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.

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.