To learn of rampant homophobia and deep-seated hatred of homosexuals startled me. To realize that oppressed people sometimes oppress others curiously disturbed me. However, it has helped allay my confusion and guilt about holding black men responsible for their violent behavior. Black women must be held accountable for the homophobia within our ranks.
WOMEN OF COLOR INSTITUTE
The meaning of violence against women in our communities is different from that in white or other Third-World communities. We need to create time and space for researching a new, more meaningful analysis that is relevant to our lives. This is work we must do alone with no apologies for not including others. (No one apologized for the long years we have been excluded.) Our community needs something that the white women’s movement has not given us, and we should know better than to expect to be given anything. We must do our own work.
This concept was dramatically illustrated at the Women of Color Institute of the 1982 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence meeting and conference. The one-day Institute, “Building a Colorful Coalition,” provided the occasion for assembling our vision and building our voice. By acknowledging our differences, we affirmed our union.
Nearly 100 Asian, Hispanic, Native American, black, and other Third World women gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to attend the Institute, a true celebration of sisterhood. Certainly, every participant considered it the highlight of the conference. For me it was the highlight of my work in the battered women’s movement.
The brilliant organizers of the Institute created an arena where we could strength our spirit as Third World women and clarify our dream for a violence-free world. The Institute and the Women of Color Caucus emerged in a leadership role of the conference, confirming my belief that Third World women will be catalysts in bringing about positive change in the struggle for the liberation of all people.
THE CHALLENGES AHEAD
Black women must also work on the direction for the struggle of the racial justice movement. Let us not be distracted by the progress we have made. Although we have won some critical battles, I have a troubling sense that some of the victories may be leading some of us astray. As we surround ourselves with objects rumored to bring happiness and success, we often forget that most black people do not have adequate resources with which to control their lives. It is tempting to push on for our individual advancement without regard for those we are leaving behind.
Black women must more critically analyze this system to which we have demanded access. We must reject those components that suggest exploitation. Too many individuals have been lost to an image of being free. The struggle against racial oppression must continue to be of utmost importance in our lives. The younger we are, the higher the risk of forgetting how far we have come and of limiting our vision of how far we will be able to go.
In conclusion, I have a sense that the lonely, isolating experiences of a black feminist in the battered women’s movement can be over. I can soon recover from the exhaustion I feel at having to constantly make a place for myself in a society that negates my existence. It is clumsy and burdensome to live in constant defense against simultaneous racial and sexual oppression. I find it empowering to be sharing my journey with you.
The ideas I have discussed represent only a part of the agenda for our future. We must begin in our homes, our heads, and mostly our hearts to identify “traps” of loyalty. We must demand equality in our communities and in our relationships with black men. Homophobic behavior must become unacceptable in our lives. As black women we must rededicate ourselves to the struggle for racial equality and ending violence in the justice system. Finally, we must study together and plan our future in the battered women’s and feminist movements in ways that are meaningful to our lives.
Clearly, we have a great task before us. Let’s join together and use our spirit to move us towards our dream of peace.
I take full responsibility for the views expressed in this article, but I would like to acknowledge those who helped in their formation: The Committee to End Violence in the Lives of Women and Women of Color Caucus of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I am most indebted to the Third World women of the communities I know, who taught me the meaning of survival and support.
June Jordan (1936—)
June Jordan, writer, activist, and presently professor of black studies and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has written three volumes of poetry, several plays, three collections of essays, a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, and one novel, His Own Where, for young adults. She gained national prominence as one of the radical poets of the sixties and continues to be one of the most insightful political writers of this era on a variety of issues, including sexuality. One of her earliest statements on the subject “Where Is the Love?” (originally published in Essence) occurred at the 1978 National Black Writers Conference at Howard University during a historic and controversial session on “Feminism and the Black Woman Writer,” whose panelists also included Barbara Smith, Sonia Sanchez, and Acklyn Lynch. In this essay she described herself as a feminist, which has much the same meaning to her as her blackness : “It means that I must everlastingly seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and the contempt that surrounds and permeates my identity, as a woman, and as a black human being” (Civil Wars, 142). As a black feminist she is both hurt and angered by the pain of her sisters: “the bitter sufferings of hundreds of thousands of women who are the sole parents, the mothers of hundreds of thousands of children, the desolation and the futility of women trapped by demeaning, lowest-paying occupations, the unemployed, the bullied, the beaten, the battered, the ridiculed, the slandered, the trivialized, the raped, and the sterilized, the lost millions ... of beautiful, creative, and momentous lives turned to ashes on the pyre of gender identity” (144—45).
“A New Politics of Sexuality” appeared in Technical Difficulties (1992) and was adapted from her keynote address at the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Student Association at Stanford University in April 1991. It attacks heterosexism and espouses a new politics of bisexuality. For an analysis of the history of bisexuality, see Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (1991), in which she also discusses homosexuality and the existence of a black lesbian subculture during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920S.
In “A Weaponry of Choice: Black American Women Writers and the Essay,” which recalls Jordan’s foreword to Civil Wars (her first collection of essays), Pamela Mittlefehldt analyzes the use of the essay as a powerful tool for black feminist resistance. Since black women’s voices have been “traditionally obliterated in Western thought and literature” (The Politics of the Essay, 1993), the revolutionary essays of Jordan and others underscore the importance of fighting with words.
A NEW POLITICS OF SEXUALITY
As a young worried mother, I remember turning to Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care just about as often as I’d pick up the telephone. He was God. I was ignorant, but striving to be good: a good Mother. And so it was there, in that best-seller pocketbook of do’s and don’t’s, that I came upon this doozie of a guideline: Do not wear miniskirts or other provocative clothing because that will upset your child, especially if your child happens to be a boy. If you give your offspring “cause” to think of you as a sexual being, he will, at the least, become disturbed; you will derail the equilibrium of his notions about your possible identity and meaning in the world.
It had never occurred to me that anyone, especially my son, might look upon me as an asexual being. I had never supposed that “asexual” was some kind of positive designation I should, so to speak, lust after. I was pretty surprised by Dr. Spock. However, I was also, by habit, a creature of obedience. For a couple of weeks I actually experimented with lusterless colors and dowdy tops and bottoms, self-consciously hoping thereby to prove myself as a lusterless and dowdy and, therefore, excellent female parent.
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sp; Years would have to pass before I could recognize the familiar, by then, absurdity of a man setting himself up as the expert on the subject that presupposed women as the primary objects for his patriarchal discourse—on motherhood, no less! Years passed before I came to perceive the perversity of dominant power assumed by men, and the perversity of self determining power ceded to men by women.
A lot of years went by before I understood the dynamics of what anyone could summarize as the Politics of Sexuality.
I believe the Politics of Sexuality is the most ancient and probably the most profound arena for human conflict. Increasingly, it seems clear to me that deper and more pervasive than any other oppression, than any other bitterly contested human domain, is the oppression of sexuality, the exploitation of the human domain of sexuality for power.
When I say sexuality, I mean gender: I mean male subjugation of human beings because they are female. When I say sexuality, I mean heterosexual institutionalization of rights and privileges denied to homosexual men and women. When I say sexuality I mean gay or lesbian contempt for bisexual modes of human relationship.
The Politics of Sexuality therefore subsumes all of the different ways in which some of us seek to dictate to others of us what we should do, what we should desire, what we should dream about, and how we should behave ourselves, generally. From China to Iran, from Nigeria to Czechoslovakia, from Chile to California, the politics of sexuality—enforced by traditions of state-sanctioned violence plus religion and the law—reduces to male domination of women, heterosexist tyranny, and, among those of us who are in any case deemed despicable or deviant by the powerful, we find intolerance for those who choose a different, a more complicated—for example, an interracial or bisexual—mode of rebellion and freedom.
We must move out from the shadows of our collective subjugation—as people of color/as women/as gay/as lesbian/as bisexual human beings.
I can voice my ideas without hesitation or fear because I am speaking, finally, about myself. I am black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist. And I mean to be fully and freely all that I am!
Conversely, I do not accept that any white or black or Chinese man—I do not accept that, for instance, Dr. Spock—should presume to tell me, or any other woman, how to mother a child. He has no right. He is not a mother. My child is not his child. And, likewise, I do not accept that anyone —any woman or any man who is not inextricably part of the subject he or she dares to address—should attempt to tell any of us, the objects of her or his presumptuous discourse, what we should do or what we should not do.
Recently, I have come upon gratuitous and appalling pseudoliberal pronouncements on sexuality. Too often, these utterances fall out of the mouths of men and women who first disclaim any sentiment remotely related to homophobia, but who then proceed to issue outrageous opinions like the following:• That it is blasphemous to compare the oppression of gay, lesbian, or bisexual people to the oppression, say, of black people, or of the Palestinians.
• That the bottom line about gay or lesbian or bisexual identity is that you can conceal it whenever necessary and, so, therefore, why don’t you do just that? Why don’t you keep your deviant sexuality in the closet and let the rest of us —we who suffer oppression for reasons of our ineradicable and always visible components of our personhood such as race or gender—get on with our more necessary, our more beleaguered struggle to survive?
Well, number one: I believe I have worked as hard as I could, and then harder than that, on behalf of equality and justice—for African Americans, for the Palestinian people, and for people of color everywhere.
And no, I do not believe it is blasphemous to compare oppressions of sexuality to oppressions of race and ethnicity: Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, shortsighted, and short-lived advancement for a few. Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever coffee if available, but you cannot follow your heart—you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world—then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess?
Or, conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?
What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?
Freedom is indivisible; the Politics of Sexuality is not some optional “special-interest” concern for serious, progressive folk.
And, on another level, let me assure you: if every single gay or lesbian or bisexual man or woman active on the Left of American politics decided to stay home, there would be no Left left.
One of the things I want to propose is that we act on that reality: that we insistently demand reciprocal respect and concern from those who cheerfully depend upon our brains and our energies for their, and our, effective impact on the political landscape.
Last spring, at Berkeley, some students asked me to speak at a rally against racism. And I did. There were four or five hundred people massed on Sproul Plaza, standing together against that evil. And, on the next day, on that same plaza, there was a rally for bisexual and gay and lesbian rights, and students asked me to speak at that rally. And I did. There were fewer than seventy-five people stranded, pitiful, on that public space. And I said then what I say today: That was disgraceful! There should have been just one rally. One rally: freedom is indivisible.
As for the second, nefarious pronouncement on sexuality that now enjoys mass-media currency: the idiot notion of keeping yourself in the closet—that is very much the same thing as the suggestion that black folks and Asian Americans and Mexican Americans should assimilate and become as “white” as possible—in our walk/talk/music/food/values—or else. Or else? Or else we should, deservedly, perish.
Sure enough, we have plenty of exposure to white everything, so why would we opt to remain our African/Asian/Mexican selves? The answer is that suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only suvive if you—who you really are—do survive.
Likewise, we who are not men and we who are not heterosexist—we, sure enough, have plenty of exposure to male-dominated/heterosexist this and that.
But a struggle to survive cannot lead to suicide: suicide is the opposite of survival. And so we must not conceal/assimilate/integrate into the wouldbe dominant culture and political system that despises us. Our survival requires that we alter our environment so that we can live and so that we can hold each other’s hands and so that we can kiss each other on the streets, and in the daylight of our existence, without terror and without violent and sometimes fatal reactions from the busybodies of America.
Finally, I need to speak on bisexuality. I do believe that the analogy is interracial or multiracial identity. I do belive that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.
Just as there are many men and women in the United States whose parents have given them more than one racial, more than one ethnic identity and cultural heritage to honor; and just as these men and women must deny no given part of themselves except at the risk of self-deception and the insanities that must issue from that; and just as these men and women embody the principle of equality among races and ethnic communities; and just as these men and women falter and anguish and choose and then falter again and then anguish and then choose yet again how they will honor the irreducible complexity of their God-given human being—even so, there are many men and women, especially y
oung men and women, who seek to embrace the complexity of their total, always-changing social and political circumstance.
They seek to embrace our increasing global complexity on the basis of the heart and on the basis of an honest human body. Not according to ideology. Not according to group pressure. Not according to anybody’s concept of “correct.”
This is a New Politics of Sexuality. And even as I despair of identity politics—because identity is given and principles of justice/equality/freedom cut across given gender and given racial definitions of being, and because I will call you my brother, I will call you my sister, on the basis of what you do for justice, what you do for equality, what you do for freedom, and not on the basis of who you are, even so I look with admiration and respect upon the new, bisexual politics of sexuality.
This emerging movement politicizes the so-called middle ground: Bisexuality invalidates either/or formulation, either/or analysis. Biexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want and to love a woman as I am likely to want and to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?
If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation:
To insist upon complexity, to insist upon the validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity, to insist upon the equal validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity.
This seems to me a unifying, 1990s mandate for revolutionary Americans planning to make it into the twenty-first century on the basis of the heart, on the basis of an honest human body, consecrated to every struggle for justice, every struggle for equality, every struggle for freedom.
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