(Referring to myself in the third person with tongue firmly in cheek, mostly because I was once part of a corporate exercise where we had to discuss what [corporate brand] wants, as if [corporate brand] was a sentient being).
Continuing with the “what do you want?” series, I’ll try to answer what I want. I want justice. Justice in the most radical, inclusive and broadest sense. I want to see wrongs addressed and corrected. I want to see justice for our dead. I want to leave this world more just than I found it.
It took me years to be able to say that what happened to me was an injustice. I used to think that what happened was entirely my fault (the “you brought this upon yourself” litany) and it was the work of women of color writers, thinkers, bloggers, activists, etc, that gave me first the knowledge and second the strength to be able to see it for what it was: part of a systemic issue with a long history, an injustice. What I want is for such injustices to be corrected. Not mine, it’s too late for that and I’m OK with it (in so much as one can be OK with this stuff) but for every other undocumented person whose lives are in the hands of a murderous State.
I want a list like this to be of utmost priority for feminism. I want every one of these dead to count more and above “the glass ceiling” and the careers of the very same kind of people who benefit from the system that makes these deaths possible. I want the priorities to be just and fair.
I want ethics to be part of feminism, central even. Ethics that include an in depth examination of priorities and accountability. I wish for a wide articulation of what it means to be an “ethical feminist” and what it means to be part of “ethical feminist media”, a media based not on representing voices that are already widely represented but working to uplift the voices that are systematically silenced. I want a feminist media that truly challenges and pushes, rather than negotiates and asks for permission.
I wish (I would say I want, but I don’t even know how that could possibly happen) for a history of online feminism that truly represents what has been happening for over a decade (since online feminism, as it is conceived, started). Not a partial history focused on “what my friends did”, as most hegemonic histories seem to be written, but one that reflects records and archives and political positions. I want feminist memory. Such memory was a lot easier (though a lot more limited due to exclusion) when it was purely based on printed records. Now, online, it seems easy to erase or remove or pretend this or that didn’t happen. I’d love an archive that preserves this, our feminist memories, if not for posterity (ha! I have no illusions of being remembered “in posterity”), at least so that we cannot be ctrl+alt+del from the collective history and so that it is known that some stood and some resisted and some protested and some devoted a good chunk of their lives. I want epistemic justice.
I want white, Anglo Saxon feminism to stop pretending that the only kind of English language feminism that happens is either in the UK or the US (with some sporadic exceptions when they give the floor to either Canada or Australia). I want that hegemony to go away. I no longer want to read what a white US or UK based woman has to say about “the situation in [country that is neither the US or the UK]”. I don’t want to read another piece by a white American writer about “rape in India” or “abortion in Mexico/ Uruguay/ South Africa/ whichever other country they decide to write about”. I promise you this: there are women living in the UK and the US from each and every of those countries already writing about these topics. Some, covering these topics, even live in those countries and already write in English and those who don’t can be translated either by a translator (and if mainstream corporate media cannot afford a translator, then they should probably evaluate their priorities) or they are already translated by the hundreds of people already doing leg work in smaller blogs with little audience numbers.
On a more personal note, what I want is for my PTSD to go away so that I can live without crippling anxiety. One of the consequences of my detention and the subsequent events in my life is that I became a broken woman. Broken in ways I haven’t been able to completely repair. See, because this stuff is all interconnected, I do wish there was more attention for the mental health issues that are unique (or manifest uniquely) to People of Color. The way some of us carry ourselves after severe trauma, the way we have to negotiate our lives in a society that has made it abundantly clear that we are not wanted. I want the stigma around mental health issues to go away. I said this before, I didn’t speak up for years because of shame. A deep shame that only exacerbated my anxiety.
At the end of the day, what I truly want is to make myself obsolete. I want the stuff I write about to be so common and so widespread and so discussed that “the shit I write on the internet” is no longer necessary because everyone else is doing it and doing it better (not difficult, considering “the shit I write on the internet” is not exactly well written; on the subject of wants, I want to be a graceful writer, one who uses words like music, one who honors the subjects by writing with grace; instead, I am as a graceful with words as I’d be with an axe, and with the musicality of a screech).
I want a feminism that no longer deems some women to be unpersons. I want that bullshit to end.
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