There are moments for dispassionate analysis. There are moments for carefully outlined arguments and editorials. And then there are moments whose psychological and material urgency render ratiocination moot. When all you can do is seethe and cry and shout and sing and celebrate. Celebrate, in the midst of rage and sorrow, the incredible resilience of those whom the powerful have done everything in their power to destroy—their miraculous survival and struggle and fearlessness. Our miraculous survival and struggle and fearlessness. Our deep, incredible, radiant beauty. Our rage, hope, suffering, joy and longings.
There are moments when five decades of hard-fought victories are rolled back in a single day. When you realize just how incredibly fragile, how fleeting, how ephemeral those victories were and are. When you wake up in the morning discussing marriage with your boyfriend—your complicated feelings thereof, your attempt to define a space for yourself and him beyond the oppressive confines of church and state, beyond cisheteropatriarchy, beyond white supremacy and capitalism—only once more to realize, by the evening, that there is no such outside space. That wherever you go, these forces follow. That under the perverse and contradictory dictates of late capitalism you can be married tomorrow and then fired the next day, with no legal recourse and no consequences, for the sake of that equally perverse and contradictory feeling you no longer hesitate to call love.
There are moments when you realize that the forces of counter-democracy have a better grasp on intersectionality than you do, that they have managed to pass an all-inclusive "eff-you" bill further oppressing, exploiting and disenfranchising trans and queer folks, women, people of color, the working classes and those who occupy a position at the intersection of these categories. Moments when you want to emblazon the words of the fierce and fearless Marsha P. Johnson on your forehead, the words on the banner beneath which your beloved trans and queer companer@s have marched: "no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us."
There are moments when you wonder why the "rights" of some dumb bigot trump those of you and your comrades. And then you remember that this is how rights have always been constituted, that the "freedom" of some has always been part and parcel of the enslavement, oppression, exploitation and extermination of others.
There are moments when you host a guest speaker and the next evening see them arrested, on the steps of the governor's mansion, fighting for a world we can all love and live in. Moments when the painfully ironic and utterly oblivious headline in the next day's newspaper proclaims the arrest of "five women," further effacing the very identities of the trans, queer and gender-nonconforming people who have just put their bodies on the line—an act of incredible rhetorical violence which cannot, in this context, be termed a mere microaggression.
There are moments when the executive vice president of your university runs over a Black female parking attendant whose job he himself has outsourced and then he drives away and there are no consequences. Moments when you think a lot about that word, consequences. About the consequences for Ms. Underwood and the (lack of) consequences for Tallman Trask. About the consequences of using the bathroom that corresponds to your gender identity. About the consequences of an utterly mythic and transphobic "bathroom panic," and the very real, material consequences of cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy.
There are moments when the vice president of student affairs at your university sends out an e-mail decrying the recent terror attacks in Brussels. There are other moments and other attacks which merit no such mention—Ankara and Shabdaqar and Istanbul and Peshawar and Maiduguri and Bamako and Grand-Bassam. There's that moment when the vice president reassures Muslim students that they are not to blame, that "we know such incidents bring you as much grief and disgust as it does to all of us," revealing that there is only room for two categories of Muslim in the American imaginary: terrorist and not-terrorist. That some deaths are not even counted.
There are moments when you wonder about the rhetorical construction of that "you" versus that "us." When you realize how much "all of us" has been constructed through the effacement and exploitation and othering of so many "yous." When you wonder why the hell you are writing this damn column—so often met with the faux-indignation of the apathetic and the affluent—and remember it was never meant for that "us" but for a different one, a counter-us composed of all the yous.
There is that moment, outside the governor's mansion, in the wake of the arrest of those five freedom fighters, when a fierce trans woman stands up and starts voguing in front of a line of police officers. "I was tired," she said. "The most I could do was dance away my anger, frustration, and sadness.” But also: “It’s important to see a Black trans woman be unafraid of police and policing.” And in that mix of sadness and anger, frustration and fearlessness, wild exuberance and willful defiance, you find whatever it is that you need when words fail and the spirit moves you.
There are moments when we acknowledge, in the words of a wise freedom fighter, that it is our duty to struggle. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Bennett Carpenter is a graduate student in the literature department. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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