QUEERING PROTEST
Queer women in this movement are so unapologetically who they are and so fiercely advocate for the recognition of all identities. They don’t accept anything less than liberation of all Black lives, and I think they’ve made that very clear. They are very visibly leaders, and I think you see that historically as well that queer and trans women of color are always there leading. They’re not always recognized and they are very, very commonly erased.
—Kathryn (pseudonym)
The processes of mapping risk onto bodies and space reflect the historically constituted practices of antiblackness that construct race and demarcate people and geographies of freedom and unfreedom. These processes made the colonial reordering of the modern world possible and built empires upon the labor and bodies of enslaved Black people. As evidenced in St. Louis and beyond, a commonsense understanding of blackness-as-risk continues to operate as a structural logic to order metropolitan space and determine the value of lives. In contrast to this power over life, the resistance witnessed in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown represents the power of life, and it demonstrates how “the biopolitical event is always a queer event—a subversive process of subjectivization that, shattering ruling identities and norms, reveals the link between power and freedom, and thereby inaugurates an alternative production of subjectivity.”1 The ability to imagine what could be in the face of what is emanates from intimate spaces of trauma and is always already present within oppression itself. The everyday spaces of extreme violence in this area coalesced with a collective trauma that transcends time and space. Although the specificity of extreme violence in the St. Louis region fundamentally shaped the work of people leading resistance here, those who identify as women and queer drew upon their experience of radical relationality that leverages an understanding of spatial and temporal transcendence of antiblackness across registers.
It should be stated very clearly here that I have no authority to speak for this movement. I participated in and observed many actions and events, and I spoke to and heard from many people; however, it is not my story to tell, and that poses not only a limitation but a problem for writing these chapters. Yet I could not write a book about predatory policing in North St. Louis County without also foregrounding the extreme practices of freedom that emerged from this place, practices that profoundly shifted my own perspective regarding what it means to live as free and the inherent demands this concept places on those who claim to be on the side of freedom. I wrestled with how to represent what I discovered and what form it should take, and I never arrived at a perfect response. This section reflects this struggle, indeed the problem, that intrinsically results from even attempting to include these chapters in the book. Nevertheless, I believe it was a necessary problem to confront.
Black women and queer people of color were the unequivocal leaders of resistance following what amounted to a public lynching on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson. Through action, debate, and the narration of their own lives and collective Black flesh, the Black women and Black queer people who made up the core leadership of what came to be known as the Ferguson Protest Movement offered unwavering critiques of intersectional domination and racialized practices—in St. Louis County, across the country and the world, as well as within the Ferguson protest family itself.2 The essential yet often overlooked work of Black women and queer of color activists and scholars, who have deeply felt both the oppressive and the liberatory capacities of inscribed flesh in their everyday lives, reveals the contradictory logics embedded within constitutional democracy as well as within the practices of people claiming to speak for Black, Brown, and queer communities. Through all forms of communicative acts, including the unapologetic presence and performance of now-visible bodies, these protesters took no prisoners in calling out actions and words that do not support being human as praxis and by pushing back against anything not in line with the unbounding of conferred identities, be it race, gender, sexuality, class, or anything else.3 While this sounds like an individualistic approach rooted in liberal idealism—“I am who I am”—it is profoundly a collective philosophy. Blackness, as a lived expression of life, joy, and freedom in the face of death and unfreedom, is understood as a shared way of being and doing that, while it has everything to do with embracing the full spectrum of blackness, exceeds epidermal and cultural definitions. Indeed, it is the excess itself, which sits outside prevailing norms of sociality, that is ultimately powerful—a reconstructed self and collective mode of life that negates the dominant terms of identity and existence.4
Leaders of Ferguson resistance engaged in a queering of protest that not only revealed extreme violence practiced at multiple scales of governance in North St. Louis County, but also interrogated “how intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices” within the culture of protest “antagonize and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital.”5 Queer of color critique is most interested in understanding how social formations reproduce or trouble social imaginaries of homogeneity—most specifically within nationalist discourses. According to Roderick Ferguson, queer of color critique combines the intersectional interventions of Black feminism and queer politics—which names the liberal state as a problem—and probes the limits of historical materialism. Ferguson argues that the Marxist obsession with class and property obfuscates the impact of race and gender on the material world and has nurtured heteropatriarchy in past national liberation movements. Queer of color critique is concerned with exposing race and gender, and ultimately structures of gendered antiblackness, and countering heteropatriarchy within antiracist projects. The actions and conversations practiced by young Black women and queer leaders in response to the killing of Michael Brown and treatment of his body offered a queer of color critique that names intersectional oppression as violence executed by the state. This intervention made visible the implications of gender and sexuality in material terms and it vehemently rejected all forms of heteropatriarchy within Black resistance.
Many of the Black women and queer and trans individuals who emerged as leaders of Ferguson resistance view their work as a global emancipatory project essential to, and intersectional with, all efforts aimed at dismantling structural foundations and everyday practices of oppression, although the specificity of blackness and the terror inflicted on Black flesh remains central to their project.6 These same Black women and Black queer protesters asserted themselves as always-already self-defined as deviant, a chosen location outside normative roles, scripts, and subjectivities. The very intentional and affective use of collective bodies—physical, fleshly, gendered, raced, sexualized, and exploited bodies—was critical to this work. This is the flesh that pushes and contests the inscripted lines found on gendered, sexualized, violated, and racialized bodies—the same bodies that Seyla Benhabib speaks of when she writes, “Women and their bodies are the symbolic-cultural site upon which human societies inscript their moral order.”7 This work was carried out upon what Katherine McKittrick describes as “demonic grounds”—the literal and figurative ground upon which inscribed flesh, past and present, is rejoined and becomes one.8 The inscription of “demonic flesh” upon the body of Michael Brown became the demonic grounds, the territories of the soul,9 upon which those inhabiting inscribed flesh, past and present, were brought together and where they staked their claims. Understanding the liberatory capacity of claiming and defining their own marked flesh, protesters identifying as women and queer used their collective bodies as placeholders of freedom. As Christina Sharpe writes, “Those black and blackened bodies become the bearers (through violence, regulation, transmission, etc.) of the knowledge of certain subjection as well as the placeholders of freedom for those who would claim freedom as their rightful yield.”10
The curated visibility of bodies—bodies that love, bodies that fight, bodies that nurture, bodies that give birth, bodies that are violated and terrorized—shifted the discursive field of protest from symbolic life and identity (the claiming of rights, the recognition of personhood, and the fixing of identity) to a relentless praxis of living as fully human. In this way, freedom is a mode of everyday being and doing, a form of protest that has no need to work within conventional structures of power (and indeed no interest in doing so).
Chuck
This is very much a Black women-led movement, and I judge that based on who is getting arrested the most. We’re in a place where we can get it right this time and we have to acknowledge the role of women. We have to fight patriarchy, and heterosexism. My growth has come through the women in this movement. The queer women in this movement. It’s a matter of listening. The LGBTQ women have been incredible teachers.
Valerie (pseudonym)
From my experience, the women in the movement have been very strong. And a lot of times, the women have been the ones to “get it done.” It didn’t matter what the call was, they did it. As far as the men in the movement, I haven’t seen anything like that. I don’t see them doing much of anything other than making callouts to people. . . . Or they also like to make very private things public and glorify themselves.
Alisha
At every action there’s always a Black woman leading it. And there’s probably a Black woman on the bullhorn. And a Black woman planned it. That’s definitely different from before. People are really challenging what humanity looks like, what leadership looks like, who can do what, and why. . . . Black women have been pushing back forever but in this movement they finally have their voice.
Ferguson resistance revealed a link between power and freedom, between terror and beauty, by disrupting, if not shattering, identities and norms conferred on residents of this area for over the past fifty years. This intervention not only linked the systemic violence practiced by municipalities in North St. Louis County to the physical death of Michael Brown and public desecration of his body, but also made decades of everyday political and physical violence visible. The tangible change that resulted from resistance in Ferguson, including whether and how it led to subsequent movements, is still up for debate. It is clear, however, that returning to an uncontested business as usual in this region is not possible, at least not without acknowledging that the choice to do nothing is the choice being made. It is also clear that a discernable shift occurred within national discourse regarding the nature and objectives of Black resistance in the twenty-first century, and that young Black female, queer, and trans protesters who showed up following the death of Brown continue to show up and haunt this region like a specter.
In writing the words young, queer, Black, female, trans, and protester, I might be characterizing leaders of the Ferguson Protest Movement, or I might simply be providing a list of marginalized subjectivities, each of which is accompanied by specific types of exclusion. To be represented as, and experience, all six descriptions at once (in many cases leaders also identified as poor) is to have intimate awareness of how it feels to be exempted from most recognitions and rights within society. When I spoke with these individuals, they read the killing of Michael Brown and the treatment of his body not as exceptional but as everyday, based on intimate experiences with multiple forms of violence directed at their bodies, and they stated that these experiences enabled them to carry out embodied and affective forms of protest in very specific terms. Yet, as everyone I spoke with conveyed in different ways, protest is not an individual endeavor, but a collective imagination of an alternative future, which is what Black struggle has always been about. Those who identified as queer, bi, or trans expressed that living their genuine identities and authentic lives occurred simultaneously with claiming blackness and that both were part of transformative and collective resistance. This is a particularly important point because it means that protest is not something special that one does at a certain time or as a reaction to a singular event. Rather, protest is “living the way you know you’re supposed to live and being the person you know you’re supposed to be in the face of someone telling you’re supposed to be something different in order to get along in this world.”11
Mary (pseudonym)
The most creative, passionate, talented, strongest individuals in the movement are lesbian, gay, trans, bi. The people that engaged me. That made me understand there was something I could do other than just watch. The people who speak across the spectrum. The people who understand how complex this issue really is. That it’s really not about this single incident—that was just the catalyst for a much bigger platform.
And they do it in a way that is not polite. They have faced enormous push-back within the movement family. And they won’t sit down. They won’t shut up. They’re like, “You know, you’re gonna need to deal with us. You’re gonna need to deal with all facets of blackness. You don’t own it.” I’m really grateful that they’re forcing the conversation. They’re refusing to walk away.
Alisha
I think queer women haven’t just contributed to the movement. They are the movement. Literally, without them you do not have a movement. They are there in leadership, in numbers, in hard work. They contribute to the conversation in a way nobody else can, because they constantly remind you to check yourself.
Estell (pseudonym)
The queer women in the movement understand strategies that cut to the core of what is at issue. They are the ones that put their bodies in harm’s way the most. They made white people feel the most uncomfortable because they are totally unapologetic about who they are, and they’re going to get right up in your face and make you feel their presence there. Sometimes in intentionally shocking ways. It’s a strategy thing they understand.
These women are the antithesis to Black patriarchy and honestly, that rubs a lot of the men in the movement the wrong way. This is one of the first times where race and queerness and transness and nonsexism have been front and center, and that makes it beautiful.
For many, a shift occurred in their thinking on August 9 regarding the nature of protest, from demanding equal rights through and under juridical law and social recognition to unapologetically embracing blackness as a force capable of liberating society from itself.12 Echoing Aimé Césaire’s recalibration of who is uncivilized in the colonial equation, one young woman recalled, “It’s clear who the animals were that day,” and several people reiterated her observation in various ways.13 For many, struggle was no longer an effort to claim equal rights or be recognized as human. Rather, the struggle entailed revealing the inhumanity of normative culture in contrast to being human as praxis.14
Ms. Jones
They pick up raccoons that been hit by cars on West Florissant faster than they got that boy off the street. He was somebody’s baby. His mama was coming unglued seein’ him lying there behind the tape and they was just yelling at her to manage the crowd like it was her fault.
Those interviewed also stated that spaces were often shut down and foreclosed by those who believed that extending a focus beyond a narrowly defined police brutality aimed at young Black men would undermine efforts. Homophobia, sexism, and generational biases were the most obvious impediments people cited regarding a queered intersectional politics; however, experiences of class, racial mixing, intermarriage, faith, geography, and education, among others, were also cited as issues that created contradictions within the movement. What Ferguson protesters did overwhelmingly agree on was that politics of respectability, conformity, and assimilation were not viable modes of achieving freedom.
Tia (pseudonym)
The thing that made Ferguson different, as a sustained movement, is that people woke up to the fact that this is not about police brutality. The killing of young Black men is just a symptom of the disease that’s always been there. Queer people, and especially queer women, have made people realize that conformity will never work. They bring a perspective that challenges all that.
Brianna
This is not a case of a bad apple or a boy that needed to pull up his pants to not get shot. The system did exactly what it was designed to do. When will they see changing the laws hasn’t gotten us nowhere? We don’t have to act like they tell us to act just so we can live. Black people gotta stop living their lives like that and stop apologizing for other Black people. I don’t need to apologize for nothing. We’re not the ones with the problem.
Angel
Some people don’t want to change what they think or what they do in this movement. They think that by adding more Black politicians, or Black institutions, or Black businesspeople, that’s radical. But it’s not. We’re pushing back by looking at history and saying, “Just slapping ‘Black’ on it does not make it radical.” Trying to solve old problems with old solutions is not radical. Assimilating and conforming to a racist system does not get us anywhere. It doesn’t work.
This is a Black queer ethics that moves beyond civil rights strategies and takes as its primary focus the practice of freedom, which casts a different light on the metrics of normativity established by traditional white middle-class heteronormativity. Ferguson protesters practiced an ethics of lived blackness that relied on unapologetically inhabiting their blackness and their bodies as an affective form of protest and performativity in space. The fact that the bodies doing affective work in the space of protest often identified and presented themselves as female and queer created a heightened effect since, as many stated, angry Black hetero men in the street are an expected stereotype.
A Black queer ethics is a political engagement. It does not, as Cathy Cohen describes, “focus on integration into dominant structures but instead seeks to transform the basic fabric and hierarchies that allow systems of oppression to persist and operate efficiently.”15 This queering of politics builds on iterations of “queer politics” that challenged persistent and invisible heteronormative attitudes and practices embedded in modern social structures.16 Moving queer politics beyond the realm of sexual identity required the work and interventions of Black lesbian feminists who theorized the interconnected and interdependent relationships of systemic oppressions yet insisted on the centering of historically produced conditions of fungible Black life.17 Queer, in this sense, moves beyond an identity linked to sexual orientations and subcultures and refers to a utopian and collective imagination of what could or should be in the world, while revealing what actually is. Queering politics occurs in, and is made visible by, the public sphere. The shift that mobilized radical imaginaries of what should be, in the face of what was, in North St. Louis County resonated because of the visible terror and aftermath inflicted on Brown’s flesh in the public sphere and the implausibility of the modern state’s representational claims.18 In this case, it was the implausibility that the liberal state would deliver justice and equality under, and through, the law.
Brittany
If queer folks and the LGBTQ community were not involved in this movement it would look different. It just would. I don’t know, man. It would just look completely different. A lot of times the LGBTQ folks out here are the heart and soul of the fight. It was an absolutely critical piece of gaining national attention in the way we did that. There was just a different tone because we were there. There was no backing down like in the past. We’re beyond that.
Jonathan
You can’t have a conversation about Ferguson and not talk about the LGBTQ community, the Black LGBTQ community specifically. . . . The ones doing the most daring actions, and the loudest ones that hold people accountable, and the ones actually doing the work—they’re the LGBTQ leaders.
Beyond revealing contradictions that exist within state policy and normative practice, a transformative queer politics also reveals contradictions in the assumptions and practices of nonnormative antioppressive projects and highlights those things that are “not yet.”19 Cohen brings up an example, asking what would happen if queer activists considered the lives of women of color who are heterosexual but whose sexual choices fit outside what is considered acceptable or worthy of state support, such as prostitutes or “welfare queens.”20 To this point, the literal and figurative space of performativity, the space of angry, empowered, and visible eroticized queer Black feminized flesh practiced by some Ferguson protesters unsettles the frame of the pathologized Black hetero female epitomized by the image of the Black Jezebel or welfare queen.21 The pathologized frame was used by many media outlets against Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown. Quick to exploit the words of a bereaved Black mother at the scene of her son’s death, some in the media used her statement “Do you know how hard I worked to keep that boy in school?” (among others) to represent McSpadden as a stereotypical young single mother (although she is married), struggling, and failing, to keep her son out of trouble in the chaotic streets of the Black ghetto, which happens to sit in the suburbs. Much of the support for Darren Wilson, and the police more generally, rhetorically blamed McSpadden for her son’s fate, and public discourse largely focused on debating whether or not she was a good mother.22 Brown’s father and stepfather were largely credited, however, for remaining in his life.
Straight, queer, trans, and otherwise nonconforming protesters provided a very different image of Black women and Black visibility from the one conferred on Lezley McSpadden, although many protesters interviewed spoke of the trend of the media’s interviewing and focusing their cameras on, in their words, “messed up” shirtless angry Black men as representative of the movement.23 Black women leading resistance intimately understood the importance of pushing back against cultural representations of blackness and of themselves and their bodies in different types of spaces, and used their own voices and bodies to tell a very different story. Some expressed frustration with McSpadden and the Brown family for embracing what they viewed as a respectability politics similar to that of Black municipal leaders, which works within current systems of power and expectations of gender, sexuality, and blackness. Yet women and queer individuals leading Ferguson resistance were also vocally critical of all of the ways Black subjectivities are produced and demonized, including representations of McSpadden and Black women in municipal leadership.
The work that emerged from events in Ferguson ultimately revealed the limits placed on blackness and gender from both inside and outside the movement. Many Ferguson protest leaders refused to tolerate heteronormative and cisgendered assumptions and attitudes, especially attempts of Black masculinity to dominate the space of protest or speak for Black people as a whole. This core group continues to seek ways to destabilize all grounds upon which clear claims to identity are staked. In this way, a queering of protest was, and continues to be, lived out—not because many of the emergent leaders identify as queer, but by virtue of persistent and embodied critiques of power across scales that brings the continuum of violence, trauma, erasure, and shame, which precedes and exceeds the Black body, into view.
Diamond
Before anybody even knew about anybody’s sexuality, we were out there, in front of the men. Making sure everybody was okay, standing our ground and making our voices heard. Putting our bodies in front of tanks and making people uncomfortable. But then we started pushing conversations about how this is not just about young Black men getting killed.
We were all hurt when [the men] didn’t come out for the Black Women’s march. Hurt, because we come out to lift up you guys, make sure you guys are okay, make sure you guys are loved on and supported, and stuff like that, but you guys don’t do the same for us? That was hurtful. But we still come out fighting for you. . . . We’re not going to pick and choose who to fight for. We’re fighting for everybody.
Alisha
Queer and trans folks of color, particularly trans women, have, from my personal observation done the most to lift up the “No one’s free until everybody’s free” perspective. You have to ask yourself, Why are queer and trans Black women leading this movement? Because they get how toxic all forms of oppression are and they communicate that. Some of the most amazing and strongest leaders in this movement are Black trans folks.
Alexis
People are now having conversations about intersectionality, and that is really important because it means that we have to be inclusive of all Black life. When people say they love their LGBTQ brothers and sisters but [then they say], “they ate the food with poison in it that the straight people knew better than to eat,” that’s damaging to the whole concept of blackness. Because people started looking at us like we were toxic. Like we’re spreading the poison. And that’s dangerous, because it’s actually violence against people even if they don’t mean to hurt anybody.
Tia
Part of what puts people at intersections are the multiple oppressions so we are silenced and we are dismissed in certain settings, but we keep having these conversations. Being a Black person that sits at intersections really helps this work. It should not be persons-who-sit-at-intersections’ responsibility to start these conversations but of course we’re more likely to since we see the internal oppression.
“Sixela Yoccm”
I feel like queer people have been critical to this movement. . . . And I think it’s because they tackle the issue of self-love. You shouldn’t let people tell you how to be. You should be comfortable with who you are and let those that can’t accept you be uncomfortable with that fact, not you. That’s what queer people bring. Also challenging the straight Black men.
Jamell
[Queer leaders] not only helped to sustain the front line . . . , their life experience helped to redefine blackness. And in a movement where the unconditional love of blackness, and the right for blackness to be all that it can be, are most important, redefining what blackness is and what blackness includes has been an unfathomably tough job.
And that’s one thing the LGBTQ community, I admire them for. Because it’s not easy when you have to deal with oppression from the system and oppression and resentment from the people you are fighting with and for. They bring a more human side to the movement. A more inclusive and honest side, and it provides the door for every single Black person to feel connected and important.
Those who identified as women and queer were attacked from both outside and inside the movement. As discussed in greater detail in chapter 7, in addition to being targeted by law enforcement and social media threats, people with whom they stood side by side at protest actions also sought to silence their voices or felt entitled to their bodies, particularly those who claimed heteronormative and masculine identities. As Angel pointed out, “Black women are not only holding down the front lines, they are also maintaining jobs and parenting well at the same time.” She added, “Women, like Brittany for example, are constantly being disrespected and dealing with comments from men. Brittany’s got a lot of curves, you know what I mean? She’s constantly dealing with men sexualizing her on top of everything else. . . . The men were frustrated because they wanted her to be available to them.” There was also persistent pushback by men against conversations that expanded the terms of protest beyond a focus on straight Black men and their treatment by the police.
Diamond
Unfortunately, Black women are still trying to make our place. Oftentimes women are not really seen as people. And it’s so ironic because the whole point is supposed to be claiming our humanness. The men are constantly putting themselves in front of cameras, in front of the media, in front of organizations. If it weren’t for the women out here, this movement wouldn’t be sustained. In fact, the women were the ones that stood out there and weren’t moved. When the men ran, as tear gas was thrown, the women stood their ground, like we’re going to protect the men, we’re not going anywhere. We not only stood beside them, we stood in front of them. People seem to have amnesia and forget that. They don’t want to admit their ass was saved by a lesbian because I will never be “their woman.”
Antwan (pseudonym)
So, it’s very frustrating to see how one side is saying, “You’re trying to include far too many people and you’re not focusing on those most important—young Black men getting killed by the police.” And the other side is saying “No, we’re trying to encompass as many people as there actually are. We’re trying to show everybody that you don’t have to leave one part of your identity at home.” Narrowing Black identity is not helping anybody. Really that’s the fundamental problem on both sides.
Cameron (pseudonym)
And Black women have been at the fore of this movement, but when it’s time to talk about the work that’s being done, it’s revisionist history. I’ve seen Black men say stuff like, “Yeah being on the front lines and we had to get the women and children out of the way.” To be honest, in many ways, in many cases, it was the opposite. Black women went up to young Black men and told them, “You need to go home.” Because they were in the way of getting anything done. I’ve never been checked by so many Black women and I grew up in a house full of women. They’ll say, “That’s patriarchy running your mouth right now.”
Brittany
As a woman, people think they can talk to you anytime they want. You need to do whatever they say right then. And your input matters very little because you’re calling out certain toxic behaviors by a certain group of folks like men and they don’t see a problem with themselves. They see it with you. They say, “Oh, well, if you are saying men are trash or men are treating women in a certain way maybe you should ask why we treatin’ you that way.” “If you hate us, why you here anyway?” Or, “Mike Brown was a man and that’s why we are here.”
Alexis
I’ve definitely had to carve out my own space and just claim my right to be here. I had to go and literally snatch the fucking bullhorn from the men. I literally had to stand up in meetings and say to dudes, “Shut the fuck up because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I really had to be assertive. I had to turn into the stereotypical strong Black sister in order to be considered a leader in this movement. Not because I wasn’t leading before but because they didn’t want to acknowledge what I was already doing.
These clowns go and post a photo on Instagram saying shit like, “Women has to act like queens in order to be treated like queens.” Or to be respected you need to put yourself up on a pedestal that some Black man is gonna kick out from underneath your ass anyway. We’re here because that shit has got to get put down if we’re gonna get anywhere with this.
Alisha
The most frustrating thing about this whole experience is definitely Black men and their lack of understanding of Black women. Like you know what we’re going through as a people but you still think you should be on top and keep me down. When it’s time to put bodies on the line you’re fine with me risking my life while you talk to a reporter. But outside of protest I should be subservient to you.
The affective environment of protest was something consistently brought up by protesters. As Diamond shared, “We make people uncomfortable by being very comfortable with who we are.”24 In addition to consistently linking Brown’s death to specific histories and cultures of predatory practices in North St. Louis County and insisting on repeated discussions within the field of protest regarding intersectional oppressions, protest leaders called out misogyny and homophobia within the movement and spoke at length in interviews about the importance of placing their bodies directly on the “front lines” of the war waged against them in ways that were intimately felt by those deployed to negate them and those indifferent to their experience.25 While protesters maintained a commitment to nonviolence throughout the twenty-plus months of active protest after August 9, 2014, the very intentional and performative use of their bodies to create discomfort and disrupt the status quo of daily life in the St. Louis region were important factors in the specific affect of sustained resistance. This resistance was often carried out as the (intentional) spectacle of nonconforming bodies stopping flows of traffic in the street or on the highway. Other traditional locations of protest were utilized, such as shopping districts and malls, restaurants, sports venues, auditoriums, and concert halls, where protesters created performative environments that were described as unapologetically Black as well as “in your face,” not respectable,and, by people outside of the movement, “inappropriate.” Often these spectacles of visible Black and nonconforming flesh were intuitively and courageously carried out “in the moment” in symbolic spaces of capitalist consumption where the effect of consumable yet unavailable bodies was heightened.26 The consistent integration of performativity, confrontation, spectacle, intervention, visibility, and eroticism came to define ongoing protest in St. Louis.
FIGURE 6.1 Three women protesting in Ferguson. “Officers in riot gear and wielding smoke bombs confronted protesters as scores of people defied the state-issued curfew in protest of Michael Brown’s death on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2014 in Ferguson, MO. The standoff came hours after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and announced the midnight curfew to quell rising unrest in the town.”
New York Daily News. Photo by James Keivom.
FIGURE 6.2 “Ferguson protesters leave arm-in-arm from the St. Ann Police Department after being released from jail on Friday, Oct. 3, 2014. Protesters have been a constant presence in the St. Louis suburb in the nearly two months since Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson.”
Associated Press/St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Photo by Robert Cohen.
FIGURE 6.3 “Ferguson tense after shootout on anniversary of Michael Brown’s Death,” August 9, 2015.
Getty Images. Photo by Scott Olson.
Some thirty-five years after Audre Lorde delivered her paper titled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,”27 Black women in Ferguson vividly demonstrated the uses and power of the erotic, which had long been used against them. Occupying the deepest margins as young, queer, Black, and feminized, these individuals claimed both leadership positions and the space of the street by relentlessly living Lorde’s definition of erotic power—refusing to deny the full spectrum of “physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest” within them, which included refusing to deny who, and how, they love.28 Whether on the front line of highly charged actions, speaking in public forums, or interacting within the protest family, these individuals embody the erotic as work, using their bodies, their language, their sexuality, their anger, and their passion as sources of disruption, power, desire, and knowledge in ways that shocked many politicians, officials, Black clergy, and those they described as “respectable Negros.”29 In the same way, they also challenged assumptions about Black identity within the movement. With the erotic knowledge that Lorde describes as a life force, these women leaders, both queer and straight, provide the lens through which to see and scrutinize all those things that do not lead to the freedom to live and love fully.
Quotidian expressions of the erotic, as Sharon Patricia Holland forcefully points out, are actually a useful place to study everyday antiblackness because they both trouble and reinforce the Black/white binary of racist practice in the most intimate registers of routine practice.30 Recalling how Christina Sharpe conceptualizes monstrous intimacies, which include such things as shame, sexual violence, desire, and confinement, Holland likewise asserts that race and racism live within the space of everyday intimacies.31 Working between critical race studies, queer theory, and feminism, Holland’s project The Erotic Life of Racism works to show how racism, personal choice, and erotic pleasure can no longer be easily disaggregated, if they ever were. As Holland states, “we can’t have our erotic life—a desiring life—without involving ourselves in the messy terrain of racist practice.”32 Holland subscribes to the possibility that blackness is not only the thingness of the thing—that which produces erotic value for whiteness, a body absent its own erotic life, the pornotrope that Hortense Spillers describes.33 Holland seeks to free blackness from the theoretical frame of thingness and complicates blackness, as do the Ferguson protest leaders, as a fluid and dynamic dialectic of both subjectification and liberation that simultaneously and inherently reflects the lived realities of racial construction in the most basic and intimate ways. By insisting that people confront all possibilities and iterations of lived blackness, Ferguson protesters release the uses of the erotic as Lorde imagined them. This shifts the meaning of the pornotopology I theorize in the introduction from the space created at the intersection of terror and desire to a space inhabited by an erotic life rooted in blackness that refuses to be for others. Suffering may still be expected in North St. Louis County because an ethics of lived blackness has not been fully realized; however, suffering is now visible and no longer tolerated in the way that it once was.
FIGURE 6.4 Brittany Farrell in the midst of leading a highway shutdown on August 10, 2015. Alexis Templeton, also leading, is in the foreground. Posted on Twitter by Keith Rose.
Reproduced by permission of Keith Rose.
Those leading Ferguson resistance took Lorde’s definition of erotic work—the full habitation of psychic, emotional, and physical spaces that transcend “states of being that are not native to [oneself], such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial”34—beyond the boundaries Lorde imagined, creating a site of visibility in which troubling visions of Black bodies, unmediated Black flesh, and queered blackness work to unsettle normative hierarchies of propriety, control, and power in the everyday lives of residents in North St. Louis County. For years, residents of this area had attempted to remain invisible lest they be targeted and fined through all manner of policing, which, as described in part I, capitalizes on discursively produced urban residents within historically produced suburban space. Women and queer protesters, however, used the tropes attached to their bodies to leverage visibility. These young queer women are well aware of what Nicole Fleetwood has articulated as “troubling vision,” in which “the visible black body is always already troubling to the dominant visual field.”35 In fact, they very intentionally used the uncanny visibility of blackness deemed out of place as a critical component and affect of protest. Whereas Fleetwood looks at the specific work of Black women artists and cultural producers “whose work is reliant on the very problem their bodies pose as visible and corporal bodies,”36 Black queer women who led in Ferguson resistance represent an ongoing praxis that similarly embraces and deploys the problem posed by the troubling presence of queered or feminized Black flesh in white space. In the case of these protesters, Fleetwood’s theory of “excess flesh”—the strategic uses of the Black feminized (and queered) body as a form of resistance—goes beyond visual culture and is embodied through claims and expressions of sexuality and eroticism that resist objectification, including the pornotroping objectification of elicit desire within white culture and the objectification conferred by Black masculinity. The countervisibility that many Ferguson protesters practiced moved beyond a reworking of the Jezebel figure, understood as the antithesis of respectability. For many Black women leading resistance, choosing between an identity based on either sexual accessibility (the Black Jezebel) or asexual respectability (the Black mammy figure) is a false choice. Instead, the queering of gender, sexuality, and identity, which renders Black bodies less available to both white and Black heteronormative practices and constructs, reconfigures the parameters of such things as intimacy, pleasure, partnership, love, marriage, and family.37
Black women and girls have consistently reconfigured their identities outside the dialectical false choice throughout history, in less overt ways and with many differing outcomes. Aimee Meredith Cox makes this point in her work, focusing on the ways Black girls negotiate and critique the identities and stereotypes conferred on them, as well as the violences that accompany poverty, racism, and gendered subjectivities.38 Using extensive ethnography of a homeless shelter in Detroit, Cox draws particular attention to how Black girls “choreograph” their own scripts in relationship to overarching narratives attached to race, gender, class, and sexuality—and also in response to everyday interactions with people in their lives. As Cox points out, while these countervisibility practices constitute powerful resistance, the choice to operate both within and outside normative scripts comes at a cost, especially for Black girls and young Black women, who are particularly vulnerable to the violence and surveillance of the state. Both power and vulnerability can be seen in the case of Ferguson resistance. While the work of young women and queer Black leaders was highly effective in revealing the violence of the state and shifting the means and objectives of Black protest, Black women, and especially Black queer and trans women, suffered the most severe consequences in the form of physical and political violence waged against them, from the expected formal institutions of power and, even more painfully, from within the Ferguson protest movement itself.
Protesters were not the only ones utilizing choreographed spectacle. In his article exploring practices of “choreopolicing,” André Lepecki asks the question, “What are the relations between political demonstrations as expressions of freedom, and police counter-moves as implementations of obedience?”39 Lepecki argues that the police assume the role of choreographing protest by controlling pathways of movement and establishing spaces of containment. Space is therefore, according to Lepecki, in the realm of the police. The traditional terms of so-called peaceful protest assume that bodies will conform within space and follow the choreography directed by the police. In contrast, Ferguson protesters followed their own choreography in space and intentionally located themselves “out of place” in an area where Black bodies had already been policed and choreographed as out of place for many decades. In both cases—the site of protest and the site of predatory policing—a consensual subjectivity was expected. The “policed dance of quotidian consensus” was the basis for policing residents in North St. Louis County; however, it was not what was practiced by protesters after the death of Michael Brown.40 Rather, transformative resistance, as Jacques Rancière observes, “consists in transforming the space of moving along, of circulation, into the space for the appearance of a subject.”41 The pathways of circulation include literal space, such as streets, sidewalks, and highways, as well as spaces in which capital circulates, such as malls, shopping districts, and financial centers. These spaces can also be places in which culture and religion circulate, such as theaters, concert halls, and churches. At various times after August 9, all the spaces of circulation and conformity listed above were transformed by the appearance of the collective, the haunting of visible Black bodies—bodies that show up and continue to show up even after they are supposed to leave or recede. Transforming spaces of circulation and conformity into haunted spaces of bodily freedom and movement, albeit temporarily, was at the core of Ferguson resistance. The relationship between choreopolicing and choreopolitics, as outlined by Lepecki, illustrates the power/freedom dialectic of biopower, the power over life, and of biopolitics, the power of life. As Ferguson protesters insisted, the power of life to resist the power over one’s life required the full habitation of one’s body as well as a relentless haunting of space by bodies that never quite leave.
Mary (pseudonym)
Making people feel comfortable is not a priority for people in this movement. That’s such a large piece of it. Other people call it anger but really it’s not about anger. The entire movement is direct confrontation. Not violence, but confrontation. People are confronted with unapologetic blackness. Black bodies that come as they are. It could not be more confrontational.
Gloria (pseudonym)
The thing about Ferguson was it was so “in your face.” We are going to make them feel the discomfort, see our pain and anger finally. We are not just a face in the crowd and we are not going to be moved. If they locked up fifteen of us, fifty more would show up the next night. We stayed in their faces, making them confront who we are. It wasn’t just mass protest of people walking in the street like you see in other cities. It was that too, but what really defines this movement is the way we made everyone aware that we are unapologetically who we are and they’ve got to deal with that.
Vanessa (pseudonym)
All we have to use is our bodies, and we use them. Using our bodies unapologetically. Putting them in places they are not welcome. Making people feel the distance by putting our bodies where they are not supposed to be. Acting the way we’re not supposed to act. Breaking all of the codes of conduct. Protest as performance of Black bodies. This is our blackness and we will not be contained. That’s what it is.
Brittany
When I think of the Ferguson movement, I think of resistance. I think of people just doing away with the status quo, you know. It’s just that, a lot of young unapologetic resistant young people and it was that resistance that, that got us to where we are today. It was that resistance. It was that rebellion . . . I mean we sparked the nation into resisting. It’s not just Ferguson resisting anymore, it’s the whole entire nation, young people.
Mary (pseudonym)
The Ferguson protesters are confrontational. More confrontational than anything I’ve seen in protest. Now or in the past. Ferguson is interruption. It was volcanic and it was not structured or organized. It was leaderless or leaderful, depending on how you look at it. Ferguson was and is completely flat out “We’re done.” “We’re rejecting everything we’ve been told we’re supposed to do or be.”
I’ve learned from this movement that there is great value in making people uncomfortable and I’m learning to confront. I’m still a white grandmother but I’m now comfortable with diverse strategies and methods. There’s a big difference between standing on a corner with a sign that you’ll just drive right by than with saying, “Oh, you know what? I think we’ll stop your car.”
The emphasis placed on embodied experience, habitation, and spectacle by Ferguson protesters is directly linked to the experience and spectacle of embodied violence suffered by Brown, which initially sparked this movement. The desecration of Brown’s body in the street, witnessed by hundreds in person and thousands through social media, could not be forgotten. The searing of an image onto a collective psyche is directly reminiscent of the embodied violence suffered by Emmett Till and witnessed by thousands who attended his funeral or saw highly circulated media photos of his terrorized body, which is credited as a catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement. In both cases, the image of a terrorized body held the power to mobilize people and emotions. In both cases, the words and actions of the mothers of the murdered boys were essential to initiating a response, which might otherwise have passed quickly, to unjust deaths. In both cases, the eventual acquittal of those who caused the deaths sparked renewed resistance and sustained national efforts and debates around Black struggle. The decision and the motives to create a spectacle of embodied violence, however, were quite different in each case. Demanding that the casket be left open and the media let in during the funeral for her son, “so all the world can see what they did to my boy,” Mamie Till-Mobley understood, or at least hoped for, the power of the image to mobilize action.42 Many people who saw Brown’s body in the street or the image of the terror inflicted on him believed that Ferguson officials, like the murderers of Emmett Till, intended to send a specific message regarding what happens when Black people get out of line. Had officials in charge of the scene in Ferguson fully considered the power of the image to initiate action, as Mamie Till-Mobley had done, it is doubtful Brown’s body would have remained on the hot pavement for four and a half hours. The power of the image, however, was not lost on Ferguson protesters and went far beyond the single image of Michael Brown’s body.
The young women and queer of color leaders of Ferguson resistance also understand that seeking inclusion in, and through, modern state structures or discourses of freedom will not bring about the transformation they seek. As stated throughout this book, changing laws and policies that implicitly disadvantage people of color is important, but the more fundamental transformation sought by these protesters occurs in and through the orientation of the body—to itself, to other bodies, and to the world. As such, race is not an ideology to be debated but rather an embodied experience—a schema—that becomes part of body knowledge and the body itself. For those who are raced, the natural body schema is interrupted. Likewise, antiblackness is not so much a set of laws and regulations as it is the bodily response of people toward others and oneself that is felt at the core of one’s being. Fanon argues that there exists a “historico-racial schema,” which, for a nonwhite and especially a Black individual, bears the full weight of the white gaze.43 He makes clear what all marked bodies understand—that the flesh of racialized bodies deeply feels and lives race. Sara Ahmed similarly observes that once race is “‘in’ bodies,” it determines the proximities and distances of the body and what it can or cannot do.44 The women and queer leaders of the Ferguson protest movement understand that transforming their experience in the world must occur at the level of corporal schema, the reorienting of bodies and a recalibration of proximities that determine what their bodies can and cannot do.
Enactments of excess flesh in the performative field of protest highlight power relations often obscured by, and through, the commodification of blackness—as something marked by difference.45 The representation and subsequent claiming of bodies that exceed the norms of “proper corporeal containment,” what Juana Maria Rodriguez calls “racialized excess,” is already read as queer and beyond that which is viewed as useful or productive.46 However, it is in the space that is created between the body and the boundaries prescribed and policed by the law—between performance and power—where the productive tensions reside. Black female and Black queered bodies produced a particularly visible tension within the boundaries that power seeks to define and maintain. This tension proves to be especially productive as a space of precarity and protest. Judith Butler argues that “performativity works within precarity and against its differential allocation. Or, rather, performativity names that unauthorized exercise of a right to existence that propels the precarious into political life.”47 The opportunities to propel the precarious into political life through embodied performance—highly visible unauthorized bodies—are also highlighted by Rodriguez when looking at queer Latinx sexual politics and how discomfort, politeness, and degrees of legibility appear on the spectrum between law and performance.48 Again, this is the legibility that emerged with the appearance of bodies that showed up and haunted space, bodies that found and expanded the cracks within the boundaries of containment.
Angel
The movement was very much about the Black female body. First, because it was mostly Black female bodies that were out there. It just was. Black women’s bodies were the ones in abundance. They were the visible bodies—the most powerful imagery was of the Black woman. . . . Black women who were historically denied their womanhood.
Kelly
What’s unique about the Ferguson Protest Movement is it’s in your face. Like, “Naw, we ain’t goin’ home. Like we’re going to stay out here, and we’re going to fight until everybody is free.” And I feel like the Ferguson Movement is here to show the respectability part of how inequality and racism works today.
Mitchell
This movement is all about constant direct action. In your face direct action. Fuck the police direct action. I’ve gone to a lot of other protests in other cities because people invite me or send me a ticket and shit. But it’s not like that in other cities. It’s different here. Like we do not have the time to be sympathetic here.
Chuck
You know the reason why this movement is not polite? It’s because white people’s ignorance isn’t polite. Everybody is done being polite. And that’s what the queer women leaders do very intentionally. They make themselves heard regardless of whether people want to hear them. They know from their lived experience that you have to shut things down, shut people down, to get heard. People will say, “Until you speak and do things in this way we’re not going to hear your message.” And then they’re saying, “Well fuck you, hear this message.” . . .
FIGURE 6.5 Woman watching tear gas. Posted on Twitter by Jon Swaine, August 13, 2014.
Reproduced by permission from Jon Swaine.
People will also say things like “I don’t think Mike Brown or Freddie Gray are the best messengers because of who they were.” Fuck you and your messenger. I think they’re perfect damn messengers. Well you know what? We tried data. We tried polite reports. We tried writing books. We laid it all out nice and polite in ways that were clear as day. We tried every motherfucking polite way and you didn’t motherfucking listen, okay?
Alisha
Like claiming really simple things become revolutionary. Simple things that are just supposed to be basic human things are revolutionary for a lot of Black people, and this movement is teaching me that I can be revolutionary in that respect. Like having a bank account is revolutionary. Self-care is revolutionary. Black Girl Magic is revolutionary. Going on vacation is revolutionary. Getting married can be revolutionary to some people. Like simple things but because they’re Black, they’re revolutionary. That’s really part of this movement.
Embodied blackness is, upon becoming visible, a location of freedom. Blackness is the haunting of freedom in the face of unfreedom, living as fully human so as to reveal vast inhumanities. The insistence upon the visibility of unapologetic and unauthorized Black bodies is a queered practice when it shatters ruling identities and norms and reveals the link between power and freedom. In North St. Louis County, Black bodies—most especially Black queer bodies—became visible and mobilized radical imaginations of what should or could be in the face of what was. This visibility, which stemmed from the initial visibility of Michael Brown’s body and the desecration of his flesh, exposed the unmet promises and false claims of the liberal state at multiple scales, including racialized practices carried out by Black leaders in tiny cities in the name of Black political autonomy. The power of bodies to become visible, to haunt, to show up unexpectedly, is the counterpoint to extreme violence, which, in its purest form, produces a life worse than death. While extreme violence was practiced out of view for decades in North St. Louis County, the possibility for bodies to resist was always already present in order for specific dynamics of power, containment, and violence to exist. This possibility to resist was literally made flesh by Black women and queer leaders of Ferguson resistance who used choreopolitics to invent, activate, and create alternative spaces of freedom.49