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TFW’s Aishah Shahidah Simmons Receives Two-Year Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship

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Aishah Shahidah Simmons“True liberation must come from within. I am a Black feminist lesbian who is a survivor of both incest/child sexual abuse and rape. What better individuals to lead the movement to end child sexual abuse than those of us who have not only been directly impacted, but who are actively engaged in transforming that unspeakable trauma and terror into healing and liberation? Love, for me, is a verb—an action—and I consistently strive to be the embodiment of what I want to womanifest in this work.”
—Aishah Shahidah Simmons

TFW Associate Editor Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a member of the Just Beginnings Collaborative‘s inaugural cohort of eight child sexual abuse (CSA) survivor-activist leaders who received a two-year fellowship to devote their full time to design and implement projects that specifically address CSA. Aishah received funding to develop #LoveWITHAccountability, her multimedia project that will uplift the ways that accountability is a necessary form of radical love needed to address child sexual abuse. #LoveWITHAccountability will also examine how the “silence around child sexual abuse in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political and professional.”

The Just Beginnings Collaborative grew out of a groundbreaking multi-year partnership between the NoVo Foundation and the Ms. Foundation for Women (from 2009-2014) that helped to establish a national network of leaders and organizations working to end child sexual abuse. Building on this foundation, the Just Beginnings Collaborative launched in 2015 as an independent project funded by the NoVo Foundation that is designed to support the field in achieving a new level of visibility and impact.


Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, cultural worker, and international lecturer. An incest and rape survivor, she is the Creator of the Ford Foundation-funded internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length film NO! The Rape Documentary. She is currently completing a semester-long Sterling Brown Professorship residency at Williams College, and has previously taught in the Women’s and LGBT Studies Program at Temple University. She was also an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Committed to archiving, documenting, and telling Black women’s herstories and contemporary realities, Aishah was a Co-Curator and Co-Editor of The Feminist Wires (TFW) June Jordan Forum with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Heather M. Turcotte, and TC Tolbert, as well as Curator and Lead Editor of TFW’s “Global Forum on Audre Lorde” and Co-Curator and Co-Editor with Heidi R. Lewis of TFW’s “Toni Cade Bambara 75th Birthday Anniversary Forum.” Aishah is also the author of several essays, including “Removing  the Mask: AfroLez®femcentric Silence Breaker,” featured in Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement, “AfroLez®femcentric Perspectives on Coloring Gender and Queering Race,” and the Foreword to Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence. She has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues about ending all forms of sexual violence; queer identity from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective; the grassroots process of making social change documentaries; and non-Christocentric spirituality at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the United States and Canada, throughout Italy, in South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow Aishah on twitter at @AfroLez and connect via her public Facebook page.

The post TFW’s Aishah Shahidah Simmons Receives Two-Year Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship appeared first on The Feminist Wire.


Reflecting Upon Nate Parker and Deconstructing Rape Myths with Aaronette M. White, Ph.D. [VIDEO]

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Breaking SilencesI first heard about Nate Parker’s and Jean Celestin’s college rape trials in 1999 from  sister-comrade-friend and an associate editor of The Feminist Wire Dr. Heidi R. Lewis several days ago. I wasn’t able to read any of the media documentation of the events until the morning of August 17, 2016. Independent of the recent revelations about Parker and Celestin, I was already triggered around my child sexual abuse. I was very unsure if I would have the wherewithal to be triggered around my own rape herstory. Addressing incest and rape is my life’s work. With the support of Dr. Clara Whaley-Perkins, Ph.D., my Black feminist licensed clinical psychologist and my dedicated practice of vipassana meditation, I moved through my own recent triggers enough to learn more about what happened at Penn State University in 1999.

I am appalled, outraged, and deeply saddened by what I read and subsequently would define as a gang rape. You can read the transcripts of his phone conversation with the victim who committed suicide thirteen years later in 2012.

I know Nate Parker was acquitted seventeen-years ago. I also know his acquittal doesn’t necessarily mean that justice was served. We still don’t have a full understanding of what rape is in 2016. In 1999, rape for many was viewed as a bad sexual experience for the victim and not a violent act.

I am enraged that many of US choose to have faith in the U.S. INjustice system ONLY when it’s time to get real about rape. But no, I am not surprised. Heaven forbid we take the time and energy necessary to foster and maintain an ethic of accountability ever. – Heidi R. Lewis

We are consistently privy to how the criminal justice system fails too many individuals who have experienced unspeakable racist, white supremacist, sexist, misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, and/or transphobic atrocities in the United States. Tragically, the criminal justice system is more often than not unjust. Our victories where true justice is served are too few and far between. To be clear, and I write as an incest and a rape survivor, I do not believe in prisons as they are currently operated in the United States. The prison industrial complex has not stopped rape and it will not stop rape. I am, however, unequivocal in my belief that the harm doers should be held responsible and accountable for the often irreparable harm that they caused.

Many Black feminist rape survivors and anti-rape activists (myself included) have been counting down the days in high anticipation of The Birth Of A Nation, the Sundance award-winning film that Parker and Celestin co-wrote and Parker directed and produced about Nat Turner‘s life. The surfacing of the devastating news about Parker and Celestin’s college rape trials in 1999 is a slap in the face to Nat Turner’s life and legacy. How can I watch the depicted on screen rape scene of Nancy Turner, Nat Turner’s wife, without simultaneously thinking about the (alleged) gang rape (my words) that happened at Penn State in 1999?

Sister-survivor-friend and the managing director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project Kebo Drew raised some poignant points in her August 17, 2016 Facebook post,

 I’m almost incandescent with all of my feelings about this. I have no words. These “friends” writing a film together makes me wonder if they even thought of or could understand the sexual violence inherent in slavery. On a filmmaking tip though, if they don’t understand the ongoing sexual violence of slavery, in which enslaved African/Black children, women and men were repeatedly abused and raped, then how they gonna make a film about rebellion? Do they understand the stakes? It affects their craft and their humanity.

In the closing paragraph of her deeply moving On Nate Parker, Rape and the Perils of Double Consciousness Colorlines article which should be read in its entirety, sister-survivor-friend, writer, and women’s advocate Tarana Burke wrote,

A Facebook friend wrote “the power of patriarchy as we fight racism demands that we fracture ourselves.” But I’m not fracturing myself between my gender and my race. I am standing against sexual violence in all forms. I am standing against a system that finds avenues for perpetrators of sexual violence to succeed, while simultaneously destroying the people they violate. I am setting clear boundaries that say no matter how gifted you are artistically, physically or otherwise, your gifts will not give you asylum on my island if you perpetrate sexual violence. So, like R. Kelly, Mystikal, Cee-lo Green and Bill Cosby before him, I have to let Nate Parker—and “The Birth of a Nation”—go.

I’m also deeply concerned about the triggering and devastatingly painful decades long pattern in Black communities when Black men are accused of molesting, raping (statutory or otherwise), battering, and even murdering women. Nate Parker and Jean Celestin are the latest but there’s a fairly lengthy preceding list of alleged and even convicted Black men rapists who are celebrated and championed by  many in Black communities. The often uninformed and even informed response is to defend the (alleged) cisgender Black male molester, rapist, batterer, and/or murderer of women, LGBTQIASGL people, and/or children (anyone under the age of 18 years old).

Sister-comrade-friend, co-founder and co-managing editor of The Feminist Wire Dr. Tamura A. Lomax didn’t leave any stone unturned when she challenged rape apologists in Black communities in her August 17, 2016 Facebook post,

[…] In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” black feminist Hortense Spillers simultaneously makes it clear that while we all experienced racism and sexual violence during slavery, the patriarchal structure enabled black men in particular to develop deeply problematic views of sex and rape, particularly as they were asked, made, and chose to participate in #‎plantationsexualpolitics, where rape culture was solidified as a right and a rite to male passage and toxic masculinity.

It makes sense, then, why many black women and black men are not only caping for ‪#‎NateParker but justifying and explaining [away] #‎rapeculture. Some of us lack not only the language of consent but the content, value, necessity, and comprehension. And some of us are so desperate (self included) for representations of black radical resistance, black love, black power and black fortitude, that we will consume such even if it means in some way negotiating #rapeculture or supporting black men or women who uphold #plantationsexualpolitics. Truth is, many of y’all defending #NateParker have been, are raising, or are close to a #NateParker. And the #‎NateParkers in your life have gone unchecked. And many of us have supported the #NateParkers of the world by supporting toxic and fragile black masculinity as a band-aide for soothing white racism and the fear and threat of black emasculation.[…]

High profile celebrity cisgender Black men who commit gender-based violence are scrutinized and held accountable by the white mainstream media and criminal justice system in ways that their white counterparts are not. However, as Heidi, Kebo, Tarana, and Tamura have all articulated, we cannot allow the relentless, vicious racism and white supremacy committed against Black people to silence the brutal intra-racial patriarchy and misogyny in all of its violent manifestations in Black communities.  My Black feminist lesbian incest and rape survivor body will never ever be safe and free with the eradication of white supremacy and racism alone.

We must dispel and deconstruct rape myths.

Aaronette M. White, Ph.D. photo credit: Scheherazade Tillet

Aaronette M. White, Ph.D.
photo credit: Scheherazade Tillet

The late Dr. Aaronette M. White, Ph.D (May 22, 1961 – August 13, 2012) was a pioneering radical Pan-African feminist anti-rape activist and social psychologist. She was also a multiple rape survivor who was one of my film NO! The Rape Documentary‘s five Black feminist scholar-activist advisors[1]. My sister-friend Aaronette played a pivotal role in the evolution of NO! both behind and in-front of the camera. In addition to being featured in NO!, she is also featured in the first segment of the five segment Ford Foundation-funded two-hour Breaking Silences: A Supplemental Video to NO!. During the thirty-minute “Deconstructing Rape Myths” segment, which was filmed in March 2000, Aaronette deconstructs over twenty racist, sexist, and classist rape myths. In her introductory comments, she posits,

Misconceptions about rape or rape myths serve a function in the sense that first they silence women. Because of these misconceptions women feel that they will not be believed. Secondly [these misconceptions] really let rapists off of the hook. If women are going to be silent and if these misconceptions, as they do, blame women and suggest that women cause rape, then rapists will not be punished for the crimes that they commit. Ultimately, it’s important to dispel these misconceptions because by dispelling them, women will tend to speak out more […]

As recently as last night, the “Deconstructing Rape Myths” segment was only available for purchase on the Breaking Silences dvd. In light of the continued almost relentless misinformation about what (heterosexual) rape is and the deeply disturbing Black women and men rape apologists who defend (alleged) Black male rapists in the name of Black solidarity and racial liberation, it’s definitely time for Aaronette’s segment to be readily accessible on my AfroLez® Productions Vimeo channel to anyone who has access to the internet. Over fifteen years old and her research informed commentary is still relevant, cited, and used widely.

I know if Dr. Aaronette M. White were alive today, she would have so much to say about how eradicating rape culture is an integral part of racial justice and Black liberation in the United States and globally. She would be explicitly clear that eradicating rape and homophobia were just as important as eradicating white supremacy. She is no longer with us in the physical form but her moving image and powerful anti-rape words live and continue to teach.

May we all envision and work diligently to co-create a world without any form of violence.

[1] NO!’s five Black feminist scholar-activists are Janelle White, Ph.D., Aaronette M. White, Ph.D., Elsa Barkley Brown, Ph.D., Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Ph.D., and Kimberly D. Coleman, Ph.D.


photo credit: Daniel Goudrouffe

photo credit: Daniel Goudrouffe

Award-winning Black feminist lesbian cultural worker Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an Associate Editor of The Feminist Wire and a 2016-2018 Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow. An incest and rape survivor, she is developing her multimedia project #LoveWITHAccountability, which will examine how accountability is a radical form of love needed to end child sexual abuse. Aishah has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues throughout North America, across Europe and in countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. You can follow Aishah on Twitter at @AfroLez and #LoveWITHAccountability at @LoveAccountably

The post Reflecting Upon Nate Parker and Deconstructing Rape Myths with Aaronette M. White, Ph.D. [VIDEO] appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

EMERGING FEMINISMS, Rainy Days

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By Sarena Tien

 

“It’s her fault that she got rained on” is tantamount to saying, “It’s her fault that she got raped.”

Why? Look around you. Consider the clear disparity between men and women, the dominance of something known as rape culture in which people use sexism to justify misogyny.

You don’t think rape culture exists? Sit back. Don’t relax. Let me tell you a story.

This is how the world works: when a woman is raped, both society and the media empathize with the man. They ramble on and on about how his life has been destroyed, how unfortunate it is that he’s going to jail (if he’s even found guilty at all, because only 3% of rapists serve time in jail). Take, for example, Brock Turner the Stanford Rapist, who is now being released after serving half of his meager six-month sentence, which was intended to minimize the “severe impact” that jail would have on him. They don’t say anything about the survivor, how she’s now stigmatized, how she has to deal with the aftermath and trauma of being assaulted, how she’s suffering for someone else’s choice.

Welcome to a phenomenon known as victim-survivor blaming, where women are evidently “asking for it” when men are the ones making the conscious decision to rape them. But we don’t teach men not to rape women, do we? No, instead we tell the women that they shouldn’t drink, shouldn’t walk alone at night, shouldn’t wear revealing clothing. This approach, however, implies that innocent women are guilty of perpetrating men’s actions—but the truth is that most rapes are premeditated and men are fully responsible for the choices they make.

And then there are the men who say that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down” and prevent pregnancy. But the very idea of “legitimate rape” is an oxymoron, because the core definition of rape means forcing somebody to have sexual intercourse. If force is involved, then it’s impossible for the act to be legitimate.

Yet the world insists on leaving men in power over women and in charge of rape and abortion laws, even when they don’t understand how women’s bodies work. Men don’t have to worry about carrying a rapist’s baby inside them for nine months, a growing reminder of an unspeakable experience nobody should have to endure.

This is a world where some girls and women fear men, where they have anxiety attacks and nightmares about becoming rape victim-survivors. But the worst part is, for some people, it’s not a nightmare. It’s reality.

And so, blaming women for getting raped is as ridiculous as blaming people for getting rained on because they didn’t bring an umbrella on a blue-skied, sunny day.

 


Sarena_Tien-Headshot (1)Sarena Tien is a Chinese-American writer, feminist, and Francophile. Her poetry and essays have been published in S/tick and As/Us, as well as on TransitionsAbroad.com, The Feminist Wire, and Bustle. When she’s not reading or writing, she can often be found folding far too many origami stars.

 

The post EMERGING FEMINISMS, Rainy Days appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Love Centered Accountability

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Content Notice:This article is part of the #LoveWITHAccountability forum on The Feminist Wire. The purpose of this forum and the #LoveWITHAccountability project is to prioritize child sexual abuse, healing, and justice in national dialogues and work on racial justice and gender-based violence. Several of the featured articles in this forum give an in-depth and, at times, graphic examination of rape, molestation, and other forms of sexual harm against diasporic Black children through the experiences and work of survivors and advocates. The articles also offer visions and strategies for how we can humanely move towards co-creating a world without violence. Please take care of yourself while reading. 


By Dr. Danielle Lee Moss

Childhood sexual abuse. Even for transcendent me, the words sit still and sickening in my throat. Childhood sexual abuse. When I see it written as CSA, my nervous stomach quiets; it gives me the distance I need to tackle the topic. CSA is the dirty secret we gift to our children through our silence, our rage, our shame – over generations. Whether the abusers are family members or authority figures with access to our children, we teach them that sex and feelings and bodies don’t make for polite conversation. We give their genitalia nick names. And, though we have created a sexualized world – a world that has few spaces where children can live free from gender roles, fear, or creeping hands – we remain challenged to speak its existence. Regrettably, our reality is that sometimes, and for the worst reasons, childhood and sex come together. The resulting wounds become permanent because we teach our children that the things that cut into them the most are the things that must not be named, or spoken of, or confronted. In fact, most of childhood pivots around the notion that children are most childlike when they powerless. In fact, the social arrangement relies on children’s ability to “recognize authority”. To date, the United States remains one of only two countries that have failed to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.

According to UNICEF, among the tenets of this international treaty is a commitment that countries

[…] “must ensure that all children—without discrimination in any form—benefit from special protection measures and assistance; have access to services such as education and health care; can develop their personalities, abilities and talents to the fullest potential; grow up in an environment of happiness, love and understanding; and are informed about and participate in, achieving their rights in an accessible and active manner.”[…]

So, what does this mean for loved centered accountability? Most of us don’t understand what this means because accountability and discipline usually show up as punishment and pain in our cultural lexicon. How many of us heard parents say they beat us out of love growing up? We condition our kids to a love/pain connection early on. Embarrassment and humiliation are also deeply wedded to notions of love centered accountability. At home, in school, and even via social media, part of the way we illicit children’s cooperation and compliance is by the fear of public shame. The social contract we’ve created with childhood gives way to a legacy of childhood sexual abuse that is seemingly intractable because it exists in a larger anti-child social context. The shame is multigenerational and supersedes our ability to adequately protect our children. Many survivors talk about the added isolation and rejection they experienced as their brave disclosures went unrecognized. The denial and rejection of brave disclosure is rooted in the same concepts of shame and fear. For many, being brought into the circle of brave disclosure is experienced as the transference of shame, and not the illumination of truth. Despite our failure as a society to adequately address CSA as a problem that cuts across race and class, the reality is that even what goes unnoticed, unacknowledged, and unrecognized grows roots that sprout and expand and cripple.

A few years ago, I heard a comedian call out childhood sexual abuse in an arena full of people. He was talking about a public rape case that had taken over several news outlets, and he said, “Some of you defending this dude are still scared to go to the family cookout because you know you’re going to see that molester relative there.” The crowd swayed, laughing/not laughing, in palpable discomfort. The joke, which sat in the arena like stinking fog, suggests that accountability is completely out of the question, that the spiritual imbalance of secrecy and shame are members of the family now – although we know that sexual abuse doesn’t always involve relatives. The social contract for CSA survivors and perpetrators – even when they embody the same beings – is silence and distance. What do you do when the people who hurt you the most are part of the very fabric and foundation of your life? When their stories and joys and tears and faith and misery are entwined in the heartbeat of your life? We don’t understand accountability and love as the same, because we are a crime and punishment society. We define and confine people by their worst actions with no roadmap leading back to restoration and redemption. We are so punitive, in fact, that if the person who finds the cure for cancer kills a puppy in the same week, we might be inclined to reject the cure. The extreme polarity of love and accountability make confession and redemption an unimaginable risk, because in the world we live in repentance can never interrupt the abuser scourged identity.

Living in a punitive, crime and punishment society makes the idea of #LoveWITHAccountability almost inconceivable. What on earth would be unearthed if we began to explore this notion in the context of childhood sexual abuse? What would happen if we said to the people who hurt us, who we still by circumstance had to interact with, that the road to healing was awareness, confession, acknowledgement, and restitution? Luckily, everything we live we have created. We are more than capable of creating something different, something courageous. We can tackle our private spaces on this issue in ways that lead to recovery and restoration. This requires brave disclosure, highly visible efforts to right wrongs, and a release from shame. We also have the opportunity to engage in broader, public conversations that allow survivors and abusers and those indirectly effected by CSA to engage in dialogue without the vulnerability and judgement that can come with brave disclosure. Creating a shame free discourse on childhood and power, sexuality, and sexual identity, and bodies and consent is central to clearly the way for #LoveWITHAccountability.

Accountability is the way to loving ourselves and being in meaningful relationship and connection with others. Love is free, but it is not solitary. Love is a binding agreement whose essence is respect, consideration, benevolence, kindness, accountability, and authenticity. Survivors, or transcenders, must first extend this love to themselves. You can’t call on anyone to acknowledge your light until you know what it feels like to be loved by you, to see your own light reflected back at you and to be warmed by its brilliance. Love makes space for truth, and truth is the only way to restorative reconciliation. This is particularly important in cases when abusers and survivors continue to be in relationship. Restorative reconciliation says,

“You did this to me, you are sorry, and neither of us has to be defined by the worst thing you ever did.”

Truth makes forgiveness, even when it is not requested, possible. Because love knows that truth is sometimes a one-sided conversation. It means that transcenders must love themselves unconditionally, courageously, and completely because of who they are, and not because of or in spite of what they’ve been through.


Dr. Danielle Moss Lee is President and CEO of the YWCA of the City of New York. She was appointed by Mayor DeBlasio to New York City’s Commission on Gender Equity, is Co-Chair of the NY City Council’s Young Women’s Initiative, and President of Black Agency Executives. Her contributions to education and the social sector have been recognized by the New York State Education Department and The New York City Comptroller’s Office, among others. In 2015 The Network Journal named her one of the 25 Most Influential Black Women in Business. Dr. Moss Lee has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Edutopia, The Amsterdam News, and City Limits Magazine. She holds M.A. and Ed.M. degrees from Teachers College Columbia University, where she also completed her Doctorate in Organization and Leadership with a focus on Education Administration. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College with a degree in both English Literature and History with a concentration in Black Studies.

The post Love Centered Accountability appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Self Love with Accountability

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Content Notice: This article is part of the #LoveWITHAccountability forum on The Feminist Wire. The purpose of this forum and the #LoveWITHAccountability project is to prioritize child sexual abuse, healing, and justice in national dialogues and work on racial justice and gender-based violence. Several of the featured articles in this forum give an in-depth and, at times, graphic examination of rape, molestation, and other forms of sexual harm against diasporic Black children through the experiences and work of survivors and advocates. The articles also offer visions and strategies for how we can humanely move towards co-creating a world without violence. Please take care of yourself while reading. 


By CeCelia Falls

I have been accused of living in the past. This comment has usually come after I engage in a discussion about childhood sexual abuse. The ease at which I now disclose having been raped as a child by an adult male family member is uncomfortable for many people to hear.  A discomfort that is thrown back at me with dismissive comments like:

you have to stop living in the past

or

it’s time you got over that.”

That is a different kind of discomfort than what I experienced from disclosing my history to a therapist who remarked about the lack of emotion as I recounted what happened to my ten year old self. That discomfort was my therapist’s acknowledgement of how disconnected I was from the impact of my own history of abuse. That discomfort came from knowing the costs of that type of disconnect.

The discomfort that comes now has nothing to do with a “disconnect” in me, but from a societal disconnect from the reality of childhood sexual abuse—its nature, prevalence and impact on the survivor, families, and community at large. I find this discomfort both common and odd. Common because childhood sexual abuse is an uncomfortable, ugly, painful reality. Odd, because though it is all of those things-it is an incredibly common occurrence, across cultures and socioeconomic groups. So why do we still continue to be so silent?

Some will note that we aren’t as silent as we used to be given the books, movies, talk shows, etc. that have addressed childhood sexual abuse. There are also a number of celebrities who have disclosed having been sexually abused as children, yet there is still an air of secrecy and shame that pushes many survivors back into the silence they escaped. There is very little room for dealing with the ongoing consequences of abuse for the survivor.

Part of the problem is the centering of the perpetrator in the conversation. It’s understandable, to a degree. We can all agree that raping children is horrific. Something should be done about it and children should be safe from this type of horror. Punishing the perpetrator becomes the immediate goal to address the issue. While this is important, it does little to address the long term impact of the abuse on the survivor.

My work is centered on survivors and what happens after disclosure, trials, or no trials-which is more often the case. Like many survivors of childhood sexual abuse, I continue to discover what healing means, looks like, and feels like on a day to day basis. As such, I don’t come to this work with all of the answers of an expert, but as a fellow survivor seeking to create a life I love and that works for me.  Surviving, healing, and thriving is at the core.

Being in community with other survivors and expressing myself artistically has been critical in my healing journey. Community helps to end the stigma and shame that often comes with identifying as a survivor. I started the volunteer group Harlem SUN-Souls United to Nurture, to support survivors of African descent and to raise awareness about the nature, prevalence, and impact of childhood sexual abuse in Black communities. We use the arts to give voice, picture, and movement to our experiences as survivors. We are also committed to nurturing ourselves, our families, and communities to create a world free from sexual violence.  Clearly this is a lofty goal, but it can’t be done in silence or without a loving accountability to ourselves as survivors. We owe the hurting parts of ourselves acknowledgement and healing. We deserve it and we can’t wait for the rest of the world to catch up to us. Love with accountability is giving ourselves permission to love ourselves to health and the full good lives we deserve.


featured-photo_cecelia-fallsCeCelia Falls is the Founder and Director of Harlem SUN-Souls United to Nurture, a volunteer group for Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse from the African/Black/Caribbean Diaspora. She hosts a monthly open mic called OPEN Expressions in Harlem. She is a writer and educational consultant, and considers both Harlem and Oakland as home.

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Paying it Forward Instead of Looking Backwards

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Content Notice: This article is part of the #LoveWITHAccountability forum on The Feminist Wire. The purpose of this forum and the #LoveWITHAccountability project is to prioritize child sexual abuse, healing, and justice in national dialogues and work on racial justice and gender-based violence. Several of the featured articles in this forum give an in-depth and, at times, graphic examination of rape, molestation, and other forms of sexual harm against diasporic Black children through the experiences and work of survivors and advocates. The articles also offer visions and strategies for how we can humanely move towards co-creating a world without violence. Please take care of yourself while reading.


By Loretta J. Ross

There is an intense dialectic between being a professional feminist who works to end all forms of violence against women and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. My life experiences propelled me into the anti-rape movement, and the movement makes sense of my life experiences. I’ve survived rape at 11, incest at 14, pregnancy at 15, gang rape at 16, and sterilization abuse at 23, but I would not forego any of those experiences. They contoured my glorious emergence as a proud, self-aware, and self-determining Black woman who unflinchingly looks life in the eye and struts proudly against all adversities. I had to decide that my trauma did not define me, although it grooved deep crevices in my mind into which it can be too easy to slip into depression. I fight these patterns daily and grow stronger with each victory. My spirit’s soul is the boss of me, not my mind, or my body, or the men who left their dirty fingerprints on my life story.

My service at a rape crisis center in the 1970s in my twenties taught me how invaluable professional therapy is in helping me stay present in my life and not seek to escape my lived experiences, as I used to do through drugs and sex work as a teenager. Instead, I learned in the company of other anti-rape sisters that fighting the numbing violence of sexual and reproductive oppression could become fuel for my passion and deepen my love of activism. Activism is the art of making my life matter. When I’ve told my story for the past 40+ years in small gatherings and national media, other women appreciate my example and find the courage to speak their own truths and be awed by the results.

All this self-confidence in knowledge gained through my lived experiences and my years as a Black feminist working in the Black nationalist, feminist, and human rights movements came crashing to a halt a few years ago at a family reunion. A 40-year-old niece secretly revealed to me that one of my brothers had committed incest against her when she was twelve. Burdened with this knowledge, I urged her to confront her father and let him know the secret was out – at least to her and me. She courageously did, and her story was confirmed when my beloved brother spent the rest of the reunion studiously avoiding me. Every time I entered a room, he caromed away as if we were two billiard balls struck by the same cue. Another of my five brothers noticed something was amiss and asked me afterwards why my joy at the family gathering abruptly disappeared. I shared the story with him. He doubted its truth because it painted a caricature of an elder brother neither of us could recognize.

I wondered what next to do, besides continuing to talk to my niece. I’m from a family of elderly women; my fondest fantasy is to finally be old enough to sit at the big girls’ table in the kitchen while other younger family members wait on us, bringing food and drinks and tenderly seeing to our needs. Since I am still mobile in my 60s, I’m not quite old enough yet, and I’m still the step-and-fetch-it kid to my aunts, great-aunts, and older cousins. But this day, I needed to sit at that kitchen table and ask my elders for advice. How could I be there for my niece in a way people had been there for me nearly five decades before? I believe with all my soul that this continuing cycle of childhood sexual abuse needs to end in my family, but I don’t know how to do it. My siblings are all grandparents, sometimes babysitting our grandchildren or even great-grandchildren. How can we protect vulnerable children we are so proud of?

I wanted my brother to be held accountable, but I had no idea what that meant. He’s battling prostate cancer, and we fear every reunion will be his last as his 77-year-old-body shrinks inexorably inward seeking relief from his chronic agony. I wanted to shout out my new knowledge, but feared what it would do to my niece, my elders, and me. My late mother was an incest survivor from age eight to sixteen, until she married to escape an abusive uncle who lived with her in a multi-generational farmhouse during the Depression. I wondered if my great-uncle also abused the surviving sisters and cousins sitting at this table with me. Did I have the courage or even the right to pull the scabs off their wounds when these women were in their 80s and 90s? If I don’t speak up, do I join a conspiracy of silence in which the men we deeply love continue to have sexual access to inexperienced girls in my family? My much older cousin raped me, leaving my late father impotent to retaliate to protect his baby girl when my abuser fled overseas to escape retribution. They may be good men who do bad things. Does that make them bad men, or complex people predictably acting out distorted masculinities?

I’ve spent the last four decades co-parenting with my rapist. My son knows this history, and has sought to build a positive relationship with his father. That effort predictably failed. What is our responsibility now as elders? Do other non-violent men in the family get a pass, and if not, what is their responsibility in breaking the silence and maintaining our love for each other? Our excessive sheltering of our girls and fierce insistence on the respectability politics of Christianity did not really shield any of our generations, my mother’s, mine, or my niece’s.

I thought I knew the answers to these questions. My Mom used to say, “Tell the truth and shame the devil!” This advice seemed sacrosanct until I became the one caught in the hinge of accountability. Fighting childhood sexual abuse no longer seemed so black-and-white, as my feminist principles urged. The nuances of family love, family healing, and family unity compromised my determination to uproot this festering canker in the hidden center of our relationships. Before I found the courage to speak up, my niece asked me to stay silent because she was not ready for her story to be more public. This was, at best, a temporary reprieve, because her father babysits his granddaughters. It’s a postponement of the truth that begs the question of whether the truth is even capable of providing healing as a pathway to justice and accountability.

The secrets of childhood sexual abuse of females in Black families can be attributed as a legacy of the enslavement, or the emasculation of Black men by white supremacy, or even dismissed as the politics of gender entitlement in society. We exist in a pervasive rape culture that normalizes and sometimes even celebrates violence against women.

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That long pause is there because in the middle of writing this essay, I received the terrible news that my son died earlier today of a heart attack. He was only 47-years old and his name is Howard Michael Ross, without whom much of my life would not have been possible. I can’t finish this now or maybe never. I have to go to Texas to be accountable to this child. My rapist is dead. My son is dead. Now I have to see that I don’t die too soon ensure that his brief life matters too. Peace my sisters…

****

Post-script. I buried my son a few weeks ago and Aishah asked me if I wanted to revise this first draft. At first I declined, but then I thought about it some more. I had the joy of raising my son Howard as a child and a teenager. At his funeral, I learned about my son as a man in ways I didn’t know before.

I wrote the following Facebook post thanking everyone for their love and support:

I witnessed at Howard’s wake and funeral how more than 200+ people loved and appreciated him as a man. He was a son, a father, a husband, an engineer, a math tutor, a college professor, a chapter president of Omega Psi Phi, a Christian, a mentor, an organizer of food for the homeless, our family nexus, a barbecue expert, a champion pool and domino player, and a proud Black man! From the students who talked about how he helped them through difficult classes, to his frat brothers who laughingly complained that he got them out of bed early many mornings to deliver food to the homeless, he was a man who touched many lives. This feminist mom was gifted with such a thoughtful and caring child who grew into a fabulous man. Although he was born of rape and incest, he made me love him immediately when they put him in my arms at the hospital, and I could not go through with the adoption. I saw how he helped others love him throughout his life of service to his family, community, Q brothers, and people. One example of how exceptional he became was demonstrated by the six siblings he sought out to bring his father’s children together to be brothers and sisters in unity, despite his father’s dubious history of violating young women. What other child of rape would do that?

I now know the stark difference between sadness and depression, because my depression comes and goes. The sadness of immense grief never totally dissipates, but grows easier to bear each day. The support from my Black sisterhood helps in ways I can never express: the pinochle sister Edith who came in her walker despite her physical pain to be with me that night. The best friend Dazon who slept with me so I would not be alone. The SisterSong leader Monica who helped elicit donations to pay for expenses. My older blood sister Carol who helped raise Howard. She talked to me every day but couldn’t attend the funeral because of her own disabilities. I am grateful for all of them and thankful that I was not alone in my grief unlike how I was isolated during my childhood traumas because I couldn’t tell anyone what happened. I can now share my story because of the anti-rape movement, and each telling helps the healing. I celebrate my son because he taught me what accountability actually looks like. I had to be accountable to him and my decision to keep him. He was accountable to me and his siblings. Maybe love with accountability is paying it forward instead of looking backwards.


#LoveWITHAccountabilityLoretta J. Ross was the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005-2012. She has appeared on CNN, BET, “Lead Story,” “Good Morning America,” “The Donahue Show,” the National Geographic Channel, and “The Charlie Rose Show.” She has been interviewed in the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She helped create the theory of “Reproductive Justice” in 1994 and led a rape crisis center in the 1970s. She co-authored Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice in 2004.

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It’s the Whispers

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Content Notice: This article is part of the #LoveWITHAccountability forum on The Feminist Wire. The purpose of this forum and the #LoveWITHAccountability project is to prioritize child sexual abuse, healing, and justice in national dialogues and work on racial justice and gender-based violence. Several of the featured articles in this forum give an in-depth and, at times, graphic examination of rape, molestation, and other forms of sexual harm against diasporic Black children through the experiences and work of survivors and advocates. The articles also offer visions and strategies for how we can humanely move towards co-creating a world without violence. Please take care of yourself while reading.


By T. Kebo Drew

I have started and stopped and rearranged this piece of writing dozens of times. Once I began to write, memories came back from the place where I forget things, where I had dismissed them.

It is no small irony that I am also a history buff who has read residential school stories, slave narratives, and the coded language of slaver diary entries, abolition articles, legal opinions of the day and newspaper adverts.

And so I write this first: racism and white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism are built on the exploitation of people, their labor and their bodies. This crushing weight rests on the horror of sexual violence perpetrated against children of color, particularly for our Native and Indigenous cousins throughout the Americas, and for Black people as a whole.

I have a memory from when my family lived in Mexico so I must have been around 4 years old. My mother was cooking in the kitchen and I hid around the corner with my father playing a game with her. Every so often, he would send me into the kitchen to smack my mother’s bottom with both my hands. I would run back to him and giggle. After a few rounds, the ever-presented music playing in the background changed, and I think that my father said something about slow dancing. I remember clearly that my mother said, “not until she is 30.”

The twin roots of sexual violence, from outside of and within the Black community, are entwined together in both my maternal and paternal family trees. Every so often a branch starts from a woman whose name is known and an often unknown, and more often unnamed, white man. When my maternal great-grandmother was 13, 14, or 15, as the story goes, her father, who was himself the son of an enslaved woman and a white doctor that recognized him as a son, told her to “go see about that white man.” The fact that she was a girl herself was of little consequence because the family needed to eat, and “that” white man had resources. My grandfather, and to hear tell, his brother/cousin born from my great-grandmother’s younger sister, were born of these transactions. There are multiple stories on both sides of my family about a distant relative from generations ago, who marries a woman who already has a young girl child. Then, after many children together, his wife dies, and he marries his step-daughter and starts another family. Long before my great-grandmother bore a son from that white man, her older half-sister later became her stepmother.

There are whispers, so faint they are like wind and when I turn to listen they seem to disappear: the elder losing memory, who when talking about the life of a grown man that has been in and out of prison since he was a teenager, and does not form friendships with other men except his cousins, tells the story of the man as a four-year-old boy who said “that woman touched him.” To hear tell, we’re the third generation of queer Black kids and there is a story known only to us. In our parents’ generation there was a cousin, who was very Butch, or possibly Transgender, who was murdered after an attempted rape. There are the whispers of my paternal grandfather and how he treated one of my aunts, to which my own father most likely said, “well, he was an alcoholic.” There are whispers of my maternal grandparents, who learned of the preacher’s intentions toward my then 13-year-old aunt, who not only changed churches, but completely changed denominations.

It wasn’t until I began to start the healing process from my own experiences that I understood that I was looking at a tree full of sexual violence, watered with degradation and fed on blood. I was rocked into the ground, looking at the roots so very close to my own grave. It was clear that there was a continuum that connected me to my great-grandmother, the women of my family, and other Black women.

I have kept my own stories locked down, diminished. I only recently began to see my experiences as child sexual abuse.

After I was born, my parents left the South, left Memphis, for big cities like Chicago, where my brother was born, and then New York. My father would allow me to walk my big dog down the streets of Manhattan, and Rochester. He said that he watched over me as I walked, but that didn’t stop all the calls from the Black men on porches from inviting me to sit in their laps and give them some sugar. Something kept me from going to them, and to this day I don’t know what it was.

We moved to Mexico, a place that Black folks have escaped to since the 1800s for freedom and a break from the specific flavor of racism endemic to the U.S. My parents and so many other Black people where following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Catlett and Audre Lorde to find space to breathe. At one point, we lived in a big house that belonged to the rich son of a Nation of Islam leader, full of activists, hippies, and students.

There was the time that my father left my younger brother and me in a car to wait for him. He went into an apartment building and was gone from day to dark. I had forgotten which door my father went into, and my brother had to go to the bathroom. We weren’t to disturb him, whatever his was doing, drugs, drug deals or a woman. Eventually police officers noticed us and we were taken to the station, where someone recognized these little dark children and took us home. My mother didn’t know about that for 30 years. By the time we left when I was 6, I had learned to lie for my father, and keep secrets, especially anything having to do with sex.

My brother and I were separated from our parents for about 6 months because of police violence against my father. We went to Memphis to stay with our extended family, where there were games that the kids played with the determination of adults. When we were all reunited at our new home in Oregon, there was the little girl who insisted that she wanted to “go down” on me because she was going to show me what people did in bed. I did not know how to say no, and I did not know what to say or who I should tell. I knew how to keep a secret. A secret about the white men on the streets of the very white college town where we lived, who would call me over to their cars, and masturbate in front of me until I could gather my thoughts and run away. About the white man who saw my neighbor friend and I playing in the upper branches of a tree in the park. Who climbed up, reclined on the branches just below and took himself out. We jumped down so far and ran, and he stole all of the allowance money we have saved up. One night, when a white woman came banging on the door at home, saying she had been thrown into a van by two men and attacked. I don’t remember all of what was said, I think that she was raped. I could not talk about it with anyone, because that was one of the nights my father had his mistress over. I might have been 9 years of age. I remember feeling weary and older, much, much older.

By then, my parent’s marriage was so horrible that I prayed for a divorce. I became my father’s girl between my mother, and his mistress. I had already learned very early to take care of my father’s emotional needs. I became his confidant and his witness. I did not feel special. I knew about his relationships. I knew about his porn stash. I knew which women were attractive. I had heard him having sex with his mistress. On those days and nights that my mother was working, my brother and I were “with” him, so he couldn’t be with anyone else. Sometimes my father would take me on long drives alone with him so that he could talk, and once he told me to choose. That my brother would stay with our mother, and his mistresses’ son would stay with her, but I was the one to decide where “we”, him and I, should go. All I remember is my hot cheek pressed against the window of his truck with the cold rain falling outside. There was a level of constant forced emotional intimacy where there was no room for my own instincts, feelings, and development. At the same time, I was going through an early puberty. I was awkward, chubby and strong, with an intellectual understanding of human sexuality. I liked to read and I would look up any mention of lesbian in the library card catalogue. I felt mature and much older than I was, but emotionally I was like a 10-year-old, because I was in fact 10 years old.

When men my father hung out with said that I would make a good wife, he said that I would remain a virgin like my hair. He would joke about the kinds of men who needed to rape women because they weren’t handsome enough to have women come to them. I felt like an embarrassment to my father because I was not beautiful like my mother, or the kind of women that he found attractive. With my twinned family trees I got the wide hips and the thick thighs, I wasn’t shapely with a nice figure at all. He did not know what to do with this strange, quiet girl. The combination of my maturing body and the emotional closeness I had with my father, led people to ask if I was his girlfriend when they saw us together. He would laugh that off every time.

I was incredibly timid, hyperaware of everyone, and ashamed of my body. My father knew this because there were no secrets from him. Sometimes my body would become the subject of adult discussion, and his jokes. Often I would feel that I was being watched. I would have these bolts of intense feeling in my body, I thought that I was embarrassed that someone was looking at me. It was only later, in the few times in my adult life when I have actually felt attracted to someone, that I recognized it as desire, and not my own. As a result, I felt emotionally raw and physically exposed all of the time. I took to wearing clothes that covered me, my fat body, and my ugliness, completely. It was visceral, instinctual. To this day, when I feel emotionally manipulated or “screwed” over, I actually feel it in my genitals.

By the time that my parents separated, and we moved away, my father still had a strong emotional hold over me. He would manipulate me over the phone to get back at my mother, and every time she cried it was for something he told me to do. By that time, I was 12 and my brother had a little friend who would say every day, “hey, let’s gang bang your sister.” My brother would always say “no” and keep playing, doing what 10-year-old Black boys do. The distance from my father was a relief, but it didn’t stop the comments from boys and teenagers. They either said that I was fat and ugly (as my father alluded to without saying it outright). Or, like the Black boy in middle school who came from behind me and put his hands in the pockets of my corduroys, drawing the anger of our Black woman teacher because she thought that I was fast. It didn’t stop men either. Like the time I was sitting on the living room floor at my own house during a backyard bbq, when a white man, a guest of a family friend, started talking to me. I was mostly invisible in my life, shy and full of social anxiety. I happily answered all of his questions, although some of his comments went over my head. I didn’t show that I didn’t understand (because my father explained his disappointment at my failings), because I was so grateful for the attention that seemed to be about me. So when my mother came in like a cold storm telling the man, “she’s only 12!”, I was confused, then ashamed because of my own ugliness and his sexual intentions.

I thought that my father was an expert gas-lighter like his siblings, and a garden-variety narcissist as a result of childhood physical abuse and PTSD as a war veteran.  This was how I diminished my own experience. For years, when people asked me about our relationship, I would say that it was uncomfortable or inappropriate. I never mentioned the level of emotional intimacy and the sexual undercurrent, because he didn’t touch me physically. Since his death 3 years ago, I learned words for the whispers and secrets that had bound me so tightly to my father, emotional incest, like strong shiny ribbons that bruise the skin and break it bloody. Along with the sexual myths about Black girls and teenagers, it was a nearly lethal combination.

Now I believe that it is a consequence and an irony of emotional incest, that what started the break from my father, was being drugged and gang raped by a group of young white men when I was 15. What I clearly remember of that night is that I once again felt grateful that anyone wanted to talk with me, and give me attention. I had never even held hands romantically with a boy or girl my age. So after I drank the water they gave me, and the first boy kissed me, I remember feeling this sense of wonder. By the time my friends, those 3 white girls who so casually used the word nigger to describe someone’s suntan, left me at the house, their departure was a dim concern. For close to 2 decades after I was gang raped, chronic physical pain and retrograde amnesia meant that I had to freshly relive the rape over and over again each year on the anniversary of that night.

Like my mother said, it was not until I was 30 that I was ready.

I had dismissed the child sexual abuse I experienced because I had blamed my own awkward, pubescent and teenage Black body for what happened to me. I struggled with beliefs that I did not deserve to be loved, that I should be grateful to anyone who could overlook my fat body to touch me with desire, and that I had to give all of my emotional energy and labor to be worthy of any attention. I had sexual relationships with people that I would not have coffee with today. Too often, my sexual desire and romantic attraction, to Black Butches, and Transgender, or cisgender Black men, felt much too much like family and too close to home. I struggled with my genuine love for Black people, emotional intimacy, and reminders of my father. Part of my healing process has been to look what I missed as a child. It is not an exercise in nostalgia but one of love for myself. I pull out memories from the place where I forget things, memories that started before I was born, and memories created yesterday.

Studies of survivors of child sexual abuse show our experiences and risk factors collide make us vulnerable to re-victimization as we get older. In the intervening decades since my childhood, survivor activists have changed the conversation about child sexual abuse. More people are haphazardly teaching children about body safety and consent, particularly from strangers. Yet as children mature and go through puberty, the conversation switches to their raging hormones. And that’s for white children.

Current activism about everything from the school-to-prison pipeline to police violence notes that our Black children are deemed older than we really are, with knowledge we do not have. Myths about our pain threshold, our strength, our assumed criminality and sexual deviance are written on our skin. We learn early to be courageous. We learn quickly to take care of our parents’ emotional needs and be watchful of white people’s feelings. We are taught that our bodies are not our own. We are taught that our emotions are not our own. And because I still like to read, I see studies that note that current rates of rape of Black girls and women, particularly in cities like Chicago and Dallas, is similar to the for rape of Black girls and women ages 15-30 during slavery (West and Johnson).

I fear for Black children now, and I fear for the children we once were.

And so I write this: we as Black people have survived a twisted breaking of souls and relationships, and child sexual abuse is a part of our history, our community, and our every day lives.

Love with accountability means that we need to understand age-appropriate intellectual, emotional, and sexual development for Black children, including teenagers. It means not simply praying for the lives of our children, and claiming that we protect them through control of their bodies and emotions, which leaves them more vulnerable. It means that we champion the wholeness of their bodies and their sovereignty over their own souls. We need to act on the entwined roots of sexual violence against Black people, from outside of and within our own community, by focusing on Black children and ending childhood sexual abuse. If we can protect the most vulnerable, small, soft and quiet beings, among us, then we can end the violence that consumes us all.

 


photo credit: Leilani Nisperos

photo credit: Leilani Nisperos

T. Kebo Drew, CFRE is a filmmaker, writer and dancer, she is the producer and director of Ain’t I A Woman? which has screened at the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival and Translations: the Seattle Transgender Film Festival, among many others around the world. She has also produced numerous films, which include Don’t Fence Me In: Major Mary and the Karen Refugees from Burma, which won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary from the 2006 Washington D.C. Independent Film Festival and the Director’s Citation Award from the 2006 Black Maria Film Festival. She got her start at a Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project – QWOCMAP screenwriting workshop in 2001, where she wrote two feature-length screenplays. She has performed in the U.S., Latin America and Europe as a poet and dancer. She is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and won an Audre Lorde/Pat Parker Award and an Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers Award. She also won an Irene Weed Dance Award and Robert Kuykendall Dance Scholarship. Kebo is currently the Managing Director of QWOCMAP, which builds power through film that radically centers our marginalized communities to fundamentally transform the world where justice and equity are the norm. QWOCMAP creates, exhibits, and distributes high-impact films that authentically reflect the lives of queer women of color (cisgender & transgender), gender nonconforming and transgender people of color (of any orientation), and address the vital, intersecting social justice issues that concern our multiple communities. QWOCMAP uses film to shatter stereotypes and bias, build community through compassionate public discussions, and strengthen social justice movements. QWOCMAP is in the second year of its joint Life Healing Project with San Francisco Women Against Rape, which combines Learning Circles and Filmmaking Workshops for LBTQ women of color to address the many forms of violence that impact our lives.

The post It’s the Whispers appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

EMERGING FEMINISMS, Where Flowers Can Grow

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By Anastasia L.

**Content Notice: discussion of sexual assault and violence**

When I was twelve, I was first sexually assaulted by a relative while we watched a movie. It was dark, I was alone. In an instant, I knew what it was like to be an adult through the stress put onto me by the actions of one man. I let him stay until the credits started to roll, then I hurried him out of the house, closing my front door, and securing the lock, I got into the shower until the early hours of the morning.

For years, I couldn’t talk about, or even acknowledge, my experience. I tried desperately to understand why I had gone from carefree, happy, and lively to depressed and untrusting within such a short span of time. I was diagnosed as having an anxious personality and a healthy dosage of teen angst. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I confessed what had happened to me to a school counselor. I told her not only about the night my relative came over to watch a movie, but about Easter Sunday, about the carpet of his condo, about every instance of touch that was unwanted, yet that I somehow ended up on the receiving end.

After that, I couldn’t stop talking.

I told countless people, some of them strangers, about what had happened to me. I was constantly going over the narrative in my head. It was like I had to warn people of what happened to me so that they would understand my shyness, why I built a wall around myself. At times, I even felt like I was protecting others from meeting the same fate.

I didn’t realize it then, but talking was my way of processing these events that I had pushed away for so long. Something that I should have dealt with years earlier was beginning to excavate from a place inside of myself that I had never dared touch.

I am an adult now, a college student, and much less vocal than I was, say, two years ago. I sought treatment through the necessary channels, I did everything that someone who has been through sexual trauma is supposed to do. My only choice now is waiting.

At first, I was waiting to die myself. I temporarily lost my will to live in those “between” years – the years that I used whatever means I could to forget what had happened on my couch, on the floor. But this changed after I told someone about what had happened to me. I could not be content with allowing myself to disappear anymore. Finding solace had to come from elsewhere.

After exploring the mediums usually recommended to survivors of childhood trauma—meditation, therapy, mindfulness—a thought crept into my mind, which quells the anxieties I still face on a daily basis.

This comforting thought? A simple fact: one day, my abuser will die.

I do not wait for news of his death for reasons of revenge (which, I have accepted, I will never get because you can never get revenge on someone who took such a large part of you away). I no longer have contact with the man who hurt me, but I do pray every day that he is not hurting someone else. I, save for a few instances of paranoid thought, no longer fear for the worst. I know it’s next to impossible that he will ever contact me again. But I do know that he could very willingly harm another, and the thought of having this type of shared connection with someone unknown is the one thought that keeps my past alive.

I know that I will feel a sense of relief when he passes. Relief for myself and relief for other women “out there” who he had regular contact with. And yet, I do not place all of my life’s value in this inevitable future event. He lives his life, and I live mine, and both of us will be gone from this earth, taking with us our actions and the consequences of them. I have other things that preoccupy my mind. That’s the pleasantry of having dealt with the past. You have time to consider other, more valuable meanderings. He, my abuser, isn’t the front of me anymore, wearing my face as a mask.

Women who have been sexually abused or assaulted often fall into a space of self blame, both because of societal expectation and due to recounted memory of the body “freezing” during the assault. I still struggle with this idea, and often I catch myself wondering what I could have done differently in those situations of abuse. A part of me is always aware that it was never my fault—I was a child when I was abused. Someone made the choice to hurt me. Reclaiming my body and my sexuality forced me to come to this conclusion. There was no other way for me to heal.

We, those who are healing, can find peace in the idea that our abusers and attackers will perish, will not be a threat to anyone. The fear that once seized my heart is no longer such a dominating force in my life. With this realization, I have been able to progress with myself in a way that I never thought possible. A man who hurt me has no more power over my life than a stranger walking next to me down the street.

The haunt and hurt will never fade. I’ve accepted this, as one must. As I slowly try to piece together my life – understanding my experience through nonprofit work, writing, and discussion – I conclude that I cannot mourn myself any longer. I cannot treat my body like the graveyard of my former self, treating my person as a shell. There was a time when I denied myself sustenance, when I treated myself as lesser because I had been so violated. In the moments where I think of the pieces of me I will never again find, when I am tempted to regress into that state of half living, I repeat to myself – not anymore. Not anymore.

I am not the guide to trauma recovery, a guru of healing. I am simply a person, trying to get through each moment the best that I can. However, I do profess to believe in the healing power of one’s consciousness. I read the self help books and I do the healing every day. Of course, it is never one hundred percent; will it ever be? I am not sure, but I am aware of my own capacity to stitch together the parts of me that were once ripped to shreds.

I transformed my pain into a place where new life can occur.


sunflower-resizedAnastasia is majoring in Psychology. They are passionate about immigration issues, ending violence against women, and LGBTQA+ activism. When not studying or advocating, Anastasia can be found with their nose in a book, running, or power napping.

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EMERGING FEMINISMS, Why I Read the Comments

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By Amelia Roskin-Frazee

 

**Content Warning: sexual violence, hate speech**

 

We’ve all had at least one friend tell us, “Don’t read the comments.”

The Comments. The He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named section of the internet. The internet equivalent of a car crash you’re oh-so-tempted to stare at even though you know you shouldn’t.

We’ve all seen our fair share of horrific comments underneath articles and blog posts. In June, I catfished Donald Trump supporters on Facebook and found a comments section in which a commenter said he’d beat a Muslim child with a baseball bat. I’ve had commenters tell me sexual assault survivors like myself are just “females who put themselves into compromising positions” or “liars who deserve to be fucked up the ass.” And that’s nothing compared to the death threats I found in comments sections below articles about fellow sexual assault survivor Emma Sulkowicz.

But I still read comments sections. I’m not masochistic — trust me, no one can derive pleasure from reading through the verbal equivalent of diarrhea and violent hate speech — but determined to defend free speech.

When I say “free speech,” I’m not talking about threat-laced comments. We seem to have this idea that “free speech” is the same as “hate speech,” and fighting against hate speech makes us thought police or too politically correct. However, freedom of speech was designed to protect ideas, words, and expression, from the brilliant to the absurd. Bigotry and threats aren’t just a form of expression; they’re intimidation and violence. In conflating intimidation and speech, we’re elevating rape threats to the same level as other dialogue. There’s an enormous difference between angry disagreement and a direct verbal attack that threatens another person’s bodily safety.

The irony is in ignoring the vitriolic bigotry and sexual harassment in comments sections out of fear of censorship, we’ve only further censored marginalized people such as women, people of color, queer and trans people, and people with disabilities. Comments sections are no longer accessible for anyone who isn’t a white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, wealthy man.

How did we get to this point? It’s more than just a fear of censorship; it extends to the idea that we, the commenters’ targeted communities, shouldn’t feed the trolls by challenging them. This is actually just another version of the argument commenters have made to me about my rapes: I, as a comment reader, shouldn’t put myself in the “compromising position” of exposing myself to threats. Reading the comments means I’ve given some troll the opportunity to call me a dyke, bitch, or list a hundred different ways they’d like to see me get raped again.

I actually loathe the name “troll” because it makes it sound like those posting slurs and threats are a different species and thus unaccountable. However, internet trolls are real people. People typing away at cafés while listening to music. People who have spouses and children and jobs. People who find the idea of a woman speaking up about her rights being taken away worthy of threatening her with bodily harm. People who find it “funny” to type the n-word. By calling these people “trolls,” we’re distorting the reality that each comment is written by a person. And as we’ve seen from the Pulse shooting in Orlando and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, bigoted trolls can and do come to life.

Reading the comments is scary. Every time I see a rape threat, I can’t help but wonder if my rapist is sitting somewhere in his Columbia dorm room typing it. I can’t help but wonder if the commenter from the Trump support group will one day follow through and beat Muslim children. I can’t help but wonder if one day, the folder of screenshots I have of death threats made against Emma Sulkowicz will be subpoenaed for a homicide trial.

But I still read the comments because someone needs to. I need to post words of support for those brave enough to share their stories online. We need to let commenters know they’re being watched and their actions are unacceptable.

I also completely understand if you choose not to read comments as a way to support your own self-care. But for those who do, and can, read the comments, please be more of a presence. Even better, write your own comment. Outnumber the bigotry with support, or challenge the bigotry directly. Until we hold commenters accountable for their violence and intimidation, even by simply ensuring they know their words don’t go unnoticed, hate will continue to fester both online and off. We’ll continue to have Orlandos and Charlestons, and the internet will grow increasingly violent and inaccessible to those of us targeted by commenters’ violent language.


amelia-headshotAmelia Roskin-Frazee is a B.A. candidate at Columbia University where she is an organizer with No Red Tape, Columbia Queer Alliance, and the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network. Outside of school, she is the Founder and President of The Make It Safe Project and serves on the National Advisory Council for GLSEN. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Feministing, and Femmes Unafraid.

The post EMERGING FEMINISMS, Why I Read the Comments appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Trauma and Infinities: How Math Sharpened My Feminism

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By Jamie Zabinsky

On one of my 90-minute train commutes this summer, I came across a post in my beloved ‘weird Facebook’ group that pulled me out of a cramped-middle-seat-stupor and into the woke world of lively discourse. In a black sans serif font, the image read “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” across what appeared to be a childhood picture of the op (original poster). This macro (a picture superimposed with text) fit with the general aesthetic of the group – a community of 17,000+ people from around the world who come together to share original pieces of what I call “internet art,” or anything fit for artistic online consumption that is NOT already a meme.


Jamie ZabinskyPosts in our group are usually self-deprecating, offensive to the outside (and often inside) world, or cater to thoughts of depression, sexuality, vulgarity, anxiety, irreverence, suicide, anti-normativity or existentialism. The posts are known to regularly reflect points of view that range from outright absurdist to apocalyptic. “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” had little shock value in a group like this, but it touched something in me. Commenters responded with questions like, “You’re right. 20 years of torture is worse. Or is that the same? Idk” and “ive met ppl who say “if i was raped id kill myself” or sincerely try to say with a straight face that rape is worse than murder lmao ok.” They felt compelled to rank things like murder and torture against rape, as if to say that any one is definitively and objectively more ideal than the others.

This back-and-forth in my Facebook group struck a nerve in me. The attempt to hierarchize traumatic experiences hit me in a sensitive spot that has grown deep and wide over a lifetime of coping with the fallout of my own (non-sexual) traumas; to know trauma is to have a cavity in your side, one filled to the brim with pained empathy for friends and strangers alike who are surviving through everything from sexual assault to the death of loved ones on a daily basis. So I took great issue with the op’s callous evaluation of rape; the very act of assigning greater value to one person’s trauma over another’s in a game of whose-worst-experience-is-actually-the-worst did not simply lack in sympathy, it lacked in logic.

I felt fiercely compelled to comment on this post, despite the fact that I knew the macro would ignite a firestorm of argumentative outrage; I wanted to respond to the image in a way that dismantled its original argument without taking an exactly opposite stance. This is a rhetorical principle I picked up during my undergraduate years studying feminist theories and issues, and yet the op’s use of faulty comparative reasoning sent me spiraling back to a course called Mathematical Explorations, a class during which I mostly slacked off with other non-STEM students as a senior who simply hoped to fulfill her math requirement to graduate on time.

MATH 1300 was an experiential approach to mathematics (hence the name), a 3-credit attempt to expose students in various humanities and social science disciplines to the fundamentals of mathematical thinking. We did not crunch numbers, but we did attempt to adopt the mindset of someone who can evolve mathematical ideas; it was all about imagination, but was not necessarily fixated on technique or calculations. It was during one of our class sessions that our TA, a PhD student with a background in both math and philosophy (not an uncommon pairing), spoke about the concept of infinities – yes, plural – and that some infinities are bigger than other infinities. Many might recall this concept from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, a YA novel I admittedly own but failed to read before I saw the 2014 film adaptation in theaters.

Jamie ZabinskyWhen I felt the need to respond to the op’s “Rape isn’t the worst thing” post and the comments that followed, infinity seemed like an excellent stand-in for trauma. Here is my unedited comment, so you might experience my argument in its first iteration:

Jamie Zabinsky I feel like a decent analogy is that traumatic experiences are like infinities. Some infinities can be bigger than other infinities but that’s not quantifiable because they’re all infinities, abstractions, and greater than all other things in life. For a rape survivor, that is likely the worst thing – the biggest infinity. For someone who gets killed, well, that’s automatically the biggest, final infinity. For me it’s something else, and the same goes for others. To compare trauma across different lives makes as little sense to me as the futile concept of comparing infinities whose values are boundless and largely equitable though technically unequal.

Like trauma, the concept of infinity is nearly impossible for some people to grasp. And while I don’t claim to have mastered many or any abstract mathematical concepts, mathematicians have logically concluded that some infinite number sets (like real numbers, which include rational and irrational numbers) are ‘larger,’ though not in concretely quantifiable terms, than other infinite number sets (like natural numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on). Real numbers can contain decimals infinitely long in and of themselves, making a complete set of all real numbers as infinitely deep as it is wide. A set of all natural numbers, however, grows infinitely in a more linear sense; like real numbers, natural numbers do not end – but unlike real numbers, natural numbers do not appear to grow as vastly in infinite directions, they simply grow upwards and onwards.

Jamie ZabinskyI can say, abstractly, that the effects (both negative and positive) of any traumatic experiences I have lived through are immeasurably large and endlessly significant, like a set of numbers (in)valued at infinity. But I can also imagine that bigger infinities exist; somewhere, in another life, stories of different traumas might read as ‘worse’ to me than the ones I’ve collected over the last 22 years. And I can see, without needing to imagine, that there are privileges and luxuries I have been afforded in conjunction with my traumas: ‘it could have been worse,’ or ‘it wasn’t so bad,’ are easy frames of mind we slip into when we attempt to reconcile our lives with the real or imagined lives of others. We can, only in theoretical terms, conclude that perhaps some traumatic experiences could grow higher, or longer, or deeper in infinite manners than others. The crux of trauma, however, is that it signifies the most intensely (or violently, or depressingly, etc.) negative-perceived experience(s) in a person’s lifetime. Trauma is an infinity in the narrative of life, unable to be quantified, difficult to explain and, more often than not, deeply misunderstood.

It is entirely possible for people who have experienced multiple traumas to say that some experiences have had a larger, longer-lasting or deeper impact on their lives than others. All hardships are not equal, just as infinities can technically vary in innumerable size. But to assign fixed values to lived experiences like rape, other assault or abuse, childhood disruption in the home/family, combat, incarceration or witnessing death, destruction or massive violence – which all have endless capacities to impact the lives they touch – is a grossly reductionist endeavor, and runs the risk of erasing the importance of stories simply because we can imagine they ‘could be worse.’ We should, for the sake of recovery and compassion, accept the ambiguities of traumas rather than focus on the impossible task of quantifying their effects.

 


Jamie ZabinskyJamie Zabinsky is a recent Cornell University grad working in the PR industry. Lifelong learner of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, only now without the mandatory papers and graded assignments. Lover of memes, documentaries and cheese fries.

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EMERGING FEMINISMS, 1 in 4

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By Courtney Sylvester

**Content Warning: sexual violence, rape**

1 in 4 finally gets invited to a party 1 in 4 gets ready for a party by buying a pretty dress 1 in 4 accepts alcohol given to her by a cute guy from her class 1 in 4 finally feels like she fits in 1 in 4 flirts with the boy from her class and thinks nothing of it 1 in 4 gets compliments from said boy that makes 1 in 4 blush 1 in 4 gets separated from the crowd 1 in 4 starts to feel dizzy 1 in 4’s world goes black 1 in 4 wakes up not knowing where she is 1 in 4 notices she is naked 1 in 4 vomits and starts to shake 1 in 4 looks for her underwear, bra, and dress 1 in 4 feels alone 1 in 4 starts to cry 1 in 4 has someone walk in on her still naked and hears laughter 1 in 4 dresses but her underwear is ripped so she leaves it 1 in 4 goes home sobbing 1 in 4 is afraid to tell her parents 1 in 4 is ashamed and takes a shower 1 and 4 is asked by parents what happened 1 in 4 confesses 1 in 4’s parents worry about pregnancy and race of perpetrator 1 in 4 decides to keep quiet and not give any details 1 in 4 has panic attacks when she sleeps 1 in 4 goes to school and has classes with the boy 1 in 4 hears gossip being said about her 1 in 4 is told by some girls that he has pictures 1 in 4 is told she just wants attention 1 in 4 is told that just because she hooked up and feels bad about it now doesn’t mean she should change the story 1 in 4 loses friends because they say she is lying 1 in 4 sees boy move onto another girl but he still smiles at her 1 in 4 feels lost everywhere she goes 1 in 4 tries to talk to a counselor 1 in 4’s counselor tells her boys will be boys 1 in 4 tells her older brother 1 in 4’s brother tells her to keep quiet because he knows the boy and the boy wouldn’t do that 1 in 4 feels nauseated 1 in 4 starts skipping school and consequently fails her grade 1 in 4 drops out of school and gets GED 1 in 4 has a round belly 1 in 4 sees her old classmates sometimes and they make faces at her 1 in 4 gets prank calls 1 in 4 gets eggs thrown at her house and slashed tires on her car 1 in 4 files a report 1 in 4 is interrogated 1 in 4 is asked why she waited so long 1 in 4 doesn’t know 1 in 4 says it is her fault 1 in 4’s interrogator asks her how many people she has been with 1 in 4’s interrogator asks her to write down what happened and what he did exactly, did he violate you anally? 1 in 4 doesn’t remember 1 in 4’s interrogator is asking to have a DNA test on the baby after the little girl is born 1 in 4’s perpetrator says she asked for it 1 in 4 goes two long years before being told the case is inconclusive 1 in 4 gets put on medicine 1 in 4 gains weight 1 in 4 cant hold a job 1 in 4 longs for the day she can move away 1 in 4 can’t date 1 in 4 can’t be in crowded rooms 1 in 4 can’t smell Ralph Lauren cologne without getting sick 1 in 4 can’t sleep with the lights off 1 in 4 wears long sleeves and pants and gains more and more weight 1 in 4’s perpetrator is married now 1 in 4’s perpetrator wants custody 1 in 4’s perpetrator tells her that she was fantastic and went all night long 1 in 4 is told that he thought she was a virgin because he could hardly get it in 1 in 4 is told how he carried her and had to situate her up so he could enter her 1 in 4 is asked by perpetrator is she has ever heard of a bucking bronco? 1 in 4 says no and 1 in 4’s perpetrator tells her that’s when you fuck a girl from behind and then stick it up her ass really quick without her expecting it


Courtney Sylvester is a single mother, and a senior at Georgia Southern University. She cares deeply for women and the issues that concern them.

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EMERGING FEMINISMS, Unbirthing Little Red Riding Hood

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By Ramisa Raya

 

to kill your daughter,
wrap her up in white satin
and place her in the hands
of wolves

then when you find her
on your doorstep,
stained with scarlet:

lock your door,
shut your blinds,
and turn off the lights,

because
nobody is home.

  • murder weapon: shame

 

they
accused
me
of
crying
wolf–

they
couldn’t
see
through
the
woodcutter’s
mask–

until
it
was
too
late.

  • murder weapon: denial  

 

Mother,

I
disappeared yesterday
with a basket of lemons
and an empty flask
of wine

She
pressed a wrinkled finger
to my lips and filled
my hands

They
faltered under my gun–
their large ears,
eyes,
mouth twitched;
I saw red

You
ignored
my waving
scarlet hood

He
is gone,
you
are gone
she
is gone
but I remain

   murder weapon: abandonment

 


Ramisa is a law student and hobbyist writer. Her collection ‘Unbirthing Little Red Riding Hood’ is part of a greater anthology, ‘Speak’ – a collection of folklore and fairytale free-verse subversions that restore the voices lost (unspoken, silenced) in feminine discourse. She welcomes you warmly to her blog: http://ramisatheauthoress.wordpress.com/.

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#BlackSkinWhiteSin: Shielding Our Girls From Misogynoir…Even When It Comes From the Church

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By Kimberly Peeler-Ringer

I was getting a feel for my own preaching voice right around the time Juanita Bynum’s “No More Sheets” came out. I still have the cassette tape a friend gave me, saying, “gurl, you’ve got to hear her preach!” I remember how it made me feel: like the woman taken in adultery, all by herself, shamed and blamed. One thing in particular sticks out, Bynum’s admonition that “we don’t know what to do with all this body.” And based upon “No More Sheets Part 2,” we apparently still don’t:

That skirts are so tight and short until half of your thighs are out? And you‘re ministering, and you’re standing on pulpits…preaching and leading praise and worship with no stocking on…with thongy, stringy shoes on, your legs all greased up, what kind of message are you trying to send us? Because to me, that look like somebody that’s got a hoe spirit, that ain’t purged out in God and any minute you can just go over in a corner to a deacon, and just raise your dress up, and hit it right there in the corner, because you don’t even have drawers on. You got on thongs! And a bip bop skirt!

I will pick back up on Bynum’s quote in a moment, but a bit of back-story is warranted here. During the Civil Rights Movement Black Christians pricked the conscience of America by identifying racial segregation as a moral issue — that any treatment of Blacks as “less than” went against the teachings of Christ. Regrettably, the Black Christian response to sexism as a moral issue has not received the same kind of attention. Patriarchy, in its simplest terms, is the privileging of maleness, which functions much like racism in that there are institutional and embedded structures that oppress women through social, political and economic practices. Black women experience racism, sexism, classism and other isms in ways that make our experience unique. Scholar activist Moya Bailey refers to this as misogynoir, “the intersection of racism, anti-Blackness and misogyny that Black women face.”

Since the first African women and girls were forced upon slave ships where shipmates raped them repeatedly, stereotypes were crafted in order to normalize diabolical behavior. Joan Morgan explains the complete disregard for Black female humanity in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost when she writes, “that filthy task of satisfying baser needs was best left to black women, whose ‘hot-blooded’ constitutions rendered them strong enough to take it.” During both slavery and segregation, white rapists preying upon Black women and girls seldom faced any consequences. This prompted Rosa Parks to travel on behalf of the NAACP to take the statement of a woman who had been gang-raped by six white men in Alabama, a decade before she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider. Unfortunately, many stories like this are outlined in Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street.

Though many historians privileged the stories of men during North American slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, women writers like Morgan, McGuire, and others aid us in recovering women’s contributions and experiences. And so I wonder, what would it mean for Black churches to include Black women and girls’ histories of violence and liberation in the collective cultural memory? Too many in Black churches continue to privilege the male point of view — just as Bynum does in the quote above. Likewise, far too many Black churches and congregations embrace strands of the same theologies that enabled slaveholders to beat and rape a Black woman on Friday then go to church on Sunday, without any condemnation or conviction. What I mean to note here is how male lust is too often excused, and how it may lead to violences against everyone, but particularly women and girls.

What if we recovered and centered those stories and how entangled they are with demonizing stereotypes? What if we chose to critique masculinist libidinous gazing rather than police women’s bodies? The persistent devaluation and policing ravages Black female self-esteem. This is exactly what Bynum does in “No More Sheets Part 2.” She assumes men are victimized by women’s choice of dress and thus articulates shame-based rhetoric meant to make Black women and girls self-conscience about the curves God gave them. And this is merely an appetizer inviting self-loathing, the starter course for a meal too many Black theologies are serving up on a silver platter. At some point, we need to recognize how many pairs of Black women’s hands continue to help with the cooking. How many bodies are attached to those hands. And how many stories those bodies may recover, if given space.

We cannot expect Black women and girls to value themselves if we co-sign God’s name onto messages that suggest our bodies, and the celebration thereof, are demonic, that our sexuality is toxic, and that men have no responsibility to control their gazes or desires. With this in mind, it is imperative that we find ways to talk about women and girls’ bodies positively in the church, as divinely and wondrously made in God’s own image, as well as our histories. Not doing so helps maintain intersecting cultures of violence. To be clear, sexual assault is a much bigger problem than sexual arousal. 60% of our Black girls report experiencing sexual assault before reaching their 18th birthday (Black Women’s Blueprint). Some of these violences happen in the church and/or by church members. Failing to center sexism and classism (along with racism), recover women and girls’ histories of agency and violence, and their right to be autonomous consenting choosing bodies, enables such cultures of violence to thrive.

In “No More Sheets 2,” Bynum centers the male gaze when she blames women and girls for men that ‘fail their wives.’ But also, she ignores the church’s history of sexual abuse, and particularly where grown men are the aggressors against pubescent and teen girls. Ideally, the church should be a place of sanctuary. However, this cannot happen as long as the Black preaching tradition ties the Sacred to misogynoir, or as long as our talk about bodies privileges the heteropatriarchal male perspective. We need to collectively resist. But in the meantime Black women must do the hard work of shielding our girls. And this is no easy task. As “woke” as I think I am, I still have to fight to keep myself from internalizing messages that Black women’s bodies are locations of inherent lubricity. Truth is, like many of us, I was twelve years old the first time a random man propositioned me on the street. We need language and rituals to combat this. But if we continue teaching girls (and women) that they cause lust simply by inhaling and exhaling, then we are affirming not only that men are not responsible for their own self-control, but the act of violence itself. Moreover, what kind of message does this send about consent?

Empowering conversations in the church about sex, consent, pleasure, resistance, rape, desire, etc., which imagines the body — all bodies — as sacred rather than a source of unholy contempt, and sex as human rather than a gender specific samurai sword, allows us to consider the uplifting of women and girls as a moral issue. I certainly do and teach from that perspective. And I believe Jesus supports that. The church should never be a place where Black women experience misogynoir, particularly when you consider the struggle it would be simply to pay the light bill if Black women withdrew their financial support and left their churches en masse. But it shouldn’t be this sort of place  just because. Who wants to worship a God that tells you—and only you—that your temple is toxic? Perhaps we should consider that many young women have already left the building because the churches they attended failed to make them feel as though God is with them, or that God cares and sees them. Let’s just say there are spiritual consequences for all of this.


Minister Kimberly Peeler-Ringer is a former television news producer with graduate degrees in biblical and religious studies from the Morehouse School of Religion at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia and Vanderbilt University. She is the founder and creator of www.thechurchedfeminist.com, and has been selected as one of the contributors to the upcoming King Bey Bible anthology. She is also a Christian Education consultant who specializes in developing curriculum that privileges the African-American woman’s experience, and identifies as a Black feminist follower of The Way. “If a woman could carry the Word of God in her womb, she can surely carry it in her mouth.” You can follow her on Twitter @churchedfem.

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Date Grape by Freesia McKee

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Date Grape

 

“Brewer responds to protests about offensive beer name”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 7th, 2016

 

What if I took the worst thing

that’s happened to you

and joked about it

 

and joked about it

Using you as both

ammunition and target

 

Puckered up

shut down

What if I pit you

 

against yourself

Only a

joke Stoked to win

 

the same old contests

If I add some sour

to the sweetness

 

how does it taste?

 

Concord seedless

purple like a bruise

wrinkled fruit

 

The bitterest grape

the stapled shut lip

All the bars I’ve jumped

 

………………over sleeping in anger

………………holding

………………that sour grape

 

………………date rape

 

Freesia McKee is a working poet. Her words have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Argot Magazine, Burdock, and Sundress Press’s Political Punch anthology. Freesia co-hosted 57 episodes of The Subtle Forces, a weekly morning show on Riverwest Radio. She is moving this summer from Milwaukee to Miami to study poetry at Florida International University.

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EMERGING FEMINISMS, You Did.

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By Eunice Park

 

You didn’t speak – but you did stare
Smile right at me and bare
A rock tumbling back and forth
South & north
A disjointed compass directing you
To a heavy moan & laugh too

You didn’t touch – but you did speak
Ruin memories of a street I no longer seek
I was going out to eat
But you were going out to keep
A palate of breasts & ass
Only words, but enough to devour as I past

You didn’t penetrate – but you did touch
But you still loved me baby
Even when I screamed to save me
The law had an expiration date
For my Prince Charming transformed to Hate
I knew I was too late
When I was asked, “Why did you wait?”

You did stare.
              You did speak.
                            You did touch.

And when you knew no one cared to see –
You did penetrate me.

Laughing when investigations shrieked to a halt
My testimony now a grain of salt
You told the fashion police what I was wearing
What tempting fruit I was baring

You did stare.
              You did speak.
                            You did touch.

And when you knew no one cared to see –

You did penetrate
me.

 


Eunice Park is a student living in sunny Los Angeles, California. She is an avid reader, writer, and feminist, who is passionate about giving a voice to the underrepresented. Founder of the Girl Talk Organization, she dedicates her time to organizing online career seminars to connect girls in orphanages around the world to women in a variety of different career fields.  Always ready to learn new things and challenge existing beliefs, Eunice hopes to fuse her passions for language, culture, and politics as a social advocate. She can be reached at: eunicepark18@gmail.com

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Photographs from The Aftermath by Paige Megan Hawley

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My project, The Aftermath, was my way of coping with the after effects of rape. Each individual photograph reflects in detail what happened the night I was raped. Photographing and developing film was my way of beginning to heal, which lead on to my projects “Process” and “STOP”, developing the negatives by stopping the process, the development stages define my healing process of the after effects of rape.

I attended court this year to get justice from when I was raped. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the justice I wanted. It was the most difficult experience being made to feel like I’m the criminal when I am the victim. I stood up and made my voice be heard: no one should be silenced; I refused to be and still do. Others shouldn’t be silenced either. My photographs are to inspire others to go forward – the more exposure for this I think will help survivors to move forward in their lives and that, for me, is important.

 

Paige Megan Hawley, is a London based photographer, specialising in the fine art industry. The artist is looking to build a career within the creative industry of contemporary art. For more information: www.paigemeganhawley-photography.com

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Recovered Histories of Anti-Rape Activism: Celebrating Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Intersectional Approaches

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By The Feminist Wire Associate Editors

We write in celebration of our visionary sister and comrade/comadre, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, black lesbian feminist, cultural worker, filmmaker, incest and rape survivor, and the creator of NO! The Rape Documentary (2006). This feature-length, internationally acclaimed, award-winning film, with Portuguese, French, and Spanish subtitles, a two-hour supplemental educational video, and an accompanying 100-page study guide (funded by the Ford Foundation and published in 2007), which includes national rape and sexual assault resources organized by state and a bibliographic treasure box of over 90 recommended readings – urges us to call rape out and end it. The latter she notes as a “non-negotiable necessity.”

We want to pause and acknowledge Simmons and this black feminist labor of love not only because she is a pioneer of the contemporary anti-violence movement, but because her work, which began in 1994, helps ground current moves to raise awareness about rape, sexual assault, and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence. More, Aishah Shahidah Simmons provides an opening to center and make present the continuum of too-often invisibilized feminist labors against rape, in which her work is deeply rooted and from which it emerges.

NO! Production Still: featured Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, assistant director Nikki Harmon, set decorator Kia Steave-Dickerson_ associate producer /prod. manager Wadia Gardiner, Photographer ©1999

Recently, the #MeToo online movement has made space for women, some for the first time, to share their experiences of sexual harassment and violence. Initially, the hashtag was incorrectly deemed to originate with actress Alyssa Milano, who tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Milano’s tweet was a response to rape allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. However, #MeToo was in fact created a decade ago as “me too” (not an online campaign) by Tarana Burke, who is currently program director for Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity. And though the current iteration of #MeToo exemplifies a significant historical social media moment, it began as a grassroots social movement, with the aim of empowering young women of color sexual assault survivors.

#MeToo, though initially focused on young women of color, seems in the current moment to have transcended race. This matters. It matters because women of color have been doing the work of “me too” for a very long time. And yet even proper attribution, though important, fails to offer adequate recognition of so many other women. In contemporary viral moments, we routinely fail to note the intricate layers, nuances, and intersections of these voices and works across several decades of anti-rape activism. It also matters that Milano is an Italian American Hollywood actress, best known for television shows like Who’s the Boss?, Melrose Place, and Charmed. It matters that she is an actress/activist who happens to have the ear not only of Hollywood but many Americans. Milano’s tweet calls rape culture back to consciousness in a very particular time in history, against a very famous white man – with very famous and mostly white survivors – and within the context of a “pussy grabbing” white nationalist hetero-patriarchal misogynist capitalist trans-antagonistic POTUS. The wide-ranging and fiery response to Milano’s tweet may very well be a covert way of saying #HimToo.

In short, Milano’s tweet likely caught on as it did not because critiques of rape culture are novel, but because hashtag activism makes anti-violence resistance accessible, easy to grasp, and contagious, and because who tweets about what, how we imagine the survivors, and who we visualize the perpetrator/s to be, matters. Still, online activism, with its tendency to strike quickly and then fade in response to moments such as this, is often ignorant of its historical precursors. Grounding viral moments in their historical, theoretical, and movement-based genealogies is critical, both to name the labor that made the moment possible and to ensure that discussions and actions continue beyond the Internet.

To be sure, online and hashtag activism may generate benefits, including providing discursive space. A great example is the Black Lives Matter network, which was first introduced to many of us as a hashtag. Notwithstanding BLM’s successes, some of the challenges of online and hashtag activism more broadly are that it erases herstories, movements, complexities, and laborers. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, #BlackLivesMatter developed out of longer and continuing movements of and for Black liberation. So too do contemporary incarnations of the anti-rape movement.  

#MeToo was not created in a vacuum. It is not a single story. And its focus is not limited to rich white cis men who victimize. The anti-rape movement is about the eradication of heteropatriarchal white supremacy writ large and its specific manifestations of sexual, gender, and racial violence. And if we look at the contributions of radical diverse women who have been fighting against rape culture for two centuries, we see the herstories of sexual violence across inter-racial, intra-racial, and intra-communal lines. It’s easy to critique white supremacy and white feminists for erasures and white men for rape. It’s more difficult to provide complex and winding history that forces us to broaden the map of violences and resistances, and engage intra-communally and historically.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Toni Cade Bambara, & Kim Hinckson, 1994 courtesy: ©

It is not lost on us how the works of first-, second-, and third-wave black and of color feminists have been left out of the current discourse, or how Burke’s initial focus on young women of color and intra-racial rape in communities of color has been excised. Rape culture impacts all women. But what cannot be ignored is how the emphasis on “all women,” particularly in hashtag activism culture, tends to decenter black women and women of color, and how each have herstories of intersecting oppressions and violences that are overwhelmingly increased because of race, ethnicity, and gender reinforcing each other. Further, some women’s narratives of sexual violence have historically been disbelieved, and are still suspect now.

In fact, as Kimberlé Crenshaw argued in 1989, sex discrimination laws were put in place to protect white female sexuality/chastity (from black men), not to protect black women. Yet sexual violence was often the pretext for terrorizing black communities. She posits, “sexist expectations of chastity and racist assumptions of sexual promiscuity combined to create a distinct set of issues confronting black women.” That is, gender makes black women and girls susceptible to sex domination and violence, while blackness denies them state or local protection. Crenshaw notes that some courts went as far as to instruct juries that black women were not to be presumed chaste, leaving them to fend for themselves. Of course, the erasure of some survivors over others is nothing new. Similarly, the blotting out of black and of color anti-rape activists is not innocuous.

NO! Production Still: featured interviewee Barbara Smith and producer/director Aishah Shahidah Simmons)_Joan Brannon, photographer ©1999

We understand anti-rape activism as the resistance to sexual coercion in daily practice and its institutionalized forms. Because rape, as Angela Y. Davis argued in 1978, is the social relations of capitalism and a capitalist interstate system infused with patriarchy and racism, its existence is historic, intentional, and pervasive. Historically, anti-rape activism is present in the contexts of state-sanctioned sexual, gender, and racial violence during colonial and imperial conquests and acts of war; within institutions such as slavery, marriage, prison, health care, immigration, and education; and in the daily acts of our socio-economic and political interpersonal relationships. Anti-rape activism is fueled by and exists alongside sexual violence, be it within survivors alone, or in collectivity with others who strategize against harm. The politicization of our contemporary anti-rape movement is grounded in the global histories of decolonization and Third World Liberation, anti-slavery and abolitionary struggles, and U.S. anti-war, Black Power, civil and labor rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and feminist movements.  

The 1960s and 1970s are central to historic understanding of U.S. anti-rape activism, particularly in its institutional formations. The anti-violence work of these decades was deeply informed by Indigenous and Black women’s activism against white supremacist sexual coercion and exploitation that extends back into U.S. settler colonialism and slavery. These efforts developed hand in hand with women’s liberation movements toward greater economic, reproductive, sexual, and cultural autonomy. Anti-rape activism became entangled with other movements, including white middle-class women’s economic empowerment, in ways that made some pathways possible for these women while closing off opportunities for women of color and poor women.

NO! Production Still: producer/director Aishah Shahidah Simmons and featured interviewee Johnnetta Betsch Cole _Joan Brannon, Photographer ©1999

Anti-rape activists for decades have worked, together and sometimes apart, to raise awareness of sexual violence and to strategize against it. Interventions have targeted “private” lives and political institutions, while at the same time challenging the divide between public and private. The Combahee River Collective, Flo Kennedy, June Jordan, This Bridge Called My Back, and many other anti-racist efforts pushed to account for the whiteness of the 1960s-1970s anti-rape movement, grounding the work in a more expansive understanding of slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism that targets Black, Indigenous, Third World, women of color, and queer and gender non-conforming bodies. The movement was refigured again by the spread of neoliberalism and inclusion of anti-rape efforts inside institutions via Title IX and sexual harassment law, moves that reframed anti-rape as largely a middle-class white women’s concern. How, scholars and activists have asked, can the movement remain radical when funded by the State?

Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Black feminist scholar-activist Beverly Guy-Sheftall at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia_Michael Simmons, photographer ©1996

NO! The Rape Documentary (and its supplemental materials), as it explores the transnational operations, reality, and effects of rape, sexual assault, and other forms of violence committed against women and girls, and as it deploys first-person testimony, spirituality, activism, and the academic and cultural works of Black folk, is a continuation of historical work, particularly the intersectional lessons of Black feminists who laid the groundwork for anti-rape activism in Black and other communities. Simmons’s cinematically groundbreaking work is significant because it forces us to think about rape through BLACK women’s experiences and intra-communally. That is, it pushes us to call out and resist not only the Weinsteins in every industry but the Bill Cosbys and R. Kellys, too. It refuses invisibility, marginalization and/or tokenism and demands a social, political, cultural, ideological, structural, institutional, and interpersonal shift.

Earlier this year, Simmons gave a powerful presentation to students of all genders and sexualities at King-Drew Magnet High School in South Los Angeles, a predominantly Black and Latinx campus.  Simmons’ presentation was followed by student-led workshops on sexual violence, harassment, and rape culture conducted by youth from the Women’s Leadership Project.  Simmons’ statements on the connection between white supremacist hetero-normative violence and racialized sexual terrorism against girls of color resonated strongly with WLP students.  Twelfth grade student Drea Wooden noted that normalized sexual violence against Black girls and girls of color is seldom discussed on most school campuses.  Tenth grader Cheyanne Mclaren stressed that Simmons’ talk reaffirmed that “sexual violence is an important issue for communities of color because women of color are seen as lesser in value than white women and women of color aren’t getting the justice they deserve.”

WLP students, peer educator Issachar Curbeon, Aishah S. Simmons & TFW’s Sikivu Hutchinson

We are celebrating Simmons because her work marks a pivotal moment in anti-rape activism. Because NO! let’s you know what you need to know fast” (“Because We”), and has inspired new generations of womanists and feminists to resist and take action against a global regime of sexual violence. Because she reminds us that all oppressions are linked. Because she holds us accountable to how we respond to sexual violence. Because she charts an Afro-futurist path for collectively doing things differently and imagining and realizing communities free of rape, assault, and incest.  Because this work was created in community for community. Because NO! centers and hopes to heal black and brown sacred flesh. Because Simmons has shown up for us and for survivors everywhere. Because when and where she enters, she brings all the anti-rape feminist and womanist foremothers, co-laborers, and survivors with her. Because Aishah Shahidah Simmons taught us that NO! is a complete sentence that not only explicitly names rape, which may sometimes be cause for erasure because language is political, but unequivocally refuses it and calls us and our communities to action.

The post Recovered Histories of Anti-Rape Activism: Celebrating Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Intersectional Approaches appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

EMERGING FEMINISMS, Where Flowers Can Grow

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By Anastasia L.

**Content Notice: discussion of sexual assault and violence**

When I was twelve, I was first sexually assaulted by a relative while we watched a movie. It was dark, I was alone. In an instant, I knew what it was like to be an adult through the stress put onto me by the actions of one man. I let him stay until the credits started to roll, then I hurried him out of the house, closing my front door, and securing the lock, I got into the shower until the early hours of the morning.

For years, I couldn’t talk about, or even acknowledge, my experience. I tried desperately to understand why I had gone from carefree, happy, and lively to depressed and untrusting within such a short span of time. I was diagnosed as having an anxious personality and a healthy dosage of teen angst. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I confessed what had happened to me to a school counselor. I told her not only about the night my relative came over to watch a movie, but about Easter Sunday, about the carpet of his condo, about every instance of touch that was unwanted, yet that I somehow ended up on the receiving end.

After that, I couldn’t stop talking.

I told countless people, some of them strangers, about what had happened to me. I was constantly going over the narrative in my head. It was like I had to warn people of what happened to me so that they would understand my shyness, why I built a wall around myself. At times, I even felt like I was protecting others from meeting the same fate.

I didn’t realize it then, but talking was my way of processing these events that I had pushed away for so long. Something that I should have dealt with years earlier was beginning to excavate from a place inside of myself that I had never dared touch.

I am an adult now, a college student, and much less vocal than I was, say, two years ago. I sought treatment through the necessary channels, I did everything that someone who has been through sexual trauma is supposed to do. My only choice now is waiting.

At first, I was waiting to die myself. I temporarily lost my will to live in those “between” years – the years that I used whatever means I could to forget what had happened on my couch, on the floor. But this changed after I told someone about what had happened to me. I could not be content with allowing myself to disappear anymore. Finding solace had to come from elsewhere.

After exploring the mediums usually recommended to survivors of childhood trauma—meditation, therapy, mindfulness—a thought crept into my mind, which quells the anxieties I still face on a daily basis.

This comforting thought? A simple fact: one day, my abuser will die.

I do not wait for news of his death for reasons of revenge (which, I have accepted, I will never get because you can never get revenge on someone who took such a large part of you away). I no longer have contact with the man who hurt me, but I do pray every day that he is not hurting someone else. I, save for a few instances of paranoid thought, no longer fear for the worst. I know it’s next to impossible that he will ever contact me again. But I do know that he could very willingly harm another, and the thought of having this type of shared connection with someone unknown is the one thought that keeps my past alive.

I know that I will feel a sense of relief when he passes. Relief for myself and relief for other women “out there” who he had regular contact with. And yet, I do not place all of my life’s value in this inevitable future event. He lives his life, and I live mine, and both of us will be gone from this earth, taking with us our actions and the consequences of them. I have other things that preoccupy my mind. That’s the pleasantry of having dealt with the past. You have time to consider other, more valuable meanderings. He, my abuser, isn’t the front of me anymore, wearing my face as a mask.

Women who have been sexually abused or assaulted often fall into a space of self blame, both because of societal expectation and due to recounted memory of the body “freezing” during the assault. I still struggle with this idea, and often I catch myself wondering what I could have done differently in those situations of abuse. A part of me is always aware that it was never my fault—I was a child when I was abused. Someone made the choice to hurt me. Reclaiming my body and my sexuality forced me to come to this conclusion. There was no other way for me to heal.

We, those who are healing, can find peace in the idea that our abusers and attackers will perish, will not be a threat to anyone. The fear that once seized my heart is no longer such a dominating force in my life. With this realization, I have been able to progress with myself in a way that I never thought possible. A man who hurt me has no more power over my life than a stranger walking next to me down the street.

The haunt and hurt will never fade. I’ve accepted this, as one must. As I slowly try to piece together my life – understanding my experience through nonprofit work, writing, and discussion – I conclude that I cannot mourn myself any longer. I cannot treat my body like the graveyard of my former self, treating my person as a shell. There was a time when I denied myself sustenance, when I treated myself as lesser because I had been so violated. In the moments where I think of the pieces of me I will never again find, when I am tempted to regress into that state of half living, I repeat to myself – not anymore. Not anymore.

I am not the guide to trauma recovery, a guru of healing. I am simply a person, trying to get through each moment the best that I can. However, I do profess to believe in the healing power of one’s consciousness. I read the self help books and I do the healing every day. Of course, it is never one hundred percent; will it ever be? I am not sure, but I am aware of my own capacity to stitch together the parts of me that were once ripped to shreds.

I transformed my pain into a place where new life can occur.


sunflower-resizedAnastasia is majoring in Psychology. They are passionate about immigration issues, ending violence against women, and LGBTQA+ activism. When not studying or advocating, Anastasia can be found with their nose in a book, running, or power napping.

The post EMERGING FEMINISMS, Where Flowers Can Grow appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

EMERGING FEMINISMS, Why I Read the Comments

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By Amelia Roskin-Frazee

 

**Content Warning: sexual violence, hate speech**

 

We’ve all had at least one friend tell us, “Don’t read the comments.”

The Comments. The He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named section of the internet. The internet equivalent of a car crash you’re oh-so-tempted to stare at even though you know you shouldn’t.

We’ve all seen our fair share of horrific comments underneath articles and blog posts. In June, I catfished Donald Trump supporters on Facebook and found a comments section in which a commenter said he’d beat a Muslim child with a baseball bat. I’ve had commenters tell me sexual assault survivors like myself are just “females who put themselves into compromising positions” or “liars who deserve to be fucked up the ass.” And that’s nothing compared to the death threats I found in comments sections below articles about fellow sexual assault survivor Emma Sulkowicz.

But I still read comments sections. I’m not masochistic — trust me, no one can derive pleasure from reading through the verbal equivalent of diarrhea and violent hate speech — but determined to defend free speech.

When I say “free speech,” I’m not talking about threat-laced comments. We seem to have this idea that “free speech” is the same as “hate speech,” and fighting against hate speech makes us thought police or too politically correct. However, freedom of speech was designed to protect ideas, words, and expression, from the brilliant to the absurd. Bigotry and threats aren’t just a form of expression; they’re intimidation and violence. In conflating intimidation and speech, we’re elevating rape threats to the same level as other dialogue. There’s an enormous difference between angry disagreement and a direct verbal attack that threatens another person’s bodily safety.

The irony is in ignoring the vitriolic bigotry and sexual harassment in comments sections out of fear of censorship, we’ve only further censored marginalized people such as women, people of color, queer and trans people, and people with disabilities. Comments sections are no longer accessible for anyone who isn’t a white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, wealthy man.

How did we get to this point? It’s more than just a fear of censorship; it extends to the idea that we, the commenters’ targeted communities, shouldn’t feed the trolls by challenging them. This is actually just another version of the argument commenters have made to me about my rapes: I, as a comment reader, shouldn’t put myself in the “compromising position” of exposing myself to threats. Reading the comments means I’ve given some troll the opportunity to call me a dyke, bitch, or list a hundred different ways they’d like to see me get raped again.

I actually loathe the name “troll” because it makes it sound like those posting slurs and threats are a different species and thus unaccountable. However, internet trolls are real people. People typing away at cafés while listening to music. People who have spouses and children and jobs. People who find the idea of a woman speaking up about her rights being taken away worthy of threatening her with bodily harm. People who find it “funny” to type the n-word. By calling these people “trolls,” we’re distorting the reality that each comment is written by a person. And as we’ve seen from the Pulse shooting in Orlando and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, bigoted trolls can and do come to life.

Reading the comments is scary. Every time I see a rape threat, I can’t help but wonder if my rapist is sitting somewhere in his Columbia dorm room typing it. I can’t help but wonder if the commenter from the Trump support group will one day follow through and beat Muslim children. I can’t help but wonder if one day, the folder of screenshots I have of death threats made against Emma Sulkowicz will be subpoenaed for a homicide trial.

But I still read the comments because someone needs to. I need to post words of support for those brave enough to share their stories online. We need to let commenters know they’re being watched and their actions are unacceptable.

I also completely understand if you choose not to read comments as a way to support your own self-care. But for those who do, and can, read the comments, please be more of a presence. Even better, write your own comment. Outnumber the bigotry with support, or challenge the bigotry directly. Until we hold commenters accountable for their violence and intimidation, even by simply ensuring they know their words don’t go unnoticed, hate will continue to fester both online and off. We’ll continue to have Orlandos and Charlestons, and the internet will grow increasingly violent and inaccessible to those of us targeted by commenters’ violent language.


amelia-headshotAmelia Roskin-Frazee is a B.A. candidate at Columbia University where she is an organizer with No Red Tape, Columbia Queer Alliance, and the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network. Outside of school, she is the Founder and President of The Make It Safe Project and serves on the National Advisory Council for GLSEN. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Feministing, and Femmes Unafraid.

The post EMERGING FEMINISMS, Why I Read the Comments appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Trauma and Infinities: How Math Sharpened My Feminism

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By Jamie Zabinsky

On one of my 90-minute train commutes this summer, I came across a post in my beloved ‘weird Facebook’ group that pulled me out of a cramped-middle-seat-stupor and into the woke world of lively discourse. In a black sans serif font, the image read “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” across what appeared to be a childhood picture of the op (original poster). This macro (a picture superimposed with text) fit with the general aesthetic of the group – a community of 17,000+ people from around the world who come together to share original pieces of what I call “internet art,” or anything fit for artistic online consumption that is NOT already a meme.


Jamie ZabinskyPosts in our group are usually self-deprecating, offensive to the outside (and often inside) world, or cater to thoughts of depression, sexuality, vulgarity, anxiety, irreverence, suicide, anti-normativity or existentialism. The posts are known to regularly reflect points of view that range from outright absurdist to apocalyptic. “Rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you” had little shock value in a group like this, but it touched something in me. Commenters responded with questions like, “You’re right. 20 years of torture is worse. Or is that the same? Idk” and “ive met ppl who say “if i was raped id kill myself” or sincerely try to say with a straight face that rape is worse than murder lmao ok.” They felt compelled to rank things like murder and torture against rape, as if to say that any one is definitively and objectively more ideal than the others.

This back-and-forth in my Facebook group struck a nerve in me. The attempt to hierarchize traumatic experiences hit me in a sensitive spot that has grown deep and wide over a lifetime of coping with the fallout of my own (non-sexual) traumas; to know trauma is to have a cavity in your side, one filled to the brim with pained empathy for friends and strangers alike who are surviving through everything from sexual assault to the death of loved ones on a daily basis. So I took great issue with the op’s callous evaluation of rape; the very act of assigning greater value to one person’s trauma over another’s in a game of whose-worst-experience-is-actually-the-worst did not simply lack in sympathy, it lacked in logic.

I felt fiercely compelled to comment on this post, despite the fact that I knew the macro would ignite a firestorm of argumentative outrage; I wanted to respond to the image in a way that dismantled its original argument without taking an exactly opposite stance. This is a rhetorical principle I picked up during my undergraduate years studying feminist theories and issues, and yet the op’s use of faulty comparative reasoning sent me spiraling back to a course called Mathematical Explorations, a class during which I mostly slacked off with other non-STEM students as a senior who simply hoped to fulfill her math requirement to graduate on time.

MATH 1300 was an experiential approach to mathematics (hence the name), a 3-credit attempt to expose students in various humanities and social science disciplines to the fundamentals of mathematical thinking. We did not crunch numbers, but we did attempt to adopt the mindset of someone who can evolve mathematical ideas; it was all about imagination, but was not necessarily fixated on technique or calculations. It was during one of our class sessions that our TA, a PhD student with a background in both math and philosophy (not an uncommon pairing), spoke about the concept of infinities – yes, plural – and that some infinities are bigger than other infinities. Many might recall this concept from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, a YA novel I admittedly own but failed to read before I saw the 2014 film adaptation in theaters.

Jamie ZabinskyWhen I felt the need to respond to the op’s “Rape isn’t the worst thing” post and the comments that followed, infinity seemed like an excellent stand-in for trauma. Here is my unedited comment, so you might experience my argument in its first iteration:

Jamie Zabinsky I feel like a decent analogy is that traumatic experiences are like infinities. Some infinities can be bigger than other infinities but that’s not quantifiable because they’re all infinities, abstractions, and greater than all other things in life. For a rape survivor, that is likely the worst thing – the biggest infinity. For someone who gets killed, well, that’s automatically the biggest, final infinity. For me it’s something else, and the same goes for others. To compare trauma across different lives makes as little sense to me as the futile concept of comparing infinities whose values are boundless and largely equitable though technically unequal.

Like trauma, the concept of infinity is nearly impossible for some people to grasp. And while I don’t claim to have mastered many or any abstract mathematical concepts, mathematicians have logically concluded that some infinite number sets (like real numbers, which include rational and irrational numbers) are ‘larger,’ though not in concretely quantifiable terms, than other infinite number sets (like natural numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on). Real numbers can contain decimals infinitely long in and of themselves, making a complete set of all real numbers as infinitely deep as it is wide. A set of all natural numbers, however, grows infinitely in a more linear sense; like real numbers, natural numbers do not end – but unlike real numbers, natural numbers do not appear to grow as vastly in infinite directions, they simply grow upwards and onwards.

Jamie ZabinskyI can say, abstractly, that the effects (both negative and positive) of any traumatic experiences I have lived through are immeasurably large and endlessly significant, like a set of numbers (in)valued at infinity. But I can also imagine that bigger infinities exist; somewhere, in another life, stories of different traumas might read as ‘worse’ to me than the ones I’ve collected over the last 22 years. And I can see, without needing to imagine, that there are privileges and luxuries I have been afforded in conjunction with my traumas: ‘it could have been worse,’ or ‘it wasn’t so bad,’ are easy frames of mind we slip into when we attempt to reconcile our lives with the real or imagined lives of others. We can, only in theoretical terms, conclude that perhaps some traumatic experiences could grow higher, or longer, or deeper in infinite manners than others. The crux of trauma, however, is that it signifies the most intensely (or violently, or depressingly, etc.) negative-perceived experience(s) in a person’s lifetime. Trauma is an infinity in the narrative of life, unable to be quantified, difficult to explain and, more often than not, deeply misunderstood.

It is entirely possible for people who have experienced multiple traumas to say that some experiences have had a larger, longer-lasting or deeper impact on their lives than others. All hardships are not equal, just as infinities can technically vary in innumerable size. But to assign fixed values to lived experiences like rape, other assault or abuse, childhood disruption in the home/family, combat, incarceration or witnessing death, destruction or massive violence – which all have endless capacities to impact the lives they touch – is a grossly reductionist endeavor, and runs the risk of erasing the importance of stories simply because we can imagine they ‘could be worse.’ We should, for the sake of recovery and compassion, accept the ambiguities of traumas rather than focus on the impossible task of quantifying their effects.

 


Jamie ZabinskyJamie Zabinsky is a recent Cornell University grad working in the PR industry. Lifelong learner of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, only now without the mandatory papers and graded assignments. Lover of memes, documentaries and cheese fries.

The post Trauma and Infinities: How Math Sharpened My Feminism appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

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