GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

[Errata]

I teach Cathy Cohen's 1997 essay, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" ("Punks"), for introductory courses in the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, which was founded in Claremont, California, in 1926 during the Jim Crow era, as a white-serving women's liberal arts college. Scripps College was built on Tongva Indigenous lands using the settler colonialist Mission Revival style of design that the school conceives as "uncommon beauty, attributed to the founder's vision that the College's architecture and landscape should reflect and influence taste and judgment" (Scripps College n.d.). While feminist and queer studies have become somewhat requisite among US women's liberal arts colleges, many of these schools were founded by white suffragists who, as the Black feminist, journalist, and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1991: 151–52) documented, campaigned for voting rights on an anti-Black platform. Therein lies the liberal paradox embedded in the institutionalization of feminist and queer politics for which "Punks" persists as an interventional pedagogical tool.

In the fall of 2015—my first semester teaching at Scripps College—students of color across the Claremont Colleges Consortium staged walkouts, rallies, and marches as part of the international "Blackout" to protest anti-Black racism in school systems and other institutions. During the 2016–17 academic year, our queer and trans of color communities at the Claremont Colleges lost two student activist leaders. One of these students—a young Black woman and daughter of immigrant parents—was in my Introduction to Queer Studies course. She was, and is, a powerful leader who held many in her coalition-building work that ranged from addressing institutional racism to anti-Zionist activism. She was a science major who wished to bring women of color feminisms and queer and trans of color critique to her lab research on HIV antibodies. We had met during my office hours to discuss her work. We also sat on campus-wide committees tasked to address social and economic inequities and initiate structural changes. She was a residential adviser who passed away in her dorm room (Bramlett 2017; Zunguze Family 2017).

Tatissa Zunguzē. [End Page 169]

Tatissa's leadership and coalitional organizing—staged against her multiple encounters with structural and everyday violence—are guided by genealogies of Black feminist and queer thought. Black feminist and queer intellectual projects continue to serve as antiracist and decolonizing pedagogical tools precisely because of their historical interjections into systems of oppression, including white feminist scholarship and other white-centered and/or heteropatriarchal canons of higher education. Black cis-women, gender-nonconforming (GNC), trans, and/or queer faculty, students, staff, and coalitional community members continue to demand engagements with Black feminist, trans, and queer studies to confront the mundane racism and institutional oppositions that form our stubbornly and persistently white-dominated US educational settings.

In "Punks," Cohen (1997: 438) questions the radical potential for queer politics because its settling into institutions elides the operations of power by "reinforc[ing] simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything 'queer.'" "Punks" foregrounds Black feminist interventions into queer politics by calling attention to the then-recent resignation of three Black board members from the first and largest AIDS service organization of its time, Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), over its alleged racism. In turn, Cohen calls for a "new politics" where the "nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work" (ibid.). It is through the "intersection of oppression and resistance" of these non-normative and marginal positions, Cohen (ibid.: 440) submits, that multi-issued, coalitional organizing could manifest the radical potential of queer politics. Cohen states,

Both the needle exchange and prison projects pursued through the auspices of ACT UP New York point to the possibilities and difficulties involved in principled transformative coalition work. In each project individuals from numerous identities—heterosexual, gay, poor, wealthy, white, black, Latino—came together to challenge dominant constructions of who should be allowed and who deserved care. No particular identity exclusively determined the shared political commitments of these activists; instead their similar positions, as marginalized subjects relative to the state—made clear through the government's lack of response to AIDS—formed the basis of this political unity.

(ibid.: 460)

Since, until the mid-1990s, there lacked effective antiretroviral medications that could maintain the health of those living with HIV, the mounting toll of deaths during [End Page 170] the early years of the AIDS pandemic pointed to the "interlocking systems of oppression" and structural violence borne from the dismantling of the US welfare state, including health care and housing, and the diversion of funds toward the arms buildup and military imperialism. Yet Cohen also emphasizes the crucial role of Black and intersectional feminisms as key to the radical and transformative potential of queer politics and cites Kimberlé Crenshaw, Barbara Ransby, Angela Y. Davis, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective, among others (Cohen 1997: 441–42). She illuminates the operations of power that have persisted before (and, now, after) AIDS was widely seen as a "death sentence" by pointing to the historical regulation of women of color who continue to be rendered perverse and criminal as "single mothers, teen mothers, and, primarily women of color dependent on state assistance" (ibid.: 455). As Roderick A. Ferguson has shown in his theorization of the field of "queer of color critique," the stigmatization and demonization of these nonnormative and marginal Black and other people of color subjects through sociological documents, such as the 1965 Moynihan Report, led to the dismantling of the welfare state (Ferguson 2004). Furthermore, Ferguson (2012) contends, the liberal implementation of "diversity" initiatives in higher education reflects the management of Black and other radical social movements through the simultaneous inclusion of ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies and the continued marginalization of people of color in higher education. Put simply, the proliferation of the AIDS pandemic is historically and persistently tied to the institutionalization of Black feminist and queer studies alongside the ongoing structural violence that Black and other people of color, and especially Black cis-women, GNC, trans, and queer peoples, experience as liminal subjects across the institutions of scholarship, art, media, and politics.

For instance, elsewhere (Cheng 2016), I have assessed how there is a trend among recent critically acclaimed popular films addressing AIDS activist historiography whereby people of color have been nearly disappeared from the historical record. I contend that this is because the white men who direct and appear in these films are invested in telling a story about political progress since the earlier years of the AIDS crisis. Rather than examine the root causes for AIDS as embedded in histories of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and socioeconomic inequality that block access for US people of color and the global South, the director David France of the feature-length documentary film How to Survive a Plague (2012) tells a false story meant to convince audiences that biomedical interventions generated and distributed by corporate pharmaceuticals, like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), will solve the pandemic (Shahani 2016). However, this narrative of social and biomedical progress comes at the cost of jettisoning the fact that the AIDS pandemic [End Page 171] manifested precisely because of structural inequalities experienced by nonwhite peoples.

Moreover, the historical video footage adapted into films like How to Survive a Plague is extracted from earlier AIDS activist films and the personal archives amassed through a large network of video artists (Cheng 2016). These archives were donated to institutions, like the New York Public Library. Film directors accessed these public archives and used the footage. As I intend to show in future writing, France left out the extensive activist leadership and on-camera discussions by Black women, people of color, and their white allies that relay their experiences and interventions into the AIDS crisis despite their marginalization by white-dominated institutions and mainstream media (Juhasz 1995).¹

As of this writing, the Tacoma Arts Collective (n.d.) continues to protest the book and touring exhibition, Art AIDS America, for nearly banishing artists of color, especially Black artists. Reina (Tourmaline) Gossett, a Black trans activist and artist, codirected with Sash Wortzel the film short Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2017), which focuses on the influence and activism of Marsha P. Johnson, who was "HIV positive, a sex worker, and an incredible performer and member of the group Hot Peaches." Johnson also cofounded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Rivera (Gossett 2017). Yet Gossett has had to contend with the aforementioned France, who stands accused of appropriating much of Gossett's labor and research on Johnson's life while amassing funding and a media platform that far exceed Gossett (Weiss 2017). Eventually, France's feature-length film version, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), was distributed via Netflix's video-on-demand.

Prompted by such systemic erasures, VisualAIDS (2017) commissioned Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett to cocurate "Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings"—a "video program [that] prioritized Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic" for the 2017 annual "Day with(out) Art." "Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings" includes video shorts by Gossett, Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye, Ellen Spiro, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia LaBeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell. Each of these works transforms time and memory by reimagining and recalling the presence of Black cis-women, GNC, and trans peoples precisely at the moments and sites where they were excluded or forgotten to exist. Dunye's earlier film, The Watermelon Woman (1997), was a watershed for the New Queer Cinema movement. The experimental film yields critical insight into how the memories of Black feminist and queer women fall out of official archives. Official archives, then, must be recast to assert Black queer women's pasts, presences, and futures. In each of the works and conditions cited above, Black cis-women, [End Page 172] GNC, trans, and queer people speak out on their own behalf, but also on behalf of a queer radical imagination that seeks liberation for all. This form of Black feminist thinking and action is rooted in the Black Radical Tradition (Combahee River Collective 1979; Robinson 1983; Kelley 2003; Moten 2003; McLane-Davison 2016; Taylor 2017).

Writing more recently, Cohen (Cohen and Jackson 2016) recognizes the powerful and collectivized vision and work of "young black women who identify as queer" that have built a "leaderful movement with cis and trans women taking positions of power," including Black Lives Matter. She contends,

Young people who have taken classes on black queer studies and black feminist theory through ethnic studies, African American studies and gender and sexuality departments are using the lessons taught in those classes to inform the organizing practices they are deploying on behalf of and in partnership with black people who may never see the inside of our classrooms. These young activists, who blend the politics of the academy and the politics of liberation, daily make black queer studies relevant to a changing world.

(Cohen 2016: xiii)

In response to Tatissa's passing, Black queer and trans students across the Claremont Colleges Consortium gathered their pain and anger and transformed it into direct action. During the spring of 2017, Claremont McKenna College brought pro-police speaker Heather MacDonald to campus. MacDonald has advocated for the use of police against the Black Lives Matter movements. Overnight, in the tradition of nonviolent protest, Black queer and trans students organized and led other students to block access to the venue. They stood front and center while white students and other students of color strategically positioned themselves as a buffer between Black students and campus security, who did not intervene when heck-lers not only shouted and taunted but took to shoving the nonviolent protestors. Students chanted "black lives matter" and "black lives—they matter here." They cited solidarity with immigrants faced with the militarization of the US-Mexico border as well as Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid. As a result, the event was effectively shut down. These students of color transformed their grief into a deep well of care and coalition building. They continue to build movements led by Black queer and trans intellectuals, writers, and artists. They teach me the radical potential of queer politics.

Ironically (or not), there are those who presumably identify as antiracists who describe such nonviolent protest tactics and aforementioned chants, which [End Page 173] echo AIDS activists who adopted these strategies from earlier social movements including Black-led social movements, as seemingly incoherent and "meaningless slogans" (Casil 2017). There are even those who would, in stark self-contradiction, laud the Black-led civil rights movement as decidedly nonviolent while, in the same breadth, describing these student protestors as "violent." The presumption is that white supremacists could be called to their senses because they are, at the bottom of their hearts, benevolent even if misguided people. Yet there is no history that shows that white people have been willing to dismantle white supremacy without the combined approach of civil rights protest and Black militancy (Singh 2004). On many occasions, I have heard decriers of Black protest urge, instead, that Black protestors conduct research and write articles—as if they have not and are not already doing so.

Given the increase in racial profiling and Black imprisonment and murder, intensified border patrolling and immigrant detention, hyperprivatization of all social safety nets, and ballooning college tuition and educational debt, alongside Donald Trump's aim to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, one has to wonder how invested sectors of "civil society" are in the institutionalization of Black feminisms and the concurrent silencing of Black cis-women, GNC, trans, and queer peoples, even though people from all sectors benefit from the historical advancements made by Black feminists. Meanwhile, the "alt right" is ramping up attacks against students of color and ethnic, feminist, trans, and queer studies scholars by claiming that expressions of white supremacy amount to "freedom of speech" and "academic freedom" when, in fact, proclaiming the right to terrorize Black subjects and other people of color enacts the opposite. Allowing white supremacy to parade as "freedom" disassembles the public sphere and tears down academic freedom.

What if, then, we as non-Black people take up Black feminist work to ask such questions as: How would we understand the AIDS pandemic differently if we consider it the outcome of histories of settler colonialism, Native displacement, massive resource extraction, and anti-Blackness? How might we understand this, specifically, from the experience of Black cis-women, GNC, trans, and queer peoples in the midst of the enduring AIDS pandemic? How might Black feminisms form a foundation for challenging the liberal inclusion of "alt-right" discourse and action in academe?

Citing the radical tradition of Black feminisms as central to his approach to the study of anti-Blackness and AIDS, Adam Geary (2014: 23) explains that a "materialist epidemiology and its Marxist inheritance allows [him] to connect [End Page 174] the health research that [he] read with materialist traditions in Black, feminist, queer, and cultural studies, especially those connected, if in complex ways, to the Marxist tradition. These critical, radical traditions are essential for elaborating the histories of struggle, violence, and domination that have made an AIDS epidemic possible and structured its development." Before Tatissa's passing, we had read Geary's work in class. She shared with me her excitement at the potential in engaging in a materialist epidemiology of AIDS that keeps at its core Black feminist, queer, and trans analyses.

Black students, staff, faculty, and community leaders cannot be expected to tirelessly research, write, produce culture, and organize against enduring racism, heteropatriarchy, and AIDS while others appropriate or even disparage such work. As non-Black faculty, staff, students, artists, and participants in social movements, we must teach and learn from Cohen's article as a genealogy of Black feminisms that make the radical potential of queer, trans, and AIDS studies and activism possible. "How" to engage Black feminisms and its continued critical importance to social movements while addressing the insistently low yet highly significant representation of Black people in scholarship, the classroom, and the pandemic is something we must continually ask and push ourselves to do.