Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Women Against Imperialism, Out of Control: Counterinsurgency and Lesbian/Feminist Cultural Resistance

Thu, November 9, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Columbian, Concourse Level West Tower

Abstract

Feminist and queer movements question, transgress, or abolish the demarcation between private and public, personal and political, local and global. Often, these binaries are undone through methods of cultural resistance that work at multiple scales. One exemplary site for exploring the embeddedness of the political in the cultural is the history of the group Women Against Imperialism (WAI), a revolutionary feminist collective whose work enacts both feminist/queer coalition politics, and radical reinventions of subjectivity. From 1974-1996, WAI worked within and between a diverse array of revolutionary left organizations, racial justice and feminist movements to create political events, including meetings, study sessions, marches, demonstrations, campaigns, and public performance, resulting in the creation of a culture of popular, radical, and revolutionary social movement participation.

Creating feminisms across borders, members of WAI communicated and traveled internationally, producing deep, lasting relationships while forming models for enacting anticolonial solidarity with activists from Palestine, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Bringing these transnational feminisms “home” to California’s Bay Area, WAI organized International Women’s Day demonstrations each year, performed direct action at corporate, military, and state intelligence sites, and brought militant anti-imperialism to queer and feminist politics through collaborations with ACT-UP, the San Francisco Dyke March, the Bay Area Coalition for Reproductive Rights, and more; through participatory practices, they enacted coalitional, revolutionary feminisms. A core component of the work of WAI was resistance against the expansion of criminalization and incarceration, which they understood as an attempt by the state to quash revolutionary decolonizing movements led by people of color. Their critique of state violence was expressed through cultural resistance, including public protest and literary and artistic activism in support of political prisoners.

Drawing on Lober’s research for the Women Against Imperialism Oral History Project, this paper explores the cultural resistance work of Out of Control: Committee to Free Lesbian Political Prisoners, a network formed by members of WAI in 1987, in support of Silvia Baraldini, Susan Rosenberg, and Alejandrina Torres, all of whom were held in the Lexington Control Unit for Women, a sensory deprivation and isolation facility where they were pressured, unsuccessfully, to renounce their revolutionary political beliefs. The Lexington Control Unit was closed after a struggle by activists, only to be replaced by similar facilities inside supermax prisons--including the Shawnee facility in Marianna prison, where Baraldini, Rosenberg, and Torres were transferred. Out of Control continued to work for women political prisoners for 10 years, during which they partnered with Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention (LAGAI) to support and defend 25 women political prisoners, especially through the yearly event, “Sparks Fly,” a poetry reading and performance night benefitting a legal and commissary fund. This paper traces how WAI, Out of Control, and LAGAI brought cultural practices and ideologies from lesbian feminism to revolutionary socialist and anti-colonial movements in support of women insurgents, in a project that both opposed the expansion of the carceral state and identified the repressive couterinsurgency project wrought through the targeting and torture of women political prisoners.

Author