Newsletter #24

These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.

These are stolen lands built by stolen people

Living a Public Feminist Life


For the past few weeks I have been asking myself, “I wonder what Angela Davis has to say about love?” or “I wonder how Mariame Kaba is handling her unvaccinated comrades?” I have hit a new and deep pandemic lows and my sadness, anxiety, and overall feeling of extreme vulnerability has me curious about the secret mundane lives of my favorite feminist thinkers. I want to know how they navigate hard sticky love stuff with their comrades, friends, lovers, and colleagues. I want to know if my favorite Black feminist thinkers have someone to rub their feet or run them a warm bath. I want to know the kind of care and ethic these women are receiving because I am currently not receiving the love and care I truly desire.  

 

I describe Black feminism as my civic spiritual practice. Black feminism helps me to articulate myself as a sociopolitical being. Put differently, Black feminism teaches me that both the personal and the spiritual are political. There is no corner of my life that my politics do not enter. Which means I am always engaging with my Black feminism, anti-racism, and social justice values. 

 

 Feminism has given us so much language and analyses and has moved the world forward on so many issues, but I feel like when it comes to the mundane and the frivolous feminist have only just entered the chat. For instance when one wants to engage in a feminist liturgy on love the only major book in our canon is All About Love by bell hooks. A book I will never stop reading and I want to know where its companion is? I read widely and listen to all sorts of thinkers and more often than not I find myself listening to famous writers or thinkers who are not trained in gender studies and I am always having to add a class, racial, gender, and social justice lens to whatever the speaker wrote or said. I hate having to go out of my discipline and my civic spiritual practice for guidance. Because to me feminism and more specifically Black feminism is the truth, the light, and the way. 

 

This is precisely why I named the newsletter ‘theory + practice = praxis’ I wanted to show people who read my work, pay for my online courses, and who hire me to work with them how I am embodying and living a feminist life. I want to make clear how I am bringing and considering social categories such as class, race, gender, ability status, nationality, citizenship status and etc., in my decision-making and the building of my feminist life. This was also the impetus for me rebranding the newsletter and adding more of my personality and myself to the newsletter. I am very interested in making transparent the quotidian practice of what it means to be a feminist in public. I am no longer interested in being just one big brain. I am a whole person who has needs, wants, and desires and I am filtering these needs, wants, and desires in a very feminist way and I want to be honest and show others the filtering process. 

 

I am complicating our digital relationship by interjecting and insisting on showing my humanity. A key feature of anti-Blackness is the inability to see Black people as members of the human species. Dehumanization happens in many ways, seeing Black women as less than human is the obvious one, but also putting Black women on pedestals and seeing us as superhumans whose sole purpose is to teach, nurture, and fix everything is also dehumanizing. 

 

I want to be levelly human as The Combahee River Collective wrote in their germinal Black feminist text forty years ago. I want to muse about deep shit, show pictures of my artistic manicure, share my Black joy with you, and talk about love and the ways I am engaging in it. I am a public feminist who is practicing being embodied. Being embodied in our anti-racist feminist practice is what living a feminist life means to me. I don’t have the answers or the blueprint, but I am determined to live publicly and as ethically as I can. My goal through my public digital Black feminist work is to leave evidence, recipes, blueprints, behind for my future feminist descendants so they never have to wonder and be without this critical love and guidance.

VIEWINGS AND READINGS:

Refuge Restrooms - This is a great web based app resource for transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people looking for safe bathrooms to use.


We Social Workers Should Remember Our Values and Stop Policing by Caitlin Becker - “The fundamental flaw in our legal and social service systems is not that there aren’t enough social workers—it’s that these systems are rooted in the belief that Black people and their families need surveillance and intervention. Their premise is that actors in the system know best—that Black communities don’t know what they need to be healthy, to stay safe and to care for their children. As social workers, we must stop lending credibility to these damaging assumptions.”


Sarah Silverman Calls Out Hollywood’s ‘Jewface Problem: Representation F**cking Matters’ - “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish but people whose Jewishness is their whole being,” Silverman said. “One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile [a non-Jew] playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.’”



Trans Characters Are In Vogue, But Where are the Thinkpieces?
 by Eli Cugini - “what if we asked about why cis people are so interested in transness, and what function characters serve in cis novels? What if we admitted that, at least some of the time, trans characters are used as a way for cis authors to talk to other cis people, and asked about the messages they’re sending? What if we looked at the anxieties and prejudices folded into some portrayals of trans people, the genuine interest and desire for connection that come in others, and work backwards towards a trans criticism where cis people might, just might, be allowed to admit that they find us interesting and scary? What if we broke the awkward silence?”


Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? by Judith Butler - “As a fascist trend, the anti-gender movement supports ever strengthening forms of authoritarianism. Its tactics encourage state powers to intervene in university programs, to censor art and television programming, to forbid trans people their legal rights, to ban LGBTQI people from public spaces, to undermine reproductive freedom and the struggle against violence directed at women, children, and LGBTQI people. It threatens violence against those, including migrants, who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order under duress.”


Guide for Reporting on Anti-Trans Medical Bans


Guide for Reporting on Anti-Trans Athletic Bans


16 Guiding Axioms for Abolitionist Organizing


LISTENING:

Gender Reveal: Gender 101, revisited - Cis folks need to listen to this several times it is always a good thing to revisit the the fundamentals 



ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Black Feminist Sunday is coming back this year. If you are in Miami let’s gather in-person to close out the year. More details to come. 

Patreon Shoutout: We want to give a special shoutout to our patrons who pledged this month!

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