VIDEO + INTERVIEW: Feminists We Love: Kim Katrin Crosby > The Feminist Wire

KIM KATRIN CROSBY

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Feminists We Love:

Kim Katrin Crosby

February 22, 2013

Kim Katrin Crosby

Kim Katrin Crosby is a daughter of the diaspora ~ Arawak, West African, Indian, and Dutch ~ hailing from Trinidad and living currently in Toronto. Kim is an award-winning, multidisciplinary artist, activist, consultant, facilitator, and educator. She is co founder of The People Project, a movement of queer and trans folks of color and our allies, committed to individual and community empowerment through alternative education, activism, and collaboration. She was featured as one of Go Magazine’s ’100 Women We Love’ in 2012 and is a current feature of The Insight Project highlighting Toronto’s game changers.

TFW: How does Feminism function, if at all, as a conceptual tool of resistance in the work that you do?

Kim: I think it is important to share what feminism means to me. I like to say that I deal in meanings and not definitions. I think that feminism has really different meanings and interpretations for a lot of people and I recognize how important it is to ensure that we get to examine the complexity of these different meanings when we imagine collective processes of resistance and freedom.

Feminism for me is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. My feminism does not target men or masculinity as its enemy; rather, it is the structure of the society with which it is at odds. I don’t believe that men are “sex-crazed maniacs” who can’t help but assault womyn. I don’t subscribe to any ideas like ‘boys will be boys,’ that deny the possibility of individual and collective masculinities to be accountable for violence, privilege, or sexism.

Cherrie Moraga in “Refugees of a World on Fire,” which is the foreword to the Second Edition of This Bridge Called My Back, says so aptly, “If we are interested in building a movement that will not constantly be subverted by internal differences, then we must build from the inside out, not the other way around. Coming to terms with the suffering of others has never meant looking away from our own.” And for me, feminism is about exactly that, exploring the ways in which womyn, girls, and femininity are subjected to a disproportionate amount of suffering globally. Women perform 66% of the world’s work, but receive only 11% of the world’s income, and own only 1% of the world’s land.

There was a study recently published in the American Political Science Review, the largest study of its kind. It details violence against women conducted over four decades and in 70 countries. Its core finding was that the mobilization of feminist movements is more important for change than the wealth of nations, left-wing political parties, or the number of women politicians.

And for me feminism is all of these varied movements. Feminism is the Gulabi Gang; feminism is hundreds of years of Indigenous resistance. Feminism is Janet Mock, Punam Kholsa, Monica Roberts, D’bi Young, and mi abuela Aurelia. And I am beyond grateful for an enormous legacy of brilliant feminist freedom fighters

TFW: You often articulate the importance of decolonization in community organizing; what does decolonization mean to you and how do you practice decolonization outside of community organizing?

Kim: Decolonization is the act of naming/understanding the violent practices of colonization and subverting them in a myriad of ways. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. It happens every time we engage in economies of barter, it happens every time we respect someone’s gender pronoun, it happens when we learn of each other from each other, it happens when we recognize our interdependence and care for each other as though our lives depend on it, because they do.

I don’t know if it is possible to impose an artificial separation between community organizing, community building, and love. I think that community organizing can be a really ablest concept that ‘requires’ that bodies function in particular ways in order to be ‘actively’ doing something. Audre Lorde tells us that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

And in a system of colonization and capitalism that would have us believe that we are only valuable when we are producing something-knowing that–it means that rest, self-care, and community care are such significant acts of decolonization.

TFW: How important is community building in mobilizing resistance?

Kim: For me community building is about relationship building. It is about engaging in processes where we learn about each other’s needs and experiences in order to best care for and consider each other. My idea of revolution is treating no one as though they are disposable and resisting the ideas of individualism. Even the idea of ‘mobilizing,’ that too is ablest, as not everyone is ‘mobile’ and resistance must include all bodies and all abilities.

Community building is also celebration, respecting boundaries, and working towards greater means of accountability. I think a significant practice is also working to address our internalized experiences of oppression and how they play out both on others and us. This means confronting things like fat phobia, shadism, audism, and ageism in ways that are meaningful and authentic to ensure that communities that we are building are truly inclusive. It is at this place where our resistance is strongest.

TFW: I’m curious to know how you reconcile your self-identification as a queer femme of colour with feminist discourses?

When I tried to find myself reflected in other people’s versions of feminism, it was here that I didn’t find myself represented. Or if I did, it was a fractured type of representation; and I can’t conceive of a practice of feminism that is not grounded in a framework of intersectionality. The lack of intersectionality present in many versions of feminism is troubling at best and violent at worst. I think it is important to recognize that there are many different kinds of knowledge and experiences. I am not counter-culture. I am culture. And in my culture, in our discourses I find myself reflected, affirmed, and existing and when I do find that those things are not happening, my communities are often willing and able to be accountable to that.

TFW: On that note, how might we foster accountability and intersectionality within feminist movements in ways that don’t reproduce erasure of experiences and bodies?

Kim: It is important to recognize that the absence of accountability and intersectionality in some feminist movements can often be the result of a willful ignorance and a comfort in their place of relative privilege. Feminists of colour, deaf feminists, trans & queer feminists have been prolific in their criticism and analysis of oppressive movements for generations. It is not as though we are not doing enough to highlight the need for these things.

Recently, I watched Khush with one of my mentors, Punam Kholsa.Khush is the first documentary (directed by award-winning feminist filmmaker Pratibha Parmar) to explore the lives and experiences of South Asian Lesbians and Gays in London, India, and Canada. And although it was made many years ago, what struck me was that the challenges they described were the same. They spoke of the experience of being asked to choose between their queerness and their brownness in communities of colour and white gay communities respectively. They spoke of the overwhelming need to be represented in their relative communities and they were clear and articulate around what their needs were. The consistency of these same troubling issues over generations reminds me of the ways that privilege allows for people to be exempt from perpetuating social inequity.

As marginalized people, we often feel as though we have to disprove the ‘stereotypes’ or fight to be represented in White Euro Western media. However, at the core of that is the fact that there are stereotypes to disprove and that we are not treated as individuals. We are consistently asked to be the representative of our race or our gender.

For example, despite the number of white men who have been serial killers, there is not a stereotype that is perpetuated in white Euro Western media that white men are asked to disprove and/or answer for. Their portrayals are often fair and complex. There are entire movie franchises that attempt to give context to how white male serial killers may come to exist (e.g. Hannibal). On the other hand, when Black men have participated in acts of gun violence, there is no nuanced portrayal, no loving descriptions, there is simply the condemnation of them as a gang members who should all be locked up or eliminated.

I, for one, am not trying to ‘prove’ to anyone, feminist or not, that I am not a stereotype. As a mixed race womyn of colour, but in particular as a Black womyn, I am often dismissed as ‘angry.’ Do the people who assign us this moniker seek to understand why I might be angry? What might have happened to make me angry? No, it is assumed that it is unwarranted and unreasonable because ‘we are all this way.’ And in truth, the womyn of colour I know and the Black womyn I know are the most consistently empathic, caring people I know and almost to a fault.

This remains true despite the fact that we continually encounter hundreds of microaggressions daily. We are held responsible for the destruction of our families; we are shamed for our sexuality and our bodies and are violently assaulted and disappeared at alarming rates.  All the while we dominate in service industries around the world including nursing, childcare, food service, cleaning, and waste removal. If we were really so angry and out of control, why then are we constantly caregivers, nurturers, and maids?

As far as representation, I will not beg and plead with an industry that time and time again deliberately does not represent us. We have been asking for representation for decades. The fact that the Oscars we win are for playing the roles of maids, then and now should tell us exactly what this industry thinks of us. Harry Potter could have been Romani, Argentinian, could have been a half Lithuanian Jewish, half Korean wheelchair user. We are talking about a magical world where anything is possible and even in magical, science fiction, post apocalyptic worlds we remain conspicuously invisible. We are asked to identify with these experiences. We are asked to watch another Queen Elizabeth biopic, meanwhile the multiplicity of so many peoples’ stories go unrepresented in this media.

We don’t need to beg for representation that reflects the intersections of our identities, we can represent ourselves and we do all the time. We make our own media and we need to support our own media makers and build industries around them as opposed to requiring that they ‘make it’ in industries where they are systemically denied access.

When it comes to feminist communities of people who are willing to examine their relative privilege while sharing their experience of oppression, I think the key is accessible, non-shaming education. I have found in my work as a grassroots educator that many of us desire to learn about each other; it is just that education is often co-opted by ablest, racist, sexist institutions charging tens of thousands of dollars to have the right to learn. When I lecture at universities, I always work to ensure that it is free. I share it in my social networks that are composed of people of a diversity of ages, experiences, and abilities. When I develop presentations, engage in research, write anything – I share it across these networks. I want education to be free; I want us to learn how to treat each other better. Sharing that information, sharing our strategies of accountability and accessibility with all people from as young as possible with as much context as possible for me is integral to fostering accountability and intersectionality in our movements. One criticism I am met with when I share this practice is “how then do you make a ‘living’?” and I always reply, ‘community takes care of me.’ Perfect strangers have sent donations, have offered their care and affirmation, have helped me travel and work all over the work and have been inspired to do so by the values that ground me and the information I share.

Now I am by no means ‘cash-rich,’ far from it. I think it is important to name this because I think that our movements and our folks often try to pass as middle class and I am not. And, yet, I do have to acknowledge my privilege as a light-skinned, young, ‘able-bodied,’ English-speaking womyn. I know that the aforementioned also provide me with cultural capital and that it is clear that dark-skinned, differently abled, fat, gender non-conforming folks are not often supported to do this same kind of community organizing.

 

 

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We welcome

our first syndicated column:

Queer, Gifted & Black


This is some real hard talks and for all my sistren who have lived through or who are living through sexual violence, be careful with yourself. You don’t have to read this to prove anything to yourself or others. You are magnificent as you are.

By Kim Katrin Crosby

I, like many of the femmes of colour in my life, regardless of sexual orientation, have experienced sexual violence at the hands of strangers, friends, family even lovers. Hell the media and the government actively participate in this shit as well, even knowledge masquerading as ‘science’ (psychology today, I am looking squarely at you) are to blame. It requires courage to as the brilliant Arti Metha says to walk out with, “me and my slutty thigh high sparkly fishnets against the world”.

Over the course of my life this violence has come in the form of caregivers, street harassment, and at the hands of partners both male and female. I was introduced to sex and sexual desire at a very young age, and let me be specific, I was introduced to being ‘sexually desired’ at a profoundly wrong age. I felt deep, gut wrenching shame, responsibility and oh so much guilt. I was sure that people could see it written all over me. I begged and pleaded to what I understood God to be, to have me forget. To wipe away the memories, the sounds, the dreams, the flashbacks and start me all over again.

I think something very different happens to girls know sex too soon.

Girls who come to know that sex is a currency and we are in a recession.

Girls who don’t yet know the context, that we come from a history where sex workers were priestesses and now our bodies are regularly dismembered and commodified. We are blamed and branded as we tap into a power stemming as far back as time immemorial. And my sistren, I want to remind us that we remain both beautiful and priceless no matter how many people we sleep with, no matter what happens to our sex.

In this patriarchal, racist, mind fuck of a world we are both what is desired and defiled, vessels of power and of shame.

And there I was trying to walk that impossibly fine line between Madonna and whore. Completely inexperienced, but with a body that clearly said otherwise and I had no allies. Had no mentors, had no women I could ask to provide me with guidance as I wandered, or rather strutted.

And then we are told that this is what makes us special. And at first it feels like it, and even when it doesn’t it still is the only place where women are truly ‘validated’. We can be smart, athletic, creative, but we all are required to still be attractive. And being this exceptional, holds in betwixt the fingers of its’ mysticism the promise of love, attention, adoration, but mostly the promise of a promise. The promise of something more.

I find myself searching the eyes of each person I meet and asking the following questions:

“Could you love me?”

“Would you hurt me?

“Do you want to fuck me?”

“And how would I know the difference?”

I imagine that it must be so freeing, so beautiful to look into someone’s eyes for the first time and see eyes, and feel nervous and curious, maybe some butterflies, some deep in the chest, down in the belly welling up of something. I wonder what it must be like not to need to know the answer to these questions, not to have your survival depend on knowing whether someone’s desire to fuck will overwhelm their desire to protect you from harm, on knowing what you must exploit, what you must manipulate in order to get space in the midst of this.

We girls of the fatherless tribe, girls of the motherless tribe we work in trade.

And I have done it too – for love, support, to build family and to find freedom.

And I have no regrets.

Not one.

We glorify men as pimps and hustlers, but I want to shout out to all the womyn doing what they have to do to survive, all the womyn doing what they have to do to thrive. To the video girls, and the trans womyn, the sex workers and the dancers. Our society gives us few options and we are still able to leverage these experiences into book deals, professional dance careers and Masters degrees in physics.

And I want to say, it’s not enough to tell us to keep being strong and keep on hustlin. We actually need work, commitment for others to challenge this culture and transform the dialogue. And I want to give props to those of you who do it. Those of you who sit with us and devise plans for us to come home safely, those who tell us that we are are your heros, those who check their brethren when they spit whack ‘game’ to a sister – because it isn’t a game.

This is our lives.

And these are our bodies.

And even if we like sex that is rough or that explores rape fantasies, even if we love or have deep appreciation for masculine energy regardless of the body that it comes in – the fact of the matter is that the consent is what turns us on. We are giving permission to ourselves to be submissive and this in fact is a reclaiming of our bodies in a culture that decries that it is our ‘no’s’ that mean ‘yes’. It is possible to protest misogyny with my legs spread wide open and I am going to just that.
And as much as wish I didn’t have to say this, we have to say this.
Don’t rape us.
Don’t shout slurs at us on the streets.
Don’t act with ownership over our bodies.
Don’t police our bodies and that includes how we dress, how we fuck and how we birth.
Yes means yes. That’s it.
Don’t drug us, slip things in our drinks, wait until we are drunk – these things are not consent.
We are not responsible for getting you off, or tempting you or in general for your lack of self control.
We are children of the universe no less than the sun or stars.
It’s time you all acted like it.
Syndicated from Queer Gifted Black

>via: http://weaponoftherevolutionworldwide.wordpress.com/tag/kim-katrin-crosby/