We're proud to introduce you to the work of our 2019-2020 cohort, the Feminist Collaboratory Fellows. The year's research theme is Feminist Futures. We asked each fellow to participate in a video or written project to display their work and explore the theme further.

In this fourth installment of the series, FRI sits down for a tele-conversation with Graduate Fellow Mia Karisa Dawson. This interview took place on May 18, one week prior to the police murder of George Floyd. 

Introduction

Mia Karisa Dawson is a second-year geography PhD student at UC Davis, with an emphasis in African American Studies. Their focus is on radical social justice movements in California, especially contemporary movements to abolish prisons and policing in Sacramento. They are an organizer with AYA: A Radical Black Healing Collective and Still Here: Alliance for Trans Rights.

The 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.  A trailer appears below.

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.

What sort of challenges have come up in the filmmaking-as-research process?

The protest involved locking arms to try to bar entry and keep people out of the Pride festival, so right away the situation became complicated. Even though we had our messaging and T-shirts, and most people who participated were visibly queer, the automatic assumption is, “Oh, I'm being kept out of Pride, so this must be something homophobic.” Seeing it play out filmically provides a good example of the challenges that we're up against. From the words of the organizers, what comes through is what the problems are and what the vision is beyond them. But something else that comes out in the video is a more nuanced understanding of what the tensions and divisions are.

There are some people who are there showing up and talking to people, beginning to feel empathetic and understand what's going on, and others who are just mad, don't really care and just want to get in. There are other people who specifically showed up wearing hats or shirts with police badges on them, showing clear support for the police who are actively antagonizing the protesters.

It helps illustrate that there's not only one tactic. There's the bringing in of people who are sympathetic but might not be as aware of the issues. There's the reaching out to people who aren't necessarily sympathetic and don't really know the issues, and seeing if you can bring them in somehow, which is a little bit more difficult. And then there are people who are openly antagonistic with whom it's often not productive to try to engage with.

Seeing those dynamics in the video, rather than just hearing an organizer talk about them, provides a good opportunity for people to reflect and understand: where would I be in that scenario? Being an intersectional feminist or being an ally or being pro LGBTQ, however you want to say it, there are a lot of different shades. It's not just one thing. One of the dangerous things about our liberal society is that people will often think that their politics or their preconceived notions are progressive even if they're not, and they don't want to hear anything that would change those perceptions. So hopefully this is something that could push back on that.

COVID-19 and Your Research:  How might your experience or expertise help us think about or approach the ongoing pandemic?

We've already seen COVID-19 disproportionately affecting marginalized people in society, and I think that's powerful because it has less to do with the virus than it does with divisions in society that have nothing to do with the virus. Hopefully this is a wake-up call. A lot of people are becoming aware of these divisions in ways that they might not have thought of before.

There’s no returning to normal because things have changed so drastically already, and the failures of capitalism to attack this kind of problem have become so evident. There is a need for organizing, a need for creating broader coalitions, because these factions and silos are very strategic in terms of preventing movements.

I've seen organizations in Sacramento being really creative and finding strength in this moment, seeing this moment of health crisis also as a moment of deeper societal crises that have been ongoing. One example is the decarceration struggle, which already conceptualized prisons as wrong for any number of reasons. This is another dramatic reason, where all of a sudden, people are dying in prisons at a completely disproportionate rate, so that allows another point of entry in the fight for decarceration or prison abolition.

How do your filmmaking, activism, and research inform each other?

In a way, they're all tied together and each gives more of a multi-dimensional approach and an additional purpose to the other. A lot of my questions for the scholarly pursuits are directly informed by what I learn and what I see in organizing. It is also driven by this hope that my scholarship-- both in research and pedagogy-- can entwine and contribute to the movements I organize with.

At UCD, I have been fortunate to join a community in which scholar activism and community-engaged research are more valued, and less marginalized than they are at many other institutions. I'm able to learn from the scholars I'm connected with about their experiences building momentum with the groups that they work with outside of the academy.

Graduate study has led me to understand more deeply the roots of the systems I organize against. This study has led me to see cracks and fissures that I otherwise might not have recognized. Incarceration, modern policing, capitalism, patriarchy-- these structures are neither timeless nor are they all-encompassing. They require constant exertion to maintain. De-naturalizing these systems represents a synergy of organizing, research, and education, which lend hope for a universe of alternatives.

July 2020 Addendum:

It’s a movement, not a moment! The riotous legacy of Pride has been honored more this June than it has been in my lifetime. This moment that might seem spontaneous is preceded and sustained by ongoing groundwork. That work has never been flashy but it is the heart and soul of the movement. My hope that anyone engaging with my project gets a sense of the longevity and legacy of the fight against state violence as it interlocks against black and brown, queer and trans life.