Li Morales and Molly Goldberg talk about Queer Occupy
SF Bay Guardian, 11/22/11: The Faces and Voices of Occupy, by Rebecca Bowe, Caitlin Donohue, and Yael Chanoff: Cover Story Volume 46, Issue 08
Queers have long resisted the ravages of the 1% on the 99%: coming together on our own, on our terms, with our own names, genders, chosen families. Like the (decolonize) occupations in the Bay and worldwide, our resistance is made of re-purposed discards & imagination. We are a menagerie of magnificent beasts, with our struggles and limitations firmly at the center.
In HAVOQ, we imagine queerness not as a What: an identity whose boundaries we police, a platform from which to put forth our One Demand. Rather, we imagine queerness as a How: a way of being with one another. We call it Fabulosity. Fabulosity means drawing on queer histories of re-imagining family to expand circles of care & responsibility. Fabulosity is to affirm the self-determination of every queer to do queer just how they do.
Our emerging autonomy & interdependence is not contingent on capitalism’s insistence on utility. We are not useful or legible. In this illegibility and lack of utility, we are not controllable. We do not have One Demand, but a cornucopia of desires.
The Occupy Movement’s articulation of the 99% has created sites to reckon with how we are all uniquely impacted by the ravages of the 1%. We come with our collective visions and share a diversity of strategies & tactics as we resist, survive and thrive. Where people gather with an interest in seeing one another, queerness lives. We’re not asking the Powers-That-Be for anything. We’re making our fabulous fucked-up world for ourselves, with each other. We always have.
For the rest of the Guardian article, featuring a number of local participants in Oakland & SF occupy/decolonize encampments, visit: http://www.sfbg.com/2011/11/22/faces-and-voices-occupy?page=0,0