Movements that don’t center “the people whose bodies are classed first as battlegrounds,” are not inclusive, intersectional movements. I don’t mean include the voices of, as that only tokenizes those of us on the margins. I mean take guidance from and support/encourage the work of “black women, trans women, sex workers, radical queers, intersex folks, drug users, the ungovernable and unrepentant and ‘disrespectful.'”
Poor and underclass; sick and disabled; houseless and housing insecure; crazy and demented; reliant on social services and indebted; incarcerated and detained; survivors and those doing rehabilitative work; uneducated and illiterate; refugee and persecuted; hungry and food insecure; immigrant and Native; anarchist and atheist. Those who speak loudly, against the grain; those who don’t speak out or up; those who can’t speak. The disenfranchised as well as the passionate.
Reconstruct your center.
When you don’t, “that shit is all a giant red sign yelling ‘YOU AND THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE ARE NOT WELCOME HERE’ to me. Also ‘WE HAVE A VERY FACILE UNDERSTANDING OF FEMINISM.'”
The center has to change. The movement can’t add on ‘voices’ to be ‘included’ as an afterthought. We can’t be added as token ‘representations’ of the marginalized. You have to collaborate with us to have a movement that is truly intersectional.
“If your shit isn’t translated, if you don’t meet in accessible spaces at least whenever possible, if all your symbolism centers ‘women’ and ‘sisterhood’ and fails to account for all the freaks and cockroaches at the margins and how our perspectives and needs may deviate, your shit isn’t the big tent you think it is. I don’t care how many buzzwords you use. SHOW UP FOR ME AND I WILL SHOW UP FOR YOU.”
quotes are courtesy of this post by Jes Skolnik.
