Feminist Studies

A Dirty South Manifesto Sexual Resistance and Imagination

in the New South

L. H. Stallings

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The calls for a moral revival . . . . . . . moral arguments . . . . and moral choices . . . . . . in the South

Seem sweet Like honey In a cup of tea More or less the same Unchanging Soothing in routine And familiar . . . . are for an Old South

What has been o$ered up for the New South, the Nuevo South, and the Dirty:

. . . . a Slow tongue . . . . . . . Dirt a Red Worm Deity . . . . and a Honeysuckle God . . . . . .

Honeysuckle, Not Honey Sucka! Manifesto

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By WeUsIOurU Is neither immoral or amoral Female, Queer, and Trans Insurgency Is natural Like all life-sustaining living things in nature Must grow, sometimes wildly, above ground and below

ground Like vines that shade, hide, coddle, and embrace Like roots that stretch out further below than the eye can

see

Rise up honeysuckles, burrow deeper red worms Threaten all that lie in your path Nourish what has been displaced Su$ocate with floral and musk the cleanliness Their perfume pretends to be Shit all over what has been starved and emaciated Choke it with your vines, But o$er your sweet dew to your peril Men, moral or immoral, are not bees or hummingbirds

Be the red worm in the dirt. Be the honeysuckle on the vine

Honeysuckle . . . Not a Honey Sucka!

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Despite public rhetoric that stridently insists upon the apolitical nature of teaching, teaching and learning have never been apo- litical. Not for the colonizers and enslavers, and not for the colo- nized and enslaved. The dismantling of public liberatory educa- tion, be it defunding or privatization through chartering or diversity initiatives, intends to cease the process of decoloniza- tion that was initiated with the intervention of Black studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies in communities and learn- ing institutions. Moreover, a divestment from arts, music, and performance in all centers of learning has also lessened the strides that might be made by those previously mentioned areas of study. Together, these factors encroach upon movements of sexual resistance in less visible and deadly ways.

Years ago, Gloria Anzaldúa explained that “We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to

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real events.”$ What might our twenty-first century bodies need to remember? How significant is the imagination to resistance about gender, sexuality, and violence? In an undergraduate class on intimate partner violence, I have taught three short fictional pieces together—Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” Estela Portillo Trambley’s “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” and Lynn Not- tage’s “POOF!”—alongside Critical Race Feminism law articles, and critical essays on intimate violence. I do so because these short pieces teach how, even in the face of violence, magic and imagination must be a first and last resort. Hurston’s female pro- tagonist in “Sweat” is saved from an abusive husband by a poi- sonous snake in a laundry basket. Nottage’s female protagonist is delivered from her husband’s abuse when she wishes him to hell and he spontaneously combusts. Trambley’s female protagonist delivers herself and other women from an abusive man because she believes the honeysuckle gods cultivated and o%ered up to her the poisonous mushrooms that end his life.

In each story, women writers present nature as a magical and ethereal force that supersedes any religious institution’s moral authority over their lives. For women of color, the fantasy of end- ing physical, mental, and sexual violence is both a militant and a magical process that is not captured by public protest, campaigns for votes, or reliance upon systems and structures whose founda- tion is male patriarchy sustained by white supremacist coloniza- tion. When the hope for something between political structure and anarchy or between morality and immorality paralyzes the less powerful, the magic makers find a way to convince them that radical action does not have to be violence by their own hand: that it can be the establishing of systemic confrontation with the fiction of moral authority. Their stories insist that the practice of magic can become a mode of fugitivity, a creative force to imag-

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ine the world away from the violence of men. Radical nonvio- lence is not passive. Radical nonviolence is knowledge, learning, and teaching magic. A Dirty South Manifesto began with thoughts on intersectionality, but it ends with a coda on bridges and tunnels.

As in the past, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa continues to be important in building bridges between multiple and diverse communities. When Anzaldúa insisted that “I am a wind- swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds,” she was describing the burden that women of color are tasked with in saving themselves and others.# Her words certainly seem pro- phetic today as new whirlwinds threaten to break bridges that have already been built. Though Roe v Wade is still legal, the ramifications of “legal” and “moral” seldom apply to girls and women of color. Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation pro- ceedings for the vacant Supreme Court justice seat brought to the forefront of America the lives of three di$erent women: Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and Jane Doe. Their stories demonstrate the ways in which the sexuality and bodily auton- omy of women continue to be contained, controlled, disre- garded, and misrepresented by white male patriarchy.

Before and during Senate confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh, it was revealed that an unaccompanied and undocumented sev- enteen-year-old immigrant girl, given the pseudonym Jane Doe, who had escaped abusive parents was denied access to abortion after she was told she was pregnant by doctors in the border internment camp. Kavanaugh issued the dissent that impeded her from having the abortion earlier in pregnancy, rather than later. Understanding the significance of this dissent, Jane Doe’s attorney, Rochelle Garza, testified on behalf of Jane Doe and other immigrant women about the threat that Kavanaugh’s

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appointment to the court poses to women’s lives and bodily autonomy. She began with these words:

There is no other way to describe the borderlands than a place where absolutely everything converges, and everything coexists. The reality is that our communities sit at the intersection of local, state, national and international policy, and as a result, our commu- nities are complex. Our families are complex. It’s perfectly normal to find a U.S. Border Patrol Agent with a non-citizen grandmother that he or she visits over the weekend in Matamoros, our sister-city in Mexico, or even siblings that aren’t all U.S. citizens and fear being separated from each other should an immigration o$cial happen to learn about their status.%

Garza provides insights about the borderlands that depict peo- ple still externally and internally struggling with settler coloni- alism. Her perspective exceeds the vision of African American former president Barack Obama, who in #&!# issued the execu- tive branch memorandum DACA (Deferred Action for Child- hood Arrivals), an immigration policy that provided temporary deferral of deportation for up to two years, renewable, for chil- dren who entered the United States before they were sixteen years old. As many less than optimistic and concerned citizens noted at the time, the application process could become a sur- veillance tracking system of children and adults that could prove harmful to them if a xenophobic president or House came into power. Such is the case now in the era of MAGA. The people who put children in cages do not believe in the snake god of Gloria Anzaldúa, or in Gloria Anzaldúa as a minor god. Other- wise we would not be here, trapped in a moment, debating and defending mostly brown children’s right to live as fully in the world as we do in our dreams and imaginations. I want to believe in the covert existence of spies and infiltrators in ICE and the

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Border Patrol, but there are too many journalists reporting sto- ries about white, Black, and brown agents who rape and kill, and kill and rape women in the internment camps and away from them.$

Anti-immigration measures in the Southwest, when coupled with border militarization, produce human tra%cking, sexual terrorism, and violence on immigrant women and children, in addition to exploitative labor practices along the borderlands and in the interior of the southeastern United States. For exam- ple, over the last few years, the state of Georgia has passed a number of bills that directly target immigrants. The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (SB&'(), which passed in '))", states that employers must “verify the legal sta- tus of all new employees and . . . provide documents on each per- son working for them” when requested by local and state gov- ernments.* Another example, Georgia’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act (HB+,), is an immigration act that requires employers to verify immigrant status and use citizen- ship as an employment eligibility factor, makes it possible for local police to randomly check the status of anyone they suspect of being unlawfully in the country, enables local police to enforce federal immigration laws, and makes it a crime to inten- tionally transport undocumented people or o-er false a%davits about undocumented immigrants’ status.. Alabama has passed similar laws.

In Georgia, these acts are complicated by a history that posi- tions race in a Black/white binary, particularly in cities like Atlanta. In border states there has been a longer history of cul- tural exchanges between African Americans and Latinas/os: for example, Los Gorras Negras (the Black Berets) were a multieth- nic group that fought for social transformation starting in !("( in

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New Mexico. Elsewhere in the South, however, dynamics of race are complicated with regards to industry and to historical politics. In their essay examining how Latino individuals are being racialized in the Southeast, Irene Browne and Mary Odem “argue that in moving beyond the Black/White binary, state laws that racialize Latinos create a two-dimensional cate- gory, with a homogenized ‘Latino’ category as one axis and an illegal/legal distinction as the second axis.”$

In addition to these concerns regarding racial formation and immigration policies, there are also other factors to consider. In his speculative examination of labor and futurism in the Nuevo South, Curtis Marez attends to considerations of labor and tech- nology when discussing agriculture robots and drones, particu- larly to the “struggle between agribusiness corporations and farm workers over technology—especially visual technologies such as cameras—as means for projecting competing futures.”% Marez’s study has implications for how the logics for and against immigrant labor have shifted and changed, while xenophobia and racism remain.

Calls for a moral revival or reliance upon moral authority also often overlook crucial populations such as LGBTQ youth. Cur- rently, LGBTQ youth homelessness is at an all-time high. Churches and state agencies continue to ignore the problem for clear-cut reasons. As one national report noted, “the most preva- lent reason for homelessness among LGBTQ youth was being forced out of home or running away from home because of their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.” More than half of the surveyed homeless youth (&&.' % of the LGBQ youth and "(.! % of the transgender youth) reported this as the reason for their homelessness, and LGBTQ youth of color are dispropor- tionately represented in these statistics.) Runaway and homeless

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LGBTQ youth who engage in survival crimes are then at a greater risk for contact with the criminal justice system. When the True Colors Fund partnered with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty to compile their National Index on Youth Homelessness, they ranked New Orleans eighth in the nation in e$orts to prevent or end youth homelessness, and positively highlighted that Louisiana’s decriminalization e$orts focused on lessening runaways’ contact with the juvenile justice system; but the report also suggested that the state needs to improve e$orts centered on LGBTQ youth.%& Fortunately, community organiza- tions in New Orleans have o$ered an example of how to address racial and sexual justice around young people. Congress of Day Laborers and BreakOUT! created the From Vice to ICE cam- paign, which provides a decolonial approach to addressing the complications that arise from nonnormative gender and sexuali- ties. In the booklet, organizers explain, “Vice to ICE is now the name we use for our campaign or areas of our work that recog- nizes the intersections between our struggles for liberation, as well as our intentional building with those whose lives are at the intersections of these identities—LGBTQ undocumented com- munities in New Orleans.”%%

Congress of Day Laborers was founded by immigrants and day laborers who were involved in the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Led by men and women of color, the organization provides grassroots organizing address- ing exploitative labor practices that pit communities of color against each other. BreakOUT! was incubated in '(!( by found- ing members Milan Nicole Sherry, Jonathan Willis, Lhundyn Palmer, Kenisha Harris, Amhari Alexander, and De-De Jack- son, along with founding director Wes Ware, who later formally organized to create an organization committed to ending the

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criminalization of LGBTQ youth and their survival practices. In addition to working with Congress of Day Laborers, the organization has worked closely with Women with a Vision (see chapter #). BreakOUT!’s We Deserve Better and From Vice to ICE campaigns have emphasized discriminatory policing prac- tices in New Orleans as major political issue. The group’s e$orts are significant because they are led by and comprised of mostly Black transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Their mission prioritizes individuals who are seldom considered in discussions of sexual rights and sexual citizenship, young peo- ple between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five.

Coauthored by BreakOUT! and Congress of Day Laborers, the From Vice to ICE Toolkit was created to address the Crimi- nal Alien Removal Initiative, which was an Obama-era initia- tive that authorized raids of racially profiled communities. The toolkit also addresses the quota-based arrest practices of ICE and the New Orleans police and sheri$ ’s departments. Inter- spersed with personal accounts of members’ experiences with state violence, the booklet includes vital statistics and notable summary information: “Louisiana has the highest deportation rate per capita than anywhere else in the country, and New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate per capita than any- where else in the world. Louisiana is also home to the highest per capita immigration arrest rate in non-border states and new data continues to show the disproportionate arrest of LGBTQ youth, specifically Black and Brown transgender and gender nonconforming youth.”%& The toolkit centers decolonial literacy practices that emphasize language and culture as relevant to activist praxis involving gender and sexuality, while also chal- lenging the foundations of moral authority that might invalidate the prioritizing of gender and sexual marginalized communities

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and their sexual praxis. Understanding that its potential mem- bers may be monolingual or bilingual (English or Spanish), the tool kit begins with a statement about language justice, but it also includes instructions for carrying out nonverbal icebreakers to navigate the language barrier. From there, exercises to develop consciousness and community—such as story circles, a dance activity o$ered by a founder of Two Spirit Journal utilizing Whitney Houston songs, and a workshop curriculum—are introduced. Often assessed as secular practices elsewhere, dance and song are notable tools of spiritual and political intervention throughout the toolkit. The toolkit prompts individuals to engage their bodies and space di$erently than in political organ- izations where the secular and sacred are axiologically opposed. Notably, the toolkit does not critique religion or religious insti- tutions. An appendix containing a glossary and brief histories of slavery, colonization, and gender and sexual discrimination (in English and Spanish) completes the toolkit. From Vice to ICE demonstrates the importance of transformational coalitions, multiple literacy practices, and a transnational lens.

Years ago, another southern writer o$ered a belowground per- spective on the Black and brown coalitions she deemed necessary for what was coming based on immigration policies from the !%&'s. It took Kentucky writer Gayl Jones decades, five other criti- cal, creative, and poetic books, and words from her mother’s crea- tive writing to produce her last published novel, Mosquito. The novel is about protagonist Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha John- son, aka Mosquito, a Black woman truck driver and conductor of a new underground movement, who “wants you to know the truth of the story, for the purposes of the revolution.”() For Jones, trans- formative coalitional politics among Black and Latino people cannot only happen in the public, political aboveground space

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where prying white normative gazes look longingly, hoping for these groups’ assimilation into the majority population.

As Mosquito travels the Southwest, becoming more deeply involved in the sanctuary movement of getting immigrants into the United States, a history and future beyond the current Black/ white binary unfolds. When she talks to Father Ray, who is not an actual priest, about the sanctuary movement, she quips “But for a organization so secretive as y’alls, y’all got a lot of books about y’allself. Seem like if y’all such a secretive Sanctuary movement wouldn’t be all them books on y’all.” The dialogue continues, stressing the importance of underground work:

He replies, “ . . . We ain’t really the mainstream Sanctuary. The mainstream Sanctuary think that the more they’re known the safer they are. That’s why most sanctuaries declare themselves. We’re more like the what they’d call the Nicodemuses of the movement. We don’t declare ourselves.”

Say What? What’s a Nicodemus? The ones who believe the more secret we are the safer we are.$%

Throughout the novel, Jones makes sure to assert that transfor- mational coalitional politics must begin in imaginations that sit- uate histories, memories, and bodies in a place and time far away from those created by slavery and colonialism. The stream of consciousness novel drops nuggets of knowledge about Black and Latino histories and connections before and after conquest, as well as during colonization. As her Mexican and Black char- acters engage each other on their own terms, they learn more about each other. There is no successful insurrection without language, spirituality, and culture that have survived or have been decolonized. Once mutual comprehension is addressed, someone must risk being misunderstood for further truths to be unveiled.

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The misunderstanding between these characters about the sanctuary movement(s) provides a fitting way to conclude this work’s celebration of and thankfulness for sexual resistance in the South and its critique of moral authority in contemporary progressive southern politics. Jones’s representation of the Nico- demuses of the movement as a nod to secrecy, or to secret socie- ties within movements, suggests that the publicness of decoloni- zation and resistance is not the only tactic. The pursuit of sexual and gender equity and freedom requires declaration and action, but it will also require a particular type of vulnerability. The Dirty South has proven as much. Thus, if we begin with the premise that decolonial sexuality and gender are as important to insurgency as weaponry and intelligence gathering, espe- cially as it relates to what have been classified as asexual or non- sexual political issues, then maybe the foundation of insurgency becomes a type of vigilante justice that understands that law and legal measurements are already corrupt and cannot be the basis of change alone. Once the bridges have been built, we must have cultural architects who can transition those bridges into tunnels in opposition to the walls now being built. This is not simply about quests for citizenship and safety, but about new modes of being human and embodying freedom.

Notes to Pages !"#–!$% / !"#

$!. “Big Freedia Takes ‘Full Responsibility,’ ” Louisiana Weekly, March #, $%!&, http://www.louisianaweekly.com/big-freedia-takes- full-responsibility/.

$$. See Cahshauna Hill’s statement in Brentin Mock, “Why Big Freedia Shouldn’t Do Jail Time Over Housing Vouchers,” CityLab, March !#, $%!&, https://www.citylab.com/equity/$%!&/%'/why-big- freedia-shouldnt-do-jail-time-over-housing-vouchers-fraud/(#(!)*/.

$'. Daniel Kreps, “Big Freedia Reschedules Mississippi Show Can- celed Due to Twerking,” Rolling Stone, March (, $%!&, https://www .rollingstone.com/music/music-news/big-freedia-reschedules-mississippi- show-canceled-due-to-twerking-$'&"("/.

$(. Ashon T. Crawley, “Circum-Religious Performance: Queer(ed) Black Bodies and the Black Church,” Theolog y and Sexuality !(, no. $ ( January !, $%%"): $%!–$$, $%$.

+,-.

!. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, $nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, !***), '#–'".

$. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writ- ings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzal- dúa (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, !*"'), $%).

'. “Testimony of Rochelle M. Garza, Managing Attorney, Garza & Garza Law, PLLC, before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Hearing on the Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States,” September #, $%!", https://www .judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Garza%$%Testimony.pdf; for video of her testimony, see “Rochelle Garza Testimony,” CSPAN, Sep- tember #, $%!", https://www.c-span.org/video/?c(#("$&#/rochelle- garza-testimony.

(. See Valeria Vera, “Border Patrol’s Not-So-Secret: The Normal- ized Abuse of Migrant Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Interna- tional A&airs Review (Fall $%!'); and Alice Spire, “Detained then Violated,” The Intercept, April !!, $%!", https://theintercept.com/$%!" /%(/!!/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs/.

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#. HCS SC #$%, Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act, https://votesmart.org/bill/!!$&/georgia-security-and-immigration- compliance-act#'$$%.

(. HB"&, Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of $)!!, http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-US/display/'$!%).

&. Irene Browne and Mary Odem, “ ‘Juan Crow’ in the Nuevo South? Racialization of Guatemalan and Dominican Immigrants in the Atlanta Metro Area,” Du Bois Review %, no. $ (October $)!$): '$!–'&, '$$.

". Curtis Marez, Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, $)!(), !!%–#*.

%. Soon Kyu Choi, Bianca D. M. Wilson, Jama Shelton, and Gary Gates, “Serving Our Youth $)!#: The Needs and Experiences of Les- bian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth Experiencing Homelessness,” True Colors Fund, June $)!#, #, https://truecolorsfund .org/wp-content/uploads/$)!#/)#/Serving-Our-Youth-June-$)!#.pdf.

!). True Colors Fund, “State Index on Youth Homelessness, $)!",” &%–"), https://drive.google.com/file/d/!*hCgF(gwxF&At$kanWLulciE! NPN-Z#C/view.

!!. BreakOUT! and Congress of Day Laborers, From Vice to ICE: Toolkit, $)!&, p. *, http://nowcrj.org/wp-content/uploads/$)!&/)( /engVicetoICE_FINAL.pdf.

!$. BreakOUT! and Congress of Day Laborers, From Vice to ICE, !$. !'. Gayl Jones, Mosquito (Boston: Beacon Press, !%%%), (!(. !*. Jones, Mosquito, ')&.