RACE, GENDER AND DISABILITY: STORYTELLING AND INTERSECTIONALITY
“We have many different faces, and we do not have to become each other in order to work together “(Lorde, 1988, p. 15).
Faith and I both came to the US academy as graduate students from the ‘global South’. Being a queer non-binary third-generation Chinese descendant from Malaysia, I was not familiar the term ‘person of color’, let alone becoming one in the US. Additionally, even though I am also a minority in Malaysia, my genealogy of race and gender is vastly different from the people of color who are born and raised in the US. For example, I did not experience the ‘model minority myth’ during my school years in Malaysia like Asian Americans in the American schools. As M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty state in “Genealogies, legacies, movements” (1997), “To talk about feminist praxis in global contexts would involve shifting the unit of analysis from local, regional, and national culture to relations and processes across culture” (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997, p. 493)
My friendship with Faith began with the recognition of how we both experience systemic racism, and how different they are from each other and from Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in the US. In order to pay attention about what stories and identities we are constructing for ourselves in the film so that we don’t collapse and homogenize our struggles, discomforts and the ways we navigate race, gender and disability, it is imperative for us to ensure that our countries of origin are and our identities clearly communicated in the film. This correlates with Alexander and Mohanty’s ‘feminist democracy’. “The working definitions of feminist democracy are (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997, p. 506):
Sexual politics are central to the processes and practices of governance.
Suggests a different order of relationships among people.
Agency is theorized differently – women (and marginalized people) are not victims.
Draws on socialist principles to address hierarchies of rule and to craft an alternative vision for change.
Has to have transnational dimensions – global processes require global alliances.
‘Feminist democracy’, a decolonial concept, invites us to reimagine marginalized identities and scholarship. It means challenging the imperial hierarchies of identities of gender, race and disability. This would require us to stay away from single-story narrative (depicting marginalized bodies as victims), which is a form of imperial gaze.
In Chandra Talpada Mohanty’s article “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, she examines how the construction of the ‘Third World Women’ is a product of the imperial gaze which assumes that all women’s struggles are the same, thus reducing and erasing the complexities and heterogeneities of the subjects (global south women) under the ‘western eyes’ (Mohanty, 1988). Both of us are ‘Third World Women’. Additionally, with me identifying as queer and non-binary and Faith as disabled, we are committed to tell our stories away from the imperial gaze. To do so, we would have to tell our stories with our full complexities. In other words, we must tell our stories that captures both our marginalized identities and how we are also complicit in the system of oppressions. It would require a form of vulnerability that forces us to consider the harm that it can potentially reproduce. There was a time when I wanted to make the film for just the both of us to heal from the pain we have caused each other. Watching the final edit wasn’t easy for Faith either, but when we both finally came around after a couple of weeks of processing, we recognized that what we have captured – our ability to carry on dialoguing despite the pain out of love and care for each other, and most importantly, the healing factor of these ‘brilliant conversations’ – is too important to not share with others, especially for those who are of marginalized identities.
What kept our friendship together in the end is our shared intergenerational trauma. Although our traumas and pains are also different due to on our social locations, both geographical and political, the work we do together in healing is a powerful force that has the potential to dismantle the master’s house when we come together to organize (coalition building) and learn from each other.
References:
Alexander, M. J., & Mohanty, C. T. (1997). Genealogies, Legacies, Movements. Feminism and Race.
Lorde, Audre. (1988). A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Firebrand Books, Ithaca, New York.
Mohanty C. (1988). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review. 1988;30(1):61-88. doi:10.1057/fr.1988.42