Hopeful Coalition: a Response to Dustin Goltz and Kimberlee Perez

Yesterday was my three year anniversary with Sam, my favorite collaborator.  I wanted to write today about our collaboration, our work together in art and scholarship, because I believe that “the meanings we make alongside those we love, particularly across lines of difference, allow us to remake our assumptions and widen our vision of the political field” (Goltz and Perez 247).  And we have done that together, continue to do that.  We challenge each other, push back and forth against each other's ideological commitments within our own commitment to each other, to an US.

Although I think our collaborative narrative is an important one, and I do want to write it/perform it, I can't ignore the larger implications of Dustin Goltz's and Kimberly Perez's work.  We are in a unique historical and political moment of radical democracy in action, of collaborative, collective decision-making and grassroots action.

The social, spatial, and of course political 'occupy' endeavor that has swept through the country and the world started on September 17th, 2011 when thousands of people increasingly agitated by the glaring disparity of wealth took to the streets in New York City in an attempt to publicly voice this agitation.  “Occupy Wall Street” started as a small action in the face of a gigantic issue proclaiming that 1% of the population comprised of an economic elite effectively dominate the remaining 99%.  While the economic validity of this claim is questionable and in no way functions as an analysis of class, it is both a broad and accurate enough rallying point. (The Second Psychogeographical Association)

Our own Occupy Carbondale is 17 days old today.

I wasn't always frustrated with identity politics.  At 16, 17, 18 years old, I was a good lesbian and a good activist.  I went to all the right events, wore all the right shades of purple on all the right days; hell, I even started a Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school.  But when my first serious partner Heather became my first serious partner Aiden, the lines in the sand started washing away.  When she transitioned to he, when Aiden occupied those dangers spaces between the poles of the binary, the lines on the stage of identity performance smeared, like chalk under feet that tracks the movement of a body. The name on my body no longer reflected my body's movement.  How could I be a lesbian when I was dating a man?

Thinking a name change may be just the thing to ease my discomfort, I took up “queer” and kept on with the GLBTQIAA leadership trainings, the GLSEN workshops, the drag shows, the AIDs marches... all the trappings of a good activist.  Then at 22, I started dating a bio-male for the first time in my life, and all the sudden, my lesbians friends were nowhere to be seen.  But I was still queer, wasn't I?  My name hadn't changed this time, just the relationships.  I felt rejected and angry; I felt like my activism had been just another waste of time, just another example of effort wasted in the face of a hegemony that knew just how to divide and conquer, or perhaps just conquer regardless.  “I believe in coalition, I do, but most coalitions don't believe in me” (256).

Academia didn't really help.  “Casting ourselves as authoritative critical scholars, we sing tunes of social justice with deceptive ease, erasing the politics of relation between scholars and the bodies from which and about whom they theorize” (255).  I could see why people called it the ivory tower.  My classed body struggled to learn new middle-class decorum, professional dress, academese innocent of swearing (my native tongue), new time commitments that exhausted and drained, and worst of all, I thought, the armchair activists.  Now I know the “armchair activist” thing is too facile a critique, and I don't really mean it, most of the time.  But “I also experience the gap between theory and practice.  I'm sick of talking.  I want to do something. [...] It's a bias.  I have it.  I'm dealing with it” (253).

Needless to say, I have been pretty cynical these last few years, watching the world fall to shit around me with a shrug.  What can ya do?  I thought.  Put a fork in me, because I'm done.

Enter the Occupy.  I started getting Facebook messages and texts from the former Vice President of that GSA I started, excited messages about a new movement starting, about people practicing democracy and camping on the streets, about the 99% and an end to economic injustice.  Messages of possibility from a person I had loved once.  But I didn't want to get my hopes up too high; I've been let down before by revolutionaries and their protests.

So I found Occupy St. Louis, and just a few days after they set their camp up, I drove up there, with my partner, one of my best friends, and another good friend who I knew would be down for an adventure and maybe an arrest.  That first time, I dared to consider hope again, and the second time I went, I realized that it wasn't a consideration anymore—I had full blown, this-shit-is-real hope.  I was deaf clapping at my computer when Dr. Cornel West said, “Don't be afraid to call this a revolution.”  I was moved to tears by the sound of my voice joining with fellow occupiers as we chanted, “Tell me what democracy looks like!  This is what democracy looks like!”

For so long, we have been taught to hold each other apart, to examine each other under microscopes of Oppression Olympics in which we all come out losers, and some losers get held up on pedestals as exemplars of suffering so that the rest of us will learn to quit fucking whining already.  Even when we reach out, “words such as 'man,' 'woman,' 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'white,' 'brown,' 'patriarchy,' and 'hegemony' work to discipline and shame us back to opposing corners of the space” (264).

But not in the occupied zones.  The Occupation “resists cooption, heirarchical order, singluarily, and definition.  This endeavor is fragmented, altered, singular, and collective; it is autonomous, site-specific and moves both toward and away from recognized goals” (The Second Psychogeographical Association).  It “bring our differential intersubjectivities together over and across the boundaries of identity politics” (Goltz and Perez 250).  It's strength is in its grounding in relationship.

Though when asked, many people would point to the General Assemblies where we perform the consensus decision-making model as the site of our work at the Occupation, but really it's in all the other things that the work happens.  It's in the conversations we have under our canopies in the cold at 3am, the art we make together, the meals we cook and eat together, it's in sleeping next to each other, and telling stories about ourselves. “Listening to one another's stories is a necessary part of the process of understanding across difference, and thus the narration of self in dialogue, in discussion, in contestation, and in collaborative relation is central to our project/process” (248).

Although the tensions of identity politics intervene in the production of our notions of self and other, a politics of relation resituates subjectivity from the social location of individuals to the relations between them (Carrillo Rowe, Power).  It is a gesture that shifts subject formation from the individual toward the relational, and toward a coalitional subjectivity.  […] In generating collaborative personal narratives, relations shift and potentially open up spaces for alternate imaginaries as we dialogue across points that divide and bring us together. (249)

Our General Assemblies are just the formalizing of all that other work we've been doing, in order to come to decisions we all can live with, situated in our relationships with one another, and our acknowledgment of each other's unique positions of empowerment and disenfranchisement.

The complexity of our relations to one another and to these issues [of economic injustice] brings us together and pulls us apart.  Flesh to flesh, our bodies stand and our stories dialogue with and through one another in an effort to materialize a coalitional subjectivity, an US, through a collaborative personal narrative. […] we hold desire, vulnerability, tension, commitment, and a trust that mirrors standing naked in front of each other, hesitating and exposing shames, hopes, resentments, and biases, despite the fear. (250)

But this isn't really about the Occupy movement.  It's about the potential for coalition-building, and our deep need for it.  “The 'I' has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or a set of relations” (262), and my story of coalition doesn't begin with Occupy; it begins with Sam.

It was in this relationship that I began to understand how coalition-building might work, the daily struggle of living together despite of and in love with difference.  I am a BIRACIAL-LOWERCLASS-QUEER-GIRL and he is a WHITE-MIDDLECLASS-QUEER-GUY; we find coalition first in our love for one another, second in our theoretical/aesthetic commitments... then we struggle to keep building.  It isn't about compromise; if we'd been compromising all along, we'd not have made it three years.  It's about creating something new, together.  Like Dustin and Kimberlee, we worked first as a duo to create, write, rehearse, perform, and live together.  And it was this smaller-scale work that allowed me ideological entrance to Occupied space.  We started with dialogue, and now move to a larger community and enter into poly-logue.  “Many of the problems being discussed [there and here] are obvious to anyone paying attention, yet the ability to address them in public civic space is what is missing from the equation” (The Second Psychogeographical Association).  This is where performance comes in, where the occupation comes in, where my relationship with Sam fits in this larger dynamic of social action and change.  Don't be afraid to call this, our intersubjectivity, a revolution.

It's no longer possible to bury our heads in the illusions of suburban life, a righteous government, the goodness of our people, and the uncomplicated threat of others.  As much as that world is the very cause of so much violence, I mourn this too.  The simplicity I felt by drawing lines, building walls, and letting soldiers I don't know go to faraway places and fight people with no name, face, voice, or humanity.  The world was easier then.  Now the hypocrisy of the ways my head is half in the sand most of the time eats me apart, as the world, which was never easy—but was allowed to seem easy—will never seem so uncomplicated again. (262)

The beginning is near.


For Goltz and Perez's full article:
Perez, Kimberlee, and Dustin Bradley Goltz. "Treading Across Lines In The Sand: Performing Bodies In Coalitional Subjectivity." Text & Performance Quarterly 30.3 (2010): 247-268.  Print.

Occupy Carbondale: Reflections on a Week

Occupy Carbondale Sign Erected 15 Oct. 2011

What a crazy rollercoaster this last week has been.  On the Global Day of Action, a call put out by Occupy Wall St. for people worldwide to join the movement for economic justice and an end to the corporatization of our government, Occupy Carbondale was begun.

Occupiers setting up camp

After a march of solidarity with the Peace Coalition, we began setting up our occupation on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  We chose this location for a variety of reasons:

• to align ourselves with the current labor disputes
• to reach the student population
• visibility at a major intersection
• access to facilities at the gaia house
• the campus is a protected free speech zone

The first few days went by without a hitch.  I mean, sure, it was a bit of a bumpy ride.  But forming a new community is always a bumpy ride.  The consensus process is long and messy; it's not a model we are familiar with in our culture of NOW.  It takes dedication and commitment, as well as the willingness to listen, really listen.

We do have a fun little provocateur, Frank, who started the Facebook Group "Being Against Occupy Carbondale." Mostly, he just drives by multiple times a night; noticeably, he only harasses us when he has friends with him.  Among their favourite tactics seem to be playing Rush Limbaugh out his window over a loud speaker, though tonight he switched it up to "What is Love," which was actually a refreshing change of pace.  They also threw a "care package" out of the window one night that included beef taquitoes (YUM!), a pair of panties, a pregnancy test, and Sarah Palin's book.  Of course, we appreciated the "donation," and proceeded to do a sexy group reading.

Though much of the movement is grounded in conversation and process, it certainly isn't as easy as it looks.  Learning how to be with one another is hard work.  We're making up our own rules from scratch, figuring out how to provide for each other, care for each other, and move forward with a new logic of radical democracy.  The conversations are challenging; the people are amazing.  With each passing day, it feels like we become more like a big family - a constantly shifting, growing, and changing family, but a family nonetheless.  I can't lie, much of my heart is occupied with occupy.

Unfortunately, at 5.30am Wednesday morning, the campus police woke us up.  It was about 38-39 degrees at the time, and raining.  They demanded we take down our tents.  Time frame?  Now.  Can we have some time to talk?  No.  The whole day was incredibly intense; I'm still not sure how to process all of what happened other than to say that I'm still emotionally exhausted.  I'm the kind of person who cries when I get pulled over for a broken brake light, and there I was, resisting police directives. Instead of typing the whole thing out right now (I have a shift outside in 15mins), here's a video that shows some of what happened.

In the end, the University is demanding that we not sleep in the "demonstration area" (which they do not define), because apparently sleeping on campus is not allowed... even though there are no rules about sleeping, nor about tents on campus, anywhere in the University Policy.  In fact, the Demonstration Policy at SIUC reads like this:

"The university is a community dedicated to intellectual development by the process of rational thought and to the freedom of expression of ideas and opinions. It is a community that not only tolerates dissent; it welcomes responsible dissent and discourse on the issues of our time. Southern Illinois University has historically stood in this tradition.
Freedom is indivisible, and recognition of this fact is paramount to the maintenance of the open university community. Freedom to protest by lawful means must and will be protected by all the authority available to the university. However, when actions of individuals or groups interfere with the legitimate rights of others and are directed at the disruption of the normal processes of university life, they must and will be resisted."

 In the end, we believe that the University violated it's own policy, especially since the administration used threats of "immediate suspension for students caught sleeping" as a coercive measure in their attempt to make us disperse.  It seems quite clear that their tactics were an attempt to root us out.

In response to the University, our General Assembly passed this statement  tonight:

"Democratic space is a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week phenomena. A common view of democracy denigrates democracy as something that happens once every so often when the citizens gather to express their opinions via ballots. Occupy Carbondale believes that this perspective is both dangerous to democracy, and completely incorrect. In our experiment establishing democratic spaces, we feel that the activities of life; including protest, conversation, group decision making, eating, sleeping, and working are all vital components of democracy. We believe that democracy is a grand experiment, and we demand the right to practice the creation of democratic space on all public lands, including the activities necessary to protect the health and safety of all of our demonstrators as we see fit. In our current situation, this means that we believe that sleep is a part of the content of our speech."

Their attempts to break us down clearly didn't work.  Spirits are higher than ever, in fact, and we have had more support in the past couple of days than we did in our first four.  We're almost a full week old now, and we're making progress, even if that just looks like itty-bitty baby steps at the moment.

I'm so proud to be a part of this movement, this community, and this on-going conversation.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Despite the early, and largely continued, media blackout, I've been following the Occupy Wall Street movement for a couple weeks now, anxiously looking for updates about their progress, and holding on to a quiet and deep hope that the movement took hold.  Truly, it has been too long that the elite 1% of wealth holders in this country ran our government with their money; it has been too long that the remaining 99% of this country has been silenced, stripped of resources, removed from their homes, forced into indentured servitude in the form of debt, and denied human rights.  The revolution has been a long time coming, and the first leaks of information about Occupy Wall Street made me start dreaming again of what this country that I love could be.

Soon, the movement did begin to spread.  Occupy Together was born, and Occupations began popping up all over the country.  (There is even planning happening in my neck of the woods to start an Occupy Carbondale!)  When I found OccupySTL, my heart longed to be with them.  I felt compelled to participate.

And I was lucky enough to be able to attend the protest on October 5, 2011 with two friends and my partner, who joined me for the two hours drive from Carbondale, IL, to St. Louis, MO.

When we arrived at Kierner Park around 4.45pm, there didn't seem to be many people - only about 20 or so holding the space.  Their set-up was impressive, and well-organized, though, and not long after entering the park, someone greeted us, took our donations of water, flashlights, and baby wipes, and told us that most of the group had marched to the Renaissance Hotel, where President Obama was schedule to be receiving people for dinner and a speech.  Of course, though the protest is NOT anti-Obama particularly, it was important to have a presence there, where voices had a chance to be heard.

We asked for directions to join the marchers, and one of the protesters, Jason, who had also been at Occupy Wall Street, volunteered to walk with us there.  One the way, he filled us in on some of the happenings in NY, as well as what had been going on in STL the last couple of days.

Along with the OccupySTL folks, there were also student protesters, and quite a few people hoping just to catch a glimpse of our president.  Folks with signs milled around everywhere, often stopping to take pictures of one another's signs or exchange names.  Several people with video cameras walked the sidewalk, prompting people to tell the camera why they'd come and what they were fighting for.  Fliers were passed out explaining the demands and the purpose of the Occupy Together movement/s, and, remarkably, people engaged in conversation with one another in a public space.

The chanting didn't start until Obama's cars appeared; of course, the President's entourage simply skirted us, electing instead to enter the other side of the building.  But we kept raising our voices: "Tell me what democracy looks like!  This is what democracy looks like!"

I couldn't help but be moved by the vast array of views being represented, but more importantly that the diversity of opinions and ideologies represented in the crowd didn't prevent the crying out of a singular voice: "Hey hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go!"

After it became apparent that the president was not going to come outside to acknowledge the protest, or his supporters who wanted to see him, several folks in the OccupySTL group took initiative to ask if people were wanting to march back to the camp together.  This was the first time I saw the decision making process that I remain impressed by.  Instead of taking a vote and letting majority dictate, or simply having a designated leader make the call, opinions were asked for by a facilitator, and then a vote was called.  It was not until consensus  was reached that the decision was made to march back to the park, chanting the whole way to mark our presence.

The park was much busier by this point, occupiers having gathered there when they got off work or school.  When the call went up, "Mic check!" and the crowd responded in turn, "General Assembly" was called.  Signs were shrugged off on the ground, outside the perimeter of the park, where anyone could grab a sign they liked to hold on the sidewalk, or passers-by could read them at their leisure.

Though I don't particularly want to go in to a ton of details about the general assembly, I do want to say that I am even more hopeful, and even more convinced that this movement needs to happen, now that I have seen the cooperation, mutual respect, and commitment to the democratic process inherent in the people gathered.  Not once did I see someone silenced for a dissenting opinion, nor did I feel as though my voice was valued less because I was only a visitor only for the evening.

During this first general assembly of the night, many people decided to run out to hold signs on the perimeter of the park to catch the massive crowds exiting the Cardinal's game at the stadium.  Holding any sign they liked from the growing pile, people lined up on all four corners and the median.  Many protesters attempted to engage in friendly, passing conversation with the baseball fans, and some fans even ended up picking up signs themselves.

Not everyone was so kind, of course, though from what I saw, the protesters were never aggressive or mean in their responses.  Strangely enough, many people seemed to think that the appropriate response to us was to yell, "Get a job!"  Clearly, they were also not at work, so the expectation that we all should be seemed, well, odd.  Not to mention the 10% unemployment rate right now preventing many people from finding a job that pays anything at all, let alone a living wage.

Though there were threats from the police about staying in the park past the 10pm curfew, many of the occupiers expressed their desire to stay, risking citations or even arrest.  Civil disobedience is, after all, an effect strategy.  A local religious leader also offered an alternative outside space in case they did get forcibly removed from the park.  My companions and I, though we could not stay the night, decided among ourselves to stay as long as we could after curfew.  We figured that, if nothing else, at the very least we could add numbers, and hopefully with enough people, the police would leave the occupation be for the night.

From what I've heard, that is unfortunately not the case, as the police did show up at 4.30am on the 5th, forcing people to leave the park.  They returned at 6am, but the latest update I've read on the OccupySTL Facebook (at 1.38am on 6 Oct 2011) says that people are now being arrested, and there is a large police presence (70+ officers).  A few people are reporting online that similar actions are being taken by police all over the country.  I am saddened by this news, but not surprised.

It is my deepest hope that despite the workings and desires of those in power to stifle and stop the movement, it continues and grows.  There is strength in our solidarity, and it is time for change.

A Performance Script in Honor of Dr. John T. Warren

This is not the performance I intended, but then... is it ever?

The junior year of my undergrad, John T. Warren came to SIUC to teach, and I finally stopped putting off that intro to Comm Theory class.  Most of the semester, a friend and I sat in the back of the room trying to figure out where the hell this John guy came from.  All of the sudden, he was just everywhere.  And he was funny, & damn smart.  He also had this curious habit of using the word “partner.”  He never used gender pronouns when he referred to this “partner,” and never once did I hear him use Gina's name.  Just this mysterious word... partner.  & ya know, my friend & I in the back of the room, we never did figure it out that semester.  We did have a running bet, though, which I eventually won.

More than the $5, though, something else happened.  When, after having identified as a lesbian for 8 years, I started dating a man for the first time, it was John I went to.  “What the hell am I doing?” I asked him.  “Well, I'd guess you're doing all you can do,” he said.

My first semester teaching, I decided to use the word partner.  I'm not going to lie to you, I wasn't exactly thought out about it; I just wanted to be like John.  But when a student told me one day that you can just tell what someone's sexuality is, that ya know, it's that gaydar thing, it suddenly clicked: this little word gave me some space.  And I want to be careful here, because, as Craig Gingrich-Philbrook has reminded me and many others, sometimes this word can both signal alliance and simultaneously obscure privilege, and I certianly didn't want the latter. But in this case, the ambiguity I'd left myself by using this word, like John, had given me a productive site of inquiry.  So I had my students take a vote: what am I?  Straight, bisexual, lesbian, transgendered?  Pansexual?  Asexual?  I made them justify their answers, and in turn, they had to think about, perhaps for the first time, how they were reading my body, my speech, my beingness with them in the classroom.  And I like to think that might have done some good.

That semester was a hard one for me, though.  On top of a personally rough time of things, one of my top students—a young, African American male from inner-city Chicago—got expelled for getting caught with a dime bag.  Another student contracted HIV from her cheating girlfriend, who had also apparently been sharing needles.  And then an A student who hadn't missed a day up to that point suddenly missed two full weeks, including the day he was scheduled to speak.  When he finally came back to class, he stayed after to talk to me.  He wouldn't meet my eyes; he just stared at the floor, tears rolling down his face, as he told me that he had been struggling with severe depression all semester, that he missed his speech because his depression had gotten so severe, in fact, that he hadn't been able to get out of bed, and then he was embarrassed to have to tell me that, so he just stopped coming.  All I could do in that moment was give him a hug, ask him what I could do, and offer him a chance to make up the assignment he'd missed.  

In all three situations, I went to John.  He helped me fight student judicial affairs on behalf of the young male getting expelled; he gave me a list of resources for my student dealing with her diagnosis of HIV.  This third student, though, touched me in a different way, and one night after a class with John, I just started crying.  This A student struck down by depression hit a chord with me; it was like looking into a mirror of my past, the  depression that hit me so hard my freshman year that I just stopped, and didn't know how to start again.  The depression I was dealing with now, in my first year of graduate school.  The first thing John did was give me a hug.  “I just don't know if I did the right thing, or if I, I dunno, maybe I care too much,” I sniffled.  John smiled, “You've had a tough semester, that's for sure,” he told me.  “But I don't believe you can care too much.  Just remember that you need care, too, and it's here for you.”  He stood with me in the parking lot for almost an hour that night.  That's the kind of teacher I want to be.

Skip forward a couple years to my first semester of my doctorate program.  In an ethnography class, we're reading one of John's really early pieces, and the topic of his publication record comes up.  We're all talking about how prolific he's been, what a huge influence he's had.  And out of nowhere, all I can think is, “John moves like spaceship.”  So, of course, lacking in much of any kind of filter, I say this outloud.  The next day, Joshua here, of course, ran to tell John all about it, and he was just tickled pink about it.  I didn't know that he knew, though, until I walked past his office door and saw a post-it with the four words: “John moves like a spaceship.”  

And it's true, you know.  John moved like a spaceship; he was prolific, quick-witted, fiercly intelligent, and always willing to engage.  But for as fast as he moved, as much as he got done, he always knew when to slow down, too, when to pause with a student, with me.  When to take time to show care, and how to create those productive spaces for dialogue, the accidents from which the real work of teaching arises.

No, this performance is not what I intended.  But sometimes, you have to know when to create space, and when to pause, to consider, to be with and among.  This is the kind of teacher I want to be.

Note: this performance took place at the 2011 Central States Communication Association conference in Milwaukee, WI.