Reflections From INCITE! Conference
At this year’s INCITE! Color of Violence Conference I was able to observe where in the feminist movement I want to situate myself in the struggle for liberation against state violence. The feminist movement as an umbrella has given birth to many waves of feminism. INCITE!’s main focus is to work with womin identified people of color, trans, gender non-conforming, queer, and lesbian. Being inclusive to these identities is also a way to resist against the hegemonic sexual orientation of hetero-normativity the capitalist state imposes on everyone. INCITE! encourages us to orient to a type of feminism that is enthusiastic about creating a better world by putting it into practice and having our revolution be fun and creative as we continue to resist the capitalist hetero-patriarchy machine.
Insights that resonated with me throughout the conference was Angela Davis’s keynote speech inviting all to have international solidarity with different issues from Palestine to Ayotzinapa. “Justice needs to be for all not for some,” she said. Rasmea Odeah took part in the plenary and the conference. She is a Palestinian tortured survivor, a woman who fought and continues to struggle to liberate her brothers and sisters in Palestine. There was also a lot of discussion about community accountability and its benefits to survivors and communities of color. When I first read about it, I was fascinated by the possibilities it offers to survivors. It shifts the idea of having violent institutions control the survivors’ autonomy and agency in their healing process. It was discussed in detail the reality that it can be a complicated process since is long and can be messy because we need to trust in one another without relying on the state.
I went to the conference representing my home collective, Community Education for Social Action (CESA) with a compañera. We also presented a workshop about using theater as a tool to heal and learn about community accountability. It was really good to notice how other groups want to use community accountability and get creative by using theater to role-play and experience the possibilities our bodies can manifest. We learn that our bodies carry trauma and suffering and to dismantle it we need to position it to imagine our bodies receiving positive feelings. We will continue these conversations wherever we go and in our communities because we notice that patriarchy lives in our own movement and we need to abolish it.
The conference provided a space to imagine new possibilities beyond the state. There was a group from Los Angeles that attended and we are excited to put into practice the work INCITE! Invites communities to do. We will have a report back and we are continuing with small gatherings the conversations of community accountability and what that looks like in different groups and communities. We are also learning to feel comfortable questioning privilege and confronting it in our groups. Working-class communities of color are systematically displaced or marginalized by a white supremacist state. We do not want to continue feeling inferior because we are not. We are beautiful if we are colored, women-identified, queer, trans, lesbian, gender non-conforming, femme, and the list goes on. These identities resist the state without following the normative hegemonic beliefs imposed by a capitalist patriarchal machine.
“Our revolution should be fun and creative resisting the capitalist hetero-patriarchy machine.”
