loving in the war years

Below is my talk for opening night of the Queer Women of Color Film Festival as a community partner for Justice Now:

 

My name is Vanessa Huang and I’m the campaign director for Justice Now. We’re based in Oakland and we partner women in prison with communities outside, like us here tonight, to end all forms of violence against women and to stop imprisonment.

 

As a queer Chinese-American daughter of immigrants born and raised mostly here in the U.S., I locate my story and the story of mi familia along a spectrum of migration and want to acknowledge the history of the forced and coerced migration connected to this land through colonialism and slavery.

 

The work that Justice Now does continues to ask critical questions about the role of prisons along this spectrum in removing generations of queer and trans women of color, and our friends and family, from our communities: How are prisons continuing to destroy our communities’ right to family? How are they acting as agents of reproductive oppression? What will be the impact on our communities now that the California Legislature has just rolled through, against our will, the single largest prison construction deal in U.S. history? And perhaps most importantly, what work must we do in this moment — within ourselves, with each other, and beyond — to challenge this?

 

As we witness tonight and throughout the weekend remarkable stories of courage and love in times of war, stories made by and for our communities, I invite you all to tap into our collective  courage to imagine the world we need to create in order for our communities to truly thrive.

 

We need to summon the courage to love each other when our communities are so fractured because of La Migra and the cops; the courage to create our own families; the courage to say ya basta when facing the enormous harm enacted against and within our communities — and to work together to create responses to the harms we face that don’t build up the very system that’s tearing us apart.

 

Let’s love ourselves enough to tap into the courage of our most powerful imagination, and take it upon ourselves and with each other to imagine and create a safe, compassionate world without prisons.

the power of erotic childbirth

Just back from Chicago for a repro justice conference hosted by Sistersong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective: “Let’s Talk about Sex.” I thought about taking time to go into the city and checking out the block my mother lived on for 10 months in the late 70s, but ended up staying right by the airport for four days.

Birth has been a consistent theme/metaphor in my life as of late, what with people in my life thinking about birthing, people engaging with having birthed children, organizing against sterilization abuse and other state-imposed challenges to people in prison ability to birth/create; recently having started a creative collaboration with Melissa Koh structured around the idea of rebirth (in relation to transforming relationships with loved ones in times of illness); working through (re)birth as metaphor in my life in relation to the work I’m doing around my resistance to dependency on others and others’ dependency on me; and the incremental acknowledgment that for the first time in my life, the idea of birthing (simultaneously with the idea of getting a tattoo) no longer feels too painful, but an opening of possibility.

The most powerful workshop I went to this weekend was offered by Lisa Lucero from Denver, Colorado: “The Power of Erotic Childbirth.” Deeply influenced by Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,” Lisa shared the idea that every oppression must corrupt or distort those sources of power that can provide energy for change, an erotic childbirth is possible and can change the world. Among the kinds of ideas Lisa identified as corrupting or distorting the erotic power of childbirth was the idea that simply having information about the risks of childbirth means access to real choices, as this focuses on fear constructs. This conversation opened space and offered guidance towards future reflection on the internal work I’ve been doing to the last two years to let go of fear, etc…

Feeling present, grateful, creative, open.