1. Intersectionality
[interviewing Inez Garcia]
Q: What did you say or do that would have given the police ample suggestion that you had been raped that night?G: I told them that they did something funny to me. And they knew the way I was. They saw my clothes. People in Soledad know how to dress. I mean, not that I dress very fine but I like to fix myself up because it's a habit we have. Spanish people, you know, are accustomed to always being dressed. If you go to an office you kind of look presentable, and stuff like that. ( "Interview with Inez Garcia" n/a, pg. 6)
Inez Garcia was a woman who had been raped and then shot one of her rapists as an act of self-defense after going to the police and yielding no response of protection. During her trial, Garcia received much support from feminist groups and introduced the idea of intersectionality between different groups of women. Here, Garcia mentions an aspect of her identity (being Spanish) and how its culture is important to the unspoken gender norm and regulation that would have shown the police how serious her position was. Also, the unspoken of sex, rape, sexual assault - all things dealing with sexuality and the power struggle between men and women during this time - limits Garcia's expression of what happened to her. Police is an institution that upholds white supremacy and sexist practices due to its largely white and male power structure, which brings into question who is believable to whom based on racial and gendered norms. This is highlighted too through Garcia being drug tested instead of examined for sexual assault first (pg. 8) as a way to immediately try to discredit Garcia if anything was found in her system regardless of what she had to say about her own drug usage.
The kinds of lesbians that were featured in this collection were women of all kinds of races, ethnicities, locations, etc. But their experiences blended into finding common ground in their politics and an aspect of their identities: the embracement of feminist practices to uplift all women, including queer women, women of color, etc.
2. Destigmitization
It [literary discussions] made one feel, Rebecca said to her cat, like one were part of a great global underground even though one didn't know any of the people personally. It made one feel, she exampled to the cat, alive ("The real thing" Francine Kranso, pg. 31)
This quote generalizes the zine's common thread of destigmatizing the experiences of queer women who are also politically informed. This short story by Francine Kranso introduces us to a main character named Rebecca who is an English student living in an apartment right above another queer woman who is an independent filmmaker. Both of these characters are deeply involved in making art that speaks on the political and lived experiences of people like them. This quote emphasizes the feeling that the community makes one feel more lively, more thoroughly involved in the world around them, and less alone in one's positionality.
As long as lesbians were seen as sexually perverted beings, then phsyically they must also be deviant. Therefore: Women are lesbians because they are too ugly to get a man. All lesbians look like men and by cultural standards are ugly ("Images of lesbains - breaking the myth" Phylane Norman, pg. 44)
This quote is introduced right before a photo series of different women who identify as lesbians. Some of them are feminine, some are masculine, and some are androgynous. Dressed in shadows and printed in black and white print, the viewer can't point out the exactness of these portraits, but the details of each person (eyes, freckles, etc.) are easily identifiable. Again emphasizes the point that those who exist outside of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are not monolithic in their beliefs or their appearance. The white supremacist capitalist patriarchy perpetuates rigid, binary systems of thinking, which Norman mentions by comparing the stereotype of lesbians as "some truck-driving sexual being that went around seducing women in the same way that men are infamous for". If a lesbian does not fit this stereotype by being more feminine, less dirty, etc., "then she cannot be a lesbian" to broader society. (pg. 44). By including these photos in the zine, it grants queer women permission and includes them in the action of existing outside the stereotype and embracing their authentic self that includes their queerness and expression in their own form.
There has been a long-standing idea that queerness outweighs Blackness, or, in other words, to be queer is a "white" attribute, removing or denouncing one's experience as a Black person and replacing it with the queer experience. Two frameworks that apply to counter this belief are "intersectionality" and "queer of color critique". Both of these frameworks emphasize the need to recognize both of these identities (Black and queer) as a unique positioner. Black queerness disrupts the experience of Black straight folk and non-Black queer folk, and those who exist only within that one avenue do not have a comparable experience to those who exist right at that intersection. The queer of color critique "helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology" (Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique Ferguson, 2003). And, the author Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality as "the interaction and cumulative effects of multiple forms of discrimination affecting the daily lives of individuals, particularly women of color", and in a broader context, "an intellectual framework for understanding how various aspects of individual identity—including race, gender, social class, and sexuality—interact to create unique experiences of privilege or oppression" (Britannica definition, August Samie).
WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST, "OUT IN THE WORLD" (pg 71-80) PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS, ASHA BANDELE (2018)
This chapter focuses solely on Khan-Cullors sexuality and how she identified as a lesbian before falling in love with her cis-male husband. Khan-Cullors depended on the relationships she made with other Black queer girls at the time, due to her and their family's unbalanced acceptance of their sexualities. “To outsiders - in many cases, outsiders being our families - our relationships may have seemed complex or odd or even dangerous. But to us, they made sense. To us they were oxygen and they still are” (pg. 79). This directly relates to the production of the zine as having any kind of resource to provide comfort, to serve as a depiction of connectedness, meant that one could find a community of others like them after being outcasted by the ones they deemed family through blood.
The idea of a chosen family comes up often in this issue of Black Maria, but seen very clearly in the piece "Women in labor unions" (pg. 53-57). Here, the combination of all-women's rights and worker's rights creates an opportunity to find a chosen community to uplift oneself and others through financial equity. The piece is written by the Coalition of Labor Union Women, based in Detroit, Michigan.
The last paragraph states:
"Despite the problems in CLUW, we encourage all union women to get involved in it. On the whole CLUW is a very positive development and is an orginization in which we can meet, work with, and learn from other women. Of course this organization cannot provide an ultimate solution to the problems of working women but it is further proof that women are rising up in greater unity and strength" (pg. 57)
Overall, the piece on CLUW encourages the idea of unionizing and general unity in order to divest the impact of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal thinking, behaviors, and impacts.
"WHEN BLACK LIVES MATTER MEETS GAY PRIDE", LOS ANGELES TIMES (2020)
Though this video only focuses on gay Black men, it does bring into light the importance of the "intersection of Black people and LGBTQ+ people" through the organization "All Black Lives Matter". This distinction is important because it brings into the conversation how one's queerness and Blackness are deeply intertwined into a unique experience that is different from being Black and straight or queer and non-Black. Instead of being faced with the non-option of "picking" which identity one identifies with more, which ultimately leads to the suppression of the other identity/identities, there begins an incision of every additional identity, be it queer, disabled, age, class, etc. due to the broad spectrum and non-monolithic experience of Black folks. The important part of this video is that regardless of those intersections, they do face the common threat of police violence based solely on their skin tone. Their intersections can make that threat more or less personal, but the shared racial oppression is one that impacts all on some level, with the goal to bring attention to it and hopefully, rid of it.
Menarche by Denice Renschen (pg. 25-26)
This poem was one of my favorite pieces presented in the zine. The poem is an ode to girls beginning their periods and mentions this kind of shift through generations of acceptance and resistance against the stigmatization surrounding it (see: second page stanzas, i.e. "they won't have this shame"). I really enjoyed this poem as it does a great job of projecting the purpose of the zine: queer women engaged in feminist theories and frameworks through political resistance against stereotypes of all levels. In the 1970s, the idea that all women have a period helped to ease the tensions between different intersecting identities, specifically through race and sexuality. Now, it may be seen as a bit of a shallow connector based simply on normative biology, but it could also be re-imagined as this Now, in the present day, this celebration of the period can be seen as a shallow connector of biology but also reimagined as a bleeding of the body, or a kind of repetitive violence, to be seen as a woman. Womanhood here is determined by a very specific event, and though it may not have been its original intention, that definition can recreate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal view instead of subverting it. This is why the evolution of theories and frameworks is so important, as well as the inclusion of other voices within those frameworks to find multiple points of view.
