Rev Left Radio - Black Feminism and Queer Theory w/ Zoe Samudzi

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

Zoe Samudzi is a black feminist writer whose work has appeared in a number of spaces including The New Inquiry, Warscapes, Truthout, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue,BGD, Bitch Media, and Verso, among others. She is also a member of the 2017/18 Public Imagination cohort of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) Fellows Program, and she is a member of the Black Aesthetic, an Oakland-based group and film series exploring the multitudes and diversities of black imagination and creativity. She is presently a Sociology PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences where academic interests include biomedicalization theory, productions of race and gender, and transgender health. She is a recipient of the 2016-17 Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. Her dissertation "'I don’t believe I should be treated like a second citizen by anybody': Narratives of agency and exclusion amongst male and transgender female sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa" engages hegemonic gender constructs in South Africa as they affect identity construction and health of transgender women and cisgender men in sex work. Zoe sits down with Brett to discuss black feminism and queer theory. Topics Include: black feminism, marxism and anarchism, schools as institutions of white supremacy, rape culture, queer (and quare) theory, cis-normativity in medical science,  dominant constructions of womanhood, the Jezebel Myth, and much more! Here is Zoe's website: http://www.zoesamudzi.com/ Follow Zoe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi  Recommendations by Zoe for further research:   “Ok wanted to shoutout Black trans women doing dope work (in no order): - Raquel Willis (an amazing writer and a national organizer with the Transgender Law Center) - Lourdes Ashley Hunter (Executive Director of the Trans Women of Color Collective) - Reina Gossett (writer, director, and producer of Happy Birthday, Marsha) - CeCe McDonald (a fundraiser for her: https://www.youcaring.com/cecemcdonald-1003185) - Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (an iconic community activist and organizer, former Executive Director of the TGI Justice Project) - Venus Selenite (a writer, performance artist, and cultural critic) - Kat Blaque (a YouTuber making content and commentary around trans rights & social justice in general) - Monica Roberts (a blogger/writer and trans rights activist) - Janetta Johnson (activist/organizer and current Executive Director of the TGI Justice Project) - L'lerrét Jazelle Ailith (a blogger/writer and Communications Manager for the BYP100) - Ahya Simone (classically trained harpist and activist) - Elle Hearns (founder and Executive Director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute) - Janet Mock - Laverne Cox Also wanted to give a non-exhaustive list of black queer and trans/non-binary thinkers that are doing great writing and scholarly work related to identity that I've really appreciated (again in no order): - Barbara Smith - Che Gossett - C. Riley Snorton - Hari Ziyad - Tyler Ford - Kortney Ziegler - Derrais Carter - Lynée Denise - Kai M. Green - Joshua Allen - Jamal Lewis - TJ Tallie - Shay Akil McClean - Kopano Ratele - Darnell Moore - Myles E. Johnson - Zanele Muholi - E. Patrick Harris - Lyle Ashton Harris - Cheryl Dunye - Ashleigh Shackleford - Devyn Springer ——- Outro Music: 'Badu' by Blackerface, off the album "Mississippi Goddam". You can find their WONDERFUL music here: https://blackerface.bandcamp.com Follow them on FB here: https://www.facebook.com/faceoppressors/ Intro music by The String-Bo String Duo, you can find their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/releases  Donate to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with the Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC.

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Revolutionary Left Radio Starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I am your host Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea And today we have on Zoe Samutsi To talk about Black feminism and queer theory

We had her on about a month ago discussing Black liberation, Critical Race Theory, applying it to our culture and our society and there are so many other issues and topics that Zoe writes about and thinks about that I wanted to address, and we just couldn't fit it into the scope of that show. So I invited her back on to discuss these issues.

So Zoe, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Hello. I'm a doctoral student in medical sociology. I do kind of work around black leftist stuff and black feminist stuff. I think that's about it. All right, awesome. And before we do start, before we get into the questions, I wanted to thank our Patreon supporters.

There's been an uptick in the amount of people donating to our Patreon. And even if it's $1, you know, it means the world to us. There's this FCC vote coming up on December 14th about net neutrality. It very well might be taken away. And if net neutrality is destroyed, you know, local or like independent DIY outfits like this show, we're going to face a slew of challenges from slower, you know, diminished access to our show to higher fees having to pay out to these corporate vampires. This is very much about reasserting the corporate media narrative and destroying our narratives

and our ability to tell our own stories. So everybody that donates, we thank you so much. And if you can't donate, I totally understand rating and reviewing us on iTunes and just sharing us, telling your friends about us. Everything helps and everything is deeply appreciative. So I just wanted to give a shout out to everybody who's donated so far. We seriously, deeply appreciate it. All right, but we got a lot to discuss.

So let's go ahead and dive in. One thing I wanted to address up front, and this may be a little indulgent on my part, because I am a Marxist and you're an anarchist, but reading through your work and after interviewing you last time, I can very much see and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, that Marxism, like, as an analysis and a methodology, it plays a role in your worldview and in your politics and your analysis, even though you do identify as an anarchist.

So I'm really curious, what are your thoughts on Marxism and who are some of the most important black women Marxists, in your opinion, that have impacted you and your thought? Yeah, that is an extremely indulgent question. No, I, yes, Marxist analysis and methodology have been really influential, in the way that I've come to understand leftism and to understand black womanhood and kind of oppression in general.

One of the people who radicalized me was an old school Marxist who was a part of a liberation struggle so I will always have use for that analysis in my work and in my writing and understanding despite some of the shortcomings sometimes. But as far as important black women,

Marxists that have impacted me, there are a lot, but I think some of the top ones, there's Claudia Jones, who was a Marxist in the 20th century, and she did a lot of really great work about internationalism, a lot of really important work about black women and the oppression that black women face using Marxian frameworks and analyses. Of course, there's Angela Davis whose work on abolition is incredibly important and informative. Our prisons obsolete was something that really changed my relationship to understanding punishment and the state. Asada Shakur, of course, is iconic.

Patricia Hill Collins does a lot of really brilliant work about epistemology and hegemony and understanding the way that we do research and understanding the ways that, like, thought is understood and looking at the ways that certain kinds of understandings and positionalities and epistemologies are subordinated and understood as being less important. Audra Lord, I think, is most importantly understood

within the lens of a queer, black woman doing these kinds of, like, Marxist, taking up this, like, Marxist project, working a lot around the erotic um i think like it's called the erotic i forget what it's called but it was in sister outsider she has this really brilliant essay about the erotic and about pornography and about the ways that the erotic the female erotic is completely de contextualized and reconstructed in ways that are really harmful to us and how we can express and articulate our agency in claiming the erotic as oh the erotic is power that's what

it's called. And then of course, a canonical black feminist work is the Kambahi River Collective Statement, which explicitly names the fact that they're working on an expansion of the Marxist analysis, but it is the, like, Carl Marx does not talk explicitly about race and the ways that race informs class depression and class struggle, and they explicitly talk about in the statement how they're expanding Marx's analysis. to understand the specific economic oppression and economic position of black women. I think those are the folks that are the most kind of impactful on my thought,

even though there are lots more that I just, yeah, I have not named. And that's one of the, I think, the beautiful thing about a lot of different leftist tendencies is that they are open to being updated as, you know, material conditions unfold and as history progresses. For anybody that is interested to hear about Zoe's anarchism, you can always go back to our last episode, Critical Race Theory, Black Liberation where Zoe expands on her anarchism and talks about an article, which I highly recommend the anarchism of blackness. So anybody interested in that sort of stuff can go check out

that episode. But let's go ahead and dive into the main point of this discussion. But before we get into the questions, I want to ask you a question about the overarching label, Black feminism. I recently heard an interview with Bell Hooks where she talked about not wanting necessarily to be identified as a black feminist because she thought that it kind of pigeonholed her and she viewed herself as a feminist, et cetera. But what are your thoughts on the label, black feminism as a whole? And how do you kind of orient yourself to that label? Yeah. That's an interesting question. I think when I self, if I have to self-describe my gender politics, I use black feminism because it, in my opinion, more, it kind of like broadly opens

it doesn't, I don't feel like it pigeonholes me in the ways that I talk about the relationship between class, race, and gender. I think that it offers a lot of possibility. I think a lot more than saying feminism, because when we have these conversations about feminism in popular discourse, I think that there's a tendency for feminism to be equated with white women, unless we're explicitly naming that we're using a black feminist lens or a queer feminist lens. So I can understand where she's coming from, but I also think that when you say I am a black feminist that you're naming explicitly a framework that isn't necessarily engaged by simply calling yourself a feminist. Absolutely. And that leads well into this next question because in

our past interview, you mentioned how your position as a black person and as a woman, they cannot be separated from one another. They're intrinsically co-entangled. So could you elaborate on those connections and intersections and flesh it out for our listeners, please? Yeah, for sure. You know, black feminism talks about how identities are not compounding. They're co-constituting. So I'm not a black person who is a woman. I am a black woman because gender is racialized and race is gendered.

And so I can't be a black person before I'm a woman because black woman is a woman. because black woman is a very specific subject position within white supremacy. Black woman as a position has all of these tropes and characteristics and tendencies and ways of being imposed upon it. And so it is a historical to attempt to separate those two things because you cannot understand the way that race works

without understanding the way that gender is constructed at the same time that race. is constructed and vice versa. And would you say that's kind of reflected in like some of the early civil rights movements and black power movements in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s that even within those liberatory movements, there was still a gender and sex hierarchy where the black male kind of sat at top that hierarchy. And so black women kind of had to come up and kind of face even within their own movement

that sort of disparity in that hierarchy? Yeah, for sure. I think that a lot of liberation movements, not just in the black community, but kind of maybe around the world, are kind of inherently masculinist. I think I was talking this morning, I was talking to a Zimbabwe and friend of mine, and we were talking about how being anti-colonial is not inherently revolutionary because you can resist colonialism in your particular context. You can resist these incursions of white men in your land, but it doesn't mean that, that the world that you envision after the end of colonialism in your particular context is a liberatory thing for everyone. And I think that in a lot of struggles, we see reproductions of gendered hierarchies. We see patriarchies that mirror the patriarchies that were imposed by colonialism. That's obviously not to say that colonialism invented patriarchy, because that is just not true. But, yeah, I definitely, I think.

Yeah, I think that that's a characteristic of a lot of liberation movements. And so that's why black women have either forced the hand of the people who are kind of dictating the rhetorics and the politics of those movements, or they have been invested in complementary movements around specifically the issues that they face as black women or women of color, whatever in their own given contexts. And I think later in this discussion, when we talk about queer theory, we're going to kind of reinvestigate those hierarchies in the context of queer theory and the queer movement and kind of talk about how those hierarchies exist in that movement. But that's a little bit later. When I was reading through your articles, this concept of the Jezebel myth, which is something that, in my own ignorance, I had not heard of yet. So what is the Jezebel myth and what are its connections to slavery? And how does it affect black women to this day?

Yeah, so the Jezebel is one of the controlling images or kind of standard tropes of black womanhood. So you also have like, you know, the mammies and other one. And this one is rooted in the idea that black women are inherently, you know, extremely sexually aggressive and uncontrollably. They have uncontrollable sex drives and are hypersexual. And it relates to not just kind of slavery in the United States, but in these kind of broader colonial projections of womanhood and where, you know, Victorian women were incredibly demure. And, you know, you saw, you know, African women on the continent with like bare breasts and there were these tropes of, you know, hypersexuality because sexuality was constructed in a

very different way on the continent than it was in Europe. And with regards to chattel slavery, you know, you see enslaved women being subjected to sexual violence by the men who were their owners because they were seen as bodies that existed solely for, you know, productive labor, but then also for sexual consumption and this kind of sexual labor. And not only were they unable to refuse their master sexual advances because they were property, which, you know, is a danger in people continuing to call Sally Hemings the mistress of Thomas Jefferson because, you know, within this, I mean, not to take away agency from women who were enslaved, but, like, within this power relation, you cannot consent if you cannot, you know, if, yeah,

if you're owned by someone. Exactly. But not only could they not refuse because they were owned, but they would not refuse because of their presumed sexual appetites. And I think it continues to affect black women because there's a notion of black women, that black women are unrapeable. that were these kind of purely sexual beings that always want sex. And so we cannot be violated and were not seen as legitimate victims in a way that white

women could be seen as legitimate victims. And we saw with Daniel Holtzklau, that police officer who specifically targeted black women. We also see the way that black girls are denied the ability to be children and to be free from sexual advances. And they have this kind of hypersexuality imposed upon them at an early age. That's, again, not to say that black girls don't explore their sexuality from an early age, but that is also to say that that sexual exploration in childhood should not be exploited by adult men who are praying on young women. And we saw this hashtag fast-tailed girls that began, that was started by Mickey Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden,

who are part of this blog called Hood Feminism talking about, you know, for example, are Kelly's victims? um, you know, where he would hang around middle schools and junior highs and high schools. Um, and, you know, because these girls are bringing it on themselves, they're dressing in particular ways that make them irresistible. Um, and, and this can be really complicated for how we as black women develop our relationships to sex, especially if we're victims of trauma. Because sometimes in attempting to, in deliberately attempting to avoid this stereotype and to avoid this controlling. image, it can lead us into kind of purity politics and respectability politics where, you know, only abstinence and virginity or saving yourself for a particular man, obviously not to say that that's not a valid choice. But we're often shamed out of liking sex or being honest about our relationship to sex. And we feel particularly guilty for being sexually victimized because we've somehow asked for it and that we didn't do a good enough job in controlling the the urges and the desires that are directed towards us because we're just these intrinsically hypersexual

people yeah absolutely and that's horrifying and it's horrifying to think that you know speaking of sally made that that thomas jefferson's face like talking about confederate statues um Thomas Jefferson's faces is carved into a mountain and this ultimate celebration of all that he was which was, you know, in my opinion, a sexual predator and a slave owner and a despicable human being. But it seems to me that there is this sad polarity that tends to manifest in any white supremacist society where women of color, all women of color, are either fetishized as like quote unquote exotic and reduced to a sort of sexual token or implicitly and explicitly denigrated for not ascending to the white supremacist and often impossible standards of beauty

that our culture so often props up. Does that seem correct to you? And if so, can you maybe touch on that struggle a little bit? Yeah, totally. So we're either understood as, yeah, being exotic, where these dark, brown-skinned, whatever-colored things that are kind of right for taking, we're taboo, where a divergence from the kind of purity of white womanhood. And so we're kind of this exciting thing to be had. And at the same time, you know, we're still subjected to,

these white supremacist notions of what is beautiful. So if we're exotic and dark-skinned, there's a very particular kind of beauty within dark-skinnedness that is accepted. Kelly Rowland, for example, or Gabrielle Union, are very, you know, these kinds of like exceptionally beautiful dark-skinned women. But dark-skinned women are also treated,

or within like colorism in like black communities, for example, are not wanted. And light skin women with looser curl patterns and with light eyes are the things that are seen to be more beautiful. And so, yeah, it's this really uncomfortable thing. And that's something that I've kind of experienced where, you know, I'm this kind of like exotic African thing. I remember I used to date, sleep with this guy from Denmark who one time called me a dirty black girl. and or he'd be like I love your African lips

and I'd just be like bro what the fuck like can we just have sex like can you relax but but as far as like colorism I'm kind of squarely in the center as like a brown skin person

so I haven't either really benefited from it or been specifically hurt by it but yeah there's this this weird space yeah and it seems like in like for a lot of women of color it's like you're damned if you do

and damned if you don't it's an impossible situation to operate out of and especially especially when you're navigating those those tender and precarious teenage years when you're trying to solidify your identity and find out who you are and sex is such an important part of for a lot of people that teenage development and to be in that situation i just i mean the the emotional sort of burden that that puts on on young girls is just like heartbreaking um do you do you think that that exotic tokenizing stems in part at least from like colonialism and imperialism, because I feel like there's a connection there with white Europeans going into other areas, and then that sort of exotic tokenizing of women of color in those areas. Yeah, for sure. I think within kind of the history of miscegenation in Europe, I think, or what kind of within colonialism, the people that were the most frequently having relations were white men and white.

women of whatever area, um, they were colonizing. Um, yeah, I think our, our exoticism, we, we exist to suit a particular kind of sexual function often, but we're never, we're very rarely seen as just being beautiful in ourselves. We're beautiful for black women or beautiful for Indian women or beautiful for Chinese women or whatever, but we're not ever just beautiful outside of the standard that is set by white women within white supremacy. And when we're discussing decolonialism, like, you know, decolonizing ourselves and our minds and our societies, that's a huge aspect of it that I think doesn't get enough airtime in those discussions. Like, this is something that we need to wrestle with and think about

as people that are trying to decolonize in that way. But moving on, in your article, dialogue with Tamara Harris being in reclaiming ourselves, the name of the article. You discussed this pressure to, quote, use sex as a means of trying to be affirmed by and get emotional validation from boys and men who ultimately see us as disposable, close quote. Can you explain how women generally struggle with that and what underlying social pressures give rise to that reality for so many women? Oh, yeah. That's a big question. I'm sorry. No. Yeah. I think you know, sex is a thing that a lot of women want, obviously, and something that we enjoy. And I also feel like we kind of understand and we learn about sex as being for men.

And so we can be rewarded by patriarchy if we are sexually appealing to men. And, yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about relationships that I've been in when they've gone awry where I've, you know, retreated into trying to have sex with that partner because I know that this is a particular way that I will be validated where I could not be validated in other ways emotionally. And I know that I'm not the only woman who has done that. And I think there can sometimes be a really tricky dance that we have to do around understanding ourselves as sexual agents as people who like to have sex and want to have sex with with the ways that we can sometimes perform particular kinds of desirability for men because we want to be affirmed by

men. And that's not to shame anyone because again, this is something that I have done and sometimes unfortunately continue to do because it's a tool that we learn very early can and will work, which is really interesting because it's also a kind of capital that we are taught is not important. You know, we talk about women who, and we learn to degrade women who sleep their way to the top of whatever business or industry that they're in, but we're also taught that we can be rewarded for giving men what they desire from us sexually. So again, damned a few do damned if you don't um yeah and and that that theme like as i'm researching and trying to come up with these questions that theme just continually reappears as in like this patriarchal sexist misogynist

society is like there's litter for so many women there's like no way out of the box like you yeah you're screwed either way and it just it's it's so like um exhausting and sort of sad and i can't imagine having to to deal with that but especially like as a black girl growing up in a predominantly white Missouri. Utah, you have talked about the struggles of not being found attractive as a black girl, as well as the pressure on some white boys to not admit that they found you attractive. Can you like talk about your experiences in that way and maybe like elaborate on what it's like to be a black girl growing up in a predominantly white community like that and sort of the struggles

involved in that? Yeah. I mean, I think that it might have been less of a struggle for me. if the way that I understood myself growing up in that space, like wasn't so steeped in anti-blackness, wasn't so steeped in kind of this aspiring to be like other white women, but obviously knowing that I will literally never be as attractive or desirable as these other white women or white girls,

I guess when were teenagers, that I was around. And there was this weird thing where when there would be somebody who maybe found me cute or whatever, It was this intense, like, what felt like a secret. Like, I was this girl that they could talk to or whatever, but they would never kind of admit in public that they found me to be attractive. And that was really awful because, you know, I wasn't being affirmed in this time where I wanted to be, I wanted people to tell me that I was pretty.

I wanted boys specifically to tell me that I was pretty. but I was continually seeing these white girls around me being affirmed and being in relationships, and I thought that I was being just like them, and I was funny enough, and I was an athlete, and I was smart, and I was doing all the things that I'm supposed to be doing to make boys like me, and yet, nothing. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I was just extra obnoxious, and I wasn't as cute and funny as I thought that I was. But, yeah, it was a real blow to.

the ego. At a crucial time when the ego is trying to develop and find itself. Totally. And you talk about this a lot in a bunch of different context about school and how that institution specifically kind of, you know, the white supremacist and patriarchal notions get institutionalized in school. And you've called, you said school is often an institution of punishment and order and regulation that teaches black girls not to act in ways that are unsuitable for them to act

within the violent white gaze. Can you define what the white gaze is and kind of elaborate on that a bit? Yeah. You know, the white gaze as in this kind of dominant, scrutinizing gaze that regulates black behavior.

So as black folks within white supremacy, we should be appropriately, you know, submissive. We should be quiet. We shouldn't act on our kind of inherently violent tendencies as we're kind of understood

within white supremacy. And, you know, a lot of black girls when they're young are troubled and black girl and black and children when they're troubled will act out. And, you know, in schools it seems like there's a lot more space for white children to have, to act out and to not be punished as severely as black children are. And so from the very beginning, you know, school is a space where we're taught that, you know, our identity is that of like some kind of deviant and that we are forced to stay in line if we don't want the kind of fullest extent of punishment and the system to come down on us. And you see, you know, work like pushed out talking about how the rates of

suspension for black girls are so high in comparison to their white counterparts. And I can think of times when I have been punished for, I'm not going to say for no reason, but the punishment that I received was like disproportionate to what I had actually done. And I think that this was done as a means of telling me to like shut up and to not talk and to not step out of line because as a black person, that's not how I should be interacting with my white authorities. Yeah. And the, and the concept of black children. children being being punished more severely. That's backed up by like a plethora of empirical evidence.

You know, there's actually been plenty of research on this topic. And I even heard the other day that it goes down to like kindergarten and like even preschool, the amount of... Children being suspended from preschool. Like what, short of like stabbing someone, what could you possibly be doing to be expelled from preschool? Yeah, it's totally crazy to me that that's a thing.

And when I heard that, I was just like baffled by it. But of course, why should we be baffled? it's no surprise white supremacy goes deep and even with little children i mean and imagine but they're not children that's the thing like black children never get to be children with their we're adults in small bodies and from a very very early age we're taught that you know every single thing that we do is scrutinized and so there are just incredible consequences for what we do but then by contrast you have you know white teenagers doing dumb shit and they're acquitted because of of what was the thing,

affluenza, you're too rich to understand consequences. And so there's this really kind of painful dissonance about the way

that Ryan Locti as a 30-year-old is understood as a young man but preschool children or minors who commit crimes are given life sentences and tried as adults or minors of color,

particularly black children, black boys. Absolutely. Yeah. And there's also this militarization of schools in inner cities and predominantly black schools.

Like when you walk in to some schools you know there's like metal detectors and like yeah canines in the halls and stuff and that's sort of a like how do you think about it is like a normalization from the school pipeline to prison the crackdown on black communities

like how do you think about the militarization of inner city schools and I almost feel like you're like you're mentally and emotion preparing black children to go to jail is what it feels like for me like you're you're desensitizing people to the presence of basically a correction I mean it's a school resource officer but to the presence of like correctional officers you're you know you're normalizing this idea of of black children being monitored like animals um I think in my school in in where I was growing when I went to

high school. We had a resource officer and he like was super chill because this was like a rural school in Missouri. But yeah, I some of the pictures I've seen and conversations I've had with like friends from when they're growing up and you know things I know about today. The videos we've seen of resource officers fucking body slamming children. It's that's just a kind of like and then we have it's really interesting that like we have conversations around the quote unquote achievement gap and where we're talking about black children quote unquote underperforming but if you under if you deliberately deprive a school of resources and then put children in an educational context that feels like they're learning in a jail of course they're not going to

do super well because there's so much kind of emotional and psychological stress that they're under not to mention the racism that they're experiencing from their teachers and just the bullshit curriculum that they're learning. And insofar as the militarization of schools lends itself to preparing children emotionally for jail, even if it's not jail, it's kind of preparing them for the occupation of black communities by police, this constant police state. If you live in a rich white suburb, the concept of a police state doesn't make sense to you. But if you live in low-income black communities, you live in a apartheid, you live in an apartheid,

police state. And in some sense, the militarization schools is both a manifestation of that and a preparation for that. I mean, I remember, you know, so before I moved to this rural town, I lived in a kind of middle, mid-sized suburban town. And my relationship to the cops was, you know, being kind of, you know, black and middle class and surrounded by white people and talking the right way and looking safe enough, was that like the police were my friends, right? And they were there to protect me. And so I had this really unwavering trust of the police, which I'm not going to necessarily say that I'm grateful for, but I am also going to say that there is a tremendous amount of kind of privilege in not feeling so intensely terrified whenever I saw police, which

I didn't super often. But now that I live, you know, in Oakland and there are police everywhere, and there's this long history of the of Oakland PD being incredibly antagonistic towards black folks and and now I just am very afraid of police all the time um as I'm sure lots of kids are um yeah yeah there's a complete lack of accountability even like even when we catch the assholes on camera like you know even even when all the evidence is there there's no accountability there's there's no justice whatsoever it's it's just a fuck but moving on because I do want to address this concept of rape culture you know we very much live in a society that has like a powerful and heartbreaking

rape culture and this manifests in a myriad of ways but for black women specifically what are the unique dynamics at play here especially when the rapist is a white man um I think if the rapist is a white man black women are even less likely to believe to be believed, which is, of course, not to pretend that black women are believed when their rapists are black men or men of another color. But I think that that kind of interracial sexual violence is invoking this long history of white male entitlement to black women's bodies. And that's, you know, much of the reason why I refused to report my own sexual assault that happened when I was living in England as a postgrad. Because between the statistical likelihood of anything actually

happening the way that I was intensely ashamed of the specific circumstances and also what felt like a reenactment of that history where then I would have to in front of the police perform this kind of purity and prostrate myself as a true legitimate victim of sexual violence in front of the state I just I couldn't do that I think that that might be more traumatic than what had actually happened. And, you know, I was talking, I said before, black women, especially in contrast to white women, are inviolable, like we're unrapeable.

Our identities within white supremacy are afloyal to white woman, and that really, that contrast really forms the basis of whether or not we're believed as victims and whether we're actually even included within the scope of what womanhood is in kind of popular narratives or what violence against womanhood looks like. You know, we have, Lena Dunham who's supposed to be this like millennial feminist icon or whatever the fuck and she had you know one of the black women that worked on her show sexually assaulted by someone on staff or part of one of the crew members or whoever and where she was previously like you know things that women lie about what they had for lunch things that women don't lie about what that you know whether or not they're sexually assaulted all of a sudden she's rushing to protect the character of the man who sexually assaulted the

black woman um and so there's this way that or you know even rose mcgowan when she was talking about all of the sexual violence that happened in hollywood um i forget exactly what she said but it was just this really painful reminder that that the victimization of black women um of women of color is not quite as important as the true victims of patriarchy um which are white women yeah and speaking of of Lena Dunham, you wrote an article, the virtuous white woman trope. And in it you say, our discussions of rape culture cannot be complete unless we engage the raced and gendered dynamics of white women who weaponize sex to leverage power over men of color. Can you explain what the virtuous white woman trope is? I know you've touched on it a bit, but kind of go in depth here,

and maybe summarize your argument about discussions of rape culture needing to engage racial dynamics? Yeah. So basically the way that I understand race and white supremacy, and I'm not, you know, the only person to believe this, and I'm not the first person to say this, is that, you know, white supremacy revolves around cis heterosexual white women and around protecting those white women. And so that is the basis for carclerality. That is the basis for this punishment and regulation of men of color, particularly black men who white men are afraid of, like, raping and stealing their women. And so, you know, in the United States, there's a very long history of white women

falsely accusing black men of rape and sexual assault to carry out whatever kind of vendetta or frustration that they had with them. You know, the woman who was responsible for the murder of Emmett Till very recently came out saying, you know, he didn't do anything. I'm wholeheart. I'm unequivocally responsible for what happened to him. Um, but, you know, because white women are, they are, white women are the, the, the, the things that produce more white people and thus maintain the, the racial majoritarian, majoritarianism of, of, of any, like, white nationalists, white supremacist state, white women have to be protected. And so there's, yeah, there's this, this history. Um, so whenever I see, like, white women, talking about like misandry

and the meme of misandry not that it's I believe it's a real thing I don't believe it's a real thing but you know white women talking about kill all men and all men are bad and it's like yes all men are bad and also there have historically been particular consequences around white women leveraging their

purity in contrast with with men of color and white women crying and saying that men of color have done a particular thing has gotten a lot of people killed And so when we talk about believing victims, I unequivocally believe, you know, victims. And also, I think that we do an injustice to a conversation about rape culture and about power if we don't look at the particular power that white women hold within whiteness to victimize men of color. And to use the purity that they know they have in the eyes of white men and to kind of exploit. this white supremacist desire to protect, to protect them, you know, they weaponize that against

black women in these conversations of feminism when they're talking about, like, toxic toxic feminists, you know, specifically talking about women of color and also when we're talking about sexual violence. Again, this is not me saying that like whenever, that men of color are incapable of victimizing white women, because that's also just completely untrue. But it is also to say that if we want to have a full, dynamic, robust, about sexual violence within white supremacy to also understand how white women are also positioned as people who do possess a particular kind of power. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, perfectly said, an extremely important point. Let's transition now to the queer theory side of this interview. A lot of people might not be familiar with what queer theory even is. So what is queer theory and why is it important? So the way that I understand queer theory, it's like a subfield within critical theory, which is focusing specifically on the construction of queerness itself, or I guess the constructions of queerness themselves because there's no single way to be queer and there's no kind of single queerness that is singly punished by patriarchy and by the kind of puritanical, um, why.

and it's really important because I think that sexuality is a really critical way that identity gets regulated within white supremacy because, you know, within whiteness, the bodies that are most valued have been the bodies that are able to reproduce. And so, you know, we see within, And like eugenics, we see like historically queer people being sterilized. We see, I mean, I'm not sure if this is still a thing, but I know that when in some places, when trans men are transitioning, they were forcibly sterilized. And so, and we're forced to get hysterectomies in order to transition to manhood. And I think it's really important to understand the ways that queer identity is regulated by white supremacy and the ways that bodies are punished for deviant behavior, for deviant expression that stems from these kinds of anxieties within capitalism, within racial capitalism, and the kind of fragility of like Euro-sexuality.

Yeah, and when I was reading about this, and, you know, to your record, I came across E. Patrick Johnson, and he talked about queer theory. Can you go ahead and touch on what that is and what that means and why that's important, especially as like an addendum to queer theory generally? Yeah, so queer theory is basically his attempt to cure queer theory of the just overwhelming whiteness of it and to kind of focus very specifically on the ways that like white queer bodies are affected. by um patriarchy um and you know foucault does a lot of great stuff talking about the regulation of queer bodies and the asylum and the prison and everything but he has a really paltry analysis of race especially given someone who is kind of doing a historical survey of empire and foucault is put on this real just un fucking necessary pedestal um as useful as his work can be um But I think that, you know, the interventions by queer and trans folks of color within queer theory have been especially important because queer theory can, especially in the academy, because of the ways that queer and trans folks of color have a much more difficult time accessing and being in those academic spaces, you know, they are not as able to discuss the ways that these black and brown queer and trans bodies are harmed by white. supremacy, and there's often a refusal by these white theorists to talk about how the contours

of colonialism are shaped by imperial anti-blackness, for example, and the ways that people are understood as deviant people is inevitably influenced by how non-white bodies are understood as being deviant, and even within, like, trans studies, for example, is very often predominated by white people, and so there are a lot of, like, cisqueer white people talking about constructions of trans identity um when trans folks could do it themselves you know yeah and there's something interesting when i was reading about this um there seems to be a very clear pattern so like when a when a movement rises up whether it's the black power movement or the workers movement or the women's movement um there's a it's it almost makes sense from a tactical point of view or

at least intuitively that there's like this this tendency towards like homogenization it's like we're fighting for black power, we're going to have a singular focus on that, and the nuances and complexities within that movement itself are kind of ignored or dismissed. So we touched on earlier in the black power movement. We talked about how black women's voices, like in the Black Panther Party even, were subordinated to dominant black male voices, to say nothing of how, you know, gay, lesbian, and transgender and queer black folk, their voices were completely erased from that discussion but then there's like this dialectical pushback from those very ignored voices so women began to push back and you had like you've mentioned some of them adra lord alice walker

patricia scott angela davis all of them kind of had this pushback to the to the dominant male narrative within their their power movements and i think as of late we're really starting to see these you know pushbacks from the the queer and trans community as well and if i like like this is kind of going to to a long-winded question, but when I look at the civil rights movement in the Black Panther Party, and then I look at Black Lives Matter, there seems to be real progress made in both the direction of women having a voice and the direction of the LGBTQ community within the black community having a voice. Do you think that that's true? Do you think that there has been progress on that front in black liberation movements?

Yeah, I think there's a truth to that. I think that there is something that is noteworthy about the fact that Black Lives Matter as a call to action, as a hashtag was begun by three, I think they're all queer, but three black women. And that black women were there kind of shaping this narrative of the struggle in this particular moment. I think it's really fascinating that you have groups like B.YP 100 that explicitly articulates its liberation politics

through a queer black feminist lens. Like I think that that's really incredible. I mean, people are getting fed up about the fact that these movements have very historically been masculinist and that there are reproductions of patriarchy within black communities in the name of liberation and people are getting fed up with the fact that, like I said, this resistance of colonialism, of whiteness is not inherently revolutionary because it sometimes is, like the narrative is sometimes for black men to take their rightful. place as leaders of the black community as opposed to kind of thinking of new, more liberatory, more deeply inclusive, more revolutionary, I hate that word, but more revolutionary ways of kind of upending these normative patriarchal structures within black liberation. And I think that folks no longer feel like they have to be respectable and kind of sit in the wings and hope that they will be listened to. And I think it's really incredible about

that people are just like, no, fuck this. If I can't do this in this movement space, I'm going to make my own movement space. I'm going to disrupt these respectable LGBT movement spaces. I'm going to disrupt these respectable kind of dominant black movement spaces and kind of make the point that needs to be made. And I think that that's fantastic. Do you think that the internet has helped bring those marginalized communities together

and kind of giving them a voice and a platform? it's it's not hard if you're a black man in a black community to find other black men but it may be difficult in the black community if you're a trans woman to find other trans women so do you think the internet has aided as aided in that effort oh hell yeah i mean for me even my discovery of black feminism like came through reading the trudes's tumbler page when I was in college where she compiled all of these really beautiful analyses

and sources and, you know, about black feminism. And if I didn't have the internet, I'm sure I would have found it eventually. But I think the internet is an incredible space for building community, for connecting with people, for

making these like transnational movements and politics and conversation. And I think that where a lot of queer and trans people are excluded from the academy, I think that the internet can really often be a far more robust space for learning about queer and trans politics than what happens in the academy because academic publications move a lot slower than a huge Twitter conversation

or a page kind of unpacking identities that are, maybe not that are being articulated differently and practices that are being articulated differently. So, yeah, I, and I think it's really incredible for me to see, like, 14 and 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds with these incredibly sophisticated sets of language for understanding race and for understanding gender. And I think that, you know, if I would have had these resources when I was, like, getting fucked up identity-wise in Missouri as a teenager, I would have been, you know,

much better off much earlier. But I think it's really amazing the ability for people to access resources and to have conversations at the speed that they can have them now with the Internet. Definitely. And that's one of the reasons I think that leftists and liberationists should fight for the Internet as not only a utility, but like a human right. Like it's so important because it connects disparate and marginalized communities and finally gives them a platform and a voice and a way to come together and fight for liberation. So if you are about liberation, we have to push back against any attempt to scale back what the internet is because it's so essential at every front, especially for intersectional politics. The internet is an absolutely vital tool.

But while we're on the issue, I really want to hammer this point home. So what specific and unique issues do trans women of color face? And how can we as liberationists begin to address those issues? so I'm not going to speak for you know trans women because I think that there are a lot of really incredible trans women doing that fucking work themselves but from what I'm from what I understand and from some of the stuff that I've been doing in my research I think I believe personally that the entire system of like gender and patriarchy like revolves around trans misogyny because trans misgeney is through misgendering trans women as like quote unquote failed men, it's the correction of mask.

It's like the violence that is used to correct masculinity. And so the violence that a lot of the violence that we see against trans women, particularly trans women of color, are people reacting because they don't know how to handle their sexuality because they found a trans woman attractive and they enjoyed the sex that they had with them. You know, trans women, through the trans misogyny, a lot of women are like, are not only violated by, you know, patriarchy.

Men in patriarchy, they're also victimized by us cis women because we refuse to expand the boundaries of womanhood to include them. And so we see TERFs, trans exclusionary, radical feminist or whatever, talking about how womanhood is about having two X chromosomes and womanhood is about that, da, da, that, a particular experiences of violence and misogyny as though trans women don't experience violence and misogyny. And also, like, none of the majority of us have never done, like, a Kara type test. And I don't know that I have two X chromosomes. Like, I have no idea what my sex chromosomes look like. So there's that. There's also because there's workplace discrimination.

And so a lot of trans women, you know, have trouble with, like, state, sometimes, often have trouble with, like, stable work. There's a lot of housing instability in a lot of communities. And then when all of these things are compounded by racism, of course, you have, like, black trans women who are experiencing both discrimination on behalf of half of their gender identity and also because they're black and so they're experiencing misogy noir um it's a whole fucking host of just horrible shit that we are all complicit in and responsible for as cis people no matter how much we purport to care and and try to support our friends and the community kind of at large yeah and you know trans women of color specifically as a community where violence against them is sort of accepted and is not

punished like it would be normally. There's this horrific sort of trans misogyny and transphobia that manifests itself in the courtroom as not taking really truly brutal and disgusting acts of violence against trans women generally, but especially trans women of color in low-income areas. Um, just, it just, it just a, what happens in the courtroom is that, you know, if, if they're doc, if their identity papers or whatever aren't consistent with the names that they use, um, they're going to get misgendered in the courtroom often. And so instead of understanding an incident as like a particular kind of like violent misogyny, it's understood as like some kind of attack against a man. And we see this in the ways that the news reports incidences of violence

fatal and not fatal violence against trans women. And we see the way that they get misgendered in death as, you know, they may have been also misgendered in life. And that's, you know, a posthumous violence that happens to trans women. Yeah. And I was actually at a protest at one point where I was arrested along with a trans man and we both entered the you know the jail at the same time and the way that they were treated the way that he was segregated based on you know the birth certificate it was just so traumatic for him and so hurtful and just like in the carceral system especially you know trans people just they face an absolute monolith of of just dead naming and just refusal to acknowledge who they are and it's just an absolutely traumatic traumatic experience and

oh yeah it's heartbreaking folks are organized based on their sex and so often people are subjected to like genital checks and you know if it's not safe for them to be in the in spaces with the people of their same quote unquote sex then they are often put into administrative segregation and forced to be by themselves which is which is its own form of torture Yeah, totally. It's horrific. So last question, and then we're going to let you go. But in your paper shifting objectives on methodology and identity politics, you argue that, quote, through cis normative biomedicine, scientific systems that revolve around and cater to, quote, unquote,

normal cisgender bodies, gender nonconformity is pathologized, end quote. Can you explain the ways in which gender nonconformity is pathologized in the medical field and point out the fallacies, inherence in that approach and the harm that it causes? Yeah, I mean, for starters, again, you have the fact that people rest on

sexual dimorphism and the gender binary as being a biological reality and that man equals X, Y, chromosome or male equals X, Y, chromosome and female equals X, X, X, X, chromosome. And so from that, from that point, you know,

you have, you know, the way that like intersex children are non-consensually gendered and sexed at birth depending on what their parents perceive to be the best set of genitals for their child

which you know is an incredibly horrific there's you know a lot of activism in the intersex community around that because it's an absolutely horrific thing to do to a child you have the ways that organs are also

gendered. And so when you are a trans person that needs to get a physical, if you're a trans woman and you have a prostate, there's like a real difficulty for people to understand that like, yes, I am a woman and yes, I also have a prostate. And so, or if you're a trans man and you have to get checked for breast cancer, stuff like that, the way that organs or body parts get gendered is really just befuddling for a lot of providers and and trans people in my conversations with you know trans folks and also with providers are often or and also research I've read you know trans folks are expected to be the teachers they're expected to teach providers who have no idea what to do with them how to care for them and so often sometimes what ends up happening

there's a lot of research around avoidance of care because trans folks are anticipating stigma and transphobia and medical encounters and so they just don't go to the doctor because they're not able to find providers that are sensitive to their identity because they're not able to find providers that are knowledgeable about the care that they need,

whether it's specifically related to hormones or to transition or just a basic, health preventative and treatment, health care that has nothing to do with anything and simply to do with them needing to be healthy people. And, you know, it causes harm because, you know, you see, yeah, it's, yeah. Well, I think it trickles down to the population in the sense, like when you engage with reactionaries or even clueless centrists, there's a trope that pops up often when you're talking

about trans issues where they're just wholly dismissed as mentally ill. And it's like, you know, there's like this, this like fake patronizing concern, like, you know, in turf communities as well, these people just need mental health care, you know, they're mentally, they're mentally sick. And that's, and that's the real issue. They're not, trans is like a not a real thing. And, you know, that's the argument from the reactionary side. And the thing that's fucked up is like there are often higher rates of, you know, depression and much higher rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in trans communities because obviously, you know, we've seen research about minority stress and the fact that like being constantly exposed to stressors and to violence related to your marginalized identity is going to make

you far more likely to have poor mental health outcomes. So you do have trans folks that do have mental illnesses, but the mental illness is not because of the fact that, well, if the mental illness is not inextricably linked to their transness outside of the fact that like being a victim of violence because of your identity. is often going to produce negative health outcomes. Exactly. And so, you know, you read some of this old work by sexologists and psychiatrists that are just like, well, if you can treat this illness that they have,

this parapheria or this mental illness that produces this health or this, this understanding of gender, then you can like have a normal person in the world. But it's just like, okay, there are trans people that also do need help. with mental health and to say that the identity itself is an expression of mental illness is to completely ignore the really the systemic violence that does produce mental health, poor mental health. It's the same thing with black people. Like multiple or just continuous experiences of anti-blackness and racism and quote unquote microaggressions is it produces kind of this aggregate of a race-based PTSD. But black, black,

Blackness itself is not this state of deviance or mental illness. Like I am, I have anxiety because I am black and because I constantly experience anti-blackness. You know, it's a similar kind of thing. Absolutely. And there's historical precedence in the sense that homosexual behavior was pathologized at one point. It was even in the DSM. To be gay was, you know, tied to being mentally ill. So when you look at these issues today, you can easily look back and say, oh, wow, you know, science and the popular.

and the general attitude towards these ideas are totally, you know, fucked and they totally reflect the dominant narratives of the white supremacists, heteronormative society we live in. And there's actually, even like slaves, enslaved people like running away from plantations and running away from the site of, like, labor exploitation was understood as a mental illness.

It was called drapetomania. Wow. So there are all of these mental illnesses that can be ascribed to, like, people that bear deviant identities, not doing the things that, you know, cis people, white people, heterosexual people, perceived to be quote, normal behavior for that deviant state.

Exactly. All right, Zoe, thank you so much for coming on again. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming back. Before we end, though, I do want to let you give a chance to, like, let listeners know where they can find your work and maybe toss out some recommendations that you would offer for anyone who wants to learn more about any of these important topics that we've discussed today.

Oh, I wasn't prepared for recommendations. but we can put that on the website. Okay. But you can catch me on Twitter at Z-T-S-A-M-U-D-Z-I, and then I've got a website, zoeysimut-Z.com. Absolutely. Please check that out. Thank you so much for coming on, Zoe.

Got can't on my floor, friends in my heart. My mama get pushing I would go so far. Tickling my throat, throw out a cigarette. The next time I fall down, that'll be it. Got anger for days and now the nexty way I'll only run away if I can run with me and the only die young if I choose to stop surviving. They got the power, they drop the bodies,

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