It was a privilege to work with the Feminist Futures Fellowship program. I received such solid support and solidarity with my peers. Check out some excerpts from this profile of my project. And find the full profile here!

Tell us about your project.

My project is a documentary short film tentatively titled Pride is a Riot: Queer Rebellion in Sacramento. The central moment in this film is a protest staged in Sacramento in 2019. An Organization called #StillHere: Collective for Trans Rights initiated a protest against a pride celebration hosted by a single organization, the Sacramento LGBT center. This organization has a history of underserving people of color, especially trans and unhoused people. Their Pride Parade centers people who have been antagonistic to the Black community and unhoused populations. For example, in 2019, the LGBT Center chose to include the Sacramento Police Department in Pride, pushing away more vulnerable parts of the community in the process. The film documents the action surrounding a few organizations who decided to protest Pride for these reasons.

I had been doing similar activist work as an organizer over the past several years. At the same time, as a graduate scholar, I had been writing about abolitionist organizing and the theory behind it. While pursuing the academic side, I have been realizing writing has its limitations– you can only get so much across in writing about an action, for example. I thought it would be exciting to try film as an alternative way of communicating what was going on during this action. There’s something very visually compelling about these actions—the way people present themselves, the type of conflicts that come up—that I think are really hard to get across in words.

How do you see your work in the context of FRI’s theme of “Feminist Futures”?

The protest represented something radically different from a status quo idea of feminist futures. In addition to the intersection of queerness with feminism, many of these protesters are also very sharp in their critique of corporate involvement in Pride, police involvement, and also the paywall that dictates who can participate. So, a critique of capitalism clearly comes through in the film. There is no such thing as a feminist future under capitalism.

Connectedly, the critique against policing is really sharp, so it’s not of a focus on protecting the rights of women, non-binary people and femmes under the current system. It’s getting to the roots of the entire system of inequality and the gender roles that are created and upheld by Western society and enforced on people for whom that’s not their history. Bundling all of that together, the view of feminist futures that I hold is a world in which policing and prisons are unnecessary, where gender is lived in a completely different way, where identities aren’t judged in terms of their proximity to these strict Western notions of masculinity and femininity, and where our political economy would be totally different.

What is at stake with this research?

The hope is to further a radical politics within the various LGBTQ+ communities to foster more of an alliance with anti-policing, anti-homelessness and anti-capitalism struggles. Even though most of these issues disproportionately harm queer and trans people, there are divisions because of the many ways in which large segments of the community, especially gay, lesbian and bisexual folks that aren’t trans, have been able to assimilate and benefit from the very same social inequalities.

In recent history, gay and lesbian identity became more acceptable in mainstream society, starting in the 1960s and moving into the 1970s. This was especially true for whites, but gay and lesbian folks in general were able to assimilate into mainstream society, live in more affluent neighborhoods, not have to be closeted out of fear for their life, while trans people of color and people with other types of marginalized sexualities were excluded from their world.1

So, what’s at stake is the deepening of these divisions. As inequality of wealth and intensity of policing increase, these divisions will push fractions of the community further apart, rather than bringing them together in solidarity under a sense of shared struggle.

1 For more check out Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing by Christina B. Hanhardt.