a group formed at the beginning of the second Intifada. It was formed in Tel Aviv, just prior to the pride parade. At the pride parade, there are a lot of handsome, naked boys dancing on big trucks with lots of corporations trying to sell you stuff . It’s quite disgusting most of the time, very capitalist. It was the fi rst pride parade after the Intifada began, and we came there with the slogan, ‘no pride in the occupation!’. We were trying to say there is no real liberation without liberating our neighbors. We, as a queer community, have an interest to stop the oppression of other groups, and other groups have the interests to stop the oppression of us. We try to always connect struggles; Palestinian liberation, animal rights, queer rights, sexual freedom, body oppression, capitalist oppression. All of this we try to connect, usually working in a performance-art way. We try to make a show out of our work. We work a lot inside the queer community about the Palestinians and about teaching people that their fi ght is part of a bigger fi ght against oppression. Being gay and rich in the center of Tel Aviv is not liberating yourself because it’s not liberating your community. About the Palestinian struggle, Black Laundry has never done actions inside Palestine. People in our group always go to Palestinian demonstrations, but we have never organized our own activities there.

It’s always very hard. You’re not allowed to be queer in the Palestinian culture. I work quite a lot in occupied Palestine, and I’m not out most of the time. It’s not something I would mention in a demonstration. But again, I am not there to educate the Palestinians or tell them how to act. And it’s not like Israel is the most liberated society, either. Th e main queer population in Israel who are being oppressed are the Palestinian-Israelis. If the Shin Beit (Israeli secret service) catches two Palestinian men in an Israeli park having sex, they often force them to become collaborators by saying that if they don’t cooperate, they will tell their families. Th is is a death threat in some instances…Even queer Palestinian-Israeli couples aren’t allowed to stay together. So again, it’s Israel that is not good for queers. Many queer Jews are being oppressed here in Jerusalem, so it’s not as if the Palestinian society is dark and cruel and the Israeli society is open and free.

Often times you hear that Israel is remarkably open towards queer culture….

No, it’s the center of Tel Aviv which is open for queers who have money and who are consumers or part of the system. It’s not open for poor queers who are coming from Jewish-oriental families, it’s not open for Palestinians, and it’s not open for religious queers. Israel can say one thing, but usually they act diff erently. Th e situation here is a lot like in the US, and you wouldn’t say the US is queer-friendly. Maybe San Francisco, but not in general.

Aaron Lakoff is a member of the International Solidarity Movement, and a journalist with CKUT community radio in Montreal. He is currently travelling and working throughout Palesine. To view his previous writing and photos, visit http://aaron.resist.ca. He can be reached at [email protected]

http://michiganimc.orgpublish your news. become the media.


REVIEWED BY AYESHA KI’SHANI HARDISON

Addicted: A NovelWritten by ZanePaperback, 336 pages.Pocket Books, October 2001

Black Women’s Adventures

Z a n e i s t h e S a m e O l ’ S a m e

IT’S A CONUNDRUM—to be black and female. And when a black woman places sexuality into this discursive mix, she enters an additional, traditionally limited

space of oppression and provinciality. To have a liberating black female sexuality is to move beyond the stereotypes purposefully created during slavery and to move past those images that have been revised yet continue to persist. Be it then or now, lascivious Sapphire tempting ol’ master is just as destructive to black female sexuality as asexual Mammy being a mother to everybody’s children but her own. Didn’t Aunt Jemina look like a maid until the 1980’s—and really, who’s aunt is she? Is it too taboo for Halle Berry to win an Oscar for a fi lm in which she has sex with a white man, or as some blacks critical of the fi lm argue, she won because she “got fucked by a white man” (which clearly changes whether or not Berry or her Monster’s Ball character has agency)?

In my epigraph, Nikki Giovanni’s “Woman Poem” explores the Sapphire / Mammy continuum. A black woman’s unhappiness swings between two poles: sex but no love or love and no sex. If she’s fat, she’s maternal; and if she’s maternal, then she’s not a woman—no subjectivity, no desire. Mothers and grandmothers are not and never have been sexual objects! And if a black woman proclaims herself a “gameswoman,” i.e. player, pimp, seductress, or Jedi mind trick master, she is still needy of a man’s love while running around “seek[ing] dick.” Even the poem’s “dick eater[’s]” powerful potential to castrate (a thematic frequented in Gayl Jones’ fi ction) is caught up in being man needy. Clearly, none of these options are viable ones for sex and love because when a black woman is seeking liberating sexuality (which could be a black woman is seeking liberating sexuality (which could be defi ned as sowing her wild oats without the double standard,

or maybe even exploring how to balance good love, good mothering, and good sex), sometimes it’s more erotically empowering to declare, “fuck needing love seeking woman!” in the face of the conundrum.

Enter Zane into the black female sexuality matrix. I had heard of the writer, but I had never read one of her books until my fl ight was canceled and I had several hours to entertain myself in a D.C. airport. Interestingly enough, I was trying to return to my earlier eclectic roots of Anne Rice, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, and All-Black-Men-Are-Trifl ing Romances (ABMATR) when the Borders’ salesperson sent me back to my gate with Addicted, a free Zane publicity pamphlet, and an ominous “I’m sure you will enjoy it.” All I had heard about Zane suggested to me that I was reading a sexier ABMATR, but when I opened the pamphlet titled “I’m reading / ZANE / Why aren’t you?” I realized this was something more like soft-core porn. Immediately, I thought, “Ohh my gawd, let me hide the cover!” Yet, when I read Zane’s address to her “Dear Readers and Friends,” I began to feel empowered by exercising my right to buy and read Zane’s illicit book. In the

letter, she explains, “Most of the emails from women thank me for letting them know that they are normal. Th at there is nothing wrong with being sexual and that men are not the only ones who should demand hellifi ed sex. My whole thing is why have bad sex? Life is short.” And in my mind, I said, “Th at’s what I’m talking about. Why have bad sex? Life is short!” Yet, despite my sense of adventure for reading a tale of sexual empowerment, I was sorely disappointed. I am not going to deny that this book was entertaining (I read it in a few hours) and that there are some hot moments (the protagonist, Zoe, and her “rough sex” lover come to mind), but I can’t see many sexually liberated woman fi nishing the book and feeling anything close to “normal.”

Th e simple plot of Addicted is as follows (if you don’t want me to ruin it for you, stop reading now): woman is sexually bored with husband, woman has hot steamy aff airs, woman almost loses husband, woman recommits to marriage, woman has hot steamy sex with husband. Now, the more

complicated (and problematic) plot is as follows: woman is sexually bored with husband, woman has hot steamy aff airs, woman seeks counseling for sex addiction, woman almost loses husband, through hypnosis woman realizes she has childhood sexual trauma, by fi nally communicating with her husband woman realizes husband has past sexual trauma, thus concluding both have sexual issues, both commit to counseling and recommit to the marriage, and then they have steamy hot sex after woman’s past lovers attempt to kill her. No, I am not making this up.

Let’s be clear: I believe in marriage; I do not advocate adultery; I do not dismiss counseling; I do not belittle people’s addictions (yes, I think you can have a sexual addition, and, yes, we should talk about mental health more in the black community); and I do not make light of sexual traumas be it man, woman, or child. However, what I fi nd problematic about Addicted is its circulating guise among readers as a liberating jaunt through black female sexuality when it really is a cautionary moral tale of black woman’s sexual pathology. Th is is not a how-to for “hellifi ed sex,” it’s a WWF smackdown on black women’s desire for sex.

Unfortunately, Zoe is caught in the conundrum: either she remains committed to her perfect yet sexless middle class marriage or she gets sexually satisfi ed through a string of promiscuous extramarital aff airs. To add insult to injury, her husband, Jason, is an ideal Prince Charming. He and Zoe fall in love in childhood, he wants to wait until they’re married to have sex, and he marries Zoe when she gets pregnant during high school. Despite their sweet relationship, there are signs that things are not right. Not only does the novel begin with Zoe talking to her therapist, but during her recollections, Zoe admits that she started masturbating at a very early age and, in a gender role reversal, she continuously pressures Jason for sex. For Zoe, her sexual aggressiveness in youth, her compulsive masturbation, and her aff airs are evidence of her sexual addition.

Yet, the troubled wife’s confessions to her therapist are problematically characterized as much as her therapist’s own sexual voyeurism as Zoe seeking help for her addiction

you see, my whole life is tied up to unhappiness... it’s a sex object if you’re pretty and no love or love and no sex if you’re fat get back fat black woman be a mother grandmother strong thing but not woman gameswoman romantic woman love needer man seeker dick eater sweat getter fuck needing love seeking woman -Nikki Giovanni, Woman Poem

in Sex and Reading:

Within the very escapades that are supposed to free Zoe, the struggle for a liberating, fulfi lling black female sexuality becomes restricted, oppressed, and, ultimately, punished.

25

to exploring her desires. And if the therapist is a voyeur, what are we dear readers? As much as I liked Jason, my mind was still framed by Zane’s own question: why have bad sex? Unlike Jason, who is traditional and lacking sexual intimacy, Zoe has the sex of her fantasies with her passionate painter, her young mechanic, and her experimental female lover. In spite of this, Zoe is trapped by asexual, “cult of true womanhood” expectations of what it means to be a wife and mother just as she is limited by her unsuccessful exploits as a “gameswoman.” Where is the sexual empowerment? Zoe is as bound and disciplined in her aff airs as much as she is in her marriage. Forget “normal”; whether it’s loving, exploratory, sensual, kinky, or freaky, all the sex in Addicted is bad sex.

Within the very escapades that are supposed to free Zoe—and vicariously her audience—the struggle for a liberating, fulfi lling black female sexuality becomes restricted, oppressed, and, ultimately, punished. For instance, even though her female lover is the most stereotypical representation of Zoe’s scandalous exploration, the story never details these encounters and leaves the identity of Zoe’s last lover as one of the many plot twists. In response to the female lover’s biting In response to the female lover’s biting

comments about their sexual interactions, Zoe adamantly claims, “I never asked you to do that either! You insisted, and it’s not like I returned the favor!”(280). Zoe explains, it doesn’t matter who did what, as long as she is getting some and not giving it: i.e. I’m not a lesbian, I’M NOT! Problematically, Zoe’s lesbian sexual encounters are supposedly the ultimate sign of her addiction, but what Addicted really does is box in black female sexuality by associating lesbianism with Zoe’s sexual pathology. Nonetheless, all Zoe’s aff airs are pathological. Her lesbian lover tries to smother her, her young mechanic is an ex-con who tries to choke her, and her passionate painter is a serial killer. Repeated attempts on one’s life are clearly an

appropriate punishment for exploring black female sexuality!

Th e novel’s pathologizing of black female sexuality comes as a double-edged sword. Not only are Zoe’s lovers forbidden because she’s married and they’re all crazy, but her sexual desire has been problematic from the start. With the help of a male specialist in sexual addition (because the black female therapist is both voyeur and inexperienced), Zoe discovers that she emotionally buried two childhood sexual traumas. In addition, Jason contributes to Zoe’s trauma with his own sexual dysfunction caused by witnessing his mother have sex with her johns. Due to the lack of a true exploration and an opening of the matrix of black female sexuality in the novel, Jason’s conservative ideals about sex are not so much depicted as a product of the confi ning images of black female sexuality (for him, his wife and the mother of his children must be kept in line by “all-your-friends-are-sluts” speeches) but his justifi ed shame of his promiscuous, unredeemable mother (167). In every twist of the plot, the latent textual message returns to the idea that black female sexuality is wrong, bad, dirty, downright pathological, and punishable by death. Zoe’s single best friend, the woman in the novel who should be having good sex, is killed by her abusive boyfriend—who, is killed by her abusive boyfriend—who,

of course, also attempts to kill Zoe. Th e saddest affi rmation of the novel’s abuse is when Zoe, realizing that Jason is going to leave her, walks into oncoming traffi c saying, “Th is one’s for you Boo!” (240). At this point, I was uncomfortably laughing at this new plot twist because I was amazed at how Zoe/Zane just upped the ante to an impossible cost for black women and their sexuality—life and no sex, or sex and no life. Despite the novel’s intended blissful ending of marital reconciliation and counseling, black female sexuality was ultimately, again, “tied up to unhappiness” for me, and the only closure I could fi nd as a reader was to conjure Giovanni’s poem and chant “fuck needing love seeking woman.”

Admittedly, Zane has made a big accomplishment in popular fi ction. Th e New York Times details how the writer started by circulating an erotic story via email, launched a website, published her book, and now she has her own publishing company, providing opportunities for other young black writers (Ginia Bellafante, “A Writer of Erotica Allows a Peek at Herself,” 22 Aug. 2004). Bellafante identifi es Zane’s appeal as the writer’s “aversion to presenting an unmitigated fantasy of sex-without-consequence.” Hmmm…I cannot admonish a housewife turned author for being successful in tapping into black women’s sexual fantasies. I can, however, question the sexual capital attached to the novel in context of the readers’ need for fatal consequences. When has black female sexuality never been about consequences? And I can identify this book as being less erotically empowering or sexually freeing than a bad porn fl ick in its distortion of liberating demands for “hellifi ed sex” and its paradoxical affi rmation that “normal” black female sexuality is pathological. Th e only thing provocative about Addicted is the explicit language in which it describes Zoe’s exploits: a proliferation of d, p, c, and f-words that make the sexually conservative blush in their bluntness. Yet, if those words cannot move black female sexuality beyond simple

sex objects, fat and black bodies, mothers, grandmothers, gameswoman, love needers, man seekers, and dick eaters (and in case you’re wondering, I don’t believe they can), then black female sexuality is just trauma and pathology. And there’s no agency in that.

Ayesha K. Hardison is a lover of literature

and a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. In her free time, she occasionally likes to indulge herself in “bad” popular culture: fi ction like ABMATR, independent/low budget fi lms, and rap, R&B, and pop music.

The soft coloration of his longing in the indifferentenvironment has never deserted me.My husband saving the spermaceti to lightour eyestrings. My husband charting my obsessionswith characteristic cool. Singing sacerdotallyin the shower, my husband intoning every cleft in my skin.Our syncopated breathing. My husband who fl ew oftenat night as a child. Above the very groundof our writing (even as power poles were fallingon volvos). My husband equally popular with womenof all ages. His nail parings, his running legs, his scriptoria.O his ludic hard head. Who cut downhis own hair with a bone-handed knife. His rackof gorgeous unworn ties. My husband touchingeven the insular men; whenever fear bredits mushrooms under rugs, a cleaning frenzy commenced.Our bed irrigated with my blood. Watching me burnfrom within; tendering his cross pen. O predominatelywhite guilt. Whenever it rained

after h.l. hix

Elation washed over our absence toward everything in the increasing darkness.toward everything in the increasing darkness.toward everything in the increasing

27

Sound

Th ere are several things that can make sex better. One of the most obvious, yet often overlooked, is sound. Little is more stimulat-ing than your lover audibly overcome with rapture. I know in group sex environments, once you hear one voice overcome in plea-sure, things loosen up for the whole room and people want to be more sexual imme-diately.

You can learn how to make noise during masturbation, just as one learns other things through masturbation. (I had one friend who suggested making love to yourself in a full length mirror, orgasming while looking in your own eyes to learn how to be more present in sex). I have noticed that women, more than men, have learned how to be quiet in sex. I know I was taught through Chris-tian brainwashing that women did not show pleasure during sex. You were supposed to be a complacent and submissive vehicle for men to masturbate in! But I found out that lov-ers liked women who were rowdy and alive, craving sexual fulfi llment.

One way to play with voice and sex: Start with sighs that are low, then raise the pitch incrementally, and consciously, as you start feeling more intensity. Th is has the ef-fect of sounding like you are getting more excited. Or, do the reverse. Start high and go low. Th is sounds ike someone going from in-tense excitement to sedated and pulsing ec-stasy. You can try sighs and grunts as you fi nd new places you never knew your vocal chords could take you.

Play with diff erent words, too, such as looking in your lover’s eyes and saying their name. Also, making these sounds directly into a lover’s ear, when you have to be more quiet, when your sound responds directly to the lover’s moves, can be very erotic. A good sound for the ear is breathing in with teeth slightly clenched, as is the classic “oh.”

Verbalize Your Desires Out Loud

Too many women, when asked what they would like sexually, say, “Whatever you want is fi ne.” Th at is not an answer. Too many women do not experience sexual fulfi llment because they have no idea what gets them off . And how would they know if they have been experiencing sex as a silent receptacle? Th e fi rst step is to get honest and to assess what actually excites you, and then, the big step is to learn to verbalize your desires. Th is is much bigger than people realize. Saying out loud to a sexual partner what you want is diffi cult and requires mutual trust. Th e tricky part is telling your partner what you do not like sexually, as it is happening, without them becoming defensive. (One exercise around this is to of- fer two diff erent things to a lover, and have them choose one. Do this over and over to learn what they like.)

Say out loud, “Th at feels really good,” during sex, to become present in your love-making and to guide your lover. Allow your-self and your lover to acknowledge your plea-sure and joy.

I used to go to women-only erotic mas-sages with my lesbian lover/partner. Th e massages involved about 20 women and 4 massage tables. We would each get 20 minutes on the table in groups of fi ve. We would meet at one woman’s house and take off our clothing and each group would then put one woman on the massage table with 4 women around her who asked her what she wanted sexually. I remember my fi rst time. I said, “Anything will be fi ne.” Th ese women would not have that. Th ey said, “Do you want us to touch your genitals?” I said, “Okay.”

Th e next woman on the table said what she wanted. “I want someone to make out with me while someone else plays with my nipples and I would like hand sex with my vagina and then after a while, I would like

this dildo to be used...” I was stunned and envious as hell! Here I had been given 20 minutes to ask for whatever I wanted and I wasted it. Who was my uptight bullshit serving? Now this woman was going to leave sexually fulfi lled instead of sexually frustrat-ed, like me.

My lesbian partner and I were envious of the women who openly asked for what they wanted. Just becoming open lesbians had been a big change for us. To learn to re-claim our sexuality as ours, and to redefi ne it, was a huge task. We tried asking for what we wanted out loud at home and even that was hard, but we worked on it by practicing.

Anticipation

Anticipation: Th is one tool can drive someone mad with desire. Much of BDSM sensation play is based on withholding ec-stasy until anticipation has built to a fantastic level. Playing with teasing and reeling one in through incremental stages of excitement is

not time wasted when mind-blowing plea-sure is the result. For penis play, you can start with a few light strokes for about 4 seconds on the shaft and head. Th en, stop and go to something else. Th en, return and stroke the shaft and head for 8 seconds. Th en, do something else, so your partner thinks you’ve moved on. Next, go down on the shaft with mouth or hand. Intensify it each time you return.

For women, there is “ringing the door-bell.” Push the clitoris lightly like ringing a doorbell, very casually, and with proper fi -nesse, and then move on to other things, as if you did not ring the doorbell. Th en, go back and lightly ring the doorbell again. A bit of this and most women I have played with (in-cluding myself ) want you to quit ringing the doorbell and come inside for a spell of more bell ringing and other fun.

So there you have it, three things you can work on today for better sex.

Sound, Stated Desire, AnticipationBY VIOLET ROSE

3 Steps to Better Sex:Sound, Stated Desire, Anticipation

3 Steps to Better Sex:Sound, Stated Desire, Anticipation

The way Americans learn about sex is sheltered, full of Christian taboos, distorted by corporate porn and the media. Because of this, too many people are having bad sex. It is time we openly discussed all aspects of sex--from its power dynam-ics to its physicality.

If you are not comfortable talking about safer sex before and during sex, then you should not be having sex. If you can-not talk about safer sex, then you probably cannot talk openly about your sexual desires, but it is never too early to start. The purpose of this article is to get people thinking creatively about sex.

The Queer Politics of Spanglish.

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Transcript of The Queer Politics of Spanglish.